> But in one of his final attempts to normalize relations with Cuba, President Barack Obama in January ended the program, which had allowed Cuban doctors stationed in other countries to get permanent residency visas for the United States.
When I visited Cuba this spring, there was a palpable level of resentment towards Obama for this change, as well as the end of the 'wet feet dry feet' policy [1]. Tourism dollars are good but probably not worth giving up 'plan B.'
You know I can't really feel their plight. Take this:
>Hundreds of miles away, in Minas Gerais State, Dr. Jiménez, 34, found the work rewarding, but also began to harbor feelings of resentment. “You are trained in Cuba and our education is free, health care is free, but at what price?” she said. “You wind up paying for it your whole life.”
Is that not the point? The communist government allows anybody to attend their very good medical schools totally for free. This doctor hasn't even made it to 34 and she wants to opt out, how many 34 y/o american doctors are even close to paying down their debt? Seems weird to come from a country which is explicitly organized around giving everybody a chance to succeed and then upon success saying, yeah but I don't like paying for it.
Cuba is explicitly organized around keeping the Castros and their cronies in power. Propaganda aside, giving everybody a chance to succeed was never an actual organizing principle.
I think that there is a bit of truth to both arguments.
There are a lot of very smart people in the west who never had the chance to study medicine (there seem to be a lot of American janitors with high IQs...) - Under a communist regime, those who are mentally able to become a doctor can generally do so; in the west there are many financial and social hurdles. Communism removes the element of luck from the system.
I don't think it's quite fair to portray the doctors as having being treated unfairly though I also understand that it might feel that way.
That was never how it worked in communist countries. Admission to medical schools and other advanced education was often based more on political reliability (Party membership), family connections, and outright bribes. Sure some people made it on merit, but communism never removed the element of luck from the system.
And yet those Cuban doctors would give up their entire way of life, access to family members and the country they grew up in to move to the evil capitalist United States.
It's actually weird how many people in capitalist countries look at failed/failing communist states and think of them as utopias, all the while ignoring the plight of millions living there in poverty and with no clear path to a better standard of life.
They should put their money where their mouth is and spend at least a few decades in such countries before criticising others who've made a choice to leave(for various reasons).
How much of that is America's doing? If the embargo were lifted, do you still think Communist Cuba would be failing? Its poverty is a result of America's intolerance for different political systems, not the result of those political systems themselves.
The communist Utopia requires trade with another entity in order to maintain its Utopia? Who manages the trade between the countries? Are the members of a society that claims to be Communist actually so if that society at large is part of a free-market? This sounds like not getting rid of exploitation, but rather sweeping it under the rug and outsourcing it to a free-market entity.
>The communist Utopia requires trade with another entity in order to maintain its Utopia?
Presumably all states do.
>Who manages the trade between the countries?
Communism is about owning the means of production so presumably the people will act through their government to decide on trade.
>Are the members of a society that claims to be Communist actually so if that society at large is part of a free-market?
Presumably, unless you mean to say that no actually Communist state has ever existed! (I'll accept this of course, I'd just like you to say it.) If you'd like to know more about this conflict I'd pull up the wiki article for "socialism in one country."
>This sounds like not getting rid of exploitation, but rather sweeping it under the rug and outsourcing it to a free-market entity.
Well the end-goal would be world communism without government, democratic everything, "from those... to those..." kind of world. In the interim trade would be necessary and you're right that unfortunately that trade may come from exploitation of the working class in another country. But if we can take our country, go socialist, reduce exploitation then that's still an admirable goal. Hopefully, those elsewhere will see and follow. I wouldn't call it "outsourcing exploitation" because presumably the trade level wouldn't increase dramatically after becoming communist. It's more like fixing our exploitation while admitting we may not be able to end all exploitation.
NOTE: I'm not actually a communist and I only know a little so these are the best answers I can give. A real communist would probably school me on this.
I think it's just as likely to work as say capitalist country if the US wasn't biased against it. But it's not just that one time, the US has repeatedly intervened in states which underwent revolucion.
I am solidly liberal and Left-leaning and most of my friends are extremely liberal and Left-Leaning, too (though, admittedly not extreme left). I don't know a single person who sees any communist state as a utopia or anything approaching utopia. Hell, I don't know anyone who likes communism as a concept any more than a they'd like a state of anarchist primitivism -- basically a quaint idea that might be nice if humans weren't actually human that's interesting to muse about from time to time. Honestly, I think it is a character made up of very few extreme examples that make a spectacle of themselves on social media trotted out by Right-wing pundits and people who don't actually like to think about reality too hard.
So you look at the millions of poor people in the United States and think, "Yes, these people have a clear path to a better standard of living"?
Do you know how many children are living on the streets in Havana? Or how many die of starvation or exposure? Maybe they're poor, but they are alive, healthy, fed, and have a roof over their heads. That's a lot more than Americans can say about the at risk in their own country.
I am by no means suggesting that Cuba is a utopia -- my own standard of living is probably quite a lot higher than the average Cuban's. I'm lucky in that way. That's not the case for many, many others.
Yeah no kidding, because they have already acquired skills that will allow them a comfortable lifestyle in the US and don't have to deal with any of the downsides.
Unlikely. Medical degrees from Cuba aren't portable what so ever. Cuban doctors are nowhere close to what Americans expect -- don't get me wrong, they are perfectly fine performing basic medical services but don't expect them to know how to use any modern equipment or be familiar with modern protocols used in the West.
What is it far more likely is that those who actually live the glorious communist future would make an educated choice that being a janitor in America is preferable.
'If they do have to go to the hospital, they must bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs — even toilet paper. And basic medications are scarce.'
'In the real Cuba, finding an aspirin can be a chore. And an antibiotic will fetch a fortune on the black market. A nurse spoke to Isabel Vincent of Canada’s National Post. “We have nothing,” said the nurse. “I haven’t seen aspirin in a Cuban store here for more than a year. If you have any pills in your purse, I’ll take them. Even if they have passed their expiry date.”'
The causality is not obvious. For example, throughout the 70s and 80s, organizations shipping medicine and other supplies to Cuba were regularly bombed or attacked (e.g. Hispania Interamericana). Anti-Castro terrorist organizations (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_66) operated openly in Miami.
So does Cuba lack medicine because they're communist? Or are they communist because the US worked against broad prosperity in Cuba, often very violently and explicitly, for decades before and after Castro?
Exactly. I never bought that argument. They can trade with everybody else, so that embargo doesn't have much of an impact.
Especially with the rise of containerized shipping. The US gets a lot of stuff from China and ships can get to Cuba for less than it costs to reach any city on the east coast of the US.
It's their rejection of the free market that makes them unable to procure goods in the free market. It's ironic that some people want the free market to serve a system that denies its citizens access to that same exact marketplace. They don't seem to question the ideas they are repeating.
>Medical degrees from Cuba aren't portable what so ever. Cuban doctors are nowhere close to what Americans expect -- don't get me wrong, they are perfectly fine performing basic medical services but don't expect them to know how to use any modern equipment or be familiar with modern protocols used in the West.
Haha, what? Look up ELAM. There are ELAM educated doctors living and working in the US today.
This bit from the Wikipedia article on the topic is actually quite interesting:
> In June 2000, a US Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) delegation visited Cuba to meet with Castro. Representative Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) mentioned to Castro that his district had a shortage of doctors; he responded by offering full scholarships for US nationals from Mississippi at ELAM. Later that same June, in a Washington, D.C. meeting with the CBC, the Cuban Minister of Public Health expanded the offer to all districts represented by the CBC. At a September 2000 speech event at Riverside Church, New York City, Castro publicly announced a further expanded offer which was reported as allowing several hundred places at ELAM for medical students from low-income communities from any part of the USA. Reports of the size of this offer varied in the US press: 250 or 500 places were suggested with perhaps half reserved for African-Americans and half for Hispanics and Native Americans. The ELAM offer to US students was classified as a "cultural exchange" program by the US State Department to avoid the restrictions of the U.S. embargo against Cuba. The first intake of US students into ELAM occurred in spring 2001, with 10 enrolling in the pre-medical program.[5][18][20][21]
> In 2004, the legality of the presence of US students at ELAM was threatened by tightened restrictions against travel to Cuba by US nationals under the administration of President George W. Bush. A CBC campaign led by Representatives Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Charles Rangel (D-NY) with 27 other members of Congress persuaded Secretary of State Colin Powell to exempt ELAM from the tightened restrictions.[4]
> Applications from US citizens had been administered through the New York City-based Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), headed by human rights activist and critic of the U.S. embargo of Cuba, the Rev. Lucius Walker Jr.[21]
While I'm no fan of Cuba, I have to point out doctors come to the US from a lot of different countries because they'll get paid more. That's just human nature.
Where to start? They don't allow anyone to attend medical school in Cuba. They accept a certain number of foreign students based on some standard of financial need. As for Cuban medical students, they're stuck as practitioners in the Cuban medical system which isn't a particularly great success from the perspective of financial reward. Certainly there are many problems with the US system of medical training and treatment, but at least it's still a financially rewarding occupation in the US.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. In non-communist countries, it is possible to pay off your education debt, and profit from your hard work thereafter. In Cuba, it isn't.
This is true even under single payer systems like Italy. Via my wife, I know the GP in the small town where she lived, and he has a place in the mountains, a boat in the laguna, and regularly takes nice vacations around the world. He's doing pretty well, in other words, and I don't think most people begrudge doctors some financial rewards for what they do.
I live in a non-communist country and still got all my education for free. There aren't just two political systems, the American one and dirty communism.
The last thing I intended to do was defend the totally broken American education system, where the costs are inflated by subsidized loans which were purportedly intended to increase access but actually work to move us closer to an indentured servitude system like they have in Cuba.
You don’t get anything for free. Your 40%+ taxes give you that “for free.”
I’d rather pay more for school and keep more of my earnings than have “free” school and high taxes forever.
Americans have more disposable income than the countries with “free” university. Student debt is temporary, confiscatory taxes are forever.
Study comp sci in France, graduate and make €40k per year before taxes. Study comp sci in the US, graduate and make $100k but with $80k in debt. What’s the better deal? Remember that $100k also includes health benefits, vacation and all that.
That €40k probably has an effective tax rate of 35% while the $100k likely has Ann effective rate of 20%.
Perhaps some amount of repayment for education is reasonable, but not this amount.
How many American doctors are paying >75% of their AFTER TAX income to pay down those debts ?
None.
How many Cuban doctors agreed to the arrangement of being restricted to a country controlled by the Cuban government, and therefore only offered a pittance for their services ?
None. They were born there.
What would happen if a bank offered such a deal to a US citizen ?
They would be persecuted, as this falls under "usury" and is a crime. Note: it's a crime. As in, if a bank does this and gets convicted (which happens regularly) people WILL go to jail for doing this.
What would happen if I did the same, organising a job for you in a foreign country and in return I get 75% of your wages in a contract that couldn't be broken ?
You could go to a judge and get the contract annulled, as this clearly violates labor laws. The article seems to confirm that this indeed violates even Brazilian labor laws.
> if a bank does this and gets convicted (which happens regularly) people WILL go to jail for doing this
thanks for pointing this out; I've heard the term "usury", but have never seen it linked with criminal charges. but a quick web search shows that you're right.
really interesting, and great point regarding the fraction of after-tax payments.
> The World Health Organization, a United Nations agency, helped broker the deal. Under it, Brazil pays Cuba... nearly four times what Cuban doctors earn through the arrangement.
Google makes $1,200,000 per employee; a comparable average salary is then $300,000, which sounds on the high end of plausible if restricted only to engineer salaries (and it'd be a very top-heavy average), but implausibly high for a company-wide average.
I'm sure American doctors would pay down their debt quite quickly if they lived like a Cuban doctor and nearly their entire paycheck went to school loans.
Ultimately, if you think it's such a good deal, I'm sure Cuba would let you defect and go to medical school for the opportunity to earn $30/month like she does in Cuba.
I think it's possible to critique both systems; the American (capitalist) system in which you need to pay huge amounts for education in order to have the mere chance to get a job that's above sustenace wage, the system screwing over especially those who can't afford to pay back debt; the Cuban system in which your training is free of charge but you cannot apply your skills such that you receive above sustenance wage. Considering the doctors who are able to get into well-paying jobs alone, the American system seems to work better.
Another commenter remarked that the Cuban system is set up to keep the people at the top in power, the American capitalist system less obviously so. I wonder what other methods of Socialist organisation may be explored other than the capitalist wage-labour system we see in both Cuba and the US. The idea of labour vouchers has always been interesting to me.
Plumbers and electricians make great money and they aren’t incurring debt to do so. Plumbers, especially self employed ones, make more than your average “marketing assistant” or some other job that requires a degree.
Plenty of people go to school and don’t rack up tens of thousands in debt.
The question we should be asking is why does education cost keep expanding so quickly: cost inflation is much higher than even healthcare. It isn’t “capitalism” it’s actually the he fact that student loan availability distorts the market. Eliminate student loans and costs will drop like a rock to a level the actual market supports. Don’t blame capitalism because capitalism would never support the artificial cost inflation caused by government intervention.
If Big Macs were subsidized as much as universities, they’d cost $100 because McDonald’s knows that if you can’t afford it, the government will be there to help.
>Don’t blame capitalism because capitalism would never support the artificial cost inflation caused by government intervention.
