Except you aren't spending somebody else's money for somebody else. You're spending your country's money for your country.
This is an important point, because Friedman's argument actually applies more to private enterprise than it does to government. It's called "agency costs". Inside the rational-by-definition black box of a corporate enterprise are people who are spending the stockholders' money for the stockholders' benefit. Arguably the corporate drone has less self interest in doing a good job than his public sector counterpart.
Of course you watch your drones very carefully so they don't put their hands in the till (at least the low paid ones). And you use your management by objectives methodologies to relate drone performance to the bottom line. But all of these things should work just as well in the public sector, and on top of that the public sector employee is working for himself in a way that most private sector employees without a stock ownership plan aren't.
The bottom line is that the model of human behavior in Friedman's observation is absurdly simplistic. People are not very rational in the best case, especially not if "rational" is defined in economically measurable terms. We have these behavioral features that we needed to survive in our small family hunter gatherer group, emotions like loyalty, camaraderie, pride, and protectiveness. The very word "company" comes from the same etymological root as "companion"; it means "one who shares your bread." Workers behave toward their companies in ways that are on average far better for the company than the company has any reasonable basis to expect, apart from this: people tend to be more loyal than is strictly good for them.
The problem with the public sector is that you can't define or redefine the mission readily. Your duty as a public servant is to the public good. But that is far more complicated than selling widgets profitably. 9/11 illustrated this -- as did West Nile Virus and probably Swine Flu will also. If you're in the widget making business, and 9/11 strikes, it becomes a problem of containing the impact of 9/11 on widget production. It would be much the same in the public sector, except that the people at the top -- the political level -- has been caught with their pants down. They have to prove to their bosses (us) that they're serious about doing something about the Red Terror/Missile Gap/whatever, but since they don't do anything but pass laws and budgets, they pass quick fix laws and spend money in huge quantities. Nobody could humanly know how what to do about something big and unexpected right away, so the *amount* of money becomes the measure of success, not outcomes.
But this is entirely at the political level, mind you. Since we vote for these people when they do these things, one would have to conclude that that is what we really *want*. If we don't believe effective steps can be taken, then we apparently settle for being reassured, and apparently nothing reassures us like having lots of money spent very, very fast.
The bill is innocuous but it *might* be the start of a slippery slope? OK, what *couldn't* possibly be the start of a slippery slope? If we are going to oppose legislation because of what it *might have* said (but doesn't), then even good, useful and sensible legislation will never get passed.
If you're really worried about what *might* be put into legislation, you ought to look at the process of amending non-controversial bills. That's where the nasty work gets done. If you are worried about *this* bill, you could actually read it and figure out what it means. If it says what you seem to think it might say, it's *not* too much trouble.
It's "scary to think what can happen from administration to administration with no more than a decree from one man," but the actual answer to that is *nothing*. It takes a lot of people going along with the President to give him the kind of power you seem to think he has. Congress can pass laws saying that the President can pull the plug on anyone any time for any reason he likes until it is blue in the face, and it's not going to happen. The law has to be narrowly drafted to serve a specific purpose, otherwise it will get squashed by the Supreme Court. Even the current SC wouldn't let a *Republican* administration get away with that. They didn't give Bush what he wanted on Guantanamo, why would they give Obama the right to shut up anybody he pleases?
Furthermore, if the President tries to exceed his legal limitations, he can't do it by himself. He needs his administration to implement his illegal schemes. But if that's your concern, worrying about defeating legislation is pointless. For the nightmare scenario to work, you've got to already have a President who is bent on breaking the law, and has full cooperation of his administration. Legislation is not going to stop such a president, you've go to stop him from being elected. Even if you elect a president whose highest priority in appointments is loyalty, he won't get absolute, unquestioning loyalty. Even George W. Bush didn't get that from his appointees. Ashcroft, of all people, defied the president's wishes on his sick bed. The had to fire Paul O'Neill at Treasury because he wouldn't toe the line.
The article is total alarmist BS. Now that it has successfully planted the seeds of fear in your mind, you're worrying about monsters under the bed. There may be monsters, but that's not where they'll be.
You won't keep the administration in line ruminating over fantasy scenarios like this. You've got to watch what it actually does. There are legitimate conservative issues about the cost of health care reform, but once people figure out the whole "death panel" business is phony (as they seem to be doing), then the president will be well positioned to sweep away any more reasoned conservative objections to his proposals. That's bad for the country. The nation needs intelligent, reasonable and substantive conservative voices on issues like health care reform, cyber-security and civil liberties. Not hysteria.
Sure, but you are using emotionally loaded, hyperbolic terms.
If slavery is always morally wrong, and taxation is slavery, then anything the government does that requires taxation is morally wrong.
As long as we're clear that in your lexicon coercion is a sufficient condition for "slavery", we can have -- or at least define the limits of -- a rational discussion. We know that national defense, the coast guard, space exploration, public transit, medical research, and grants to artists we don't like are all slavery according to *your* definition, then we have to shift the terms of our discussion as to whether any of these forms of what you call "slavery" are morally justifiable.
