[SNOWBALL]

Please don't respond to this thread if you want to talk about why central planning is bad. This isn't about that at all.

Anyway, here goes.

I go to 3 different martial arts schools. Judo charges $20 per month for three 2 hour lessons per week. Jeet Kune Do charges $40 per month for one 2 hour class per week. The Third I'll call Jun Fan, and it charges $120 per month for two 90 minute classes per week.

Judo is nonprofit. It's run as a club/sports organization. I think I would rank Judo as the best training that I currently engage in. The class is VERY VERY hard. I frequently get injured. I often get thrown hard or submitted on the ground. Most people would hate to be in this class unless they were in reasonable shape.

The advantages of the judo class are that everything you learn is extremely practical, and you learn it in a way that teaches you how to apply it in a violent encounter against a strong, and capable fighter.
We spare for about an hour total every class. The other hour is warmup/instruction in techniques. There;s no such thing as having a false sense of self-confidence in Judo. You spar every class, including your first day, and there's almost always someone much better than you.


The 2nd best class I go to is the Jeet Kune Do class. I might rank it first, except it only meets once a week, and we don't do as much sparring. We learn very few techniques in this class. Everything is refinement, and it's refinement through hard work. All of the drills we do are very alive. You will sometimes get hit in the drills, because they are done at a high speed, and the attitude in the class is that getting hit is the price you pay for screwing up and it's the only way to learn. We spare for about 15 minutes at the end of class.
Everything is allowed in the sparring. We wear boxing gloves, and shin guards, and groin protectors, and use mouthguards, and we don't go full power out of courtesy, but we still go full speed and you still get hurt.

The third best class is the Jun Fan class. We learn new, and somewhat complicated techniques almost every class. There is zero sparring for many students, even those who have been there for 18 months or more. The drills are done in a slow manner, and your partner is there to basically assist you in completing your technique, instead of acting as a resistant opponent.

What's happening in the case of this third school is that the seller is able to give the consumer something that appears to be what the consumer wants, and he is able to do this for a long period of time without the student having the ability to tell the difference. Students come to learn how to defend themselves effectively, but instead they end up learning fantasy roleplaying techniques.

Most markets in capitalism seem to function in a very different way than this, because:

1. The consumer can tell beforehand if the product sucks

and at the very least

2. After the initial transaction ("small buy") the consumer can decide to continue to make that purchase, based on whether it satisfied a need or not.

In the case of nonprofit martial arts schools, like my Judo school, they really don't care very much if you join or not, and they're not there to make you feel good about yourself. They are there to teach you how to compete effectively so that you can do well in tournaments, and so you can continue the tradition of the school and help to teach other students later on.

conclusion: sometimes the profit motive sucks.

Ok, sorry if you think I'm being captain obvious here, but I mainly made this post in he hopes that some of you would share some other examples of when non-profit organizations might outperform for-profit organizations.

One I was thinking about, but I'm not sure about, is the practice of psychology.