What is capitalism other than the system of predominant wage-labour, private ownership of socially productive property (supported by the state), capital accumulation and class society? The idea that capitalism cannot be blamed for the fact that people are required to obey the whims of speculators in the market, to tailor their ambitions such as to maximise wage rather than to pursue enjoyment and the replacement of relations between people with relations between commodities is absurd.
Capitalism "supports" whatever will make a profit; in this case, student loans turn profits. Why would this system of student loans not occur under government intervention? There clearly exist private loan agencies.
To be clear I'm not speaking in favour of the Cuban system, so please don't assume that I am.
If the Cuban government is making those decisions it's not communism, it's state capitalism. In socialism, workers own the means of production collectively, and have voting power and representation in their workplace.
state capitalism is an oxymoron. NO capitalist leader/think thank/literature advocates it and they are explicitly anti socialism - which is what it is.
> the American (capitalist) system in which you need to pay huge amounts for education in order to have the mere chance to get a job that's above sustenace wage
You do realize that wasn't true until about 15 years ago, right? You should be asking what happened (hint: it wasn't Capitalism, it was the US Government's inflationary student loan program). Until the mid 1970s when the US Government nearly destroyed the dollar, you could pay for a Harvard education with a part time job. As recently as the late 1990s, the US had very little in the way outstanding student loans compared to the size of its median income (thus the epic student loans increase that everybody can't stop talking about, ie that's why it's a headline now, because it wasn't expensive before).
It should take you about 15 minutes to do some research and compare the price of a college education prior to the year 2000, versus incomes at the time. Pick any decade prior to 2000 and do the comparison. What happened after 2000? The Bush years wars & spending hammered the dollar, which also sparked the big commodity bubble.
College tuition & fees costs climbed 500% from ~1990 to ~2010. I wonder if that was spontaneously caused by Capitalism; you know, just out of the blue prices suddenly skyrocketed because of Capitalism; or if it was something the US Government did to cause it.
Another hint: how were college costs able to completely disregard income growth and all other restraints for two decades?
The costs of university increase on a purely free-market basis because of incredibly expanding demand for a university education, now poor students can't afford to go to school. The government steps in and assures their loans so poor students can attend. Now since these loans are guaranteed capitalist institutions begin seeing just how much they can bilk students for and thus our dilemma. Our problem is the free market. Government intervention to this point has transformed one free-market problem (school only for well-to-do) into another (school for anyone but loaded with debt) because we haven't had enough government intervention. Just make it free and our problem is solved.
That's not what happened at all. The US Government didn't step in to assure the student loans of poor people. The US Government backed student loans for everyone, on a perpetually increasing basis.
You fail to address the most obvious problem with your claims:
How college costs were able to skyrocket in complete disregard to the ability to repay those loans. The lack of the ability to pay back a loan is a normal check against irresponsible lending, unless you have a printing press backing said loans and can afford to disregard defaults. The lack of responsible lending, courtesy of the US Government, is what enabled the universities to perpetually raise their costs against the lack of any economic restraints. You fail to recognize the broken core to the system: there were no cost inflation restraints, because the US Government made it possible for there to be none.
The fundamental you aren't dealing with, is what enabled the cost inflation to be so extreme, radically beyond any reasonable standards of lending or potential to repay.
The lack of a free market in education is precisely what caused the hyper cost inflation. The US Government created a system of lending backed by its ability to print dollars, which stands completely apart from normal economic reality.
Another hint: guess who is making nearly all the money off the student loans? Yep, the US Government. They're yielding tens of billions per year in interest profit, courtesy of their ability to magically make dollars appear and to put an entire generation into vast debt. The US Govt is earning about 20 times what the private sector is making off of student loans.
No, I think you're not really grasping what I'm saying. Here:
(1) College is cheap, only the few and the wealthy go.
(2) More people start to attend college.
(3) Supply and demand kick in, increasing costs, ensuring that still only the few and the wealthy go to college.
(4) The government doesn't like that poor people aren't able to afford college so they guarantee student loans.
(5) Poor people can go to school now, but price spirals out of control.
This is my timeline.
>The lack of the ability to pay back a loan is a normal check against irresponsible lending, unless you have a printing press backing said loans and can afford to disregard defaults.
You're totally right. The problem here is that it's "irresponsible lending" to give a student loan to a poor student, a black student, and especially say a poor, black student who wants to study history. We as a society though want poor students to get more education and we as a society don't want certain fields limited to just those who are already rich. So we guarantee student loans. Then a bunch of capitalists see that we've broken the loan system, pull out their Gordon Gekko hats and start robbing us blind.
>The lack of a free market in education is precisely what caused the hyper cost inflation. The US Government created a system of lending backed by its ability to print dollars, which stands completely apart from normal economic reality.
The lack of a free market in education is precisely what gave lots of kids who would never have otherwise had the opportunity to attend college that chance.
>Another hint: guess who is making nearly all the money off the student loans? Yep, the US Government. They're yielding tens of billions per year in interest profit, courtesy of their ability to magically make dollars appear and to put an entire generation into vast debt. The US Govt is earning about 20 times what the private sector is making off of student loans.
Sure, I don't like this either. College should be free.
The very fact that we are talking about student loans, inflation, destroying the dollar and income (wage-labour) means that we are talking about capitalism; though other actors within a capitalist economy by virtue of having more military or property power may influence a capitalist economy, it does not change the fact that it is a capitalist system nevertheless.
Nowhere did I claim that "free market" policies led up to this point, nor did I claim that government intervention didn't lead up to this point. However I did claim it was due to the capitalist mode of production and so far I haven't been refuted on that point.
> The very fact that we are talking about student loans, inflation, destroying the dollar and income (wage-labour) means that we are talking about capitalism
We're talking about government abuse of and intervention into a former Capitalist economy (which is now a heavily regulated, heavily taxed mixed economy). The US isn't even remotely close to being a free market system and hasn't been for decades. One quick check at the regulation count, the taxation system, the government involvement in every industry and segment, easily makes that point (further, take a look at the expansion of those things over the last 50 years). Where's the free market part?
>The US isn't even remotely close to being a free market system and hasn't been for decades.
Where exactly did GP claim that it is? And why is regulation incompatible with a capitalist system? You are making the confusion that capitalism means "free market", when it doesn't.
Capitalism is inseparable from a free market system. They are in fact the same thing and have been regarded as such for a century across all the writings of every modern proponent of free market economics. From Hayek to Mises to Friedman.
To the extent you have regulation, is the extent to which you lack a Capitalist economy. All systems opposite to Capitalism make use of extreme State control of the economy through various regulatory means. Whether we're talking rudimentary Socialism or its derivatives, including Fascism and Communism. It's an inversion. You can either have market-based economic levers or you can have State levers, or you can mix them and get a mixed economy to the extent you do so. Regulation is antithesis to Capitalism because it imposes State control over the economy. The more regulation you add, the less market freedom you must inherently have; the regulation removes possible action and decision making by free actors in the economy, it places those decisions into the hands of the State (ie out of the bounds of Capitalism to dictate).
>Capitalism is inseparable from a free market system.
No, it's not; there exists market Socialism, for example. There also exists mutualism. I don't know where you're getting this from other than the idea that authors in favour of capitalism also tend to prefer free market economics.
>Whether we're talking rudimentary Socialism or its derivatives, including Fascism and Communism.
Communism is actually the complete lack of state control but also the lack of commodity production and therefore the market.
>Regulation is antithesis to Capitalism because it imposes State control over the economy.
You have still failed to explain why lack of regulation is central to capitalism other than to name Hayek, Mises and Friedman who were in favour of free-market capitalism. Other authors who sought to describe capitalism prior to them didn't include "free market" as a core principle of capitalism.
There is no denying that the epitome of capitalist production is completely unencumbered by a State, but there is also no denying that the state must intervene in a capitalist economy to protect property rights on a large scale. There is also the idea that the the State itself cannot be a capitalist actor which is totally false; we see the State engaging in the employment of wage-labour and selling on the national and international market. This makes the state as capitalist as Microsoft or Google.
I'm posting right now on what is by and large a forum hostile to anti-capitalist thinking; this is the very opposite of me being in an echo chamber.
Many "decent" jobs require at least a university degree, which almost always entails taking out a loan. So while you don't have to "pay" large amounts of money, you may need to loan it and then pay it back later.
The echo chamber you're in is your understanding of 'decent jobs'. No, you don't need to go to university to have a decent job. There are tons of self-made people with no university education, working in the trades or by starting a small business.
Gosh if we can't even agree on what kind of echo chamber we're in, how will we ever manage to make convincing fallacious arguments?
I think the echo chamber AT spoke of was not HN. The point is that in the US there are a plethora of options for low cost high quality educations/degrees which absolutely can help you earn a very decent living. They may not be famous name-brand cliques which guarantee a plush job right after graduating, but it is a fundamental pillar of Americanism that opportunity is there for those willing to put in the time.
Edit: since we asked you to stop using HN primarily for ideological battle and you've been battling up a storm since then, I've banned this account. Because we're serving our capitalist masters, you say? The mask slips, you say? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571118) Nope. It's
just lame and off-topic.
There's no intellectual curiosity in ideological battle—they are two different games. In one the goal is to learn, in the other to smite enemies. Football and chess don't mix, either, and tackling your opponent's bishop is off topic.
American medical system is not capitalist but mercantilist. It's illegal to offer services without explicit permission of the medical guild. It has the exact same effect all historical guild systems had: price gouging and reduced supply. Taxi licenses are another good example.
Capitalist medical system would mean the value of a particular medical certification would be set by the market, ie. everyone would be able to sell medical services. Historically free market has always resulted in a much better quality in addition to lower prices.
>American medical system is not capitalist but mercantilist.
This distinction is made on the fallacious idea that "capitalism" is equal to a totally free market. This is a common confusion but false nevertheless. There is no reason I see why a capitalist system cannot include intervention by the government, and indeed it must deal with this to uphold property rights as even libertarian authors tell us.
Capitalism is the predominant employment of wage-labour, the private ownership of social means of production and the goal of accumulation of capital.
>Historically free market has always resulted in a much better quality in addition to lower prices.
It has also resulted in much higher rates of exploitation, as the workers of countries with more lax or unenforced labour laws suffer greatly for it.
>There is no reason I see why a capitalist system cannot include intervention by the government
You're attempting to redefine the meaning of words to create a strawman where 'capitalism' can have any property you want, which then allows you to misrepresent an attack on a $random_negative_thing as an attack on 'capitalism'.
A system with state intervening in the market is called a mixed economy.
>It has also resulted in much higher rates of exploitation, as the workers of countries with more lax or unenforced labour laws suffer greatly for it.
The more protected against 'exploitation' people in a particular country are, the more likely they are to risk their lives trying to escape their socialist utopias.
If you weren't a hypocrite you would renounce your citizenship and relocate to a 'better' place, like Cuba or Venezuela.
>You're attempting to redefine the meaning of words to create a strawman
Isn't this exactly what post-Marxian authors did? By the time Marx was writing, it was clear what capitalism was - the predominant employment of wage labour, private ownership of social means of production, and accumulation of capital. The idea that a state which owns all or most of the productive capacity of society cannot be "capitalist" for some reason is outstandingly silly.
>The more protected against 'exploitation' people in a particular country are, the more likely they are to risk their lives trying to escape their socialist utopias.
This is a very ignorant statement; there exist heavy protections against high exploitation in the EU, but the EU is not a Socialist organisation nor are many people trying to escape it for its labour laws. There has not existed a Socialist society as of yet aside from the Paris Commune and Catalonia (which I must note, very few people tried to escape); before you reply that this is an NTS fallacy, I must say that the Socialist mode of production rests upon the abolition of the law of value (i.e commodities are not produced) and the working class as a whole hold ownership of the social means of production, and the functions of private property have been done away with. This was not observed in the regimes of the USSR, Soviet satellite states, Cuba or Venezuela.
>If you weren't a hypocrite you would renounce your citizenship and relocate to a 'better' place, like Cuba or Venezuela.
No. Cuba and Venezuela both operate the capitalist mode of production, and in fact Cuba is in very direct violation of the principles of non-alienated labour. How can a Socialist country be opposed to fair working conditions? This suggests to me that it is not Socialist at all. You must also note that I have not shown any appreciation for the economic models of either Cuba or Venezuela. The idea that I must support any country which calls itself "Socialist" is as absurd as saying that as a democrat I must support any country which calls itself "democratic", including the DPRK.
> I'm sure American doctors would pay down their debt quite quickly if they lived like a Cuban doctor and nearly their entire paycheck went to school loans.
After medical school, doctors still aren't qualified or licensed to practice - they need to go through residency first, which pays really poorly (in some cases, less than the equivalent of minimum wage). During that time, doctors aren't going to be paying down their loans, because they're just making enough to get by. (Some doctors even end up having to take on additional debt just to get through residency. That debt comes from the private market and has a higher interest rate than the unsubsidized Stafford loans).
This period lasts anywhere from 4-10 years, depending on your specialty. In the end, it's not unusual for a doctor who enters medical school in their mid-20s[0] and is not independently wealthy to expect to turn 40 before paying off their final medical school loan.
Medicine isn't the unbelievably, guaranteed lucrative field people think it is. It may have been in the past, but those days are long gone, and the expected lifetime earnings for physicians continues to drop each year, which means it takes even longer to pay off your debt.
[0] This is actually typical; most physicians, especially at top schools, don't enter medical school straight out of their undergraduate program
> My friends that are residents in podunk Illinois are making 65k/year. It goes very far there.
