The Space To Create Wealth
Recently, Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s humanoid robots (which in full disclosure are not yet ready for public use). As I watched his presentation, a few things suddenly clicked to me about the direction Musk and Trump want to take the country in, and the immense implications they have for everyone. In this article, I will explain them and how all of that relates to the current state of medicine.
Creating Wealth
Throughout history, there have always been two ways to accumulate significant wealth:
1. By producing things of value.
2. By stealing wealth from someone else.
In turn, I believe almost all empires follow a similar cycle—initially an empire creates its own wealth (allowing it to rapidly ascend as a superpower), but gradually, transitions to using its newfound power to steal wealth from others until eventually, the foundation which underlies the empire (e.g., its ability to create wealth) becomes unstable, the empire crumbles and its replaced with a new empire in its ascendancy phase.
While the above is a simplified description of wealth accumulation, I believe this paradigm very much describes the current state of our society. For instance, many of our institutions have transitioned from having to earn their value to simply being given it either through government subsidies (e.g., a key reason why education is so bad now is because the government gives unconditional student loans to everyone to attend college which in turn incentivizes colleges to focus on retaining as many students as possible rather than on ensuring they get a worthwhile education) or by them having a market monopoly that prevents competition from forcing them to produce something of value.
One of the best illustrations of this has been the relentless promotion of diversity equity and inclusion (DEI), where rather than selecting applicants or employees on the basis of merit, it’s done on the basis of their race (or sexual orientation) and their commitment to social justice. Because of this, many corporations and institutions are producing lower and lower quality outputs, but thus far they have gotten away with it due to the monopoly they (and by extension the US dollar) have.
Medical Monopolies
Consider that as the years have gone by, medical education has had a greater and greater focus on DEI. Because of this, I have seen numerous unqualified diverse applicants be admitted to medical school over more qualified non-diverse applicants, and numerous poorly performing diverse applicants be retained by their medical schools so that the graduating class has diversity. Despite the fact this lowers the quality of the graduating class, nothing has been done to stop it as the accreditors place immense pressure on the medical schools to maintain DEI in their classes.
Likewise, originally, medicine “earned” its reputation on doctors being the pinnacle of what society could produce. However, as the years went by and a medical monopoly was established based on the prestige afforded to doctors, medicine became more and more about forcing doctors to follow standardized protocols (that could not get to the root of each patient’s issues but could sell a lot of products for the medical industry). As such, having substandard medical graduates isn’t actually an issue for the medical industry because they simply are cogs in a system where there’s now minimal room for doctors to make independent decisions.
If you take a step back, it’s clear our medical system has failed disastrously as the cost for it keeps going up (on average 4.8% per year), but the quality of care gets worse (e.g., despite spending far more than any other country, currently we rank 69th in healthcare outcomes)
I would argue
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
