This is not the end of capitalism
By Mark Shuttleworth
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
Some of the comments on my last post on the economic unwinding of 2008 suggested that people think we are witnessing the end of capitalism and the beginning of a new socialist era.
I certainly hope not.
I think a world without regulated capitalism would be a bleak one indeed. I had the great privilege to spend a year living in Russia in 2001/2002, and the visible evidence of the destruction wrought by central planning was still very much present. We are all ultimately human, with human failings, whether we work for a state planning agency or a private company, and those failings have consequences either way. To think that moving all private enterprise into state hands will somehow create a panacea of efficiency and sustainability is to ignore the stark lessons of the 20th century.
The leaders and decision makers in a centrally-planned economy are just as fallible as those in a capitalist one - they would probably be the same people! But state enterprises lack the forces of evolution that apply in a capitalist economy - state enterprises are rarely if ever allowed to fail. And hence bad ideas are perpetuated indefinitely, and an economy becomes dysfunctional to the point of systemic collapse. It is the fact that private enterprises fail which keeps industries vibrant. The tension between the imperative to innovate and the consequences of failure drives capitalist economies to evolve quickly. Despite all of the nasty consequences that we have seen, and those we have yet to see, of capitalism gone wrong, I am still firmly of the view that society must tap into its capitalist strengths if it wants to move forward.
But I chose my words carefully when I said “regulated capitalism”. I used to be a fan of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and great admirer of Ayn Rand’s vision. Now, I feel differently. Left to it’s own devices, the market will tend to reinforce the position of those who were successful in the past, at the exclusion of those who might create future successes. We see evidence of this all the time. The heavyweights that define an industry tend to do everything in their power to prevent innovation from changing the rules that enrich them.
A classic example of that is the RIAA’s behaviour - in the name of “saving the music industry” they have spent the past ten years desperately trying to keep it in the analog era to save their members, with DRM and morally unjustifiable special-interest lobbying around copyright rules that affect the whole of society.
Similarly, patent rules tend to evolve to suit the companies that hold many patents, rather than the people who might generate the NEXT set of innovative ideas. Of course, the lobbying is dressed up in language that describes it as being “in the interests of innovation”, but at heart it is really aimed at preserving the privileged position of the incumbent.
In South Africa, the incumbent monopoly telco, which was a state enterprise until it was partially privatized in 1996, has systematically delayed, interfered, challenged and obstructed the natural process of deregulation and the creation of a healthy competitive sector. Private interests act in their own interest, by definition, so powerful private interests tend to drive the system in ways that make THEM healthier rather than ways that make society healthier.
Left to their own devices, private companies will tend to gobble one another up, and create monopolies. Those monopolies will then undermine every potential new entrant, using whatever tactics they can dream up, from FUD to lobbying to thuggery.
So, I’m a fan of regulated capitalism.
We need regulation to ensure that society’s broader needs, like environmental sustainability, are met while private companies pursue their profits. We also need regulation to ensure that those who manage national and international infrastructure, whether it’s railways or power stations or financial systems, don’t cook the books in a way that lets them declare fat profits and fatter bonuses while driving those systems into crisis.
But effective regulation is not the same as state management and supervision. I would much rather have private companies managing power stations competitively, than state agencies doing so as part of a complacent government monopoly.
Good regulation is very hard. Over the years I’ve interacted with a few different regulatory authorities, and I sympathise with the problems they encounter.
First, to be an effective regulator, you need superb talent. And for that you need to pay - talent follows the money and the lights, whether we like it or not, so to design a system on other assumptions is to design it for failure. My ideal regulator is an insightful genius working for the common good, but since I’m never likely to meet that person, a practical goal is to encourage regulators to be small but very well funded, with key salaries and performance measures that are just behind the industries they are supposed to regulate. Regulators must be able to be fired - no sense in offering someone a private sector salary and public sector accountability. Unfortunately, most regulators end up going the other way, hiring more and more people of average competence, that they become both expensive and ineffective.
Second, a great regulator needs to be independent. You’re the guy who tells people to stop doing what will hurt society; it’s very hard to do that to your friends. A regulatory job is a lonely job, which is why you hear so many stories of regulators being wined and dined by the industries they regulate only to make sure they don’t look too hard in the back room. A great regulator needs to know a lot about an industry, but be independent of that industry. Again, my ideal is someone who has made a good living in a sector, knows it backwards, can justify their high price, but wants to make a contribution to society.
Third, a great regulator needs to have teeth and muscle. It has been very frustrating for me to watch the South African telecomms regulator get tied up in court by Telkom, and stymied by government department inadequacy. Regulators need to be able to drive things forward, they need to be able to change the way companies behave, and they cannot rely on moral suasion to do so.