$65K/year is significantly more than the average amount that a first-year resident (intern) makes ($51K/year). Also, medicine is one field where it's often much more lucrative to work in small towns than large cities, so that's the place where the discrepancy would be expected to be the largest.
$51K/year is not a lot, though. That comes out to $980/week, and residents generally now work 80 hours/week (it used to be significantly longer - 100 or more). That comes out to $12.25/hour, which is actually less than minimum wage in many cities. And again, that's the average.
Whether or not residents are literally making less than minimum wage, though, is not really the point: the point is that residents aren't making the kind of money that would make a significant dent in their debt, so they don't really start paying off the principal on their loans until they're done with residency (and even fellowships), which is a long time for interest to compound.
> Ultimately, if you think it's such a good deal, I'm sure Cuba would let you defect and go to medical school for the opportunity to earn $30/month like she does in Cuba.
Well, yes, they very explicitly have programs to take foreign students who get free or subsidized medical education in Cuba in return for practicing in Cuba for a certain amount of time.
That it isn't attractive for American doctors is unsurprising given the huge difference in economy, but it is attractive to a lot of people from developing countries, and it does a lot of good for the countries they come from, given that these doctors are meant to return, unlike e.g. the UK NHS which contributes to a lot of brain drain.
A typical case of "grass is greener elsewhere" and quitter syndrome. Pretty common in ex-commie countries that expected manna from heaven once they switched their system, then ended up in a shock. It would probably suck if you were confined to the same work/hospital/team most of your life though.
There are many problems in Cuba, but what this article is saying is based on pure propaganda. Of course these doctors are not receiving money as they would in the US, this is the whole point of a communist system. In the other hand they didn't have to pay anything for education during their whole life, unlike the US where just a few people have the money and/or opportunity to go to medical school. It is just like going to Cuban managers and saying that they wished to live in a capitalist system where they would made 10 times more than their poor friends. It doesn't make it right.
In other words, this article is trying to attack Cuba for what it did right as a communist country, not for what it did wrong. If this were the worst that came out from Cuba, then it would be pretty close to perfect.
The thing you're not mentioning is that these doctors don't live in Cuba. They live in capitalist countries in which the government doesn't (even try to) provide X, Y, and Z.
Sure, the doctors got a free education, and that's worth a lot. But at some point they'll have paid off the value of that education and after that point, they're still being taxed at some very high rate and they're seeing no benefit from those taxes because they live in Brazil. Seems like exploitation to me.
That says something about human nature. Many want to satisfy themselves in a way that money conveys.
I wonder if other countries (US, France, England...) students would see things like this Cuban doctor if they had full medical education for free. Would they think relatively to the tuition system ? would they say that being able to cure people is so worthy they'd do it for free.
I think it's understandable. They see parts they like and either ignore or don't know about the rest. The most anti-communist places you'll find are in Eastern Europe where the old people remember going through sub-zero winters without heat.
> The most anti-communist places you'll find are in Eastern Europe
I'm not totally sure that's still true. It might be. But I think a lot of people are now nostalgic for communism after living what is apparently the alternative for them.
The most anti-communist people I know, though, are definitely some people in _the U.S._ from Eastern European countries, who moved here before or shortly after the end of communism. (I also know some people in the U.S. from Russia especially who are not particularly anti-communist. Russia definitely had it better than most other soviet bloc). (Also, the very poor seldom get to immigrate to the U.S. from Eastern Europe either before or after communism, immigrants are not a representative sample. Although I knew a lot of poor-ish undocumented immigrant Poles in Chicago in the late 90s. They weren't particularly anti-communist by and large.)
But yeah, the grass is often greener, as they say.
I see it as sort of the same thing as when, say, a city-dweller reveres deer and thinks they are somewhat magical, because they only have intellectual knowledge of deer. Whereas, take a rural-dweller, and they usually see deer as a nuisance and pest.
It occurs to me that when Yaili Jiménez Gutierrez, an educated citizen of Cuba that knows full well the consequences of being critical of the regime's policies, characterizes these circumstances as "slavery" we're hearing from a pretty courageous person. You don't do this lightly.
But this isn't flattering of the collectivist system so no love for her...
It's not that different (it is different, sure, but not that much) from how people who look at capitalism and only think of rich countries, ignoring the ample supply of capitalist countries with completely failed economies. Of course there is also a bit of survivorship bias here, because failed economies are much more likely to try out communism than flourishing ones. After the revolution, one easily blames communism for economic failure that actually happened before.
I'm not saying that we should all turn commie, but just looking at the richest country and acknowledging that they are not communist paints a very incomplete picture. (By that measure, we might also determine that we should ditch democracy, because look at how wealthy a few selected monarchies are!)
Of course it's free. That's how slavery works. Slaves get everything provided for them but have no freedom to profit from their labor or improve their conditions.
That is not how slavery as practiced in North America, including Cuba, worked. You didn't get things "provided", you got absolute subsistence (or less) during your most productive years.
Okay, just for fun I punched this into a loan calculator. Assume the cost of their medical education is $200,000. (Everything here is USD.) A ten-year loan at 10% interest would require paying $2,643.01 a month. According to the article, the Cuban government is making about $2,700 a month on each doctor in Brazil.
So even if you factor in free medical education, it's hard to argue the doctors still owe the Cuban government something 10 years after getting their degree.
I am willing to believe that, but I don't have any way to calculate what the number should be, so I took a generous estimate. (Average US post-medical school debt is $18x,000 according to a quick search I did.)
Cuban education lacks major cost components like practice/internship insurance and U.S. level income healthcare professionals in the teaching: their professors are also paid $30/mo. They also have no top-tier equipment, use run-down facilities, don't stick to expensive regulations and protocols and (if their communism is anything like communism of the place I grew up) most likely employ the students for all kind of maintenance chores. I'd put it at $20k tops for 6 year curriculum, and that's being on very generous side.
Well, working with your assumption, $20,000 loan 10% interest over FIVE years is $424.94 a month.
Somehow I doubt all the Cuba-defenders here are going to accept your assumption, though, as it makes the outrageousness of the whole thing much more explicit.
Yes but that is the difference between a loan system and a welfare system, you're not just paying for the services you received, you're paying for the availability of all services (including ones you didn't use) for all people.
Is it free if it sets you up for working for 900 dollars a month in the best case for a mid-thirties medical professional? Or working for a complete pittance at home? Seems to me that there are pretty horrid strings attached to that deal. I can feel for their plight.
You find this mixed reaction in a lot of former communist countries, both capitalist and communist institutions have a vested interest in maintining a cartoon dichotomy.
But everyone’s life expectancy and literacy is up since the revolution. Comparing 1940 Cuba with 2017 Cuba isn’t even useful, regardless of political system.
But he thought wrong. There is absolutely no comparison in the standard of living in Cuba to the western world. None whatsoever. Cast whatever aspersions you like about it, the fact remains.
> Seems weird to come from a country which is explicitly organized around giving everybody a chance to succeed and then upon success saying, yeah but I don't like paying for it.
Succeed at what? What success do they gain from being a doctor in a country which prevents them from being rewarded for it? Their returns are fixed by the government, and even when they're working overseas (earning way more money) the government is kind enough to even it out.
It may surprise you, but it is hard work to be a doctor. These folks are basically forced to work however long is required by the state in a country where they're probably not even allowed on the internet, with a government which was built on tricking peasant farmers into willing their land to a psychopathic dictator who killed everyone who got in his way.
The conditions they work under have every feature of slavery, even if the clothes they put on look professional.
A 34 y/o American doctor, even if they are somehow still paying off school, had the personal opportunity to take on that burden. Every working person in Cuba, peasants, mechanics, and seamstresses alike, takes on the burden of training you as a doctor. Everyone, including the doctor, spends their entire life paying it off.
Watch out, this goes against the oh so currently hot narrative that capitalism is bad and the government providing "to each according to his needs" is the silver bullet.
Take a picture of a street in Cuba, look at the buildings, the vehicles if it's a nice one.
Every nice thing (or thing that looks like it was once nice) you see in the picture was produced by capital markets; and it looks like the 1940s because because the capital markets stopped functioning in the 1940s.
> What success do they gain from being a doctor in a country which prevents them from being rewarded for it?
Hmm, do you think most doctors in the U.S. are only in it for monetary rewards, and don't find any other part of the job rewarding? I don't think I want that doctor.
They're in it to have a good life. To some extent that enjoyment can come from serving patients, but they would also like to have a good life at home. Is it so much to ask that people who spend all day saving and improving lives (yes, for pay) should be paid pretty well relative to the supply?
In any walk of life in a capital system, your pay is determined by how you serve people. Doctors serve the very basis of their patients' lives.
If you can put a price on that, it should be pretty darn high.
I think everyone working an honest job should be payed pretty well (not sure what you mean about 'relative to the supply'), at least enough to have a good life, for sure. Is it too much to ask that everyone have enough to live a good life? Who doesn't deserve a good life because of their occupation? Nobody.
I don't know there's any reason doctors should get exceptionally high incomes (except that in the U.S. they have to pay back exceptionally high student loans for the first decade-ish, of course).
By "relative to supply", I mean that if there are far more than enough doctors in a given region or scenario or specialty, the price could go down and it would be fair.
If you don't think that doctoring should earn especially high incomes, then you have not seen a doctor work, and perhaps you've never been gravely injured.
>Is it too much to ask that everyone have enough to live a good life?
Depends on 'the good life' - we can't lift everyone up to live like a doctor, but it's easy to push doctors down so they live like everyone else.
>I don't know there's any reason doctors should get exceptionally high incomes
U.S doctor's incomes are probably influenced by the AMA cartel that keeps good candidates from earning medical degrees. After we bust the cartel, we can let the chips fall where they may. My hunch is that doctors would be paid more like veterinarians if the market were freer.
On some level, a job's compensation is tied to the challenge of the job. It's more difficult to perform good medicine than it is to be a cashier, we should expect doctors to be better compensated than cashiers.
>Succeed at what? What success do they gain from being a doctor in a country which prevents them from being rewarded for it?
I would say the success of being a doctor at all but it seems that to you success is purely a function of wealth. In that case these people could have left Cuba before using it's free education. It's highly hypocritical to use all the benefits of the Cuban system and then be upset when you also have to help pay into it.
>It may surprise you, but it is hard work to be a doctor.
Nope, I totally get that.
>with a government which was built on tricking peasant farmers into willing their land to a psychopathic dictator who killed everyone who got in his way.
Oh lord, put the overreaction away. How many words do you think I would have to change in this sentence to make it reflect America's founding relation between wealthy British WASPs and native americans?
>The conditions they work under have every feature of slavery, even if the clothes they put on look professional.
I understand you don't like communism but really the hyperbole man... and shame on you for trivializing slavery. These doctors all knew what the Cuban system was, they chose to use Cuba's excellent medical education program which is provided for free and which can only be provided, again, for free because it taxes it's citizens heavily and now that they have received that benefit, want to rescind on it's price.
>A 34 y/o American doctor, even if they are somehow still paying off school, had the personal opportunity to take on that burden.
Ah but how many Americans really get a shot at medical school?
In the most recent year for which quintile census data are available, more than three-quarters of medical students came from families in the top two quintiles of family income. [0]
And you should check that citation, Figure 2 is particularly damning. Essentially, these Cuban doctors face the reality that had they been born in the United States there is a significant percentage of them that never would have had a shot at attending medical school in the first place.
You could also take a look at the Wired article[1] that I found that linked from, it's about how poor American students are actually going to Cuba for education. In effect, Cuba that poor communist country is to a certain extent actually subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system that happen to be less lucrative:
Most of the school’s American graduates go into family medicine, internal medicine, or pediatrics—all fields facing major doctor shortages and all fields on the low end of the doctor pay scale.[1]
Thanks Cuba!
>Every working person in Cuba, peasants, mechanics, and seamstresses alike, takes on the burden of training you as a doctor. Everyone, including the doctor, spends their entire life paying it off.
Can I just change the framing of this a little bit, tell me what you think:
Every working person in Cuba, peasants, mechanics, and seamstresses alike, chips in to train you as a doctor. Everyone, including the doctor, continues to chip in to train the next generation of doctors.
> Every working person in Cuba, peasants, mechanics, and seamstresses alike, chips in to train you as a doctor. Everyone, including the doctor, continues to chip in to train the next generation of doctors.
They're not chipping in, they don't have a choice in the matter. I think Cubans would rather have a better basic quality of life, than spend so much of their income training doctors who probably won't even operate near them, and who are used basically as indentured servants by the government, a government which pockets most of the money (as evidenced by the mansions and secret wealth of the despots).
Come on man, I wrote a big rebuttal, actually line by line. I at least expect an attempt at addressing the meat of it.
But to blame Cuba's poverty on communism is wrong, it's a result of being excluded from trade. And I really wish you could pull back from the slavery hyperbole. They're not indentured servants. I work at a corporation, I make a bunch of money for the corporation that they pocket and then I get a tiny piece back, am I an indentured servant? What about my debt? Am I an indentured servant? Come on, just pull back on the rhetoric a bit and let's hash this out. And no one likes the hoarded wealth of secretive and bad people but that exists in America just like it does Cuba.
> I think Cubans would rather have a better basic quality of life
They do have a better basic quality of life. That's exactly what they already have. Cuba is not a rich country like the US, so of course the direct comparison without historical context will mislead you. If they opened up free capitalism style trade with other nations, they would be slaves on foreign owned farms and foreign owned factories instead of the government (using this thread's definition of slavery, of course). If they opened up capitalism style free trade internally, some people would get very rich and the majority of people's lives would be much much worse off. The income inequality would skyrocket.