Since Microsoft hired the Rolling Stones to play "Start Me Up" at the Windows 95 launch. After that, Red Hat could hire Natalie Portman to cliff dive 30m into a vat of hot grits, and that would count as "restrained".
The management probably felt offended by the image against their favorite man, yanked it off the site, and then made-up a story about a DMCA notice that doesn't exist.
OK. So do you have any evidence of this? If not, why should we lend this statement any credence: "The most likely answer is that Flickr, like television media, is left-leaning."? If you are allowed to create evidence out of your preconceptions, you can argue that most television media are satanist.
I am a bona-fide leftist. I wasn't always. I used to be center-right in this country, but now I'm a leftist, without changing my political opinions very much. I don't think of myself as extreme left, or radical, but if the country shifts much more to the right I guess I will be. So I know a leftist news outlet when I see one, and I've never seen a left leaning news outlet that was mainstream. Alternative papers, web sites, sure. Television networks, no.
What I look at when I see the television news is the squishy complacency of a money making machine that doesn't want to rock the boat. As such it is repugnant to anybody, right or left, that wants to see change. It is a profoundly *conservative* medium -- not "right wing" but "conservative". It is too timid to tell people anything that contradicts their opinions. A "left leaning" medium wouldn't have rolled over for the Bush administration's Iraq invasion.
Oh, I've been researching racist website recently, and they're all about love of the White Race.
Racists aren't necessarily stupid, they just have broken thinking. They know that hate, while potent within its sphere, but going around feeling hate all the time has limited appeal and draws unwelcome attention. So they indoctrinate love of what they call the White Race, knowing that once people have bought into that abstraction they can produce unlimited quantities of hate on an as needed basis by saying that, for example, people from India are a threat to the Aryan race.
go with what you know works. In this case using your deep pockets to draw your opponents into a legal war of financial attrition.
This has already been tried in the only court that matters to a thinking person: the peer reviewed scientific literature. People who complain that scientists treat it like an established theory are right, because it is an established theory. The first papers on this were around 1960, and the fight was fought vigorously in the literature in the 1980s. The remaining uncertainties are of the sort that will always be uncertainties, because we don't have a control planet on which to conduct experiments. What is up for grabs are questions of degree: how much, how fast, which sources are more significant.
This is like patent trolls trying to get their case into an East Texas court. The companies behind this can win in court because of attrition. But it's a scientifically meaningless victory.
Well, that's fine when it comes to computers. Mobile phones are different.
Phones are controlled by the carriers. They want to decide what you can do with them. If a phone has dial by voice and that's a service the carrier sells, the manufacturer takes it off. Why doesn't my phone support more bluetooth profiles? Because the carrier doesn't want it to. Why can't I put my own apps on a Windows Mobile Phone without a registry hack? Because the carrier wants you to buy apps from them. Why do we have so many incompatible mobile networks in the US? Because the carriers want it to be hard to switch.
Our mobile phone situation shows why net neutrality is important. We've seen the non-neutral utopia they've been selling, and it sucks. The iPhone is wonderful compared to other mobile phones largely because Apple is better at this than the carriers are. But that won't last forever.
Well, one way to think about this is to ask how *equal* access to anonymity is in a society.
To the degree that public officials can escape the consequences of their words and deeds, private individuals can reasonably demand the same privileges. A totally transparent society could work too, except it won't ever happen. Some people will be the first to lose their anonymity, others the last. And the last will have power over everyone else.
Re:What have they been doing until now?
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NASA May Outsource
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Er...
I think the problem isn't "doing all the work themselves", which they never did. They ran *programs* themselves. No, the problem is choosing programs that the country is willing to support realistically, not programs that recapture the glory days when the country was willing to support more.
Maybe this is the time to incubate private programs for things like launch capabilities, but if it does so it will be a remarkable case of altruism by the American people. Didn't we just have an article about high tech companies "detaching" from the US (e.g. moving know how out to cheaper countries). We'd be paying for somebody else to control access to space.
I'm not sure I agree with your iron ore to steel example.
If we import a million dollars of steel, we export a million dollars of wealth in the form of cash, and import a million dollars of wealth in the form of steel. So from a *wealth* perspective, the deal is a wash.
What is being shipped out of the country is the wealth generation activity. In its own way, shipping a million dollars per year of wealth generation capability out of the country is more disturbing than sending a million dollars of cash overseas.
If this is an opportunity cost scenario, then we're probably OK. But what we've seen is that a lot of the wealth generation we replaced our industrial and technological capabilities with were illusory.
And that $200K saved by not imposing tariffs goes right into the pocket of the guy whose $50K job was lost as a result, right?
We can all agree that the enclosure movement increased the economic productivity of Britain. On the other hand, people who had lived for generations off of their traditional rights on the common starved or were forced to move to the city and make their living any way they could -- crime and prostitution were often the best they could manage.
