Slashdot Mirror
Why Can't Industry Design an Affordable Hearing Aid?
Hugh Pickens writes "Tricia Romano writes in the NY Times that over the last 10 years, purchasing a hearing aid had become even more difficult and confusing than buying a new car — and almost as expensive. 'I visited Hearx, the national chain where I had bought my previous aids. There, a fastidious young man spread out a brochure for my preferred brand, Siemens, and showed me three models. The cheapest, a Siemens Motion 300, started at $1,600. The top-of-the-line model was more than $2,000 — for one ear. I gasped.' A hearing aid is basically just a microphone and amplifier in your ear so it isn't clear why it costs thousands of dollars while other electronic equipment like cellphones, computers and televisions have gotten cheaper. Russ Apfel, an engineer who designed a technology now found in all hearing aids, says there is no good reason for the high prices. 'The hearing aid industry uses every new thing, like digital or a new algorithm, to raise prices,' says Apfel. 'The semiconductor industry traditionally reduces the cost of products by 10 to 15 percent a year,' he said, but 'hearing aids go up 8 percent a year annually' and have for the last 20 years."
Terrorists hate countries with strong governments, and they hate countries with no government (because the Americans can fry them with Hellfire.) They go for countries with _weak_ governments -- enough to keep the Americans out, not enough to send them to hell.
Capitalists love weak governments for the same reason: strong enough to protect property rights, weak enough that they can run trusts, set up monopolies and suck the blood of the people like the bloated tick parasites they they are. Crony capitalism, as practiced in places like the US and China isn't real capitalism: it's feudalism. Real capitalism, and healthy functioning markets depends on a strong state with a strong hand to step in to level the playing field and stamp out abuses.
This is what 'small' (read: weak) government gets you: a dystopian crony capitalist hell, where entrenched monopolistic parasites are free to corrupt the political system and distort the markets.