Communism is not the future, but the past.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. (try not paying "property tax")

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. (check)

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. (partial)

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. (not yet, but "civil forfeiture" is getting there)

5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. (check)

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state. (check, if you consider, as any anarchist must, any regulated cartel to be a part of the state)

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. (check)

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. (this is what they mean by "national service")

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. (check)

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. (check)

So basically, once the next president institutes their "national service plan" and with a bit more of police running amok stealing shit, we'll be very very close to fulfilling all the planks of the communist manifesto here in the USSA. They'll never raise the inheritance tax because the kind of communism we have here is more Animal Farm-ish in which "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". In other words, a group of elite proletarians (We could call them the "High Bureaucracy" or simply The Managerial Class) have split off into a new oppressive class(while merging with remnants of the old elite), something Ol' Onkel Karl didn't exactly foresee. (which he probably should have because that was a big part of the story of how the "Bourgeoisie" formed)

However this leads to a new revolutionary situation in which the "sub-proletariat" can break the back of State Property and State Power, establishing all property as fluid, personal, and possession based. Our major inroad of opportunity comes along plank 6, in that communication technology is rapidly escaping from the hands of the state, and along plank 5, through the degradation of state-based currencies due to the inevitable crisis that comes from central banking (read FSK on the Compound Interest Paradox). Planks 2 and 9 will collapse not long after.

Is Environmentalism a Scam?

What makes a scam work is that it contains elements of the truth mixed with hidden lies. Otherwise it would just be ridiculous. Almost no one would sign up for the "Self Immolation Society".

Environmentalists often point out real facts, but then make a lot of false assumptions in order to get from those facts to their conclusion, which seems to always be:
"We need massive government controls on all aspects of production and consumption".
This assumes that people left to their own devices wouldn't adapt to these facts on the ground on their own. This is no different from the economic argument for state socialisms of various forms, just with different apparent problems. Again, the "right wing" plays into the scam by claiming that the facts don't exist, or that these things aren't a problem, just like with the economic argument.

The anarchist argument is that these things may well be real, but that people would solve these problems if left to their own devices, just as they always do. We don't need the state to solve our problems, and in fact, the state is often the source of the problems, by disempowering people and leaving them no incentive or opportunity to fix things spontaneously and ad-hoc.

Economics can be seen as cultural ecology. If voluntary, spontaneous order works, it will work in all areas of life. (edited because of a very good point that Rad Geek brought up, and that I will address in my next post)

"It's not capitalism, but it's got bits of capitalism shot through it."

He said it as well as I could have.

Quote of the month:
"Look: resistance to eating one's own children could be plotted along an elasticity curve, too."

When you talk about the housing bubble, it's important to understand why housing prices got so high in the first place.
If you can just lend money out of thin air for buying houses (not that they're actually owned in a fully allodial sense, but for convenience sake...), given that land is a relatively fixed supply*, the price is just going to go up and up to the limit of what people can afford to pay back, and in this case, beyond. People made predictions about increasing income that they weren't able to back up.
The problem is that such over-extension is almost inevitable, because failing to participate in the upsurge of credit just makes it harder and harder to afford a house later on. It's like a pyramid scheme in that way, the "early adopters" get a pretty sweet deal, and the late adopters mostly get fucked. (which in a human, long term sense, means that it's a way for the old to fuck over the young...)

Since prices are relative in a fiat currency (that is, a currency not backed by any specific commodity), what these credit bubbles actually do economically, in the long run, is to make durable, resellable goods more expensive relative to consumable goods. Houses are expensive because you can foreclose on them. Cars are expensive because you can repossess them.
College education is expensive because it increases your income (in a sense making you more "resellable") - this is the most horrible one of all, because it's direct labor farming. They loan money so you can go to school, and you can make more money, that you will pay them back in interest. College becomes more expensive, so people need to get more loaned to them, at higher rates of interest. Those who don't take these loans are condemned to exist as second-class citizens for the rest of their life. And of course, given the ratio of population growth to marginal capital growth, eventually you get people who go to college just so they can get a job as a secretary.
Then the labor farming moves up a notch as everyone competes to go to grad school of one sort or another.

Eventually you end up with bankrupt, homeless PhDs who have cell phones and ipods.