And fourth, a regulator has to make very tough decisions about innovation, which amount to venture capital decisions - to make them well, you have to be able to tell the future. For example, when an industry changes, as all industries change, how should the rules evolve? When a new need for society is identified, like the need to address climate change early and systemically, how should the rules evolve? Regulators need to move forward as fast as the industries they regulate, and they need to make decisions about things we don’t yet understand. And even when you regulate, you may not be able to stop an impending crisis. It’s very easy to criticize Greenspan for his light touch regulation on hedge funds and derivatives today, but it’s not at all clear to me that regulation would have made a difference, I think it would simply have moved the shadow global financial system offshore.
So regulation is extremely difficult, but also very much worth investing in if you are trying to run a healthy, vibrant, capitalist society.
Coming back to the original suggestion that sparked this blog - I’m sure we will see a lot of failed capitalists in the future. Hell, I might join their ranks, I wouldn’t be the first ;-). But that doesn’t spell the end of capitalism, only the opportunity to start again - smarter.
My Commentary:
Mike Zemack says: (permalink)
November 5th, 2008 at 2:49 am
Mr. Shuttleworth’s essay conflates two separate and distinct issues…the government’s proper role as protector of individual rights, vs. the arbitrary power of government regulators, which results in the violation of those rights.
The answer to the issues of environmental pollution and fraud, for example, can be addressed with relation to individual rights. Here, it is proper for government to step in when the economic activities of one pollutes the property of another…a violation of that person’s property rights…by ordering fines and restitution be paid to the injured party (based upon the objective findings of a court). Objective, clearly defined environmental laws such as anti-littering laws, statutes banning the dumping of specific industrial wastes proven to be harmful into rivers, or legal bans on the selling of paints containing lead intended for sale to the general public are also appropriate.
Similarly, fraud (such as “cooking the books” or deliberate misrepresentation of products) is a violation of the rights of the injured party. Civil and criminal penalties against fraudsters can and should be a tool of government in its role as protector of individual rights.
The civil courts, another proper function of government, is a powerful “regulator” where people can settle disputes involving harmful products or breech of contract, in an objective forum.
None of these governmental functions involve groups of bureaucrats with the power to impose rules that carry the force of law.
But the arbitrary powers Mr. Shuttleworth would delegate to government regulators who would, for example, have the authority to “make very tough decisions about innovation” is scary indeed. This is odd, after Mr. Shuttleworth starts out with a strong denunciation of central planning. This is a call for dictatorial powers to be placed into the hands of one or a group of individuals that usurp the free and voluntary decisions of free individuals…i.e., the free market. Never mind the idea that some innovations may not flourish in a free market. To make a determination of that kind, a regulator would “have to be able to tell the future”-a logical impossibility given the kind of dynamics inherent in the billions of choices made by millions of participants of a free market. Short of the coercive roadblocks enabled by the kind of political connections endemic to a mixed economy…i.e. of “regulated capitalism”…there is virtually no way any company, no matter how large, can stop innovative new technologies in the long term. In any event, if the result of the voluntary, uncoerced trading decisions of private individuals pursuing their own best interests occasionally means that some “superior” product doesn’t “make it” in the market, then so be it. There is no inherent “societal” entitlement to “superior” or “innovative” products. No one should have the power, in a free society, to violate the rights of others through governmental coercion in order to impose his idea of which or whose products should “succeed” in the market.
Government regulation is inherently corrupt, leading to “many stories of regulators being wined and dined by the industries they regulate only to make sure they don’t look too hard in the back room”. Industry influence on the bureaucrats that regulate it is a necessary result of “regulated capitalism” (a contradiction in terms, actually). Mr. Shuttleworth’s solution, however, is far worse than the disease. He proposes to eliminate the corruption by trampling all over the first amendment right of “the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”. Regulated companies are made up of people who have the right to “assemble” (form lobbies) in order to “petition the Government (i.e., the politicians who create the regulatory agencies)”. To make a regulator “independent” means to shield government from the peoples’ influence…an inversion of a key American principle. The problems caused by rights violations in one area, end up leading to rights violations in another. Anyway, how do regulators get “to know a lot about an industry, but be independent of that industry”, in “capitalist economies [that] evolve quickly”…without maintaining a close relationship with the very companies being regulated?
