
The US city preparing itself for the collapse of capitalism - spking
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/31/us-city-preparing-itself-for-the-collapse-of-capitalism
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_bxg1
> My new neighbors – artists, musicians, shop owners, builders, gallerists,
> restaurateurs – treated me like family. Our community was diverse in age,
> but we all had our independent creative pursuits in a place with scant
> economic opportunity otherwise. Thus, many of us shared the same problem: a
> lack of access to healthcare. America’s healthcare system has long been in
> shambles: then and still today, where single-payer care was available,
> premiums and deductibles were astronomical. Luckily, among our friends were
> doctors and dentists who valued the work we did as equal to their own. So,
> we came up with a plan. Drawing on the age-old system of barter, we figured
> out a way to trade – the art of medicine for the medicine of art.

I wish they'd gone more in-depth with this part of the story, instead of
trying to tie a bunch of different things together under a vague "collapse of
capitalism" theme. The healthcare problem is much more acute and their
solution is much more interesting than the rest of what the article covers.

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qnsi
sounds like a solution to help each other with easy to treat conditions like
flu etc. How would they perform surgery?

Also this whole "barter" is just regressing to the times without one of the
most important innovation, money. Going without money because you don't like
capitalism is like cutting the Internet cord because you don't like Google

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_bxg1
Money is the very problem. Capitalism pushes prices towards whatever brings in
the most profit, not towards what does the most good for the most people.
Those two things can align to varying degrees in different domains, but in
healthcare they are extremely divergent. Any solution to the healthcare
problem requires either artificially warping the market, or circumventing it.
Single-payer healthcare is an example of the former; the bartering idea is an
example of the latter.

I'm not going to place a bet on barter-based healthcare taking the country by
storm, but it's good to see people experimenting with alternate systems,
especially when this one seems to be working in at least this small test case.

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jmpman
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs?

~~~
_bxg1
I don't believe pure communism can ever work, but yeah, I agree with the
principle of this statement.

