To stay in business, casinos need to be a bad deal for customers _as a group_.
Did I say casinos? I meant insurance companies.
Seriously, insurance is a bet on something bad happening. Usually it only makes sense to buy insurance for the equivalent of long-shot "lottery jackpots". Like a catastrophic health problem. Or like the damage you might do to other people and their property in an auto accident --- but probably _not_ the damage to your own car. i.e. Insure for personal liability calamities, but not collision damage if you could pay for it out of savings.
Insurance is accepting a small but certain loss to prevent a large and unlikely loss. Gambling is accepting a small but certain loss in the hopes of getting a large and unlikely gain.
The Casino, not the gambler, counts on a constant stream of money coming in with the occasional large chunk of money going out. Insurance companies operate the same.
Constant stream of money coming in with the occasional large chunk of money going out? Your description applies to almost every business on the planet.
Doesn't mean it isn't accurate. It is inaccurate to say that casinos and insurance are dissimilar in that regard.
If casinos find themselves paying out too often, they change the size of those payouts with respect to how much it costs to play, until they are back in the black. If insurance companies find themselves paying out too much, they raise their premiums. Same basic concept, the only thing that is different is the motivation of the customers.
Socialism is a lot more than a single economic exchange - its a system. Perhaps what they're describing is cooperative or risk-sharing. But its no more 'Socialism' with a big-S than its Monarchy. To quote Billy Crystal - I eat a burrito - I'm not Mexican.
You know what's really socialistic? The systems inside any large company. You need a computer and a cubical? These things will be provided to you, in return for your work. Nothing reasonable is denied as long as your productivity justifies it, comrade!
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." -- Karl Marx. Not a misquote.
actually... no. Companies are still pretty capitalistic considering the owners/shareholders get all the major money out of it without putting any "effort" in. Though i guess socialism would be a like an employee-owned company where everyone gets a share of the total profit etc. Or where they decide as a whole what to do with the surplus (get a pool table, or heck even an indoor POOL!)
Marxism is not the only socialist ideology, nor the first. Tying socialism to Marx is a good way of restricting your view.
And since you make the explicit point that you're not misquoting: No, but the quote you give is severely out of context.
Marx very specifically did NOT believe that this would be the case for _socialist_ society, but for a well developed _communist_ society, and that in any case he makes the case that it is really a distraction.
The quote is from Critique of the Gotha Programme, a critique of a draft programme of the United Workers Party of Germany.
The full paragraph reads "In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
This was part of Marx' criticism of this phrase in the programme:
'3. "The emancipation of labor demands the promotion of the instruments of labor to the common property of society and the co-operative regulation of the total labor, with a fair distribution of the proceeds of labor.'
Marx made the point that while this is desired endgoal in a communist society, the above programme point is largely meaningless in terms of practical policy for a revolutionary party that has communism as its goal, as the distribution of wealth can not reasonably be treated separate from the ownership and control of the means of production. Thus focusing on redistribution is effectively making an own-goal, playing right into the hands of the ruling classes and/or reformists by changing focus away from the necessity of restructuring society and the control of labor.
He goes on after the most famous part of the quote, to say:
'I have dealt more at length with the "undiminished" proceeds of labor, on the one hand, and with "equal right" and "fair distribution", on the other, in order to show what a crime it is to attempt, on the one hand, to force on our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the other, the realistic outlook, which it cost so much effort to instill into the Party but which has now taken root in it, by means of ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French socialists.
Quite apart from the analysis so far given, it was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it.
Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?'
In other words: Marx saw the focus on redistribution as largely _missing the point_. The main issue, according to Marx, is the mode of production: ownership of the means of production and conditions under which people work.
Thus the systems inside any large company, no matter how much you "spread the wealth around" is a sideshow: Unless it alters the decision process, ultimately the distinct capitalist distribution of wealth eventually asserts itself. And just how many capitalist companies do you know where an objective measure of productivity, rather than hierarchy, is used to determine what is available to most employees?
There may be socialist ideologies that might fit your idea - various meritocratic systems, such as Saint Simon's original technocratic meritocracy, for example might be a better fit. But Marxist it isn't.
Insurance is the opposite of gambling. You take a guaranteed loss instead of risking a huge one. Not having insurance is a bet that nothing bad will happen.
If you can afford to replace everything you own out of savings, good for you, but most people can't.
Beyond that, given the perverse 'market' for health care in the US, even if you can (theoretically) afford to self-insure, the pricing mechanisms and negotiating power of insurance companies practically ensures that they can offer you premiums for less than your out-of-pocket cost for even fairly pedestrian services.
There are (or at least were when I sold insurance) products that costed very little (compared to an actual plan) that provided you with the negotiated price the insurance company would pay if something happens. If you can afford to self-insure, the best bet would be to buy one of these products and store the rest in the bank.
No clue if those things exist anymore with everything going on in the world of health insurance, though.
But you really can't afford to self-insure, even if you're young and healthy. There's always the small but real chance of getting a catastrophic illness and running up a million dollar bill.
Therefore, you really need to buy at least catastrophic coverage. And that's real insurance, not self-insurance.
Health insurance is complicated because for most people, it's so much more than just insurance. It's prepaying $300 a month so you don't have to pay $200 to visit the doctor once per year. No, I don't know why people do that. You're right that paying $100 a month for "please reattach my severed limbs" insurance is more affordable. Terminology be damned, that's possibly what people mean by "self-insured". They pay day to day expenses out of pocket.
> If you can afford to replace everything you own out of savings, good for you, but most people can't.
Exactly this. The advice I was always given is that if you can afford to replace x (whatever x is) if something bad were to happen, then it's better not to bother. But if you can't, and x is necessary for your life, then you need to accept insurance as a necessary evil.
> If you can afford to replace everything you own out of savings, good for you, but most people can't.
Not that it's relevant, but I can't. Anyway, I didn't say anyone should plan to replace everything from savings. My point is, whatever you _can_ replace from savings, don't waste money to insure _that_.
Please don't compare insurance companies to casinos. In casinos the odds are completely computable and known beforehand to everyone. Not so with insurance which deals with real life.
Did I say casinos? I meant insurance companies.
Seriously, insurance is a bet on something bad happening. Usually it only makes sense to buy insurance for the equivalent of long-shot "lottery jackpots". Like a catastrophic health problem. Or like the damage you might do to other people and their property in an auto accident --- but probably _not_ the damage to your own car. i.e. Insure for personal liability calamities, but not collision damage if you could pay for it out of savings.