This is a new one for me...  I guess the thread is boring enough I could go ahead and add legal musings to provide a sufficient base for my views on corporations.

First step is massive tort reform.  No more punitive damages in civil court.  Punishment is for criminal court, this should never have changed to begin with.  It's a violation of ones rights to strip them of their property as punishment for a crime that doesn't exist, and if it does it clearly needs punished in the criminal court.  You then strip down all this pain and suffering bullshit and have actual damages.  No million dollars for lost income and health care costs, then tacking on another five because you're missing a hand and just can't cope with the change.  I know, if I lose my legs in a freak accident I'll be terribly unhappy with myself, it's still horseshit even if I change my mind after I can get rich off the stupidity.  Less relevant things like a loser pay system are in there as well, but these are the only points pertinent to corporate law.

No more liability gaps.  He who makes the decision, hangs for the consequences of it.  Those that know of it and go along with it are accessories to whatever crime has been committed.  I mean that literally.  If you knowingly produce defective products and kill someone with them, you're a murderer, straight up.  Your punishment should be determined at your murder trial.  The company profits, being the proceeds of a crime, are fair game for civil redress of property losses, but not punishment.  A corporate entity can have profits from them, but only individuals commit crimes.

I also want the numerous protections from takeover stripped from public companies.  We were a leaner, meaner country before this crap started.  When a company got sold off in pieces because it was caught undervalued, it was a good thing.  being undervalued means you're pissing away the potential of those assets.  If they go more for scrap than they were worth in the business, it's because the company has been mismanaged in a spectacular fashion.  The corporate raider was a damn good thing, predators keep the population of their prey healthy by weeding out the weak.  These bailouts for companies that are "too big to fail" are even more idiotic and damaging to our economy.  GM will never be of any value if they don't break the union contracts and they can't do that without going into default.  Raiders would have chopped it up into smaller, smarter companies 20 years ago if it weren't for the legal hoops, now the only answer is bankruptcy with so much more debt than capital.  The joys of management fucking up beyond the pale.

Do I still sound like an anarcho-syndicalist?

Even coercive monopolies are exceedingly rare.  Non-coercive monopolies defeat themselves if they attempt to abuse their circumstances, that high profit margin just begs to be cut into, you can make a fortune while taking one down to reasonable levels.  The worse the abuse, the higher the market for rapid growth.  Most monopolies are established by government intervention, not the other way around.

The railroads had a monopoly because it was the only way to get them built at someone elses expense, same with the telecom industry.  Things like Standard Oil got there by crushing the competition and keeping them out with pricing that required a huge investment to match, for low returns.  When they were finally broken up, the price of oil products went way up.

Has the meaning changed while I wasn't looking, or what?  I was under the impression that anarcho-syndicalism contained worker ownership of production as a key component.

Sorta like Commies, minus the top down control.

I'd find and listen to Andalusian folk music, but it would probably kill me.  I'll just assume it's filled with rampant proletariat propaganda espousing decentralized management.  Not sure how a corporation exists in such an environment, but whatever.

A view on the US healthcare system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7oMNu6P4Vc

Administration costs are a bit high in the US, 20 cents of every dollar.

That may be due to air.  How many languages do you speak, read or write?

I didn't say it's never treatable, I said it always metastasizes.

This is the Internet.  Tangential posting is an essential part of it.

Fuckin' A right it is. Arguing over the specifics of pancreatic cancer treatment outcomes is a really good example of why rationing of care is part of all health care systems. Most combat vets understand this because they know what triage is, although triage is certainly not what it used to be on account of the amazing skills of modern trauma surgeons and nurses.

Even in the world outside battlefields, there are limited numbers people with the requisite medical skills, limited equipment, and limited supplies. Private insurance orgs do the same basic things that the British PHS gets slammed for doing in the US press--namely, putting dollar values on abstract peoples' lives and rank-ordering health care needs to help determine who gets what service or meds, and when. Somehow here in the US, it is 'good business' to fully subsidize boner meds but often a real problem to get birth control covered. Is that the free market in action, or is that a reflection of the disproportionate political power of religious conservatives? Looks like the latter to me.

Really? Well, really, I had no footnotes, rotten me. Just sloppy recollections of some footnoted stuff about the hysterically lucrative boner med market and various things about how some insurance plans and specific health care facilities (down to pharmacies) make it hard for some women to go on the 'normal' pill, much less get reliable access to emergency contraception. Just the idea that rules could cause the latter problem drives me batty.

Your "V thingy," while quite admirable in a civilized adult male, is not really comparable to a uterus owner's situation. They suffer a burden of historical oppression and the consequent fact of being less well studied as patients, and I suspect that their gear (being the default gear) is fundamentally tricker than ours. Tying her tubes is riskier and more expensive than tying his.

Removal before it metastasizes does not mean it wouldn't metastasize, intervention doesn't factor into the behavior of a disease left untreated.  The context for the statement was rebuttal to a theory that cancer screenings catch cancers that will never metastasize, thus inflating the US survival rates.

I see this and think it makes sense that they didn't have a tenth of the surgeons they needed in the past.  Top down command and control is never efficient, it's the expected outcome.  We're still like that too.  You might be thinking, no way our military has the best care in the world, it's technically true.  If we had a thousand casualties in a week in Iraq, we'd have been in the exact same situation we were in during the dark ages of medicine back in the civil war.  We'd have been chopping legs off, running out of anesthetic, antibiotics, all kinds of horror.

This is why us crazy free marketers get irritated at capitalism being blamed for it.  None of that is a product of a free market.  The health insurance agencies are heavily regulated.  The reason you have poor catastrophic coverage, when you actually need insurance, is because your federal government exempted health insurance companies from the Constitution, allowing states to restrict interstate trade from them.  They then stuffed regulation on top of regulation into the insurance market, telling them what they can and can't sell in the respective state.  This is why you pay for insurance that covers boner meds in the first place.  You could be skipping the idiocy entirely, paying for catastrophic coverage that would actually protect you from the economic problems due to a life altering illness.  Instead, selling such insurance is illegal in most states.

Why do we have high administration costs?  You pay your insurance company a hundred bucks for a routine checkup and it pays your doctor eighty for the visit.  Why do political powers get to decide what kinds of things we have coverage for?  Because politicians are mandating that coverage to everyone and forcing people to fund someone elses abortions, boob jobs, whatever.  If uncle weren't stepping on your rights, you could get catastrophic coverage anywhere and stop paying the insurance company to pay your bill for you.  You could get added coverage for things you think would be worth paying for over time in advance, and only those things.