The "limit" to the pyramid, and the reason why they can't just keep the boom going forever, is the capital infrastructure. In the long run, you need to have a certain amount of economic circulation for the idea of "wealth" to mean anything at all. So at some point before there's a total breakdown in production, they have to allow interest payments to outstrip money growth and "harvest" what they have sown, financially.

* in an economic sense things like skyscrapers increase the supply of residential land, but it's still fairly limited.

"Recession? If you say so. Things are exactly the same down here."
- William Gillis

I think he's spot on here, except that to call privileged workers "upper class" is a severe semiotic error, IMO. As far as I'm concerned the "upper class" are the people that are behind the croupier's stick, not the ones at the gaming table, no matter how well they have the odds stacked for them.

Your average "suit and tie" person is not upper class, though they may be a useful dupe of the upper class. What IS good is that these people will begin to wake up to the fact that there is a much larger game at work, and that they haven't necessarily "made it" at all.

For many of us, living on the periphery of "the economy", a financial collapse will only help us in terms of relative purchasing power. Productive Labor must receive a wage high enough to reproduce itself, no matter how it's denominated. This fact is actually a cause for much of the concern of the ruling class. They've squeezed and squeezed and there's not that much "maneuvering room" left for them. They can crush the "upper middle class" now, and wring some profit away, but then what? Not to mention the political instability that will cause, when the "silent majority" starts to identify with the rest of us. Their only hope will be to cause enough cultural division and conflict to keep us at each others' throats a little bit longer.

And so they shall try. Expect to see more "identity politics" and pseudo-christian "culture war" issues in the media soon.

"Some people say that China is an experiment. Is it possible to have a USA-style booming economy when you:

* deny people freedom of speech
* deny people the right to communicate freely
* deny people the illusion that they have the right to choose their leaders by voting

I suspect the answer is "You can't have a booming economy lacking all the above." The bad guys are hoping that China will prove the answer is "You can have a booming economy lacking the above", and use China as the model for the future US economy. Currently, the booming Chinese economy is really US companies relocating their factories to China, using production techniques developed in the USA. China won't reach the level of innovation present in the US or Japan, unless they allow their citizens the ability to think independently. Currently, a lot of factories are being developed in China, but you don't hear of many new technologies being invented in China. Contrast that with Japan, which contributes many inventions in the area of electronics and software."
- FSK

I tend to be sympathetic to this view. I suspect that the USSR was also a failed experiment. There is historical evidence in the gaps to suggest that it was. (for instance, the secret funnelling of money from Wall Street to Lenin in the 20s, or the findings of the congressional commission studying the Ford and Rockefeller foundations in the 50s... )

On a similar geopolitical note, I think the thing that messes up peoples heads when they compare Europe and the US is the belief that Europe has a less free market than the US. I think the opposite. It's just that the kind of interventions that are used more in Western Europe tend to be the kind of things that conservatives bitch about - i.e. the "crutches" provided to the people who have had their socio-economic legs broken by the kind of controls that conservatives never talk much about but are very prevalent in the US economy.
(licensing laws, zoning laws, construction permits, copyrights, property acquisition laws, laws protecting people from their own choices - all very subtle but devastating to the poor and lower middle class)

A couple of thoughts on taxation.

I had originally posted a more elaborate analysis, but it was hastily written at 3 AM. I've saved it somewhere, and I'll get back to it when I get a chance. (maybe tonight)

In the mean time, I'd like point out that under a fiat currency, all taxation is redistributive... that is, there's a centerline at which dollars and "things which can be purchased with dollars" float, and taxation merely shifts purchasing power around that line. That's really all it does (under a fiat currency). All taxation is theft, yes, but that's only half the picture. All taxation is redistribution. All government spending is taxation. This is a complicated idea, but if you think of the fact that the actual number of dollars in circulation means nothing, and pursue that line of reasoning to it's end point, eventually you'll see what I'm talking about.

Think of government spending. When the government steals that money, who benefits, really? The government itself? They get their salaries, yeah. But other than that, most of the money goes to contractors of one sort or another. The people who get paid by the government are the Power Elite. They are the people the government is really working for.

The government also pays people by not taxing them as much. This one is the most difficult to grok, and will cause the most objection, but if you've understood the last two paragraphs, it should make sense.