It could have been managed so that everyone won in the short term. But it wasn't. It was managed so that a small number of wealthy individuals got as much as possible out of the legislating the legal rights of laboring people away, even if it meant the people losing their rights got nothing. And from that moral stench we got ideologies like Communism.
Nations have a right to erect tariffs at their borders if they wish. It is true that the global system benefits from low tariffs, so it's a good thing (looking at *aggregate figures only*) to drop those tariffs. But if you don't want a resurgence of Communism and socialism, it would have been sensible to make this a win-win all around. Free trade plus universal health care coverage would have been a square deal. But instead the deal was: free trade, shred the safety net and shift the tax burden down the income scale.
And now the people who benefited from this (and their less educated followers) are complaining about "socialism". They don't even know what "socialism" is. They have no idea what "class warfare" is really like. But if they have their way they'll find out. It's what you get when you removed "enlightened" from "self-interest".
The "welfare state" didn't come about because FDR was a socialist. It came about because he was a wealthy capitalist but one who could see the writing on the wall. It was a hair of the dog that was going to bite.
The reasons bankruptcy can making a profit can co-exist is that profit is about increasing net worth, bankruptcy is about having enough cash and credit on hand to pay the bills coming due soon.
Imagine somebody who has a job bringing in $50K/year and owns a house worth $250K at the start of the year. It is during the expansion phase of the housing bubble. He loses his job at the start of the year, and starts burning his savings to make ends meet. At the end of the year, his house is worth $350K, so he's had a $100K profit, but he no longer has any savings and if he can't mortgage or sell his house, he's bankrupt despite making a profit.
On the other hand, suppose we're at the peak of the housing bubble, and he keeps his job. At the end of the year, his house is worth $150K. He's brought in $50K in wages, so he's had a net loss for the year of $50K. But he can still pay his bills so he is not bankrupt.
Most of the money in the economy is credit secured on accumulated assets. That's why wiring bubble inflated housing assets into so many investment instruments was so damaging. When the bubble collapsed, it wasn't just homeowners who were affected; banks literally didn't know how much money they had. And since businesses relied on credit from those banks to tap the value in their fixed assets, businesses began to suffocate for want of cash.
Some figures put the obesity related excess costs at around 147 billion. That's a lot of money, but we're still only talking 6% of our total health care expenditures. It doesn't explain why we spend multiple times what other countries spend to get worse outcomes.
And you think poverty has nothing to do with obesity?
We've got a system which makes certain things really, really cheap, like consumer electronics and empty calories. We have an economy that no longer has much use for heavy manual labor, particularly if it is not skilled. But let's set that aside.
But let's imagine a world where poor people are smart and wise and virtuous, but had no access to health care. Do you think they'd live as long as wealthier people who *did* have access to health care? Don't you think that would affect their ability to better themselves?
There were lots of problems with the old mental health institutions to be sure. Some well intentioned people thought we could do a better job de-institutionalizing a lot of people, and they were right. You could also do a *cheaper* job. What you couldn't do was a better *and* cheaper job.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Concentrated in an institution, you can't ignore people too long before somebody holds you up to shame. Dispersed onto the street, these people become everybody's problem, and nobody's responsibility. It goes from being a public shame to a fact of life nobody can do anything about.
Maybe things are better this way. They probably are for a lot of people who would have been institutionalized.
You're absolutely right. The thing is, it's *harder* to take care of yourself when you're poor, because *everything* is harder. Have you ever tried looking for a decent supermarket in a poor neighborhood? It costs poor people more to buy food, not only because the competition for their dollars is less, they don't have the cash to buy in quantity. Life's tough when you're poor, and it's a lot harder just to get by without people telling you to do things that are *easy* for them because they've got money and people vying to get a hold of it.
But you're absolutely right, the poor *ought* to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It doesn't matter that it's harder for them to do things they ought to do than it would be for us. They *still* ought to do them.
But should they wait until they've pulled themselves up into the middle class to see a doctor?
This seems to me to be a case for enlightened self-interest for the non-poor. We already pay for the most expensive, ineffective health care imaginable for these people. It doesn't cost $8000 for a one hour emergency room treatment, that's the cost of the uninsured who have no place else to go amortized over *your* bill. That's not to mention the time you spent to be triaged because of people who ought never have been there in the first place.
Oh, and don't forget how risky living in the same city as a huge unhealthy population is to *your* health.
If you want the poor to be productive contributors to society, they're going to have to keep themselves healthy. Yes, there are lots of decisions many of them should make better, but for the uninsured you can't blame them for being less healthy until they're able to see a doctor. Hell, most of *us* wait until our doctor shows us our tests and reads us the riot act before we really get serious about our blood chemistry.
When poor people have their own primary care physicians, by all means talk about the fecklessness of the poor in a health care debate. But it's really a bit.. I'd say "insensitive" but that's not strong enough, to call them irresponsible with their health when they don't have a doctor, don't get prenatal care, and don't get basic pediatric screening for their kids.
