I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, precisely the opposite of giving US$100 to every consumer in a capitalist market.
Why? You haven't really answered anything with regards to the incentive structure of Capitalism to manipulate the market ASAP. What good "free markets" segments of society even exists today? Restaurants? No, the big chains lobby intensely there as well - less profits if employees earn a living wage.
> I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, precisely the opposite of giving US$100 to every consumer in a capitalist market.
You're missing the point entirely. The comparison if ofc with what would happen if e.g. a Nordic government would do the same thing under a system of universal healthcare.
Sectors that lack competitive markets include the military, healthcare in much of the world, banking, and most of telecommunications.
I agree that business (not just capitalism!) creates incentives to destroy free markets, just as politics creates incentives to destroy democracy. When actors succeed in following those incentives, that ends capitalism by eliminating competitive markets, which prevents the price system from being used to allocate resources. Competitive markets and the price system are central characteristics of capitalism; where they fail to exist, what you have is not capitalism, but something else.
At this point I'm starting to repeat myself, because I've already explained this about as clearly as I know how, and you still apparently don't understand.
The two examples are temporal inverses of one another. In the situation of capitalism collapsing into government-granted monopolies, free-market capitalism is the first stage, and state central planning is the second stage. In the situation in China, the first stage was a vanguard-party-led society governed by a dictatorship of the proletariat that carries out state central planning, and the second stage is mostly free-market capitalism.
I don't think that anyone ever tried to use "Leninist system" to mean "a system where the government is not corrupt", but maybe I just haven't read enough of Lenin?
You seem to be relying on a rather narrow definition of "capitalism".
But the standard definition I'm using has evolved a bit and is somewhat richer. Quoting the Wikipedia definition:
> Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.
I think that is a very good and uncontroversial definition of "capitalism", and that is the one I am using. It sounds like you have some non-mainstream definition in mind?