You're suggesting that they're poor because they're communist. That's not the case. They're poor because they're an ex colony whose never became rich from wars, imperialism, natural resources, etc.. And when you consider that and the US trade embargo, they've done amazingly well.
> You're suggesting that they're poor because they're communist. That's not the case.
I'd like you to back that up. Right now, the private sector in Cuba (for example, taxi drivers with private licenses) is rich by Cuban standards. A taxi driver with a private license can make several times more in a day than a doctor makes in a month. Participation in the black market also contributes to quality of life.
The most successful common people in Cuba are those who engage with the freest markets.
I don't disagree that rational citizen actors are making themselves more money in those specific scenarios. But that doesn't mean capitalism is increasing the nation's net capital and wealth in any way communism could not have. It doesn't mean those actors are not increasing wealth inequality (some could be, maybe it's negligible, maybe it's even decreasing). Fixing one's own microeconomics isn't equivalent to fixing the entire nation's macroeconomics. If the nation has a small total value, it's not going to increase total value size if you yourself take a bigger peice of the pie.
>I understand you don't like communism but really the hyperbole man... and shame on you for trivializing slavery. These doctors all knew what the Cuban system was, they chose to use Cuba's excellent medical education program which is provided for free and which can only be provided, again, for free because it taxes it's citizens heavily and now that they have received that benefit, want to rescind on it's price.
It's pretty clear by that statement that you don't understand the government of Cuba or how it has been funded. Most Cubans don't pay taxes, and haven't since the revolution. Only recently have income taxes been put in place, and mostly that's for business owners and comes with significant write-offs.
>Ah but how many Americans really get a shot at medical school?
In the most recent year for which quintile census data are available, more than three-quarters of medical students came from families in the top two quintiles of family income. [0]
Ok, so 75% of medical students come from families in the top 50% of incomes. That doesn't seem too absurd to me.
As to your Wired article, the statement that "In effect, Cuba that poor communist country is to a certain extent actually subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system that happen to be less lucrative"
is a bit ridiculous, because that article mentions a total 100 doctors using the program over a 17 year period. Yes, Cuba may train 6 American MD's a year, (actually, more like 4 - not everyone graduates) but that isn't really subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system, not in any meaningful way.
>It's pretty clear by that statement that you don't understand the government of Cuba or how it has been funded.
Fair, fair, it's communist not tax-capitalist. I shouldn't have said "tax."
>Ok, so 75% of medical students come from families in the top 50% of incomes. That doesn't seem too absurd to me.
Top 40%. It does seem absurd to me, did you look at Figure 2 that I linked? That is the inversion of a meritocracy.
>As to your Wired article, the statement that "In effect, Cuba that poor communist country is to a certain extent actually subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system that happen to be less lucrative" is a bit ridiculous, because that article mentions a total 100 doctors using the program over a 17 year period. Yes, Cuba may train 6 American MD's a year, (actually, more like 4 - not everyone graduates) but that isn't really subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system, not in any meaningful way.
But totally true! 100 doctors here working in geographic areas that don't normally attract doctors and/or fields that don't attract doctors. It may not be super large but I bet you there are some Americans out there who are very happy (any may not even know it) that Cuba invested in our doctors when we wouldn't.
>Fair, fair, it's communist not tax-capitalist. I shouldn't have said "tax."
It's not just that. Powerful central governments don't function on the idea of everyone chipping in, they function on the idea that they can oversee the use of resources and allocate them in the best possible way. Normal people don't get a say in terms of resource allocation and don't get a say in who makes up the central government, so they aren't 'chipping in' in a meaningful way, as that implies it was their choice.
>Top 40%. It does seem absurd to me, did you look at Figure 2 that I linked? That is the inversion of a meritocracy.
I am not surprised by the news that 75% of doctors come from families that make over $50,000 a year. To become a doctor, you need to go to college, which costs money, then go to medical school, which costs more. During that period you must also not need to provide for your family so there's also a significant opportunity cost.
That said, the fact that this rate is increasing may be cause for concern, as noted in the article. Frankly, there is also another significant issue: the idea that you can become a doctor at all as a realistic goal, which I think is also a barrier - many people don't believe it is possible for them when it actually is.
As for the 100 medical students, I bet a lot of those doctors did not return to the United States to practice medicine, as they would have to do their residencies here to get licensed.
That is the whole point but the social contract in a communist society is one that you can't really get ahead through working harder / smarter - at least not as dramatically so as one can in a capitalist country. Though that's not to say that no one gets ahead in communist societies, just that those who do tend to get ahead on their ability to amass political power.
And there's a nugget about income inequality here - Cuba has reduced income inequality by making people more similarly poor. Doctors and managers live side by side with laborers and cooks. Maybe that's good for society, but the average Cuban lives like an American at the federal poverty line. Americans are unequally rich - our poorest are poorer and worse off then the average Cuban but the median American is richer than the median Cuban and the average American is much better off then the average Cuban.
It might be too utilitarian for humanitarians but I don't think income inequality matters on its face. My life wouldn't be worse if there were 10x as many billionaires, in fact, it'd probably be better because those billionaires would have created great things to earn their fortunes - if they earned their fortunes giving humanity cheap power and better health care and tastier, more nutrious food we'd be much better off.
I think the KPI to target is poverty - I simply want fewer poor people to be poor. There's a role for a better safety net, and probably some tweaks to laws that infringe upon the right to work, but historically redistribution works once in society and then you run out of other people's money.
The comparison to the United States seems meaningless. Of more interest is how Cuba compares to pre-revolutionary Cuba or to capitalist countries with more similar characteristics as far as population and resources. How well do people live in Cuba compared to, say, the Dominican Republic? I'm not sure of the answer but none of the Caribbean islands (even Puerto Rico) really have US mainland-like economic output or standards of living. Trinidad and Tobago is supposed to be a success story but I'm not sure how it compares.
In Cuba often tourist dollars greatly outstrip the local economy. So you're ending up with a situation where qualified doctors are moving in to tourism - waiters, doormen - to earn more money.
Same here; evidence I have to support is that the ONLY people with (newer) cars [1] were Airbnb hosts. My host not only owned a late-model Suzuki 4door but also was getting into the business of "flipping" old apartments into Airbnbs/Casa particular. Since he had 24 hour access to the internet (somehow?? [2]) he also acted as the agent for other Airbnbs for people that didn't have access.
[1] Of course there were people with the old cars, but these were passed down and are, as I understand it, required by law to act as a mini-bus service.
[2] Although internet in Cuba is only officially available by buying a hourly code on a scratcher card from the telephone company and then Wifi is in the parks in Havana, I did notice bootleg Wifi SSIDs when walking the streets. They were easy to spot even without "war-walking" since they are a good 1/2 km from any nearby park and had usually a dozen folks on their phones browsing Facebook or using Skype. I suspect it's either an insider connection at the telephone company OR a clandestine Directway / Hughesnet satellite (there are NO visible dishes in Cuba, I believe it must be illegal).
Same experience here when I was there for a couple of months. Taxi drivers (and some other tourism related jobs) get paid and tipped in dollars. Easily 10-50x the income of a doctor being paid the equivalent of $30 in Cuban pesos
Where did you learn about this? I'd like to investigate in more detail.
Visit Cuba and talk to people. The barman, the taxi driver, the bellhop, the waiter can easily earn in a day's tips in hard currency, over a month's wages in local currency, especially if they speak good English. It was the same in Russia when the USSR imploded. The chances were your taxi driver in Moscow had a physics PhD and had quit or was moonlighting from their official job in a research institute...
> The pastor was outraged to learn that, under the terms of their employment, Cuban doctors earn only about a quarter of the amount the Brazilian government pays Cuba for their services.
This is how Sweden finances their free education as well, it is called taxes. The problem isn't with how Cuba treats specifically doctors but how Cuba refuses to let people emigrate in general.
Yes that confused me a bit as well... I work for a US-based engineering company and they bill clients 3 - 4x what I earn for my work. Am I misunderstanding something about the article?
It's propaganda, but it still points to a system of perverse incentives that the Cuban Government should address. My parents took a bicycling trip to Cuba a number of years ago. Their guide had a wife who was a doctor. He made ~20x what she did because he earned his money by serving foreigners. So in a country that tries to make everyone equal, there are still tiers of wealth and the people in the upper tiers are the ones who are arguably doing the least valuable work for their society.
Note that this is a problem not limited to communist countries like Cuba. In America, in particular, we have this problem when it comes to our teachers. Teaching the next generation is one of the most important jobs we have and, yet, the pay is so low that the best people for the job are disincentivized to go into that profession. When a hedge fund manager managing teacher pensions out-earns an entire school faculty who are invested in his fund while underperforming the S&P, we too have a problem.
If you feel like you're not being paid what you should, you always have the option of starting your own engineering practice instead of letting someone else decide how you get billed out and what cut you get paid.
Presumably these doctors don't have that choice; they get what the government says they get and that's that.
Of course med school in the US is far from free. Totally different system over there, if you compare a single part at a time of course one of them is going to look terrible.
I definitely don't disagree with you regarding the doctors not having any other option. I was just surprised that the article was describing a 4x billing rate to salary ratio as outrageous when in my experience that is typical for the technology industry in the US.
I think consulting is a reasonable comparison. Most management consulting firms (Big 3 for sure, and probably Deloitte, Accenture too) will pay for your MBA if you commit to working 2 more years for them. The Cuban government also paid for these doctors' education and is billing them out similarly to consultants.
The Cuban people should have more freedom of choice and freedom of movement, but economically, these kinds of arrangements present themselves under capitalism as well.
Am I right in assuming this is very similar to most work abroad agreements? I work for a company AAA that sponsors my visa to work in Brazil. If i want to leave AAA, I must go back to America or find someone else willing to sponsor my work visa? Additionally my company may be charging the client 2x-4x what they pay me.
well, you can find someone willing to sponsor your visa but they can't, they aren't allowed to, and if the leave the "mission" they are considered traitors or deserters and get exiled for 8 years
This feels like an awfully insensitive metaphor given Afrocuban history and its role in Castro's revolution.
You might be getting an awfully short end of a stick, but if you're getting free education and free health care at that level, you are not justified invoking slavery as a comparison, given the history there.
Right now Nazism is rightfully consigned to the trash heap of history and mostly people don't talk about it in polite company. Communism should also undergo the same fate. It probably has the highest body count of any ideology (see Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro ) and is the only ideology where a country built a wall, not keep people from coming in, but to keep people from leaving. It has made millions of people miserable, so miserable in fact, that multitudes of people risked their lives to flee it.
TLDR: Nazism and Communism should be in the same bucket.
45 million people died over 4 years in Mao's Great Leap Forward from starvation and execution. 10+ million people died in Stalin's gulags alone. Are you really trying to equate this with healthcare in America?
Totally, we're past these times and living in a more stable and richer world, how is it that we're still letting people die because of competition? I think it's a fair comparison in today's standards.
> What about capitalism America where you don't deserve healthcare if you can't afford it?
Well if you're going to be sensationalist about it. What about Socialism, where your material needs are provided for through extreme violence, via theft; using guns to take from one person against their will, to give to another. The entire foundation of all forms of Socialism, require extreme violence as a means to redistribute and at no time can that violence be relaxed, for it works at all times against human nature and self-interest. It's also why every nation that has ever attempted Socialism has collapsed into perpetual barbaric violence against its people, holding them as State slaves with few rights: Cuba, Cambodia, North Korea, Soviet Russia, East Germany, Mao's China, Venezuela, North Vietnam, National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy, the numerous Soviet satellites, Socialist Ba'athist Iraq, and so on.
Military dictatorships are responsible for the atrocities you mention. Not communism. Evil people. Atrocities have also happened in capitalist counties - we're not placing the blame for those on the style of market the government chooses to adapt and it would be idiotic to do so.
Are you saying communism cannot exist separately from (evil) dictator? Lots of the ideas do (there are plenty of functioning highly socialist countries). Theoretically at least communism could exist peacefully (although it seems you would need everyone in the country to agree and remain agreed to the principals for that to work).
Also - dictatorships can work. There have been several 'benevolent' dictators who made communism work without introducing any more evil than many democratically elected leaders. A dictatorship doesn't naturally lead to Mao/Stalin etc.
This is the same tired argument: "But communism would work if people did it right." This is neither an historical nor a scientific argument. It is pure wide-eyed ideology that ignores the devastation that communism has caused everywhere it has been tried. Communism = oppression, poverty, and starvation.
Around 100 years of history isn't a big sample size when it comes to political/economic ideologies. Also, I would argue their are examples of it existing with non-evil dictators. I won't bother naming anyone specifically as it's easy to say 'but x did y' however I feel like that applies to a majority of world leaders under any system. There are certainly leaders of communist countries who did no-more evil than some of our recent democratically elected leaders in the west.
There have been many attempts at communism and it has had a 100% rate of ending in dictatorship. Which of those dictators would you consider non-evil? Should we want dictatorship, even if the the dictator is non-evil? Given the absurdly bad consequences in many cases and the fact that it's not all that surprising that an ideology like communism ends in dictatorship, I'd suggest that trying it again is not very wise.
> There are certainly leaders of communist countries who did no-more evil than some of our recent democratically elected leaders in the west.
What if they had the most powerful army in the world at their disposal?
