Sure, that is why I said your post was 'somewhat' contradictory.
Was just trying to figure out what you were getting at.
Actually I thought Smith's invisible hand would take care of the ethics
At least, that is how it is supposed to work in theory...
Anyway, the US system must be different for an eco degree than in the AU. We only have intro to micro and macro, and then you pick specialties, as all subjects will have elements of both, so you are never considered to be done with micro and macro! But yea, I figured you must be early into your degree as you are too idealistic. ;p I was a hardcore socialist at the start of my undergrad (I was 15, 15yos are stupid what can I say!) and six years of study later, well, go the free market!
This is why I don't get concerned with instructors being paid crap as you are looking at an industry that has fairly low barriers to entry and exit (sure training is expensive but not compared to a college degree - at least where I come from), there are a lot of options for places you can work, and so on, yet it is still a low paid job. As I said earlier, I think this is because a lot of people would be happy to do it and just break even. It is not a job that people feel forced into, if that makes sense, so people choose it knowing full well what it will entail. And if they don't well it is easy enough for them to leave the industry... and they should have researched it better in the first place.
Haha, mine had a rebreather listed. Think it likes to play funny buggers.
Well, it sounds like it's similar, we just have a barrier separating certain classes such as lower division classes being your general, introductory stuff and then upper division are the classes that are specifically focused to your major. For economics degrees in the U.S., and my degree I'm shooting for is the same, you do take introduction to microeconomics and introduction to macroeconomics but then you still keep learning micro and macro more in-depth through intermediate & advanced micro & macro, etc. so it sounds like the degrees are similar for our two countries. I don't consider myself socialist at all, to tell you the truth, because socialism is defined as government having control over the economy of it's country which I am firmly against. In fact, the U.S. government has become dangerously large and I think it needs to be scaled back significantly to restore the rights and freedoms we've lost over the last 8+ years.
The "invisible hand" principle in free markets generally does work, however, I've lived off chicken**** EMT pay for way too long to think that there's not room for improvement in EMS as far as pay goes.
I don't think the profile was glitching to be honest....whenever you click into a field with a drop down list, if you scroll down with the ball on top of your mouse, it actually scrolls through the choices in that drop down list possibly without the user knowing about it so in this case I think it was technically user error on my part.
And what will happen is someone down the street will open a similar business, pay what the labor market dictates, and be able to undercut your fees, and eat your lunch, especially when the insurance companies decide to cut you out because he charges less. It's called competition. That's how capitalism works. That's why people need to choose careers with their heads, not their hearts. You look at what the MARKET pays, based on supply and demand, and you choose a path that will meet your economic needs. People do not operate businesses out of the kindness of their hearts; they do it to make a profit.
If you run a dive op and pay more than market rates, you'll have people beating down your door for a job. However, it will also lead more people to quit their day jobs and try a career in diving. If enough ops pay above market, even more people will follow that path. Pretty soon, all the divers are homeless divemasters wandering around South Florida, and there aren't enough divers with real jobs to keep the industry running, and it collapses. The market will always adjust to suppress aberrations. Your sig indicates you're a beginning business student - you have much to learn.
Your second paragraph, outside the last sentence which is inaccurate, is spot on for the most part. Your first paragraph indicates a massive lack of knowledge of how health care, and specifically EMS, functions as far as reimbursement goes. Insurance companies do not have any control, nor do they care, about who charges what or who gets paid what; the reimbursements are set in stone and are the same for each procedure or service regardless of who the provider is. If ambulance company A charges $500, and ambulance company B charges $300, but the insurance company reimburses $250, then ambulance company B is not "cutting out" the other provider because both of them are getting reimbursed $250. Health care economics is different from normal economics...I would recommend you research it before making judgments about other people's knowledge on that subject.
Furthermore, there are several ambulance companies I can think of who pay their employees very well and they still turn a handsome profit. Fact of the matter is that two different ambulance companies can charge the same amount, in order to be competitive with each other, and one can pay its employees more than the other if they are willing to make less profit than the other. The key phrase here is less profit; you are still turning a profit and clearly increased pay should not be done unless you can still make enough profit to make it worthwhile. No offense but this is a basic concept, business isn't black and white, so I'm at a loss as to how you didn't think of this.
Lastly, just FYI, I take offense to being referred to as a business student. Business degrees don't teach jack ****; go look at the list of courses required for one of those worthless pieces of paper. There is a big difference between business and economics; one teaches generic BS about business that should be common sense whereas the other teaches scarcity and the choices people make as a result of scarcity. Economics can sometimes overlap with business but that is /not/ the focus of economics; and typically business majors do not have anywhere near the amount of mathematical rigor that economics majors do. Again, I'm at a loss as to how you didn't think of this before you inferred that economics & business are the same when it should be common sense that they're not. Perhaps this is a common mistake that is made, however, if you're going to try to debate a topic then I would think it would make sense to know the topic beforehand.
No, we don't take it far enough. This country is mostly socialist. Your employer could pay you more if he wasn't getting taxed to death to support people who won't work.
And that problem is investor ignorance - it's part of the consequences of 401K's democratizing the market - too many people trading stock don't understand how the one-time charge of a layoff artificially inflates profit figures.
We need less, and then we'd have politicians with scruples.
Well said. The ironic thing is that people think more taxes mean our government will be able to afford more programs to keep people from working and baby them from the cradle to the grave...the opposite is true. Supply side economics has plenty of graphs and studies to show that tax revenue
decreases when tax rates increases.
Furthermore, I agree with bfw that we need less politicians and less government. I'm simply terrified at the notion that some people think we need more government; this country has endured enough damage from the incompetence of government in the last decade to suffer much more. I hope that the next president will understand the aforementioned and scale down the size of government....I'm not going to hold my breath though.