Granted. But it's also true that if you're sick you're more likely to die if you don't have access to a doctor except if you can get triaged past the insurance check at the emergency room.
Homicides rates are higher among the poor -- particularly drug related murder, and the murder of a teenager in a drug incident has a disproportionate affect on life expectancy. That said, the rate of death by homicide is *tiny* in relation to other causes of death.
For some reason economic based breakdowns of things like accidents are hard to find. Race and ethnicity based data is easier. Blacks don't die from accidents a higher rate than whites -- in fact the rates are nearly identical. Race isn't a very good stand-in for income, but since blacks are generally less prosperous, we'd expect the rates to be higher. Rates for accidents *are* higher for Latinos, but that may reflect the large number of Latinos that are employed in agriculture, which is dangerous. Latinos are on average less prosperous than the rest of the US.
So accidents and violence probably *do* contribute to the discrepancy, but not hugely.
But if you really want to go where the rubber hits the life-expectancy road, look at infant mortality. A recent study (doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2004.040287) found a very significant correlation between low income and infant mortality in New York (p 0.0005), but *no* correlation in Tokyo or Paris and a barely significant correlation in London (p 0.05).
It's not really all that mysterious. People who don't have access to health care are more likely to die, and in the US that's more likely to be a poor, uninsured person. You don't need to imagine all kinds of mysterious reasons for the discrepancy. There *are* of course other factors that contribute, but that isn't necessarily a cause for celebration.
Of *course* they want health care reform, so long as it doesn't have a public option. Any reasonable definition of health care reform means getting insurance for *millions* of uninsured people, so they'll start using cost effective primary care rather than going to the emergency room to and using up the absurdly expensive care of last resort. So naturally that means that without a public option, the insurance companies will be absorbing huge numbers of new customers, either paid for on the public dime or by some kind of employer mandate.
As for the crisis, I don't *blame* the industry. They're doing what they were made to do: maximize shareholder profits. I blame the politicians they've bought.
Single payer isn't some strange, exotic, radical idea. It's normal in most of the world. Yes, they have what they think of as horrible cost containment problems, but they're all paying a tiny fraction of what we do, and getting better results on most objectively measurable outcomes. So it is single payer that is the "conservative" (in the Burkean sense of favoring proven solutions) approach to getting the most health care for the buck. Provided, of course, you think that's important. It's perfectly consistent to say that the public has no interest in the health of private individuals (although this is not true in an economic sense, so perhaps we should say "morally legitimate interest"). In that case we should outlaw treating uninsured patients, because it drives up the costs for those who can pay.
The problem with single payer isn't that it is an exotic, unproven idea, the problem is that nobody knows how to switch from the kind of system we have today in the US to a system like they have in (to pick a non-controversial example) France. If we passed single payer today, how long would it take to get the system up? A year? Two years? In the meantime private insurers, who are obligated to take care of their shareholders, would fold up as quickly as they could so they can distribute the remaining value in the companies to their stockholders. It'd be their duty to do so.
Furthermore, the idea of the public option as a Trojan Horse for single payer doesn't work either. It'll be apparent that private insurance is doomed well before we stop needing it, and you can cue the same disaster, albeit on a smaller scale.
So why have a public option at all? I don't see any moral imperative to stick it to the insurance companies. If we could have health care reform which gets people covered and controls the crippling growth of health care costs as a percent of GDP, I'd be happy. The problem I see with this is the power of companies with lots of cash (as insurance companies do) to twist legislation and regulation to their benefit. It is (a) perfectly legal for them to do this and (b) therefore the fiduciary duty of management to their stockholders to change the rules so that the "reformed" rules steer public dollars into their pockets. That's true to a lesser degree with the public option, but it's a safety net. If you're mad at your insurance company, you're stuck. If you're mad at your public insurance program, you can vote the people in charge out.
It is not a *logical* necessity to have a public option. The rules *could* be written to get the job done entirely with private insurance. They just won't be. Likewise there's no guarantee that the insurance industry won't use its political buying power cripple the public program. If they do, it won'[t be because the insurance companies are evil, corporations are just *machines*, albeit legalistic ones. It'll be because the politicians are evil and their constituents, lazy.
Single payer won't happen if any kind of viable health reform is passed, because it would be too disruptive to change over. However, if single payer is the ONLY system that will satisfy you, your best option is to work against any effective health care reform. When health care spending gets high enough, the current system will stop working and there won't be any practical obstacle to sweeping the insurance companies away. Maybe it'll be when we hit the 20% of GDP mark, which will be soon. Maybe 25%. But at some point, something will break.
Unfortunately, these things bear repeating. The problem is that the Big Lie still works even if you say it with a smirk on your face. I'm not talking about aquatone282 here, who's just making a wisecrack, but propagandists like to fall back on the "joke" excuse too often after they've been caught lying.
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Except you aren't spending somebody else's money for somebody else. You're spending your country's money for your country.
