Someone did, Roger. Unfortunately, those systems fell after the Soviet Union collapsed. But prior to that, Poland, East Germany, and so forth would have no doubt suited Professor Lincoln’s ideals.

There are, mind you, quite a few dedicated humanities professors who are not surprised the study of the humanities isn’t good business, and would agree it probably *shouldn’t* be, either. But such modest, real teachers–who simply care more about the humanities than about making money–are the minority.

The average humanities professor cares little about his chosen field, and still less about truth or the search for it in general. He mostly cares about his own social status as an “intellectual”. (Ever noticed how the good teachers, the ones you remember fondly as passionate about Shakespeare or 18th-century Indian poetry or Hume–or whatever their specialization was– *never* called themselves “intellectuals”, still less “public intellectuals”?)

It eats him up that he lives in such an economic system where his social status, as a “public intellectual”, is less than that of a beginning lawyer. He longs for an economic system where some powerful junta or dictator gives money “to each according to their merit”–since he’s certain he’d then be at the top of the heap, being so full of caring, understanding, openness, multiculturalism, and all the rest of those self-important meritorious attitudes.

In real life, the first thing such a junta does is, usually, to hang all these “public intellectuals” from the lampposts, as a potential revolutionary danger. But these guys know nothing of history.

It ranks as it does, as the primer economics system, because it has proven to be the best at sustaining and maintaining a society, through incentives, organization and the cultivation of capital, both financial and human.

No.

WORK is about the creation of wealth. Capitalism is one way of organising and distributing wealth; socialism is another.

(Scratches head) presuming this isn’t a joke, how exactly can the waiting list for maternity beds be longer than nine months?

European health systems achieve their “lower costs” by skimping on care, hiring foreign staff from Third World countries who will work for much less than a native, and rationing care, sort of like triage. In Britain recently the PM ordered that emergency rooms must see all patients within four hours of being admitted. In order to achieve this the staff left patients in ambulances for hours before admitting them to ER, when they still had to wait four hours. The ambulences, of course, were unavailable for further emergency calls while this was going on. Yeah, those nationalized health services are sooooo wonderful. Feh.