1) Using markets to allocate resources without real money: http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2016/article/why-fa...
2) Finland charges road fines on a "day-rate" that varies depending on the offender's income: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...
—- Medicare payroll taxes are proportional to salary.
—- Low income people that use hospitals generally don’t end up paying for their surgery and care which is passed on to people that do pay their bills.
—- Big pharma offers heavy discounts to low income patients for expensive drugs resulting in higher costs for the rest of us.
—- Under the current Afforadable Care Act free/low cost insurance is provided by raising taxes on the upper income people.
I don’t know what’s the best way to improve the system; I just wish the costs, who was paying for it, and where the money was going was more transparent. It appears that it is intentionally designed to be inscrutable.
Still fairer than the US, though.
Both the "fake money" and the "cost scales with income" are great ways to extend the applicability of markets to areas without currency or to minimize wealth effects.
You just need to be a little less greedy.
“Scarce” in economics doesn’t mean “rare”, it means “has a non-zero marginal cost” and usually “has a concave supply curve”.
Merely that they idea that everybody can't have it, and there it must be rationed by economic means is a little crazy.
We can't all have private jets; but efficiency gains in food production suggests we can easily produce enough food. We are choosing not to distribute it.
But most market exchanges do not involve the government (except sales tax). The government can't efficiently capture the excess funds Bob is willing to spend on ice to provide ice for Paul (though the increased price should provide great incentive for people to increase the supply of ice...)
Votes could be that, but they too are depreciating.
This happened recently in Texas not because of a market failure, but because Texas has “anti-gouging” laws that prevent people from raising prices around a disaster, which entirely predictably had the effect of people being unable to get what they needed (wood, water, etc.) during Harvey.
https://hbr.org/2013/07/the-problem-with-price-gouging-laws
"A well-known gouging case involves the invisible hand actions of John Shepperson. After the Hurricane Katrina disaster, John bought 19 generators, rented a U-Haul truck, and drove 600 miles from Kentucky to Mississippi. In return for his efforts and risk, he hoped to sell the generators at double his purchase price. Instead, he was arrested for price gouging, spent 4 days in jail, and the generators were confiscated. It’s a tricky issue: while Mr. Shepperson’s morality can be debated, his initiative would have unequivocally added supply and made some people better off. We all are charitable, of course, but how many of you would have rented a truck and driven twelve hundred miles round trip to sell generators for the price you purchased them?"
But we have a free market. /sarc
Billionaire Bob can spend $100,000 on a whim, but Pauper Paul can't scrounge $10,000 for life-critical health-care. Or after a natural disaster, market theory says equilibrium prices rise to balance demand, but prices cannot rise enough so that Bob hesitates to buy all the ice for his drinks, pricing Paul out of buying ice to keep his insulin cold.
It almost feels like there needs to be some fixed currency that everyone gets equal amounts of per day and that can be exchanged for the really important things. But then some people will accumulate that currency, and we're back to wealth distortions.