There are more nuanced critiques of either of the predominant systems discussed in this comment section. If you want to throw unfair death totals for what are at best regimes loosely approximating their underlying communist or capitalist ideologies, you can just as easily claim capitalism kills tons. https://i.redd.it/h0l4hqcf5inz.jpg
but honestly, I don't think body counts are the right way to judge either. Makes for a great way to emotionally charge the conversation, though.
scoreboard really. name a single capitalist totalitarian dictator? Capitalism implicitly does not incentivize centralization of power. Now name how many successful western countries haven't embraced capitalism as, at the very least, their main source of funds to experiment with.
>Now name how many successful western countries haven't embraced capitalism as, at the very least, their main source of funds to experiment with.
Almost all western countries are capitalist I believe? Usually I take western to mean (1) democratic (2) capitalist. Besides as I'm arguing elsewhere, the failure of many socialist states is due to US intervention. Cuba's Embargo is a great example, the coup that placed Pinochet in power is another. America hates socialism/communism so it constantly acts aggressively towards those states while helping capitalist states. It's tough to look at the scoreboard and judge when the ref is obviously biased.
So just because he instituted some free market policies, hes capitalist? In no way did any capitalist figurehead advocate any of his violence. Also, what was Pinochet's body count? many orders of magnitude less than just Mao right?
> Almost all western countries are capitalist I believe? Usually I take western to mean (1) democratic (2) capitalist.
You are stretching the word capitalist beyond any recognition. It simply does not describe a government embargo nor aggressive government actions by any definition.
> In no way did any capitalist figurehead advocate any of his violence.
You should really do some research before you make claims like this. One place to start would be Marvin Liebman and the American-Chilean Council, which planted pro-Chilean propaganda in several high-profile conservative press outlets.
In what way, shape, or form does slavery have nothing to do with capitalism?
The millions of American Indians that were murdered because they wouldn't give up their valuable land?
How is throwing away good food because no one pays for it, and thereby letting poor people starve, not capitalist? How is it the "antithesis of free enterprise"?
To the degree that they did trade peacefully (free enterprise), they flourished - thus the lesson of Thanksgiving. Not to mention they were fleeing religious persecution themselves in North America. Of course establishing private property in a new land was not without friction and abuse. However, the killing of Indians by the Union army were direct actions of Government - not the enlightenment principles of capitalism, free trade & movement, as expounded by the likes of Mises and Adam Smith.
and it was financed by European royalty in South America. How did that go?
The truth is there weren't many options. But I would attribute abuses by violent governments to government, not private enterprise.
I somewhat agree, but any connection between Communism and Socialism needs to similarly find its way to that trash heap. Communism's failing is its seemingly inescapable combination with totalitarianism and despotism, which was a significant problem with Nazism as well. It's not the principle that society is responsible for caring for and providing for it's citizens. For too long, we've resisted more socialist policies because those with a vested interest in the status quo were able to paint them as communist.
But Socialism has been successful enough in European countries at this point to be fully differentiated from Communism despite sharing that single principle. In The United States, in particular, there is still a legacy of the 'red scare' that's used to push back against socialist policies that would greatly improve this country and that needs to end too.
Exactly, and as a European I'd like to caution that this article plays into the "oooh communism isn't so great now is it" mentality that is prevalent in the US due to the cold war.
Let's separate the principles of a system of government with how it's been implemented, there's still a good discussion to be had on individualism vs society and the tradeoffs when forming governmental structures.
That is not what socialism used to mean. European countries are capitalist with a welfare state. This was first set up in Germany by Bismarck, and the socialists were opposed to it. Socialism used to mean that the means of production were in the hands of the government, and by that standard Europe is certainly not socialist. The capital is privately owned and the decisions about how to use that capital are made by those owners. The wealth that is redistributed in Europe is created by capitalism. Europe does not differ significantly from the US in this regard; the government expenditure as a percentage of GDP in "socialist" Europe is not very different than "capitalist" United States. The US spends 42% whereas France and Sweden (usually considered the two most socialist countries in Europe) it is 56% and 51%, respectively. In Germany it's 45% and in Switzerland 35%.
IIRC, that 3.3% is just for the 5 branches of the military and doesn't include intelligence spending (~$80b/yr) or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which are around $2.4 trillion dollars thus far over ~14 years. A more honest number is probably above 4%.
My understanding is that US spending is relatively 'inefficient' compared to European countries, esp for healthcare. We spend more for comparatively worse outcomes (this is definitely true when compared to UK NHS, probably for France too).
Generic ideological tangents are off topic for HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They don't count as interesting in HN's sense, i.e. they don't gratify intellectual curiosity. The more grandiose a topic, the fewer new meaningful things there are to say about it.
The SV atitude on communism threads is always interesting. Communism is great, quit whining you greedy doctors. Helping people is its own reward! But for me? No no, I'm a developer! I deserve my salary!
Anarchy isn't the lack of governance or hierarchy, it's the lack of a government. Not an anarchist, they generally have the worst possible ideas...but he wasn't really a hypocrite for this.
You may have fallen prey to the 'HN commenters are in SV' fallacy. HN long ago became an international community, and even in the US its readers are mostly outside SV. The majority of HN commenters aren't that well-disposed toward SV.
Users here have a broad range of politics, just like any sufficiently random large population sample. The ones who feel strongly about X are more likely motivated to post to X threads. So what you're seeing is not a high communism rate in general, just in (lord help us) communism threads. In other words the sample-bias fairy is afoot.
To round out the bias list: a good test when you think you see a pattern on HN is to ask if the same is true of humans in general. We're seeing a return of classic ideological battles (e.g. communism vs. capitalism), but that's also true in society at large. It's the macro trend, and HN can't be immune from that. We get wet in the same rainstorm as everyone else. I guess history didn't end after all!
The doctors are outraged at only getting paid 25% of their billing rate. Back in the '90s I worked with a lot of engineers billed out to customers by Digital at $200/hr who were paid less than $50/hr. They certainly didn't consider themselves slaves.
Yup. The only people who like communism are the ones who have never lived under a communist regime. Ask any Eastern European over 40 about what that’s like before you make any rash decisions out of ignorance.
I had the luck of leaving Cuba 4 years ago and then my family came as well, my mother was a doctor for 25 years and I had asked her a lot of questions about why doctors left to go on a "mission" to any of these countries.
One of the incentives the Cuban Government used to use to make doctors go to those "missions" as they call it in Cuba, is that once they have finished it they were allowed to buy a house or car, I say allowed because until recently you couldn't buy any of it without the government authorization.
Nowadays they used another technique which is; we will allow you to bring back 1 container ( those in ships) full of whatever you want, as usual the with the government they haven't been allowing it even though those doctors already spent 2-3 years on the "mission" so those people went there with that promise and it turn got nothing.In Cuba the whole idea of making 1.3k/month sounds great and many doctors blindly agree to go without knowing first how much they will spend on food/clothes/supplements etc, but of course they can't really look up that information because internet until recently was non existent and nowadays WIFI access cost $1.5/hr ( CUC) which is their salary of a fully day.
Of course that's modern day slavery, the government acts as your owner, they set the condition and can change it at will, if you don't abide them, well you have two options:
- back to Cuba in 24 hours and be prepare to have your doctor's license removed
- stay in the country and be exiled for 8 years.
PS: Until recently, doctors in Cuba weren't allowed to leave the country under any circumstances except for "missions", the government train of thoughts is " I own all these people".
All: Generic discussions about communism and other grand ideological themes are off topic here. Because we're communists? No, because there's nothing new to say about them, at least not on an internet forum—if you've really found some, you should write a book. As a topic gets bigger and bigger, what one can say gets less meaningful. We end up in the space of 'what's new is not good and what's good is not new', and that is one of the lame squares on the intellectual curiosity board.
Perhaps we should revisit the idea of a political detox?
I for one have been noticing the signal-to-noise ratio on HN has been lowering over the past year. Discussions have become less about the content of the article and more about the title or some other related fact. Technical discussions are becoming increasingly derailed by bike-shedding, ideology, and flame wars. Hell, I bet even the average word count per comment is down.
In signal processing, when noise becomes too high we implement a filter. It doesn't have to be too harsh of a filter, perhaps a band-stop filter which passes most frequencies unaltered but attenuates those in a specific range to very low levels.
That didn't work, because the question of how to define 'political' is itself highly political. We knew that before we tried the detox experiment but boy did we know it afterwards. And it wouldn't be in HN's mandate (like, not at all) to try to limit it to technical stories. Our core audience, even if it feels like a minority sometimes, is readers who are interested in both technical and non-technical things.
> the signal-to-noise ratio on HN has been lowering over the past year
People have been saying that since the beginning. Is it true? Maybe, but there are strong biases (e.g. it always feels like things are getting worse) and it's hard to measure.
I agree that defining "political" is itself partly political. Having said that, and just as my 2 cents, I think the experiment was not run long enough to be conclusive.
People always complain with changes. I think it's reasonable to believe that people who actively want politics on HN would be on the noisier end of the spectrum of complainers. Any attempt to get these conversations off HN was bound, initially, to cause a loud and pointed reaction from one subset of users.
But people also adapt and forget. I think there's a real chance that after, say, 6-8 weeks, HN would have established a "new normal" and people would know that it's not a place to discuss the outrage of the week, just as it's already known it's not a place to discuss the latest celebrity-dancing-baking-show scandals.
I'll reiterate that it's a very tricky problem. But I don't agree that there was conclusive evidence that the political detox "didn't work" -- it was canceled long before a steady state was reached.
While defining 'political' might be too difficult, isn't detecting 'noise' on a comment-level quite a bit easier?
There are still many comments that, even when they often end up 'dead', spawn entire pointless discussions or just clutter up the rest of the discussion in the time that they're up. Quite possibly they affect the general conversation in ways that are difficult to measure.
The thing is that many of these comments appear to me as either immediately and obviously noise, or obviously so after a cursory check of the poster's comment history. In fact, I'm very often surprised that you or your colleague(s) leave a "don't do this here" message, when after clicking through to the commenter it's obvious that they're probably going to keep doing this until they're banned (and trivially create a new account).
I'm wondering if perhaps a stricter zero-tolerance to low-quality posts, or at least repeat offenders, might not be necessary to offset the inevitable growth of 'noisy' accounts.
I'm very impressed with the moderation here, to be clear, so I'm sure that it's more difficult than I think it is, or that I'm missing something. But I guess I'm just how often I come across an active, unbanned account that clearly hasn't been commenting in good faith for quite a while. Considering how little these accounts are 'worth' (as in, if there's any association with the username, it's negative, and karma is low), and how cheaply new ones can be create, a slightly swifter 'banhammer' might not do much harm?
The last political detox week occurred at the height of first evidence of social media's influence on the election, and the same week as YC partner Peter Thiel built out his influence on Donald Trump's transition team.
It would be implausibly coincidental for the second attempt to happen at the same time Facebook and Twitter are being directly investigated for their role in electoral propaganda and Thiel is a frontrunner for the PIAB position.
209 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadWhen I visited Cuba this spring, there was a palpable level of resentment towards Obama for this change, as well as the end of the 'wet feet dry feet' policy [1]. Tourism dollars are good but probably not worth giving up 'plan B.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_feet,_dry_feet_policy
The second priority was to pimp out the people for more pocket money.
Now that's Progressive.™
>Hundreds of miles away, in Minas Gerais State, Dr. Jiménez, 34, found the work rewarding, but also began to harbor feelings of resentment. “You are trained in Cuba and our education is free, health care is free, but at what price?” she said. “You wind up paying for it your whole life.”
Is that not the point? The communist government allows anybody to attend their very good medical schools totally for free. This doctor hasn't even made it to 34 and she wants to opt out, how many 34 y/o american doctors are even close to paying down their debt? Seems weird to come from a country which is explicitly organized around giving everybody a chance to succeed and then upon success saying, yeah but I don't like paying for it.
There are a lot of very smart people in the west who never had the chance to study medicine (there seem to be a lot of American janitors with high IQs...) - Under a communist regime, those who are mentally able to become a doctor can generally do so; in the west there are many financial and social hurdles. Communism removes the element of luck from the system.
I don't think it's quite fair to portray the doctors as having being treated unfairly though I also understand that it might feel that way.
I know more than a few successful Americans that age who whinge about their student loan debt too.
Weird.
They should put their money where their mouth is and spend at least a few decades in such countries before criticising others who've made a choice to leave(for various reasons).
Presumably all states do.
>Who manages the trade between the countries?
Communism is about owning the means of production so presumably the people will act through their government to decide on trade.
>Are the members of a society that claims to be Communist actually so if that society at large is part of a free-market?
Presumably, unless you mean to say that no actually Communist state has ever existed! (I'll accept this of course, I'd just like you to say it.) If you'd like to know more about this conflict I'd pull up the wiki article for "socialism in one country."
>This sounds like not getting rid of exploitation, but rather sweeping it under the rug and outsourcing it to a free-market entity.
Well the end-goal would be world communism without government, democratic everything, "from those... to those..." kind of world. In the interim trade would be necessary and you're right that unfortunately that trade may come from exploitation of the working class in another country. But if we can take our country, go socialist, reduce exploitation then that's still an admirable goal. Hopefully, those elsewhere will see and follow. I wouldn't call it "outsourcing exploitation" because presumably the trade level wouldn't increase dramatically after becoming communist. It's more like fixing our exploitation while admitting we may not be able to end all exploitation.
