I once heard a libertarian talk about doctors under socialism. They brought up how doctors would make less then what they could make on the market and the state would need to coerce them into working. The same went for other services that required high skill levels.
What do you think Famrades? A doctor preforms a valuable task with his abilities and knowledge alone, there is no means of production to collectivize here, he is the utility.
High skill services
Doctors don't just lay on hands and heal people you fucktard. The medical industry has mop just like everyone else.
Do they really think all doctors become doctors only for the money, and that people don't become doctors because they have a calling as a healer?
But in any case, you can't make more money than other people, or have the associated problems with specialization, when you've abolished markets and money all together a la kropotkin or bookchin.
The country with the most doctors per capita is cuba, where they make less money than cabbies do. They also have better healthcare outcomes than the united states.
I know that
But I mean the skill here
we can seize the factories that make the necessary equipment for the doctors but
but we cant seize their knowledge
Who makes his medicine? The tools he works with? Etc. A doctor requires all that to be a doctor. And in no way do people need coercing into working, without work people become bored, people enjoy work, just not massive amounts of it. And with a larger work force means the small amount of work will be done with less hours per person. Since many people are forced not to work due to the lack of opportunities to do so.
*same amount of work
One field of work that doesn't get paid much but is most definitely required is farming, they much little and yet still work. Money is the most powerful driving force for work, it is being able to live what you do.
Fair enough
I guess it's just the inner cynic in me run wild again
*make little
*Money is not
I'm sorry.
If you know that then why did you say the exact opposite in the OP.
Furthermore their knowledge can be seized you dumbass. It's not like it came from nowhere. If every doctor disappeared tomorrow, do you think people are just going to give up? If your kid's appendix is about to burst and all you have is a knife and anatomy textbook, I doubt many people would take the sure, agonizing death by sepsis over the relatively quick death from a botched amateur surgery.
Worst case scenario, people become their own doctors again, just like they were for thousands of years.
And farming is skilled labor, it requires a lot of either study on agriculture at colleges or past on knowledge from the previous generation.
Socialism can educate a greater number of people to a greater extent and therefore breed a great deal more of doctors so the individual doctor would not have to be coerced to work because they wouldn't be working nearly as long or as hard as they work under capitalism.
Look at how that turned out in Greece…
In addition, I'm really confused why your friend is making a distinction between doctors and other workers (beside the educational level required, which I've already addressed.)
Every worker benefits from having to work less while still having their needs met. Doctors are no different. Only the big bourgeoisie objectively have something to lose by transitioning to socialism.
If this is what you base a political system on, this belief, then you'll be in for a shock.
If you were to study how idle time was filled in any precapitalist societies you would be shocked. Being forced to work shitty jobs under shitty conditions for nothing more than a paycheck is what makes work miserable.
A state in capitalist crisis isn't comparable to a socialist society
But what about lazy parasitic NEETs like me
Our time isn't filled up by wage-slaving and yet we STILL don't do anything productive in our hours upon hours of free time.
I'd rather you do nothing than shit up anything I'm going to use in my life to be perfectly honest.
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pls don't bully anons, i don't like living this way
I see, it lacks the socialist magic dust that will create healthcare because hey we have books and wikipedia so we don't need dem doctors, only capitalists need those when they leave.
You also seize the med schools which no longer have tuition so even if doctors don't make as much they have no debts to pay. And the people who become doctors will be more from column "I want to help people" and less from column "I want money"
How many doctors do you know of that would not instantly treat anybody in their vicinity who needed medical treatment?
For doctors is the trend to instantly give care or is the trend for them to ask for a cheque before they perform an emergency procedure on somebody?
Would it kill these libertarians to know that most doctors are actually decent people who like to help the sick and would probably do so for much less (like they do in many places)
Ask them why I get paid more to serve coffee in Scotland than a Junior doctor gets in Guatemala? I know this for a fact. I earn significantly more than the junior doctor, and yet still she works.
Why Propertarian? Why?
The USSR didn't have to coerce doctors into working.
Anyway as the wonderful movie threads noted (in the context of Britain after a nuclear attack), without supplies, electricity, sanitary products, and generally speaking a functioning hospital, etc, a doctor is little more useful than anyone else.