This is an important point, because Friedman's argument actually applies more to private enterprise than it does to government. It's called "agency costs". Inside the rational-by-definition black box of a corporate enterprise are people who are spending the stockholders' money for the stockholders' benefit. Arguably the corporate drone has less self interest in doing a good job than his public sector counterpart.
Of course you watch your drones very carefully so they don't put their hands in the till (at least the low paid ones). And you use your management by objectives methodologies to relate drone performance to the bottom line. But all of these things should work just as well in the public sector, and on top of that the public sector employee is working for himself in a way that most private sector employees without a stock ownership plan aren't.
The bottom line is that the model of human behavior in Friedman's observation is absurdly simplistic. People are not very rational in the best case, especially not if "rational" is defined in economically measurable terms. We have these behavioral features that we needed to survive in our small family hunter gatherer group, emotions like loyalty, camaraderie, pride, and protectiveness. The very word "company" comes from the same etymological root as "companion"; it means "one who shares your bread." Workers behave toward their companies in ways that are on average far better for the company than the company has any reasonable basis to expect, apart from this: people tend to be more loyal than is strictly good for them.
The problem with the public sector is that you can't define or redefine the mission readily. Your duty as a public servant is to the public good. But that is far more complicated than selling widgets profitably. 9/11 illustrated this -- as did West Nile Virus and probably Swine Flu will also. If you're in the widget making business, and 9/11 strikes, it becomes a problem of containing the impact of 9/11 on widget production. It would be much the same in the public sector, except that the people at the top -- the political level -- has been caught with their pants down. They have to prove to their bosses (us) that they're serious about doing something about the Red Terror/Missile Gap/whatever, but since they don't do anything but pass laws and budgets, they pass quick fix laws and spend money in huge quantities. Nobody could humanly know how what to do about something big and unexpected right away, so the *amount* of money becomes the measure of success, not outcomes.
But this is entirely at the political level, mind you. Since we vote for these people when they do these things, one would have to conclude that that is what we really *want*. If we don't believe effective steps can be taken, then we apparently settle for being reassured, and apparently nothing reassures us like having lots of money spent very, very fast.
The bill is innocuous but it *might* be the start of a slippery slope? OK, what *couldn't* possibly be the start of a slippery slope? If we are going to oppose legislation because of what it *might have* said (but doesn't), then even good, useful and sensible legislation will never get passed.
If you're really worried about what *might* be put into legislation, you ought to look at the process of amending non-controversial bills. That's where the nasty work gets done. If you are worried about *this* bill, you could actually read it and figure out what it means. If it says what you seem to think it might say, it's *not* too much trouble.
It's "scary to think what can happen from administration to administration with no more than a decree from one man," but the actual answer to that is *nothing*. It takes a lot of people going along with the President to give him the kind of power you seem to think he has. Congress can pass laws saying that the President can pull the plug on anyone any time for any reason he likes until it is blue in the face, and it's not going to happen. The law has to be narrowly drafted to serve a specific purpose, otherwise it will get squashed by the Supreme Court. Even the current SC wouldn't let a *Republican* administration get away with that. They didn't give Bush what he wanted on Guantanamo, why would they give Obama the right to shut up anybody he pleases?
Furthermore, if the President tries to exceed his legal limitations, he can't do it by himself. He needs his administration to implement his illegal schemes. But if that's your concern, worrying about defeating legislation is pointless. For the nightmare scenario to work, you've got to already have a President who is bent on breaking the law, and has full cooperation of his administration. Legislation is not going to stop such a president, you've go to stop him from being elected. Even if you elect a president whose highest priority in appointments is loyalty, he won't get absolute, unquestioning loyalty. Even George W. Bush didn't get that from his appointees. Ashcroft, of all people, defied the president's wishes on his sick bed. The had to fire Paul O'Neill at Treasury because he wouldn't toe the line.
The article is total alarmist BS. Now that it has successfully planted the seeds of fear in your mind, you're worrying about monsters under the bed. There may be monsters, but that's not where they'll be.
You won't keep the administration in line ruminating over fantasy scenarios like this. You've got to watch what it actually does. There are legitimate conservative issues about the cost of health care reform, but once people figure out the whole "death panel" business is phony (as they seem to be doing), then the president will be well positioned to sweep away any more reasoned conservative objections to his proposals. That's bad for the country. The nation needs intelligent, reasonable and substantive conservative voices on issues like health care reform, cyber-security and civil liberties. Not hysteria.
Sure, but you are using emotionally loaded, hyperbolic terms.
If slavery is always morally wrong, and taxation is slavery, then anything the government does that requires taxation is morally wrong.
As long as we're clear that in your lexicon coercion is a sufficient condition for "slavery", we can have -- or at least define the limits of -- a rational discussion. We know that national defense, the coast guard, space exploration, public transit, medical research, and grants to artists we don't like are all slavery according to *your* definition, then we have to shift the terms of our discussion as to whether any of these forms of what you call "slavery" are morally justifiable.