NOTE: I'm not actually a communist and I only know a little so these are the best answers I can give. A real communist would probably school me on this.
Do you know how many children are living on the streets in Havana? Or how many die of starvation or exposure? Maybe they're poor, but they are alive, healthy, fed, and have a roof over their heads. That's a lot more than Americans can say about the at risk in their own country.
I am by no means suggesting that Cuba is a utopia -- my own standard of living is probably quite a lot higher than the average Cuban's. I'm lucky in that way. That's not the case for many, many others.
What is it far more likely is that those who actually live the glorious communist future would make an educated choice that being a janitor in America is preferable.
'In the real Cuba, finding an aspirin can be a chore. And an antibiotic will fetch a fortune on the black market. A nurse spoke to Isabel Vincent of Canada’s National Post. “We have nothing,” said the nurse. “I haven’t seen aspirin in a Cuban store here for more than a year. If you have any pills in your purse, I’ll take them. Even if they have passed their expiry date.”'
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432680/myth-cuban-heal...
So does Cuba lack medicine because they're communist? Or are they communist because the US worked against broad prosperity in Cuba, often very violently and explicitly, for decades before and after Castro?
Especially with the rise of containerized shipping. The US gets a lot of stuff from China and ships can get to Cuba for less than it costs to reach any city on the east coast of the US.
It's their rejection of the free market that makes them unable to procure goods in the free market. It's ironic that some people want the free market to serve a system that denies its citizens access to that same exact marketplace. They don't seem to question the ideas they are repeating.
Haha, what? Look up ELAM. There are ELAM educated doctors living and working in the US today.
> In June 2000, a US Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) delegation visited Cuba to meet with Castro. Representative Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) mentioned to Castro that his district had a shortage of doctors; he responded by offering full scholarships for US nationals from Mississippi at ELAM. Later that same June, in a Washington, D.C. meeting with the CBC, the Cuban Minister of Public Health expanded the offer to all districts represented by the CBC. At a September 2000 speech event at Riverside Church, New York City, Castro publicly announced a further expanded offer which was reported as allowing several hundred places at ELAM for medical students from low-income communities from any part of the USA. Reports of the size of this offer varied in the US press: 250 or 500 places were suggested with perhaps half reserved for African-Americans and half for Hispanics and Native Americans. The ELAM offer to US students was classified as a "cultural exchange" program by the US State Department to avoid the restrictions of the U.S. embargo against Cuba. The first intake of US students into ELAM occurred in spring 2001, with 10 enrolling in the pre-medical program.[5][18][20][21]
> In 2004, the legality of the presence of US students at ELAM was threatened by tightened restrictions against travel to Cuba by US nationals under the administration of President George W. Bush. A CBC campaign led by Representatives Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Charles Rangel (D-NY) with 27 other members of Congress persuaded Secretary of State Colin Powell to exempt ELAM from the tightened restrictions.[4]
> Applications from US citizens had been administered through the New York City-based Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), headed by human rights activist and critic of the U.S. embargo of Cuba, the Rev. Lucius Walker Jr.[21]
I’d rather pay more for school and keep more of my earnings than have “free” school and high taxes forever.
Americans have more disposable income than the countries with “free” university. Student debt is temporary, confiscatory taxes are forever.
Study comp sci in France, graduate and make €40k per year before taxes. Study comp sci in the US, graduate and make $100k but with $80k in debt. What’s the better deal? Remember that $100k also includes health benefits, vacation and all that.
That €40k probably has an effective tax rate of 35% while the $100k likely has Ann effective rate of 20%.
School isn’t “free” — you pay dearly for it.
How many American doctors are paying >75% of their AFTER TAX income to pay down those debts ?
None.
How many Cuban doctors agreed to the arrangement of being restricted to a country controlled by the Cuban government, and therefore only offered a pittance for their services ?
None. They were born there.
What would happen if a bank offered such a deal to a US citizen ?
They would be persecuted, as this falls under "usury" and is a crime. Note: it's a crime. As in, if a bank does this and gets convicted (which happens regularly) people WILL go to jail for doing this.
What would happen if I did the same, organising a job for you in a foreign country and in return I get 75% of your wages in a contract that couldn't be broken ?
You could go to a judge and get the contract annulled, as this clearly violates labor laws. The article seems to confirm that this indeed violates even Brazilian labor laws.
thanks for pointing this out; I've heard the term "usury", but have never seen it linked with criminal charges. but a quick web search shows that you're right.
really interesting, and great point regarding the fraction of after-tax payments.
thanks!
> But the doctors get a small cut of that money,
If the Cuban government were taking something like 10%-20% of salaray, you could see how that would wash. I presume they are taking much more
> The World Health Organization, a United Nations agency, helped broker the deal. Under it, Brazil pays Cuba... nearly four times what Cuban doctors earn through the arrangement.
Google makes $1,200,000 per employee; a comparable average salary is then $300,000, which sounds on the high end of plausible if restricted only to engineer salaries (and it'd be a very top-heavy average), but implausibly high for a company-wide average.
Ultimately, if you think it's such a good deal, I'm sure Cuba would let you defect and go to medical school for the opportunity to earn $30/month like she does in Cuba.
Another commenter remarked that the Cuban system is set up to keep the people at the top in power, the American capitalist system less obviously so. I wonder what other methods of Socialist organisation may be explored other than the capitalist wage-labour system we see in both Cuba and the US. The idea of labour vouchers has always been interesting to me.
Plenty of people go to school and don’t rack up tens of thousands in debt.
The question we should be asking is why does education cost keep expanding so quickly: cost inflation is much higher than even healthcare. It isn’t “capitalism” it’s actually the he fact that student loan availability distorts the market. Eliminate student loans and costs will drop like a rock to a level the actual market supports. Don’t blame capitalism because capitalism would never support the artificial cost inflation caused by government intervention.
If Big Macs were subsidized as much as universities, they’d cost $100 because McDonald’s knows that if you can’t afford it, the government will be there to help.
There's no limit to how much marketing can be done.
Thus, late capitalism.
(Also the "genius" of software development, where we seem to have invented a way to make infinite broken sinks.)
What is capitalism other than the system of predominant wage-labour, private ownership of socially productive property (supported by the state), capital accumulation and class society? The idea that capitalism cannot be blamed for the fact that people are required to obey the whims of speculators in the market, to tailor their ambitions such as to maximise wage rather than to pursue enjoyment and the replacement of relations between people with relations between commodities is absurd.
Capitalism "supports" whatever will make a profit; in this case, student loans turn profits. Why would this system of student loans not occur under government intervention? There clearly exist private loan agencies.
To be clear I'm not speaking in favour of the Cuban system, so please don't assume that I am.
You do realize that wasn't true until about 15 years ago, right? You should be asking what happened (hint: it wasn't Capitalism, it was the US Government's inflationary student loan program). Until the mid 1970s when the US Government nearly destroyed the dollar, you could pay for a Harvard education with a part time job. As recently as the late 1990s, the US had very little in the way outstanding student loans compared to the size of its median income (thus the epic student loans increase that everybody can't stop talking about, ie that's why it's a headline now, because it wasn't expensive before).
It should take you about 15 minutes to do some research and compare the price of a college education prior to the year 2000, versus incomes at the time. Pick any decade prior to 2000 and do the comparison. What happened after 2000? The Bush years wars & spending hammered the dollar, which also sparked the big commodity bubble.
College tuition & fees costs climbed 500% from ~1990 to ~2010. I wonder if that was spontaneously caused by Capitalism; you know, just out of the blue prices suddenly skyrocketed because of Capitalism; or if it was something the US Government did to cause it.
Another hint: how were college costs able to completely disregard income growth and all other restraints for two decades?
You fail to address the most obvious problem with your claims:
How college costs were able to skyrocket in complete disregard to the ability to repay those loans. The lack of the ability to pay back a loan is a normal check against irresponsible lending, unless you have a printing press backing said loans and can afford to disregard defaults. The lack of responsible lending, courtesy of the US Government, is what enabled the universities to perpetually raise their costs against the lack of any economic restraints. You fail to recognize the broken core to the system: there were no cost inflation restraints, because the US Government made it possible for there to be none.
The fundamental you aren't dealing with, is what enabled the cost inflation to be so extreme, radically beyond any reasonable standards of lending or potential to repay.
The lack of a free market in education is precisely what caused the hyper cost inflation. The US Government created a system of lending backed by its ability to print dollars, which stands completely apart from normal economic reality.
Another hint: guess who is making nearly all the money off the student loans? Yep, the US Government. They're yielding tens of billions per year in interest profit, courtesy of their ability to magically make dollars appear and to put an entire generation into vast debt. The US Govt is earning about 20 times what the private sector is making off of student loans.
(1) College is cheap, only the few and the wealthy go.
(2) More people start to attend college.
(3) Supply and demand kick in, increasing costs, ensuring that still only the few and the wealthy go to college.
(4) The government doesn't like that poor people aren't able to afford college so they guarantee student loans.
(5) Poor people can go to school now, but price spirals out of control.
This is my timeline.
>The lack of the ability to pay back a loan is a normal check against irresponsible lending, unless you have a printing press backing said loans and can afford to disregard defaults.
You're totally right. The problem here is that it's "irresponsible lending" to give a student loan to a poor student, a black student, and especially say a poor, black student who wants to study history. We as a society though want poor students to get more education and we as a society don't want certain fields limited to just those who are already rich. So we guarantee student loans. Then a bunch of capitalists see that we've broken the loan system, pull out their Gordon Gekko hats and start robbing us blind.
>The lack of a free market in education is precisely what caused the hyper cost inflation. The US Government created a system of lending backed by its ability to print dollars, which stands completely apart from normal economic reality.
The lack of a free market in education is precisely what gave lots of kids who would never have otherwise had the opportunity to attend college that chance.
>Another hint: guess who is making nearly all the money off the student loans? Yep, the US Government. They're yielding tens of billions per year in interest profit, courtesy of their ability to magically make dollars appear and to put an entire generation into vast debt. The US Govt is earning about 20 times what the private sector is making off of student loans.
Sure, I don't like this either. College should be free.
Nowhere did I claim that "free market" policies led up to this point, nor did I claim that government intervention didn't lead up to this point. However I did claim it was due to the capitalist mode of production and so far I haven't been refuted on that point.
We're talking about government abuse of and intervention into a former Capitalist economy (which is now a heavily regulated, heavily taxed mixed economy). The US isn't even remotely close to being a free market system and hasn't been for decades. One quick check at the regulation count, the taxation system, the government involvement in every industry and segment, easily makes that point (further, take a look at the expansion of those things over the last 50 years). Where's the free market part?
Where exactly did GP claim that it is? And why is regulation incompatible with a capitalist system? You are making the confusion that capitalism means "free market", when it doesn't.
To the extent you have regulation, is the extent to which you lack a Capitalist economy. All systems opposite to Capitalism make use of extreme State control of the economy through various regulatory means. Whether we're talking rudimentary Socialism or its derivatives, including Fascism and Communism. It's an inversion. You can either have market-based economic levers or you can have State levers, or you can mix them and get a mixed economy to the extent you do so. Regulation is antithesis to Capitalism because it imposes State control over the economy. The more regulation you add, the less market freedom you must inherently have; the regulation removes possible action and decision making by free actors in the economy, it places those decisions into the hands of the State (ie out of the bounds of Capitalism to dictate).
No, it's not; there exists market Socialism, for example. There also exists mutualism. I don't know where you're getting this from other than the idea that authors in favour of capitalism also tend to prefer free market economics.
>Whether we're talking rudimentary Socialism or its derivatives, including Fascism and Communism.
Communism is actually the complete lack of state control but also the lack of commodity production and therefore the market.
>Regulation is antithesis to Capitalism because it imposes State control over the economy.
You have still failed to explain why lack of regulation is central to capitalism other than to name Hayek, Mises and Friedman who were in favour of free-market capitalism. Other authors who sought to describe capitalism prior to them didn't include "free market" as a core principle of capitalism.
There is no denying that the epitome of capitalist production is completely unencumbered by a State, but there is also no denying that the state must intervene in a capitalist economy to protect property rights on a large scale. There is also the idea that the the State itself cannot be a capitalist actor which is totally false; we see the State engaging in the employment of wage-labour and selling on the national and international market. This makes the state as capitalist as Microsoft or Google.
You need to get out of your echo chamber.
Many "decent" jobs require at least a university degree, which almost always entails taking out a loan. So while you don't have to "pay" large amounts of money, you may need to loan it and then pay it back later.
I think the echo chamber AT spoke of was not HN. The point is that in the US there are a plethora of options for low cost high quality educations/degrees which absolutely can help you earn a very decent living. They may not be famous name-brand cliques which guarantee a plush job right after graduating, but it is a fundamental pillar of Americanism that opportunity is there for those willing to put in the time.
A hit! In the same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15366755. More: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13110004&sort=byDate&prefix&pa...
Edit: since we asked you to stop using HN primarily for ideological battle and you've been battling up a storm since then, I've banned this account. Because we're serving our capitalist masters, you say? The mask slips, you say? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571118) Nope. It's just lame and off-topic.
There's no intellectual curiosity in ideological battle—they are two different games. In one the goal is to learn, in the other to smite enemies. Football and chess don't mix, either, and tackling your opponent's bishop is off topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Capitalist medical system would mean the value of a particular medical certification would be set by the market, ie. everyone would be able to sell medical services. Historically free market has always resulted in a much better quality in addition to lower prices.
