Maggie's Farm

(I hope this is not a duplicate. When I tried to submit it before, I got a red-text failure(?) message "Your comment did not contain a Session-Hash...")

"Nobody in America wants a doctor who would say 'I've worked my 8 hours' or 'I'm too tired.'"

Nobody? I am receptive to the idea of getting most of my medical care from someone who would say this. And though I'm not any kind of medical professional, I'm not completely ignorant of the tradeoffs involved. I spent a summer and more doing lab work in a virology and manual-DNA-sequencing lab way back when I was an undergrad. I got a biology BS degree --- very much not premed-oriented, but nonetheless I couldn't avoid learning a thing or two about how stuff works. Since then --- and even before then, in my after-school jobs during high school --- I have done various complicated computer programming, which is often limited by human error. And I know more than average about economics and about the history of medicine.

Now, I'm not enthusiastic about addressing irresponsible practices in the centrally-imposed medical guild system by adding even more central state command and control to the system. And, alas, that is what I expect --- indeed, not just average mediocre command and control, but command and control driven by lobbying and yellow journalism and well-past-its-prime bloated technocracy -- is the most likely response to the current criticism. So whatever changes are likely to be made in this regard in the near future are likely to be so perverse that they're unwelcome to me. But if I was free to shop for medical services in a more classically liberal system, I'd consider it a selling point for an organization if their work was organized like a high-quality organization in an ordinary free market line of business with low barriers to competitive entry, rather than like a state-gated guild system with extensive hazing for candidates before they're allowed to compete with the senior members.

Gung-ho attitudes do have their place even in demanding error-prone work. I have seen old family history video (converted from much older film) of working desperately to cope with a serious disaster in a natural-resources extraction operation. Given the emergency, people naturally and appropriately went very much the opposite direction from stopping after eight hours of work, and people naturally and appropriately did difficult risky things to try to cope with the problem while exhausted and otherwise imperfectly prepared. It is apparent in the film and it is apparent in the way the family talks about it today how much they are expected to be admired for it, and I do admire them for it. But valorizing routine day to day exhausted disorganized gung ho is not excusable just because we naturally honor desperate work when a once-in-a-decade crisis makes it unusually suitable. Routine gratuitous sloppiness is the kind of thing that is easier to force on one's customers under artificial legally-imposed scarcity when thoughtful sensible people who might want to organize their work differently are prevented from law from competing freely for customers.