I found this interesting:
Why the global financial system is about to collapse.

It's well-written and clear, and though he's not any sort of anarchist, he's also kind of tricky about not being an anarchist. :)
It's almost as if he's some sort of public choice agorist in a way.


On the other hand, Tyler Cowan is kind of an idiot, at least publicly. It's not even that he's shilling for the state or "actually existing capitalism", it's that he doesn't seem to actually understand what he's shilling for. Statements like "One five or ten percent deflation is enough to crush the economy and indeed the whole gold standard idea" (umm... apples to oranges?) or "But we don't live in the broad sweep of world history, we live in 2008 and our ability to monitor and control central banks is unparalleled" (huh? how can that possibly work?) don't seem to recommend him much. If this is the kind of logic that Economics PhD programs produce nowadays, then we agorists don't have long to wait for the collapse.

As a counter-example, though Paul Krugman is an awful statist, the things he says at least make sense within his own insane world-view.

"There's no time to think, just do it."

This here is something pretty fundamental:
Labels, Enemies and Rambling.

Most people tend to fall back on associative thinking instead of actually listening to what other people are saying and considering it. In a way I don't blame them, the pressures of modern life do everything they can to push people into it. Not only directly, through propaganda engines (media, advertising, etc...) but also indirectly, by stressing people out and sapping them of their free time and energy.

On a related note is this:
Unbundle The Zaxlebax!

5 minutes to midnight?

First, a link I stumbled across:
The End Of Money?

The writer starts out explaining what FSK calls "The Compound Interest Paradox". But he goes on to make the further explanation that money growth is exponential(but not continuously/smoothly so).
I think this quote is extremely illustrative:

Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacterium into an empty bottle at eleven in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at twelve noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth, it has a doubling time of one minuet, and it's in the finite environment of one bottle. I want to ask you two questions.

Number one; at which time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12, because they double in number every minute?

Second Question; if you were an average bacterium in that bottle at what time would you first realize that you were running out of space? Well let's just look at the last minute in the bottle. At 12 noon its full, one minute before its half full, 2 minutes before its ¼ full, then 1/8th, then a 1/16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12 when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realize there's a problem?

Just Do It, in a different sense.

Blowing up walls and streaming across en masse so you can buy food is exactly how things need to happen.
Fuck letting people put you in a cage, even (especially) if they claim some metaphysical bullshit reason for having the authority to do so.

What's funny is how different media sources describe the situation.
Freedom in Gaza (but for one day only)
vs
Gazans pour into Egypt after gunmen blast down barrier

A good post I read recently, but not a recent post.

The Danger Of Assumptions
What's super interesting about this post to me is that the pattern he identifies at the bottom of this post applies to other ideologues as well, especially religious fundamentalists. For instance: the Islamic brouhaha over the Danish comics. Or if you've ever tried arguing with a Dominionist pseudo-christian (as I have begun calling most evangelicals).
There is this assumption that somehow the rest of us also believe what they do, only somehow we've obscured it in our minds or we're being willfully ignorant of it. (Some "Objectivists" try to play that card too).
This goes back to the Corporatist Statists because Statism is a religion too. It is a Poison Mythos that has been inserted into all of our cultural tropes for so long that we don't even see it any more. Even trying to point out the more obvious aspects of this Mythos is like trying to explain water to a fish. For instance, the Old Mythic World ended in 1929. The New Rational World was born as of WWII. That's why everything around us glorifies WWII so much.

On Electoral Politics

It seems to me that there are only two "strategies" for voting that make any sense, and one of them is only an action out of despair.
The first is "always dis-elect" - that is, always vote against the incumbent (and whomever he may support, it may take some thinking to figure this out). As long as the incumbent supports using a monopoly of violence against non-violent people, vote against him, no matter what else he believes. Once politicians are forced into a de-facto one term limit, they'll get the message. This is the politics of despair though. It's essentially saying "we know we can't stop you but we can put a limit to your excesses".