This distinction is made on the fallacious idea that "capitalism" is equal to a totally free market. This is a common confusion but false nevertheless. There is no reason I see why a capitalist system cannot include intervention by the government, and indeed it must deal with this to uphold property rights as even libertarian authors tell us.
Capitalism is the predominant employment of wage-labour, the private ownership of social means of production and the goal of accumulation of capital.
>Historically free market has always resulted in a much better quality in addition to lower prices.
It has also resulted in much higher rates of exploitation, as the workers of countries with more lax or unenforced labour laws suffer greatly for it.
You're attempting to redefine the meaning of words to create a strawman where 'capitalism' can have any property you want, which then allows you to misrepresent an attack on a $random_negative_thing as an attack on 'capitalism'.
A system with state intervening in the market is called a mixed economy.
>It has also resulted in much higher rates of exploitation, as the workers of countries with more lax or unenforced labour laws suffer greatly for it.
The more protected against 'exploitation' people in a particular country are, the more likely they are to risk their lives trying to escape their socialist utopias.
If you weren't a hypocrite you would renounce your citizenship and relocate to a 'better' place, like Cuba or Venezuela.
Isn't this exactly what post-Marxian authors did? By the time Marx was writing, it was clear what capitalism was - the predominant employment of wage labour, private ownership of social means of production, and accumulation of capital. The idea that a state which owns all or most of the productive capacity of society cannot be "capitalist" for some reason is outstandingly silly.
>The more protected against 'exploitation' people in a particular country are, the more likely they are to risk their lives trying to escape their socialist utopias.
This is a very ignorant statement; there exist heavy protections against high exploitation in the EU, but the EU is not a Socialist organisation nor are many people trying to escape it for its labour laws. There has not existed a Socialist society as of yet aside from the Paris Commune and Catalonia (which I must note, very few people tried to escape); before you reply that this is an NTS fallacy, I must say that the Socialist mode of production rests upon the abolition of the law of value (i.e commodities are not produced) and the working class as a whole hold ownership of the social means of production, and the functions of private property have been done away with. This was not observed in the regimes of the USSR, Soviet satellite states, Cuba or Venezuela.
>If you weren't a hypocrite you would renounce your citizenship and relocate to a 'better' place, like Cuba or Venezuela.
No. Cuba and Venezuela both operate the capitalist mode of production, and in fact Cuba is in very direct violation of the principles of non-alienated labour. How can a Socialist country be opposed to fair working conditions? This suggests to me that it is not Socialist at all. You must also note that I have not shown any appreciation for the economic models of either Cuba or Venezuela. The idea that I must support any country which calls itself "Socialist" is as absurd as saying that as a democrat I must support any country which calls itself "democratic", including the DPRK.
This trope is doubly lame on Hacker News: both a personal swipe and a heat-dead cliché. Please don't comment like this here.
Civil and substantive comments are the kind we want on Hacker News. This was neither. Please read and follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
After medical school, doctors still aren't qualified or licensed to practice - they need to go through residency first, which pays really poorly (in some cases, less than the equivalent of minimum wage). During that time, doctors aren't going to be paying down their loans, because they're just making enough to get by. (Some doctors even end up having to take on additional debt just to get through residency. That debt comes from the private market and has a higher interest rate than the unsubsidized Stafford loans).
This period lasts anywhere from 4-10 years, depending on your specialty. In the end, it's not unusual for a doctor who enters medical school in their mid-20s[0] and is not independently wealthy to expect to turn 40 before paying off their final medical school loan.
Medicine isn't the unbelievably, guaranteed lucrative field people think it is. It may have been in the past, but those days are long gone, and the expected lifetime earnings for physicians continues to drop each year, which means it takes even longer to pay off your debt.
[0] This is actually typical; most physicians, especially at top schools, don't enter medical school straight out of their undergraduate program
Yea, if you break down all their on call hours and shit, it's not very much hourly. But they still make more than most people in their small city.
$65K/year is significantly more than the average amount that a first-year resident (intern) makes ($51K/year). Also, medicine is one field where it's often much more lucrative to work in small towns than large cities, so that's the place where the discrepancy would be expected to be the largest.
$51K/year is not a lot, though. That comes out to $980/week, and residents generally now work 80 hours/week (it used to be significantly longer - 100 or more). That comes out to $12.25/hour, which is actually less than minimum wage in many cities. And again, that's the average.
Whether or not residents are literally making less than minimum wage, though, is not really the point: the point is that residents aren't making the kind of money that would make a significant dent in their debt, so they don't really start paying off the principal on their loans until they're done with residency (and even fellowships), which is a long time for interest to compound.
Well, yes, they very explicitly have programs to take foreign students who get free or subsidized medical education in Cuba in return for practicing in Cuba for a certain amount of time.
That it isn't attractive for American doctors is unsurprising given the huge difference in economy, but it is attractive to a lot of people from developing countries, and it does a lot of good for the countries they come from, given that these doctors are meant to return, unlike e.g. the UK NHS which contributes to a lot of brain drain.
Reveal communist redistributuon to mean almost 95% of your income is given to rural meth head white trash.
I guess you're right. I wouldn't give a fuck about your plight, either.
In other words, this article is trying to attack Cuba for what it did right as a communist country, not for what it did wrong. If this were the worst that came out from Cuba, then it would be pretty close to perfect.
The thing you're not mentioning is that these doctors don't live in Cuba. They live in capitalist countries in which the government doesn't (even try to) provide X, Y, and Z.
Sure, the doctors got a free education, and that's worth a lot. But at some point they'll have paid off the value of that education and after that point, they're still being taxed at some very high rate and they're seeing no benefit from those taxes because they live in Brazil. Seems like exploitation to me.
I wonder if other countries (US, France, England...) students would see things like this Cuban doctor if they had full medical education for free. Would they think relatively to the tuition system ? would they say that being able to cure people is so worthy they'd do it for free.
I'm not totally sure that's still true. It might be. But I think a lot of people are now nostalgic for communism after living what is apparently the alternative for them.
The most anti-communist people I know, though, are definitely some people in _the U.S._ from Eastern European countries, who moved here before or shortly after the end of communism. (I also know some people in the U.S. from Russia especially who are not particularly anti-communist. Russia definitely had it better than most other soviet bloc). (Also, the very poor seldom get to immigrate to the U.S. from Eastern Europe either before or after communism, immigrants are not a representative sample. Although I knew a lot of poor-ish undocumented immigrant Poles in Chicago in the late 90s. They weren't particularly anti-communist by and large.)
But yeah, the grass is often greener, as they say.
But this isn't flattering of the collectivist system so no love for her...
I'm not saying that we should all turn commie, but just looking at the richest country and acknowledging that they are not communist paints a very incomplete picture. (By that measure, we might also determine that we should ditch democracy, because look at how wealthy a few selected monarchies are!)
So even if you factor in free medical education, it's hard to argue the doctors still owe the Cuban government something 10 years after getting their degree.
Somehow I doubt all the Cuba-defenders here are going to accept your assumption, though, as it makes the outrageousness of the whole thing much more explicit.
Is that what Cuba is organized around?
He explained that the results of the Cuban system are mixed.
On the one hand, literacy and life expectancy are way up since the revolution.
On the other hand, cardiologists need to rent rooms to people like me to afford their simple life.
He recognized the deficiencies of their system, but he thought they were outweighed by the benefits.
Succeed at what? What success do they gain from being a doctor in a country which prevents them from being rewarded for it? Their returns are fixed by the government, and even when they're working overseas (earning way more money) the government is kind enough to even it out.
It may surprise you, but it is hard work to be a doctor. These folks are basically forced to work however long is required by the state in a country where they're probably not even allowed on the internet, with a government which was built on tricking peasant farmers into willing their land to a psychopathic dictator who killed everyone who got in his way.
The conditions they work under have every feature of slavery, even if the clothes they put on look professional.
A 34 y/o American doctor, even if they are somehow still paying off school, had the personal opportunity to take on that burden. Every working person in Cuba, peasants, mechanics, and seamstresses alike, takes on the burden of training you as a doctor. Everyone, including the doctor, spends their entire life paying it off.
Every nice thing (or thing that looks like it was once nice) you see in the picture was produced by capital markets; and it looks like the 1940s because because the capital markets stopped functioning in the 1940s.
Hmm, do you think most doctors in the U.S. are only in it for monetary rewards, and don't find any other part of the job rewarding? I don't think I want that doctor.
In any walk of life in a capital system, your pay is determined by how you serve people. Doctors serve the very basis of their patients' lives.
If you can put a price on that, it should be pretty darn high.
I don't know there's any reason doctors should get exceptionally high incomes (except that in the U.S. they have to pay back exceptionally high student loans for the first decade-ish, of course).
If you don't think that doctoring should earn especially high incomes, then you have not seen a doctor work, and perhaps you've never been gravely injured.
Depends on 'the good life' - we can't lift everyone up to live like a doctor, but it's easy to push doctors down so they live like everyone else.
>I don't know there's any reason doctors should get exceptionally high incomes
U.S doctor's incomes are probably influenced by the AMA cartel that keeps good candidates from earning medical degrees. After we bust the cartel, we can let the chips fall where they may. My hunch is that doctors would be paid more like veterinarians if the market were freer.
On some level, a job's compensation is tied to the challenge of the job. It's more difficult to perform good medicine than it is to be a cashier, we should expect doctors to be better compensated than cashiers.
I would say the success of being a doctor at all but it seems that to you success is purely a function of wealth. In that case these people could have left Cuba before using it's free education. It's highly hypocritical to use all the benefits of the Cuban system and then be upset when you also have to help pay into it.
>It may surprise you, but it is hard work to be a doctor.
Nope, I totally get that.
>with a government which was built on tricking peasant farmers into willing their land to a psychopathic dictator who killed everyone who got in his way.
Oh lord, put the overreaction away. How many words do you think I would have to change in this sentence to make it reflect America's founding relation between wealthy British WASPs and native americans?
>The conditions they work under have every feature of slavery, even if the clothes they put on look professional.
I understand you don't like communism but really the hyperbole man... and shame on you for trivializing slavery. These doctors all knew what the Cuban system was, they chose to use Cuba's excellent medical education program which is provided for free and which can only be provided, again, for free because it taxes it's citizens heavily and now that they have received that benefit, want to rescind on it's price.
>A 34 y/o American doctor, even if they are somehow still paying off school, had the personal opportunity to take on that burden.
Ah but how many Americans really get a shot at medical school?
In the most recent year for which quintile census data are available, more than three-quarters of medical students came from families in the top two quintiles of family income. [0]
And you should check that citation, Figure 2 is particularly damning. Essentially, these Cuban doctors face the reality that had they been born in the United States there is a significant percentage of them that never would have had a shot at attending medical school in the first place.
You could also take a look at the Wired article[1] that I found that linked from, it's about how poor American students are actually going to Cuba for education. In effect, Cuba that poor communist country is to a certain extent actually subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system that happen to be less lucrative:
Most of the school’s American graduates go into family medicine, internal medicine, or pediatrics—all fields facing major doctor shortages and all fields on the low end of the doctor pay scale.[1]
Thanks Cuba!
>Every working person in Cuba, peasants, mechanics, and seamstresses alike, takes on the burden of training you as a doctor. Everyone, including the doctor, spends their entire life paying it off.
Can I just change the framing of this a little bit, tell me what you think:
Every working person in Cuba, peasants, mechanics, and seamstresses alike, chips in to train you as a doctor. Everyone, including the doctor, continues to chip in to train the next generation of doctors.
[0] https://www.aamc.org/download/102338/data/aibvol8no1.pdf
[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/03/students-ditching-america-medi...
They're not chipping in, they don't have a choice in the matter. I think Cubans would rather have a better basic quality of life, than spend so much of their income training doctors who probably won't even operate near them, and who are used basically as indentured servants by the government, a government which pockets most of the money (as evidenced by the mansions and secret wealth of the despots).
But to blame Cuba's poverty on communism is wrong, it's a result of being excluded from trade. And I really wish you could pull back from the slavery hyperbole. They're not indentured servants. I work at a corporation, I make a bunch of money for the corporation that they pocket and then I get a tiny piece back, am I an indentured servant? What about my debt? Am I an indentured servant? Come on, just pull back on the rhetoric a bit and let's hash this out. And no one likes the hoarded wealth of secretive and bad people but that exists in America just like it does Cuba.
They do have a better basic quality of life. That's exactly what they already have. Cuba is not a rich country like the US, so of course the direct comparison without historical context will mislead you. If they opened up free capitalism style trade with other nations, they would be slaves on foreign owned farms and foreign owned factories instead of the government (using this thread's definition of slavery, of course). If they opened up capitalism style free trade internally, some people would get very rich and the majority of people's lives would be much much worse off. The income inequality would skyrocket.
You're suggesting that they're poor because they're communist. That's not the case. They're poor because they're an ex colony whose never became rich from wars, imperialism, natural resources, etc.. And when you consider that and the US trade embargo, they've done amazingly well.
I'd like you to back that up. Right now, the private sector in Cuba (for example, taxi drivers with private licenses) is rich by Cuban standards. A taxi driver with a private license can make several times more in a day than a doctor makes in a month. Participation in the black market also contributes to quality of life.
The most successful common people in Cuba are those who engage with the freest markets.
It's pretty clear by that statement that you don't understand the government of Cuba or how it has been funded. Most Cubans don't pay taxes, and haven't since the revolution. Only recently have income taxes been put in place, and mostly that's for business owners and comes with significant write-offs.
