A random thought from a non-economist.

Jul 12, 2009 15:41

The free market exists to maximize the profits of the shareholders at the top ( Read more... )

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detailbear July 12 2009, 23:25:35 UTC
All delivery systems other than entrepreneurship or co-op automatically lead to bureaucracy (co-op may lead to bureaucracy). Bureaucracy leads to overhead and usually leads to waste.

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On waste by bureaucracy backrubbear July 19 2009, 18:09:27 UTC
Agreed. Yet in that case, bureaucracy is a form of parasitic interaction where necessary management infrastructure grows beyond the actual needed scope. It serves itself, not usually others.

Perhaps a counter-argument to my own point is that bureaucracy sometimes serves as a reward of political capital. In that case, it ceases to be about money and becomes about power.

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backrubbear July 19 2009, 18:22:42 UTC
Let me start off that it's clear that my use of terminology here was clearly sloppy. Thanks for correcting some of that.

What you're talking about is capitalism.

I agree. The market is the system wherein my observations are happening.

I also generally agree with your point that the desire for profits often encourage efficiency. The point you pass along from your professor is probably an excellent one: corporate profits are a form of taxes and excess profits indicate a lack of health in the system.

Where my original thoughts on this lay was the example of the public health insurance system. detailbear effectively caught some of this: Bureaucracy is the parasite of the public system. However, when bureaucracy is a "service" of a capitalistic company providing services for a public service the bloat becomes waste in the system. But the observation that such bloat exists in a slightly different form in public bureaucracy suggests that it's a problem that exists without respect to whether it's being provided by the government instead of a ( ... )

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