Since Microsoft hired the Rolling Stones to play "Start Me Up" at the Windows 95 launch. After that, Red Hat could hire Natalie Portman to cliff dive 30m into a vat of hot grits, and that would count as "restrained".
OK. So do you have any evidence of this? If not, why should we lend this statement any credence: "The most likely answer is that Flickr, like television media, is left-leaning."? If you are allowed to create evidence out of your preconceptions, you can argue that most television media are satanist.
I am a bona-fide leftist. I wasn't always. I used to be center-right in this country, but now I'm a leftist, without changing my political opinions very much. I don't think of myself as extreme left, or radical, but if the country shifts much more to the right I guess I will be. So I know a leftist news outlet when I see one, and I've never seen a left leaning news outlet that was mainstream. Alternative papers, web sites, sure. Television networks, no.
What I look at when I see the television news is the squishy complacency of a money making machine that doesn't want to rock the boat. As such it is repugnant to anybody, right or left, that wants to see change. It is a profoundly *conservative* medium -- not "right wing" but "conservative". It is too timid to tell people anything that contradicts their opinions. A "left leaning" medium wouldn't have rolled over for the Bush administration's Iraq invasion.
Oh, I've been researching racist website recently, and they're all about love of the White Race.
Racists aren't necessarily stupid, they just have broken thinking. They know that hate, while potent within its sphere, but going around feeling hate all the time has limited appeal and draws unwelcome attention. So they indoctrinate love of what they call the White Race, knowing that once people have bought into that abstraction they can produce unlimited quantities of hate on an as needed basis by saying that, for example, people from India are a threat to the Aryan race.
That's a good point. If you want to see the kind of Internet the industry wants, look at the US mobile phone market.
go with what you know works. In this case using your deep pockets to draw your opponents into a legal war of financial attrition.
This has already been tried in the only court that matters to a thinking person: the peer reviewed scientific literature. People who complain that scientists treat it like an established theory are right, because it is an established theory. The first papers on this were around 1960, and the fight was fought vigorously in the literature in the 1980s. The remaining uncertainties are of the sort that will always be uncertainties, because we don't have a control planet on which to conduct experiments. What is up for grabs are questions of degree: how much, how fast, which sources are more significant.
This is like patent trolls trying to get their case into an East Texas court. The companies behind this can win in court because of attrition. But it's a scientifically meaningless victory.
Well, that's fine when it comes to computers. Mobile phones are different.
Phones are controlled by the carriers. They want to decide what you can do with them. If a phone has dial by voice and that's a service the carrier sells, the manufacturer takes it off. Why doesn't my phone support more bluetooth profiles? Because the carrier doesn't want it to. Why can't I put my own apps on a Windows Mobile Phone without a registry hack? Because the carrier wants you to buy apps from them. Why do we have so many incompatible mobile networks in the US? Because the carriers want it to be hard to switch.
Our mobile phone situation shows why net neutrality is important. We've seen the non-neutral utopia they've been selling, and it sucks. The iPhone is wonderful compared to other mobile phones largely because Apple is better at this than the carriers are. But that won't last forever.
Well, one way to think about this is to ask how *equal* access to anonymity is in a society.
To the degree that public officials can escape the consequences of their words and deeds, private individuals can reasonably demand the same privileges. A totally transparent society could work too, except it won't ever happen. Some people will be the first to lose their anonymity, others the last. And the last will have power over everyone else.
Er...
I think the problem isn't "doing all the work themselves", which they never did. They ran *programs* themselves. No, the problem is choosing programs that the country is willing to support realistically, not programs that recapture the glory days when the country was willing to support more.
Maybe this is the time to incubate private programs for things like launch capabilities, but if it does so it will be a remarkable case of altruism by the American people. Didn't we just have an article about high tech companies "detaching" from the US (e.g. moving know how out to cheaper countries). We'd be paying for somebody else to control access to space.
I'm not sure I agree with your iron ore to steel example.
If we import a million dollars of steel, we export a million dollars of wealth in the form of cash, and import a million dollars of wealth in the form of steel. So from a *wealth* perspective, the deal is a wash.
What is being shipped out of the country is the wealth generation activity. In its own way, shipping a million dollars per year of wealth generation capability out of the country is more disturbing than sending a million dollars of cash overseas.
If this is an opportunity cost scenario, then we're probably OK. But what we've seen is that a lot of the wealth generation we replaced our industrial and technological capabilities with were illusory.
And that $200K saved by not imposing tariffs goes right into the pocket of the guy whose $50K job was lost as a result, right?
We can all agree that the enclosure movement increased the economic productivity of Britain. On the other hand, people who had lived for generations off of their traditional rights on the common starved or were forced to move to the city and make their living any way they could -- crime and prostitution were often the best they could manage.
It could have been managed so that everyone won in the short term. But it wasn't. It was managed so that a small number of wealthy individuals got as much as possible out of the legislating the legal rights of laboring people away, even if it meant the people losing their rights got nothing. And from that moral stench we got ideologies like Communism.
