As you would imagine I disagree with your economics. I do agree though that government investment absolutely has provided a foundation to a lot of the great technologies we have today, that's unquestionable. The question is whether those technologies (and others on top) would have been made had that money remained in the hands of business and entrepreneurs, rather than been stolen by government in the form of taxation. My view is they would have.
In terms of the deaths in hospitals you're acting like this isn't happening anyway in awful NHS hospitals around the country. Likewise deaths that needlessly occur on our dreadful
road system every day.
I agree by the way that laws against monopolisation should be regulated more vociferously, however creating public sector monopolies is counterproductive to that.
The market we mustn't forget is merely a reflection of individuals. If consumers demand green products, they will get them. If they prioritise cheaper goods instead then they will get these. My faith is in individuals, not in business (business merely reflects those individuals).
The economics in my post weren't "mine". Econ 101 was a compuslory college course, and this is what I remember from it. Inelastic goods, the conditions for perfect competition, etc are all concepts not from Marx but from mainstream marginal economics. I used soe basic concepts from there to show what (successful) market competition means. If I wanted to be ideological, I would point out that a series of privatisations of basic services in the UK have resulted in a lack of competition, rising prices, and often worse serivice.
The excess death in the current NHS could very probably be solved by higher expenditure, to bring UK spending in line with more privatised systems like Switzerland or France:
(y-axis = percent GDP expenditure on healthcare; x-axis = percent of govt expenditure in total healthcare spending).
On your statement about monopolies - you don't seem to have read Econ 101 itself. Firstly the natural formation of monopolies (for example in the late 19th and early 20th century oil industry) shows that despite open competition (including the building of private railways) and the utter lack of government regulation, the market can tend towards larger size, less choice, super-profits etc. Secondly you seem to implicitly be saying, ignoring every point in my previous post, that competition, specifically market competition, is a cure-all and monopolies are
necessarily bad. As a counterexample, you have the remarkable rapid gains in human health outcomes seen by monopolies as varied as the Soviet system, the Cuban system, and the NHS. None of these were subject to market competition, and they were at times greatly underfunded compared to others, yet produced better results. The same can be said for some transport companies like the publicly-owned trains in France. Again, no comeptition, great outcomes.
This doesn't mean the converse is necessarily true. But the trite, just-so, story about markets and competition and optimisation has a ton of caveats, holes, and failures too.
that's exactly what you said when trying to argue the other way that it wouldn't make a difference.
