I understand your points, Manfred. Yes, competition is a good thing because it helps drive innovation and improvement. And, yes, you do tend to have more of it under a free enterprise system...

But...you can definitely have very real competition in a socialist system too....for example: before, during, and after WWII the Soviet government, like other governments, would submit a request to several different independent socialist design bureaus to present prototypes for a new fighter or bomber aircraft. The aircraft would have to meet certain new requirements in speed, armament, cost, etc.   Those bureaus were identified as Mig (Mikoyan & Gurevitch), Yak (Alexander Yakovlev), Lagg (Lavochkin, Godunov, etc), Polikarpov, etc. They all DID compete vigorously against each other to produce the best design...and the politburo then selected the winner after flight tests were done and the prototype planes were evaluated. The prize to the winner was that his design got mass produced and he reaped the political, financial, and other numerous rewards of his plane and his bureau winning the contract.

This was quite similar to what happened in the capitalist countries such as the USA or Germamy or the UK, although the design bureaus in those countries of course belonged to entirely private companies (Boeing, Messerschmitt, Avro, Focke-Wulf, Arado, Short, Supermarine, Junkers, Dornier, Consolidated, Grumman, etc.). The end result was the same. The best airplane design won....usually. (On some fairly rare occasions the best design might not win because its company had more political or financial pull with the government!!!) ;-)

What you say about the doctors...I tend to agree with you...but I wanted to go a little easy on them, because I've known some doctors in my life who genuinely did their very best to help people in the right way. I've known others who I would say were mainly in it just for the money.

I think I agree that the bankers are worse overall than the drug companies. They are parasites on society, whereas the drug companies at least partially do supply something that is really needed.

Did you know that the American Federal Reserve...which sounds like it is part of the government...is really a huge privately owned banking system? And that it is in control of the American dollar? The American government is financially at the mercy of a gigantic privately owned corporation called "the Federal Reserve". Who does the Federal Reserve work for? Themselves! Not the public. Themselves. They are in it to make profits for themselves.