The other is "worse is better". This actually has a chance to do some good. Vote for, and support the worst possible candidate in terms of freedom and justice (and do so openly on the basis of "worse is better", so no one gets the wrong idea). We aren't far from the brink of collapse, and honestly, to use a recent example, the only reason why Ron Paul has the support he does, is because things are so fucked right now. When people see an extreme, concrete example of what their ideology leads to, they will revise their ideology. This is because most people, as ethically destroyed as they are by the propaganda engines of our society, still retain a measure of self interest and pragmatism. Their self interest may be idiotic, which is why "worse is better"... they will only respond to extreme stimuli at this point.
Pay the bill quickly, despite the pain involved.

Some thoughts on suicide

If someone is suffering so much that they really want to kill themselves, and you pressure them to stay alive, you are essentially advocating their torture. You want to keep them alive and suffering for your own agenda.

Now, if you intend to aid and relieve their suffering, that's a different story. But most people who try to stop other people from killing themselves have no intention to do anything serious to change the other person's life. (or you would have done it before it got that far)
The ethical freedom to take your own life is the root of all other freedom, it is the ultimate act of self-ownership.

Saying "oh it's not that bad" (or something of that sort) is a horrible thing to say.
It shows your own inconsideration of the other person's subjectivity. Their situation might not seem too bad to you, but you have no ethical right to superimpose your values on their condition. It's oppressive and disgusting.

If society had a more evenhanded attitude toward suicide, the power structure as we know it would fall. People would be killing themselves a lot more often than most of us suspect.
I believe this is why most of the "moral" arguments and emotional sentiments against suicide exist. In order to torture and subdue people that are unhappy with the situation to the point where it is intolerable to them. This aids the power structure by creating a vast number of people who are surviving (and thus feeding the system) even though society at large has failed them.

Ran Prieur
This guy is definitely worth reading... I haven't been reading long enough to know completely where he's at but when he hits the target, he hits it...
Plus, he's doing that sort of global system analysis that I try to do, coming from the idea that everything is an analogy for everything else...

Interesting that he's found the same problem that I have:
namely, when you do that, you find yourself drifting into politics all the time, even though it's not what you really were planning to think about.

Now this is a very interesting factor to me. What it seems to tell me is that:
1. Most of the global human system has been infected by politics to some extent or another.
2. Most of the resistance, which of course creates counter-resistance, comes from political ideas.
3. The modern form of the civilization virus, the black iron prison, is the Church of State.
Though I am an anarchist of some sort, technically, what's more important to me than directly opposing the State (which doesn't really work, for reasons that Philip K Dick hinted at very succinctly) is to de-mythologize it.
To get people to see it as it is, and when I say that, by way of analogy, imagine what "the government" feels like to someone who is a government official.
Whose 9-5 crappy job is to be a high ranking government official.
Now, you might be able to argue on some Benthamite/Hobbsean utilitarian ground that we need a super-mafia to bully us into submission lest we fall into raw violent chaos.
But what needs to be understood is that it is a super-mafia. It is not a bunch of "public minded statesmen". Those don't exist.
There's no reason to believe that The State (and that includes all the "major corporations" at this point - I mean the fact that the propaganda engines call them "major corporations" says something in itself...) are any more sentimental than anyone else is, and plenty of reason to believe they are much less so. Now it is possible to be unsentimental, and also just and honest.
But no one could do what the State does, unless they were either utterly deluded and/or utterly corrupt. At the lower levels, the level of the rank and file soldiers/police/agents of course, they are mostly deluded. They also worship the idea of The State as a modern god.
This is what I am trying to take apart. People need to be able to mock The State, to see it as the ridiculous social fiction that it is. Yeah, some people do, but it's always presented as some sort of good natured patriotic wiseacre thing. But it's deeper than that.

If our civilization requires a massive lie in order to function, better that it not function.

One of the ironies of the whole thing is that "America" was fundamental in creating the modern Church of State. This is one reason why I distrust a lot of minarchists. Minarchism creates the myth of "good government" or "honest government" or even "government under control". But right from the very beginning, the US Gov't was in bed with bankers and slave-owners. They were bankers and slave owners!