The real question for me (more for communism than socialism) is the specifics of how you compensate them - what is "keeping the product of their labour" in this context? (I mean I'd push so far as to believe it's vocational, but I'm interested a bit in the specifics - it's not an unsolvable problem.)
That's true. Cuban here. Most doctors just want to suck dick for money to buy meth with, so they have to be coerced to be doctors. That's also why prostitution is illegal in many countries, so you can even have doctors.
Still, the depravity of doctors and surgeons knows no bounds. I was in the hospital with a broken leg, the bone sticking out, me in unbearable pain. And this doctor just casually comes up to me and he says he wants to suck my dick. WTF MY WIFE WAS STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO ME. Otherwise I would have said yes of course.
doctors are just glorified mechanics, in a socialist society we would recognise this and stop treating them with unreasonable reverence
What kind of corrupted mentality is that? A doctor is not more or less important than the person who cleans the operating room. If the operating room is not propperly clean, the doctors can not operate the patient.
The idea that doctors need to be coerced into working is just utterly insane, it's probably one of the most high status and rewarding professions of all. I mean the argument is fully disproved just by looking at Doctors Without Borders, most of their doctors volunteer for free, working often in extremely high risk areas such as war zones. They do this for periods of time and then return home to work at their local hospitals for a wage.
This, the reward of being the resident doctor of your community is mostly a social one. Even today few people become a doctor solely because of the money you get out of it.
Load of shit. Cuba has more doctors than any country in the world and being a cap driver there pays more, yet still lots become doctors.
Why not keep the market (but with worker coops) until the doctors can be replaced by cheap and ubiquitous machines?
The goal of economic planning shouldn't be to actively eliminate the market, it should be to passively replace the market once it is unnecessary.
In the USSR a bus driver made 140 rubles per month while a doctor made 138. (Saw this in an AskHistorians thread)
Why do people take years to get degrees in sociology and end up working as a bureaucrat making $35k per year? Why don't they just go into CS and double their salary?
Why do people with degrees in Biology bother going into lab work for $13 per hour when they can just become a doctor?
Money is bullshit, people do what the want to.
Do you have a single non imperialist source to back that up?
Who gives a shit? Fuck em.
He said, something…..something..Misis institute
He said, something….something….COERCION REEEE
This is the foundation of Marxism. Our species-essence is our love of work. Not work like bees in a hive though, humans can innovate and plan which other animals can't.
That isn't what was said you fucking retard. The point is that even if doctors just all got up and left, people aren't going to just give up and let themselves die, and they'll use what resources they have to fulfill this social need.
You stupid, brain dead piece of worm ridden shit. Unfuck yourself, you stupid asshole.
Does anyone know how exactly this works. Are people forced to become doctors? Is their incentives? Is it for social respect? If the latter it definitely BTFOs the whole everyone will be lazy bums without the market argument.
From personal experience I can tell you the feeling of being unemployed is very different feeling from having free time. Being unemployed really hurts your soul it makes you feel like shit because you feel like you should be working. Even the fact you call yourself a parasite shows capitalist ideology is preventing your free time from being truly free. Think back to summer breaks when you were a kid, I bet you felt 100 times more free then you do know.
Also know reason not to use your unemployed time productively. Buy a book and promise yourself you'll go read in the park for 1 hour everyday. Even if you zone out a couple of times its ok, just make an effort to read for an hour and don't bring a phone or anything to distract you. An hour of day of reading and you can get some theory under your belt.
Speak to Cubans some time. They will tell you their doctors amounted to shitty nurses.
When you're unemployed you can't even enjoy the time off, I would do nothing for hours because I didn't want to seem like I was just partying while being a parasite.
What kind of fucking retarded logic is this? Medicine is extremely costly in terms of material resources. Maintaining a sterile facility full of mechanized equipment and expensive tools is not exactly easy.
The main reason doctors make so much is because med school is expensive and hard.
so, like 97% of american doctors?
please dont be so dogmatic. i grew up in cuba, and i can tell you, its shit.
Fucking boat nigger.
People seem to code open-source even if they aren't directly profiting from it (besides social gains, future career potential).
Maybe being a doctor could model off of that. Now that I think about it, there is Doctors without Borders and other voluntary orgs. Maybe they don't need profit incentive.
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