Democracy is coming to the USA...

The Health Care debate is interesting to watch from the perspective of seeing so many interest groups collide against each other.

Radical Democrats rail against the Health Insurance companies, harnessing (justifiable) populist anger and channeling it into political support. Meanwhile Radical Republicans are violently opposing it, with murmurs of Hitler comparisons and violence bubbling up amongst their supporters.

Both of these positions aren't based on anything principled, merely attempts to harness populist anger into political support. My statement that these statements are not principled is that most of the Radical opposition is based on fanciful claims and that the Health Care reform that the Radical anti-health insurance industry Democrats supports is basically a bail-out for the insurance companies, excepting only the "Public option."

The Health insurance industry is enthusiastically for "health care reform", as long the public option is nixed. This extremely corporate friendly reform is billed by some as a blow against Big Business and by others as a Marxist take over. It is neither.

I think this article illustrates the true nature of Health care reform: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/healthcare/la-na-healthcare-insurers24-2009aug24,0,6925890.story

The Ghetto in our Hearts

(part 2)

As the Gilded Age winded down, the great business empires were continually frustrtated by their failure to achieve either monopoly or industry cartels. US Steel, Standard Oil and their ilk were enormously wealthy, but unceasing competition were starting to contract profits of these unwieldy behemoths. And they did what every good businessman in trouble does: ask the government for help. And although there was much dis-agreement between business leaders, regulators and the Presidents, the major continuity remained clear: to cartelize each industry to provide "stability". Competition is war, after all, and war is Hell.

A good example is Teddy Roosevelt's Pure Food and Drug Laws. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair had created a furor for clean food laws. No one seemed to notice that this wasn't the point of the novel, nor (as Sinclair points out in the novels) was the industry opposed to it. The Meat Trust couldn't sell their disgusting products in foregin markets, they had been entirely blocked, and The Jungle was giving them a ton of bad PR. So the Bull-Moose himself stepped in. With the new FDA seal of approval, foregin markets allowed American meat in again, and the public's disgust began to subside. Was there in any improvment in the quality of the meat? In some cases, marginal improvements, more often than not though the regulators worked at the discretion of the Meat Trust.

And so it goes. When Populist outrage (justifiably) grew against the "Money Trust", the handful of super banks running the economy, when recessions followed recession without sight in end, business people began writing proposals to "stabilize" the banking industry. Legislation first drafted by Chambers of Commerce would end up getting proposed in Congress. And that's where the Federal Reserve came from. And so it goes, again and again. The public is outraged, as they usually should be, but any attempt at "reform" is drafted and supervised by the very people who are being "reformed", conforming to very narrow lines of thought, and although concessions to the public are usually made, the winners are always the same.

The Ghetto in our Hearts

Discussions of the American economy are so rife with mis-charectorization and outright falsehoods, a person needs a sword to cut through all the cobwebs. Or, short of a sword, a book.

Two such books are The Triumph of Conservatism and Regulating the Poor. Both books deal with two areas of the American economy most commonly mis-understood: regulation and welfare.

Triumph of Conservatism by Gabriel Kolko is a revionist look at the "Progressive Era", the period at the tail end of the Gilded Age whereupon the modern regulatory apparatus was born. The book traces the Roosevelt administration and the two subsequent presidencies, Taft and Wilson.

The common myth of regulation has two sides, either the government is filled with naive do gooder liberals who attempt to fiddle with economy, to the detriment of everyone involved, out of either a misguided and quixotic quest for equality, a hatred for the wealthy, or perhaps a deep seated love of Karl Marx; or, the government is simply trying to mitigate the excesses of the market place. Both these views are completely false. They contain a fundamental mis-understanding, a beleif that Big Business and Big Government are opposed. A cursory understanding of history shows the relationship to not be one of either antagonism or even parasitism, but of a symbiosis. Big Business and Big Government feed off and support each other to rob cheat and steal from the rest of the country.

(end of part 1)