Nations have a right to erect tariffs at their borders if they wish. It is true that the global system benefits from low tariffs, so it's a good thing (looking at *aggregate figures only*) to drop those tariffs. But if you don't want a resurgence of Communism and socialism, it would have been sensible to make this a win-win all around. Free trade plus universal health care coverage would have been a square deal. But instead the deal was: free trade, shred the safety net and shift the tax burden down the income scale.
And now the people who benefited from this (and their less educated followers) are complaining about "socialism". They don't even know what "socialism" is. They have no idea what "class warfare" is really like. But if they have their way they'll find out. It's what you get when you removed "enlightened" from "self-interest".
The "welfare state" didn't come about because FDR was a socialist. It came about because he was a wealthy capitalist but one who could see the writing on the wall. It was a hair of the dog that was going to bite.
The reasons bankruptcy can making a profit can co-exist is that profit is about increasing net worth, bankruptcy is about having enough cash and credit on hand to pay the bills coming due soon.
Imagine somebody who has a job bringing in $50K/year and owns a house worth $250K at the start of the year. It is during the expansion phase of the housing bubble. He loses his job at the start of the year, and starts burning his savings to make ends meet. At the end of the year, his house is worth $350K, so he's had a $100K profit, but he no longer has any savings and if he can't mortgage or sell his house, he's bankrupt despite making a profit.
On the other hand, suppose we're at the peak of the housing bubble, and he keeps his job. At the end of the year, his house is worth $150K. He's brought in $50K in wages, so he's had a net loss for the year of $50K. But he can still pay his bills so he is not bankrupt.
Most of the money in the economy is credit secured on accumulated assets. That's why wiring bubble inflated housing assets into so many investment instruments was so damaging. When the bubble collapsed, it wasn't just homeowners who were affected; banks literally didn't know how much money they had. And since businesses relied on credit from those banks to tap the value in their fixed assets, businesses began to suffocate for want of cash.
It's not like we don't have figures for this.
Some figures put the obesity related excess costs at around 147 billion. That's a lot of money, but we're still only talking 6% of our total health care expenditures. It doesn't explain why we spend multiple times what other countries spend to get worse outcomes.
And you think poverty has nothing to do with obesity?
We've got a system which makes certain things really, really cheap, like consumer electronics and empty calories. We have an economy that no longer has much use for heavy manual labor, particularly if it is not skilled. But let's set that aside.
But let's imagine a world where poor people are smart and wise and virtuous, but had no access to health care. Do you think they'd live as long as wealthier people who *did* have access to health care? Don't you think that would affect their ability to better themselves?
There were lots of problems with the old mental health institutions to be sure. Some well intentioned people thought we could do a better job de-institutionalizing a lot of people, and they were right. You could also do a *cheaper* job. What you couldn't do was a better *and* cheaper job.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Concentrated in an institution, you can't ignore people too long before somebody holds you up to shame. Dispersed onto the street, these people become everybody's problem, and nobody's responsibility. It goes from being a public shame to a fact of life nobody can do anything about.
Maybe things are better this way. They probably are for a lot of people who would have been institutionalized.
You're absolutely right. The thing is, it's *harder* to take care of yourself when you're poor, because *everything* is harder. Have you ever tried looking for a decent supermarket in a poor neighborhood? It costs poor people more to buy food, not only because the competition for their dollars is less, they don't have the cash to buy in quantity. Life's tough when you're poor, and it's a lot harder just to get by without people telling you to do things that are *easy* for them because they've got money and people vying to get a hold of it.
But you're absolutely right, the poor *ought* to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It doesn't matter that it's harder for them to do things they ought to do than it would be for us. They *still* ought to do them.
But should they wait until they've pulled themselves up into the middle class to see a doctor?
This seems to me to be a case for enlightened self-interest for the non-poor. We already pay for the most expensive, ineffective health care imaginable for these people. It doesn't cost $8000 for a one hour emergency room treatment, that's the cost of the uninsured who have no place else to go amortized over *your* bill. That's not to mention the time you spent to be triaged because of people who ought never have been there in the first place.
Oh, and don't forget how risky living in the same city as a huge unhealthy population is to *your* health.
If you want the poor to be productive contributors to society, they're going to have to keep themselves healthy. Yes, there are lots of decisions many of them should make better, but for the uninsured you can't blame them for being less healthy until they're able to see a doctor. Hell, most of *us* wait until our doctor shows us our tests and reads us the riot act before we really get serious about our blood chemistry.
When poor people have their own primary care physicians, by all means talk about the fecklessness of the poor in a health care debate. But it's really a bit.. I'd say "insensitive" but that's not strong enough, to call them irresponsible with their health when they don't have a doctor, don't get prenatal care, and don't get basic pediatric screening for their kids.
Granted. But it's also true that if you're sick you're more likely to die if you don't have access to a doctor except if you can get triaged past the insurance check at the emergency room.