>Ah but how many Americans really get a shot at medical school? In the most recent year for which quintile census data are available, more than three-quarters of medical students came from families in the top two quintiles of family income. [0]
Ok, so 75% of medical students come from families in the top 50% of incomes. That doesn't seem too absurd to me.
As to your Wired article, the statement that "In effect, Cuba that poor communist country is to a certain extent actually subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system that happen to be less lucrative"
is a bit ridiculous, because that article mentions a total 100 doctors using the program over a 17 year period. Yes, Cuba may train 6 American MD's a year, (actually, more like 4 - not everyone graduates) but that isn't really subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system, not in any meaningful way.
Fair, fair, it's communist not tax-capitalist. I shouldn't have said "tax."
>Ok, so 75% of medical students come from families in the top 50% of incomes. That doesn't seem too absurd to me.
Top 40%. It does seem absurd to me, did you look at Figure 2 that I linked? That is the inversion of a meritocracy.
>As to your Wired article, the statement that "In effect, Cuba that poor communist country is to a certain extent actually subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system that happen to be less lucrative" is a bit ridiculous, because that article mentions a total 100 doctors using the program over a 17 year period. Yes, Cuba may train 6 American MD's a year, (actually, more like 4 - not everyone graduates) but that isn't really subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system, not in any meaningful way.
But totally true! 100 doctors here working in geographic areas that don't normally attract doctors and/or fields that don't attract doctors. It may not be super large but I bet you there are some Americans out there who are very happy (any may not even know it) that Cuba invested in our doctors when we wouldn't.
It's not just that. Powerful central governments don't function on the idea of everyone chipping in, they function on the idea that they can oversee the use of resources and allocate them in the best possible way. Normal people don't get a say in terms of resource allocation and don't get a say in who makes up the central government, so they aren't 'chipping in' in a meaningful way, as that implies it was their choice.
>Top 40%. It does seem absurd to me, did you look at Figure 2 that I linked? That is the inversion of a meritocracy.
I am not surprised by the news that 75% of doctors come from families that make over $50,000 a year. To become a doctor, you need to go to college, which costs money, then go to medical school, which costs more. During that period you must also not need to provide for your family so there's also a significant opportunity cost.
That said, the fact that this rate is increasing may be cause for concern, as noted in the article. Frankly, there is also another significant issue: the idea that you can become a doctor at all as a realistic goal, which I think is also a barrier - many people don't believe it is possible for them when it actually is.
As for the 100 medical students, I bet a lot of those doctors did not return to the United States to practice medicine, as they would have to do their residencies here to get licensed.
And if you want a proper education system, take a look at Europe.
And there's a nugget about income inequality here - Cuba has reduced income inequality by making people more similarly poor. Doctors and managers live side by side with laborers and cooks. Maybe that's good for society, but the average Cuban lives like an American at the federal poverty line. Americans are unequally rich - our poorest are poorer and worse off then the average Cuban but the median American is richer than the median Cuban and the average American is much better off then the average Cuban.
It might be too utilitarian for humanitarians but I don't think income inequality matters on its face. My life wouldn't be worse if there were 10x as many billionaires, in fact, it'd probably be better because those billionaires would have created great things to earn their fortunes - if they earned their fortunes giving humanity cheap power and better health care and tastier, more nutrious food we'd be much better off.
I think the KPI to target is poverty - I simply want fewer poor people to be poor. There's a role for a better safety net, and probably some tweaks to laws that infringe upon the right to work, but historically redistribution works once in society and then you run out of other people's money.
Are we talking about the same Cuba?
[1] Of course there were people with the old cars, but these were passed down and are, as I understand it, required by law to act as a mini-bus service.
[2] Although internet in Cuba is only officially available by buying a hourly code on a scratcher card from the telephone company and then Wifi is in the parks in Havana, I did notice bootleg Wifi SSIDs when walking the streets. They were easy to spot even without "war-walking" since they are a good 1/2 km from any nearby park and had usually a dozen folks on their phones browsing Facebook or using Skype. I suspect it's either an insider connection at the telephone company OR a clandestine Directway / Hughesnet satellite (there are NO visible dishes in Cuba, I believe it must be illegal).
A quick Google turned up a few articles: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1995-04-17/news/950417013... (1995, but there are other sources).
Doctors and other higher ed degrees tend to have a strong English component, which is a plus in the tourist industry.
It's possible that they are all lying, but the staff said it and the official gov welcomer said it, so it's likely true.
Visit Cuba and talk to people. The barman, the taxi driver, the bellhop, the waiter can easily earn in a day's tips in hard currency, over a month's wages in local currency, especially if they speak good English. It was the same in Russia when the USSR imploded. The chances were your taxi driver in Moscow had a physics PhD and had quit or was moonlighting from their official job in a research institute...
This is how Sweden finances their free education as well, it is called taxes. The problem isn't with how Cuba treats specifically doctors but how Cuba refuses to let people emigrate in general.
Note that this is a problem not limited to communist countries like Cuba. In America, in particular, we have this problem when it comes to our teachers. Teaching the next generation is one of the most important jobs we have and, yet, the pay is so low that the best people for the job are disincentivized to go into that profession. When a hedge fund manager managing teacher pensions out-earns an entire school faculty who are invested in his fund while underperforming the S&P, we too have a problem.
Presumably these doctors don't have that choice; they get what the government says they get and that's that.
Of course med school in the US is far from free. Totally different system over there, if you compare a single part at a time of course one of them is going to look terrible.
The Cuban people should have more freedom of choice and freedom of movement, but economically, these kinds of arrangements present themselves under capitalism as well.
You might be getting an awfully short end of a stick, but if you're getting free education and free health care at that level, you are not justified invoking slavery as a comparison, given the history there.
TLDR: Nazism and Communism should be in the same bucket.
Well if you're going to be sensationalist about it. What about Socialism, where your material needs are provided for through extreme violence, via theft; using guns to take from one person against their will, to give to another. The entire foundation of all forms of Socialism, require extreme violence as a means to redistribute and at no time can that violence be relaxed, for it works at all times against human nature and self-interest. It's also why every nation that has ever attempted Socialism has collapsed into perpetual barbaric violence against its people, holding them as State slaves with few rights: Cuba, Cambodia, North Korea, Soviet Russia, East Germany, Mao's China, Venezuela, North Vietnam, National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy, the numerous Soviet satellites, Socialist Ba'athist Iraq, and so on.
I find these discussions always fly into the "no true scotsman" fallacy.
Also - dictatorships can work. There have been several 'benevolent' dictators who made communism work without introducing any more evil than many democratically elected leaders. A dictatorship doesn't naturally lead to Mao/Stalin etc.
History does seem to bear that out.
> There are certainly leaders of communist countries who did no-more evil than some of our recent democratically elected leaders in the west.
What if they had the most powerful army in the world at their disposal?
but honestly, I don't think body counts are the right way to judge either. Makes for a great way to emotionally charge the conversation, though.
Pinochet.
>Now name how many successful western countries haven't embraced capitalism as, at the very least, their main source of funds to experiment with.
Almost all western countries are capitalist I believe? Usually I take western to mean (1) democratic (2) capitalist. Besides as I'm arguing elsewhere, the failure of many socialist states is due to US intervention. Cuba's Embargo is a great example, the coup that placed Pinochet in power is another. America hates socialism/communism so it constantly acts aggressively towards those states while helping capitalist states. It's tough to look at the scoreboard and judge when the ref is obviously biased.
So just because he instituted some free market policies, hes capitalist? In no way did any capitalist figurehead advocate any of his violence. Also, what was Pinochet's body count? many orders of magnitude less than just Mao right?
> Almost all western countries are capitalist I believe? Usually I take western to mean (1) democratic (2) capitalist.
You are stretching the word capitalist beyond any recognition. It simply does not describe a government embargo nor aggressive government actions by any definition.
You should really do some research before you make claims like this. One place to start would be Marvin Liebman and the American-Chilean Council, which planted pro-Chilean propaganda in several high-profile conservative press outlets.
The millions of American Indians that were murdered because they wouldn't give up their valuable land?
How is throwing away good food because no one pays for it, and thereby letting poor people starve, not capitalist? How is it the "antithesis of free enterprise"?
To the degree that they did trade peacefully (free enterprise), they flourished - thus the lesson of Thanksgiving. Not to mention they were fleeing religious persecution themselves in North America. Of course establishing private property in a new land was not without friction and abuse. However, the killing of Indians by the Union army were direct actions of Government - not the enlightenment principles of capitalism, free trade & movement, as expounded by the likes of Mises and Adam Smith.
and it was financed by European royalty in South America. How did that go?
The truth is there weren't many options. But I would attribute abuses by violent governments to government, not private enterprise.
But Socialism has been successful enough in European countries at this point to be fully differentiated from Communism despite sharing that single principle. In The United States, in particular, there is still a legacy of the 'red scare' that's used to push back against socialist policies that would greatly improve this country and that needs to end too.
Let's separate the principles of a system of government with how it's been implemented, there's still a good discussion to be had on individualism vs society and the tradeoffs when forming governmental structures.
My understanding is that US spending is relatively 'inefficient' compared to European countries, esp for healthcare. We spend more for comparatively worse outcomes (this is definitely true when compared to UK NHS, probably for France too).
Users here have a broad range of politics, just like any sufficiently random large population sample. The ones who feel strongly about X are more likely motivated to post to X threads. So what you're seeing is not a high communism rate in general, just in (lord help us) communism threads. In other words the sample-bias fairy is afoot.
To round out the bias list: a good test when you think you see a pattern on HN is to ask if the same is true of humans in general. We're seeing a return of classic ideological battles (e.g. communism vs. capitalism), but that's also true in society at large. It's the macro trend, and HN can't be immune from that. We get wet in the same rainstorm as everyone else. I guess history didn't end after all!
One of the incentives the Cuban Government used to use to make doctors go to those "missions" as they call it in Cuba, is that once they have finished it they were allowed to buy a house or car, I say allowed because until recently you couldn't buy any of it without the government authorization.
Nowadays they used another technique which is; we will allow you to bring back 1 container ( those in ships) full of whatever you want, as usual the with the government they haven't been allowing it even though those doctors already spent 2-3 years on the "mission" so those people went there with that promise and it turn got nothing.In Cuba the whole idea of making 1.3k/month sounds great and many doctors blindly agree to go without knowing first how much they will spend on food/clothes/supplements etc, but of course they can't really look up that information because internet until recently was non existent and nowadays WIFI access cost $1.5/hr ( CUC) which is their salary of a fully day.
Of course that's modern day slavery, the government acts as your owner, they set the condition and can change it at will, if you don't abide them, well you have two options: - back to Cuba in 24 hours and be prepare to have your doctor's license removed - stay in the country and be exiled for 8 years.
PS: Until recently, doctors in Cuba weren't allowed to leave the country under any circumstances except for "missions", the government train of thoughts is " I own all these people".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I for one have been noticing the signal-to-noise ratio on HN has been lowering over the past year. Discussions have become less about the content of the article and more about the title or some other related fact. Technical discussions are becoming increasingly derailed by bike-shedding, ideology, and flame wars. Hell, I bet even the average word count per comment is down.
In signal processing, when noise becomes too high we implement a filter. It doesn't have to be too harsh of a filter, perhaps a band-stop filter which passes most frequencies unaltered but attenuates those in a specific range to very low levels.
> the signal-to-noise ratio on HN has been lowering over the past year
People have been saying that since the beginning. Is it true? Maybe, but there are strong biases (e.g. it always feels like things are getting worse) and it's hard to measure.
People always complain with changes. I think it's reasonable to believe that people who actively want politics on HN would be on the noisier end of the spectrum of complainers. Any attempt to get these conversations off HN was bound, initially, to cause a loud and pointed reaction from one subset of users.
But people also adapt and forget. I think there's a real chance that after, say, 6-8 weeks, HN would have established a "new normal" and people would know that it's not a place to discuss the outrage of the week, just as it's already known it's not a place to discuss the latest celebrity-dancing-baking-show scandals.
I'll reiterate that it's a very tricky problem. But I don't agree that there was conclusive evidence that the political detox "didn't work" -- it was canceled long before a steady state was reached.
There are still many comments that, even when they often end up 'dead', spawn entire pointless discussions or just clutter up the rest of the discussion in the time that they're up. Quite possibly they affect the general conversation in ways that are difficult to measure.
The thing is that many of these comments appear to me as either immediately and obviously noise, or obviously so after a cursory check of the poster's comment history. In fact, I'm very often surprised that you or your colleague(s) leave a "don't do this here" message, when after clicking through to the commenter it's obvious that they're probably going to keep doing this until they're banned (and trivially create a new account).
I'm wondering if perhaps a stricter zero-tolerance to low-quality posts, or at least repeat offenders, might not be necessary to offset the inevitable growth of 'noisy' accounts.
I'm very impressed with the moderation here, to be clear, so I'm sure that it's more difficult than I think it is, or that I'm missing something. But I guess I'm just how often I come across an active, unbanned account that clearly hasn't been commenting in good faith for quite a while. Considering how little these accounts are 'worth' (as in, if there's any association with the username, it's negative, and karma is low), and how cheaply new ones can be create, a slightly swifter 'banhammer' might not do much harm?
It would be implausibly coincidental for the second attempt to happen at the same time Facebook and Twitter are being directly investigated for their role in electoral propaganda and Thiel is a frontrunner for the PIAB position.