Also very good is this right here: Solvitur Ambulando (roughly: we'll solve it as we go along)

One of the things that Ran picks up on, and so did RAW for that matter, is the importance of visible weirdness. Visible but not harmful weirdness opens people's minds on a level that the conditioned rationalism can't block out so easily. It goes straight to the core. Which is why it often creates a lot of resistance at first... so you have to sort of edge up to High Weirdness I think. Get people used to seeing minor weirdness at first, then keep amping it up.
People tend to treat political subjects as either boring and unimportant or ZOMG serious business. To some extent this is justified by the fact that the civilization virus is so ubiquitous that most political actions, taken in isolation, are very dangerous and/or unavoidable. This makes the job of the unravellers a bit more difficult. But we've managed to muddle through so far, against all odds, with a tremendous amount of centralized force and corrupt mythology arrayed against us. That's because reality is our ally, and a powerful ally it is, indeed.

Meta-Agorism?

Reading back through various blogs and such, I think I'd have to say that Adem Kupi's definitions of liberty and anarchy are really on the money:

"Liberty, in my opinion, is merely the absence of Crime. Crime, not as defined by legislature, which is another form of fraud, but the normal, everyday intuitive sense of crime. Murder, assault, theft, rape, swindles, that sort of thing.
A perfect Liberty is a situation where such things do not exist at all. This is probably not an achievable situation, but it constitutes an asymptote, a limit towards which true libertarians wish to carry society above all else. And I reserve the right to use the phrase "true libertarians" because I mean people who are libertarian by the definition of the word, not people who identify as libertarians. This is not a "no true scotsman" argument.

Anarchy on the other hand is a situation where no one is given the authority to commit crimes. They might still get away with it, but by and large people don't believe they are entitled to."

This points the way toward a possible meta-agorism:
People pursuing their own interest, regardless of "the state" or any other organization. Treating it the way they would any other mafia.
This meta-agorism would include agorist counter-economics of course, but also more than that, a realignment toward spontaneous culture and social interaction. Because it implies the idea of following your own conscience without regard to ideas of "rank" or "authority". If you think techno music is awesome, well fine, then it is. If you prefer Beethoven, ok that's fine too.
It would include a severe sort of moralism, but one in which the primary precept would be to develop a moral sense of your own. Or to keep it focused inward pointing outward, it would mean not to accept anyone else's moral sense as any better than your own. Let your conscience be your guide.

In this way, meta-agorism of this sort is more "realistic" and practical than any sort of particular political agitation or movement. The main way of spreading it is just to encourage people to question all authority, and to come to their own conclusions. Criticize everything that exists ruthlessly.
If people ask what your positive program is, tell them "I'm not a revolutionary, I'm a destroyer". This is the connection by the way to buddhist anarchism as mentioned by William Gillis. Buddha was considered a destroyer of illusion.
I'm a Daoist, not a Buddhist, but I respect that idea, that the path to liberation is to destroy that which holds you back from reality.
It's also a connection to the sort of super anarchism of Allan Thornton, who was a big influence on Adem Kupi. Thornton said "What will happen under Anarchy? EVERYTHING."

Kevin Carson says it so I don't have to.

"I am no social democrat. I'm under no illusions about the central role of big business in formulating the New Deal. I don't like statism of any kind. In my opinion, New Deal liberalism and the Reagan-Thatcher model of neoliberalism are like two farmers. The first farmer thinks he can get more work out of his livestock, in the long run, if he feeds them well and gives them comfortable shelter and sufficient rest. The second farmer thinks he can get more work out of them if he works them to death and then replaces them. There's no question that both "farmers" view us as "livestock," and that their prime concern is with their own profit. But I know which farm I'd rather live on.

Quite frankly, if my only choices are corporate liberalism and social democracy, and a banana republic on the neoliberal model, I'll take the former any day. If I get to choose between the paternalism of Brave New World and the jackboot in my face of 1984, it won't take me long to decide. I'm not ashamed to say that if my only choices are the welfare statist and neoliberal versions of statism, I'll take the kind of statism whose yoke weighs less heavily on my own back." (emphasis mine)

In my view, that's a big "if" though. Given the advanced instability of modern production and finance, and the increasing growth of global black and grey markets, I suspect that neither form of farming will be sustainable for much longer, and it's long past time for the livestock to take over. That said, we must beware of any doctrine of "some animals are more equal than others".