Homicides rates are higher among the poor -- particularly drug related murder, and the murder of a teenager in a drug incident has a disproportionate affect on life expectancy. That said, the rate of death by homicide is *tiny* in relation to other causes of death.
For some reason economic based breakdowns of things like accidents are hard to find. Race and ethnicity based data is easier. Blacks don't die from accidents a higher rate than whites -- in fact the rates are nearly identical. Race isn't a very good stand-in for income, but since blacks are generally less prosperous, we'd expect the rates to be higher. Rates for accidents *are* higher for Latinos, but that may reflect the large number of Latinos that are employed in agriculture, which is dangerous. Latinos are on average less prosperous than the rest of the US.
So accidents and violence probably *do* contribute to the discrepancy, but not hugely.
But if you really want to go where the rubber hits the life-expectancy road, look at infant mortality. A recent study (doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2004.040287) found a very significant correlation between low income and infant mortality in New York (p 0.0005), but *no* correlation in Tokyo or Paris and a barely significant correlation in London (p 0.05).
It's not really all that mysterious. People who don't have access to health care are more likely to die, and in the US that's more likely to be a poor, uninsured person. You don't need to imagine all kinds of mysterious reasons for the discrepancy. There *are* of course other factors that contribute, but that isn't necessarily a cause for celebration.
Unfortunately I believe that was ad libbed by Harrison Ford.
Here's something I'd like to know: what exactly are the criteria used to decide some fatal event is not "health related"?
I Want My Country Back
So, which Indian tribe do you belong to?
Of *course* they want health care reform, so long as it doesn't have a public option. Any reasonable definition of health care reform means getting insurance for *millions* of uninsured people, so they'll start using cost effective primary care rather than going to the emergency room to and using up the absurdly expensive care of last resort. So naturally that means that without a public option, the insurance companies will be absorbing huge numbers of new customers, either paid for on the public dime or by some kind of employer mandate.
As for the crisis, I don't *blame* the industry. They're doing what they were made to do: maximize shareholder profits. I blame the politicians they've bought.
Single payer isn't some strange, exotic, radical idea. It's normal in most of the world. Yes, they have what they think of as horrible cost containment problems, but they're all paying a tiny fraction of what we do, and getting better results on most objectively measurable outcomes. So it is single payer that is the "conservative" (in the Burkean sense of favoring proven solutions) approach to getting the most health care for the buck. Provided, of course, you think that's important. It's perfectly consistent to say that the public has no interest in the health of private individuals (although this is not true in an economic sense, so perhaps we should say "morally legitimate interest"). In that case we should outlaw treating uninsured patients, because it drives up the costs for those who can pay.
The problem with single payer isn't that it is an exotic, unproven idea, the problem is that nobody knows how to switch from the kind of system we have today in the US to a system like they have in (to pick a non-controversial example) France. If we passed single payer today, how long would it take to get the system up? A year? Two years? In the meantime private insurers, who are obligated to take care of their shareholders, would fold up as quickly as they could so they can distribute the remaining value in the companies to their stockholders. It'd be their duty to do so.
Furthermore, the idea of the public option as a Trojan Horse for single payer doesn't work either. It'll be apparent that private insurance is doomed well before we stop needing it, and you can cue the same disaster, albeit on a smaller scale.
So why have a public option at all? I don't see any moral imperative to stick it to the insurance companies. If we could have health care reform which gets people covered and controls the crippling growth of health care costs as a percent of GDP, I'd be happy. The problem I see with this is the power of companies with lots of cash (as insurance companies do) to twist legislation and regulation to their benefit. It is (a) perfectly legal for them to do this and (b) therefore the fiduciary duty of management to their stockholders to change the rules so that the "reformed" rules steer public dollars into their pockets. That's true to a lesser degree with the public option, but it's a safety net. If you're mad at your insurance company, you're stuck. If you're mad at your public insurance program, you can vote the people in charge out.
It is not a *logical* necessity to have a public option. The rules *could* be written to get the job done entirely with private insurance. They just won't be. Likewise there's no guarantee that the insurance industry won't use its political buying power cripple the public program. If they do, it won'[t be because the insurance companies are evil, corporations are just *machines*, albeit legalistic ones. It'll be because the politicians are evil and their constituents, lazy.
Single payer won't happen if any kind of viable health reform is passed, because it would be too disruptive to change over. However, if single payer is the ONLY system that will satisfy you, your best option is to work against any effective health care reform. When health care spending gets high enough, the current system will stop working and there won't be any practical obstacle to sweeping the insurance companies away. Maybe it'll be when we hit the 20% of GDP mark, which will be soon. Maybe 25%. But at some point, something will break.
Unfortunately, these things bear repeating. The problem is that the Big Lie still works even if you say it with a smirk on your face. I'm not talking about aquatone282 here, who's just making a wisecrack, but propagandists like to fall back on the "joke" excuse too often after they've been caught lying.