this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Because a profit motive does much better for efficiency. Government run things are not known for their efficiency and innovation.
Plus the government is very inefficient deciding how to delegate resources. Democracy isn't able to get a lot of information from everyone about their exact priorities and desires without extreme expenditure. But people can show how much they value some services over others by how much they're willing to pay, doing prioritisation automatically.
I would be in favor of nationalizing some industries where free market forces don't work, for example healthcare or Internet. But free markets with profit motives are very efficient.
And I claim that they can be moral if the external costs of immorality are internalized. Make a business pay exorbitantly for being bad, and they'll stop being bad.
Do you have any actual proof that the profit motive has any positive links to innovation, or are you just taking it for granted? The first cell phone was invented in the USSR, and Frederick Banting sold the patent for insulin for $1, to name two counter-examples. What innovations have come from the profit motive?
Likewise, I doubt the claims of market efficiency. 10% of Americans were food insecure in 2021. Hundreds of thousands are homeless. To me, this is a drastic failing of resource allocation in the richest country on earth. When push came to shove during WWII, even the US ran their war industry as a command economy because corporate graft could not be tolerated in an existential crisis. Socialist countries consistently outperform similar capitalist nations; compare Cuba to any other Caribbean nation (or even China to India; while I assume we would disagree about what China's doing, I think we would agree that it's more government-directed than US-style "free-market capitalism").
I'm curious what would justify whether something should be nationalized to you. Surely it's not just to do with profitability, as you give healthcare as an example. Is it to do with how essential something is? If it's the latter, then surely that would justify the nationalization of food, decommodification of housing, etc.
To your point of "regulate businesses to ensure good behavior", surely you must realize the reason we don't already have those regulations are that private businesses bribe politicians to prevent such regulations.
It would be whether there can be sufficient competition to prevent anti competitive behavior. Healthcare inherently has less competition since you shouldn't be deciding what treatments you get, the doctors should. But you can also get less competition due to extreme barriers to entry, such as trains, mobile networks or internet.