Shade is a value the magnolia and elm produce. If they added no value it means your not getting anything useful out of them.
The normal formal definition essentially amounts to making a profit. If you sell what you produce for more than it costs you to produce, you have added value. I consider that a bit too narrow, it doesn't cover non-profits, who also create value, but it does show that there is no requirement that you produce more value than a competitor or alternative in order to show that value has been added.
"In economics, the difference between the sale price and the production cost of a product is the value added per unit. Summing value added per unit over all units sold is total value added. Total value added is equivalent to Revenue less Outside Purchases (of materials and services)."
en.wikipedia.org
Any monopoly that provides a necessary service like a utility will necessarily end up protected by the government.
Hardly necessary. An argument might be made about natural monopolies needing to be regulated by the government (which begs the question if they are really natural monopolies, but that's a whole different discussion so I'll assume electric and water utilities are for the sake of argument), but even if you buy that it doesn't mean they have to be protected (in fact if they are truly natural monopolies there should be no need to protect them). In any case hospitals are not natural monopolies, and "facilities that provide medical services" are even further from being such a monopoly.
It is already the case in some places. And don't say that people can just move elsewhere...
So your talking local monopolies, not taking over the nations health care (or just the hospital side of it).
If they are local monopolies its often because they got their first. The "value added" (even by your unusual definition) is that they provided hospital care where it didn't exist before. And if they were able to maintain the monopoly it implies they provided tolerable care. You can maintain a local monopoly by providing what consumers want. If you don't provide part of what they want typically someone else will. Even if the someone else doesn't take over all of the business, they take over what you won't provide. For example in another context Walmart not providing records, then later CDs with explicit lyrics was condemned as restricting choice, but in the pre-internet days you had more record stores, and now you have Amazon and other sources. Anyone who wants the explicit lyrics can get them.
In the case of the hospitals what they don't provide someone else will, if the government doesn't try to stop it (and often even if the government does, witness all the sales of illegal narcotics). |