I'd also like to point out an interesting thought by "Bunty" in the comments section:
"There could lie root of the problem, in the vulgar view, the market seems to be something external, a strict ruleset/framework in which people have to participate competitively (even those up the ladder have to keep fighting for market share; or fall, meaning that any means justify that end). It is an old skool religion, with banks as churches and and priests and sacrifice and Greed itself as a god."

This is why I don't trust minarchists, to an extent. But either way, it is an EXTREMELY GRAVE error to view "markets" as anything at all. The word is an abstraction to describe the sum of exchanges among people. In this sense a "free market" means a situation in which all of these exchanges are voluntary.

War... what is it good for?

Why is war so damn important to the ruling class?

There are a lot of smaller reasons, economic and political, why it might be desirable, why it might be a boon to them.
But right now, they seem thirsty for it, desperate for it. Why is that?

Because the threads of the mythos they have created are unraveling all around them. Even though they have developed a vast propaganda machine, the economic damage to the middle class is too difficult to hide at this point. War is still a psychic force that can mobilize people against their own self interest. Especially since World War II was the grounding ur-myth of the modern mythos.

Every discussion is framed as if we were facing the next Hitler. (Notice how the Japanese are never brought up, even though it's the Japanese that actually got us into the war. I guarantee if Mussolini had been on "our" side in the war, Fascism would be a perfectly acceptable ideology to people)

If "war fever" subsides, if we stop fighting, people will begin to look at their own domestic situation again and demand more of their own capital back. In a subtle way, this was a criticism that the neo-conservatives often levelled at American society after the Cold War ended. "National Greatness Conservatism" seems to me to be a code word for "using war as an excuse to suppress the peasants and keep them in their place".

What I'm trying to do here consists of a few basic themes:
1. Delineate the situation clearly
This is important because the biggest hurdle we face is one of deception, a false mythology implanted in people by the various propaganda engines of the powers that be.
In order to attack this mythology we have to see it clearly, and not be led astray ourselves. The powers that be have had a long time to improve their techniques of deception and cooption through trial and error.
2. Point out means of escape. Fortunately a lot of the work in this area has been done. Harry Browne and SEK3 come immediately to mind. The good thing about counter economics is that it is something which contains its own incentives for spreading and they scale with the level of statism. But on a psychological level you must also free yourself from traps that keep you stuck in the Red and Pink markets, as FSK so cleverly put it.
On this note, I think that Adem Kupi is on to something with his emphasis on saving as a revolutionary act. (personal disclaimer, he's a friend of mine...)
3. Create the seeds of a new counter-propaganda/counter-mythology. The revolution, such as it may be, must take place first in the hearts and minds of the people. Only then will they do anything worthwhile. Some of this will consist of "preaching to the choir", but also of taking the message and making it more transmissible, whether through pithy sound bites or images.

Hypothetical Fun

I was chatting with a friend of mine last night who said "But I want to alleviate suffering right now".
The context was "healthcare"... well one interesting article on that and similar subjects is "Socialism Vs Regulation" by James Leroy Wilson. So, making the other side of that argument, one way to alleviate suffering right now would be to deregulate health care and abolish medicare and medicaid.
It would be better for the government to basically give people money to spend on medical care, within a context of a free market, where people would still have an incentive not to use care they don't need (this is basic economics right here, economizing scarce resources). Right now we have not only a subsidized demand, but also a restricted supply. So of course "healthcare" is terribly expensive. Which forces more people into the pyramidal institutions to pay for their needs.
To paraphrase Robert Higgs, "There are no failed policies in the long run". This is no accident.

So would it be "better" to have socialized medicine? Well, as long as medicine was completely deregulated and unlicensed outside the system, yes, it would be better than what we have now.
But what all these goons in the government want for us is not that at all but an extension of the current system to absorb everyone, and with government in control. Which is Fascist Medicine, for lack of a better term.
Medical taxes will keep going up, especially now that all these Baby Boomers are retiring (and are spoiled people with a vast sense of entitlement - which may come from growing up in an age where government still "worked", before the seed capital of the past had been completely eaten away) which will put pressure on doctors to lower their hourly rates or find other ways to reduce cost, which will create a shortage of doctors and poor, but "free" care for everyone, once you get off the two year waiting list.
Most poor people I know don't need MRIs. They need better jobs and more opportunities for wealth creation.

This same pattern applies to most areas of American society where the government has corrupted it.