Georgist and Mutualist Economics Could Lower Health Costs by Eliminating Unnecessary Taxes

     I am running for the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois as a Mutualist.

     I am doing this for several reasons including: 1) Spread awareness of Mutualist and Georgist economics; 2) fix and simplify the tax code through lessons we can learn from those economic systems; 3) use those same lessons to improve the environment of the 10th District of Illinois, and its health, and its financial well-being, all at the same time.

     In regard to the question, "What should we tax?", Georgists favor taxes on the non-improvement of land, and they want to stop taxing improvements made to property. Mutualists, on the other hand, believe that if anything should be taxed, it should be negative externalities, and economic activities that cause them. These negative externalities - which are negative effects that two parties' agreements can have on unaware or non-consenting third parties - include coercive "agreements", one-sided deals, overtaxed transactions, and economic opportunities which may have been lost through being forced to purchase this or that good or service by government (or the monopolies it sponsors).

     Georgists and Mutualists may differ slightly in terms of which forms of taxes they favor, but they both agree that degradation of land, and making land unuseable for others, is a negative externality. Georgism and Mutualism are also remarkably similar systems, considering that they are both close to the economic center; both want to preserve a balance between community and property, and they are united in their opposition to monopolies and central government control. Additionally, they both care about people's freedom to make use of land in order to survive, with the minimum amount of resistance from government possible; and they want to make rent, interest, and profit unnecessary, in order to make land and consumer goods more affordable.

     This agreement is why I am promoting Georgism - and pro-market critiques of so-called "free-market libertarianism" - alongside Mutualism, as possible solutions to America's taxation and budget problems, environmental problems, and land tenure and housing and gentrification problems (among others).

     Georgists want to tax land, not labor and capital. And they want to tax land in order to avoid taxing labor and capital.

     If we were taxing land value - instead of income, sales, consumption, production, and trade - that would mean no taxation of health goods and services.

     By this, I mean that health workers and medical device producers would pay no taxes (except to the extent that they receive taxpayer assistance, benefit from monopoly privileges, and/or make land unusable for others).

     Just like all sales and consumption taxes, the medical device sales tax is unnecessary, because it unnecessarily adds to the total cost of medical devices, making each potential buyer (hospitals) decrease the number devices they were going to buy by that percentage (all other factors assumed to hold equal).
     Think about it: If medical devices were more affordable, and each hospital or doctor's office would have more of each medical device, then the likelihood that people would sue the clinic for malpractice for not having and using the latest medical technology to diagnose and treat their illness properly, would decline. Because medical devices would become that much more accessible to any given person might need one used on them.

     Unless there is an economic justification for taxing sales, and it's sustainable, we should not tax the sale of anything (except land). And if you tax land value, waste and destruction of land, monopolies, and use of common or taxpayer resources, and no taxation of health goods and services; then no taxation of anyone's earned income - doctor or not a doctor - will be necessary.

     If you pay no income taxes - and neither do your nurse, your doctor, and the people manufacturing the medical devices - then everyone's ability to afford medicine will increase. That's because unnecessary taxes that hinder productivity and earnings, will have been replaced with taxes that directly punish a significant cause of our health problems: land degradation and land hoarding. This will help further reduce health costs, by taxing the organizations that directly cause our health problems, making corporate polluters bear the financial burden of pollution instead of the patients themselves.

     Once we can tax the right things, we can balance budgets, in order to stop borrowing and inflating. Then, the value of the money in everyone's pockets will steadily in increase, and medical costs will stabilize, flatten out, and then eventually begin to decrease. With taxes on productivity gone, investment in medicine will increase, but it will be sustainable, rather than oriented toward short term profit, because taxpayer funds will no longer subsidize medical R&D in a way that trains companies to be reliant on taxpayer handouts, and medical patents will be drastically shortened, instead of continuing to allow drug manufacturers to hold pharmaceutical patents for 14 or 17 or 18 years.

     Thus, the increase of the duration of patent, trademark, and copyright protection, since the establishment of the U.S. Patent Office, has caused patents to behave more like monopolies. Long-protected patents are monopolies that got out of control; they were originally intended to only confer a temporary monopoly. Patents are supposed to protect the property rights of real inventors, not confer a long monopoly privilege to a business long enough for it to become a corporate crony and a beneficiary of government largesse.

     Think of how few congressmen would be able to engage in "insider congressional trading" in medical device stocks, if they had zero ability to subsidize medical research or keep pharmaceutical and device patents absurdly long? With so much power to influence business, "insider trading", in this context, merely refers to the congressmen's abilities to trade stock, and then the same day, turn around and write legislation which sometimes literally provides for the spending of taxpayer funds on projects overseen by medical device and Big Pharma companies.
     The only reason some people don't see this as wrong, is because it is legal. But the same thing is true about subsidies for medical research and development! (Read the following article to learn more about that: http://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/376574-pharmaceutical-corporations-need-to-stop-free-riding-on-publicly-funded).

     Why go in a socialist or free market direction with our health care system, when we can do both at the same time?
     We can do this by: 1) Shortening medical patents will allow generics to come onto the market sooner, leading to cheaper prices sooner; 2) Urging states to legalize interstate purchase of health insurance, while eliminating the employer provided health insurance tax credit, to make health insurance affordable and portable, while removing the unfair advantage that employed people have over unemployed people in obtaining coverage; and 3) Eliminating taxes on nonprofit and cooperative health providers, because they produce no profit which could be taxed.

     We can spread the word that direct primary care eliminates the health insurance middleman and allows people to avoid large bills by simply paying in a small amount of cash in person. The number of direct primary care providers should increase, the tax system should be restructured to leave them free to thrive, and they should be free to partner with any church or charity organization that wants to provide donations of physical cash to patients as they walk into the direct primary care provider's office (as long as the church or charity pays its land value taxes).

     Learn about Georgism, Land Value Taxation, environmental taxation, and Mutualism. The solution to the war in the streets between capitalists and socialists, is to teach them where their common ground lies, and that other economic systems exist besides the two that most of us know about.

     We should try some of those economic systems. We'll never know whether they'll work, unless and until we try them.




     To learn about where I got the idea that cheaper medical devices could lead to fewer malpractice lawsuits, watch Season 11, Episode 2, of the show King of the Hill, titled "SerPUNt" (in which Hank Hill becomes responsible for taking care of a snake and bringing it in to a veterinarian's office).

Written and Published on September 3rd, 2020
Edited and Expanded on September 4th, 2020