Thread by @simon_brooke

Thinking about the privatisation of the English Health Service, about @richardbranson essentially using health service money to fund his space tourism, and about why there are some sectors capitalism should not be allowed to touch with a bargepole: >>>

Mercenary armies, like Blackwater, have no incentive to create stable peace. On the contrary, if there were stable peace their business model would collapse. So they provoke, foment and escalate conflicts. This is against everyone's interests. >>>

The same goes, of course, for armaments companies like @BAESystemsplc and @RaytheonTech: without active war, not only will no-one buy their products, but they will be unable to demonstrate their products to prospective customers. >>>

Similarly, if drug and vaccine companies produce products which eliminate diseases from the population, the need for those products evaporates. As Purdue found, producing products which keep people ill is much more profitable. >>>

Socialised medicine has a motivation to eliminate disease. Socialised militaries have a motivation to eliminate war. In both cases, if they succeed, everyone's taxes go down. But capitalist medicine and capitalist military? They would go out of business. >>>

Every capitalist enterprise which seeks to tackle a major social problem faces a perverse incentive: without a problem to tackle, there can be no more profit. So eliminating the problem is not something they'll willingly do. >>>

This applies to healthcare, to peacekeeping, to waste disposal, to, actually, engineering; and, probably, many other sectors. Markets are not only not good ways of distributing products, they are disasterous ways of tackling major problems.

Here's evidence of the consequences of allowing capitalism to run the energy industry; and those consequences include the end of human civilisation. Is this a rational way to run an economy?