re: #517 Obdicut

You’re entirely right. Many large companies these days spend more time fiddling with financial instruments than concentrating on their core industry, since that’s what’s most profitable. In addition, health care costs, through insurance, make up such a large part of their costs that they spend tons of time and money figuring out how to minimize those— also a distraction from the actual business.

In a well-regulated market, this would make those companies inefficient, but in the actual market we have, where financial instruments are highly unregulated and health care is a byzantine system that rewards economy of scale, it’s exactly backwards.

A lot of this is socialization as I alluded to before. It is the socialization and normalization of Gordon Gekko mentality. Many of them went into business school not because they loved business or industry but instead to make money. This is almost the same thing that happened with medical doctors. Television and the movie industry played a large part in this socialization. Americans are highly influenced by the mass media and they become our role models. They are not even numbers people.