Mr. Shuttleworth actually builds a stronger case against regulated capitalism than he does in its favor, in my view. His four steps to an “effective regulator” sounds contradictory and utopian after his description of central planning in the first few paragraphs. And if the government can’t even manage its copyright and patent functions without eliminating the undue influence of established players seeking to block innovative newcomers, how in the world can it ever hope to regulate entire industries in a capitalist system where “the imperative to innovate and the consequences of failure drives capitalist economies to evolve quickly”?
The biggest contradiction is perhaps the key to this confusing essay. After exposing the futility of centrally planned economies, Mr. Shuttleworth ends by declaring that “regulation is…very much worth investing in if you are trying to run a healthy, vibrant, capitalist society”. Nobody “runs” a capitalist society. You “run” a planned economy. Under capitalism, people run their own lives, and government protects their right to do so.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Commentary 46- Mulshine on McCain
How the McCains really stick it to Joe Sixpack
Posted by Paul Mulshine October 17, 2008 12:59PM
Radley Balko of Reason Magazine has an interesting piece up on the politics of beer distributorships and how this has made John McCain a rich man.
"To be blunt, the entire industry is a farce. It's an artificial, anachronistic, government-created entity that's anti-competitive and full of lobbyists and special interests. It raises the cost of each bottle of beer you drink, though 'Joe Six Pack,' as McCain's running mate might put it, receives no value for the added cost."
Balko adds,
"What does the candidate lecturing Wall Street about greed think about the alcohol wholesaling industry? Is it fair? Should government be subsidizing (if not outright creating) an industry by forcing consumers to pay more for alcohol--for which they get little to no added value in return? And who's greedier, the family who exploits that system to amass a small fortune, or the brokers and traders McCain derides for pursuing profits in a free market?"
To which I can only add: Let us all hoist a beer in honor of Ron Paul, the only true adherent of the free market who ran for president this year and an opponent of rent-seeking behavior.
No wonder McCain hated him so much.
Other's Commentary:
Posted by hglindquist on 10/18/08 at 8:28AM
Ah so, a clear example of negative government intervention in the market ... in terms of market dynamics.
But control of the sale of alcohol is seen to be necessary for the collective good for a variety of reasons ... (there are other goods and services that are deemed to need to similar controls) ...
So the issue is the monopolistic nature of distributorships/wholesalers in those states that have the 3-tier system (explained in the articles you reference) ...
And there appears to have been some history as to why the 3-tier system was seen as a solution.
Which gets us to root of the economic problem: How do we control/pay for the costs that are directly tied to the consumption of alcohol -- for example, the devastating effect on families of alcoholism -- when they are not paid for out of the profits from the sale of alcohol for consumption? These costs are externalities like the dumping of mountaintops into fishing streams when mining. Cancer from second-hand smoke and earlier working with asbestos are other examples of externalities,
Quoting dear ol' Milton Friedman (my favorite quote of his): "'Free markets' is a very general term. There are all sorts of problems that will emerge. Free markets work best when the transaction between two individuals affects only those individuals. But that isn't the fact. The fact is that, most often, a transaction between you and me affects a third party. That is the source of all problems for government. That is the source of all pollution problems, of the inequality problem. There are some good economists like Gary Becker and Bob Lucas who are working on these issues. This reality ensures that the end of history will never come."
Aside, what it also assures is that there is no such thing as a "free market".
My personal view is that the more directly costs can be paid out of the profits that generated the costs, the more efficient (and effective) the market will be. But I am not an economist. On the other hand while Physicists can give a reasonable layperson explanation to the way atoms work, Economists have not been able to explain how free markets work ... in relation to reality ... and not even to themselves -- in my opinion.
In any case, you -- Mr. Mulshine -- are right in labeling Senator a McCain a hypocrite ... and pwc is right in questioning the Senator's character in regards to his treatment of his first wife.
My Commentary:
Mr. Mulshine's understanding of McCain as an enemy of free markets is right on. He is dangerous because he is a statist running under the free market banner...just as President Bush waved the free market banner while destroying it the last 8 years. I had decided that rather than vote for one of the two statist candidates, that I would abstain from voting for president this year...for the first time in my 4 decades as a registered voter. But maybe I'll write in Ron Paul, who Mr. Mulshine describes as "the only true adherent of the free market".
A free market is a crucial ingredient of capitalism, and of freedom. It is based on the recognition of individual rights, in which each individual is free to think and act on his own judgement, to associate and trade with others voluntarily to mutual advantage, in pursuit of his own goals, welfare, and happiness. Rights are a guide to freedom of action, not to the productive efforts of others (ex.-a home, food, health care, a job, etc.). Philosopher Ayn Rand described individual rights as "the means of subordinating society to moral law."
The concept of individual rights...including the all-important property rights, without which no other rights are possible...contains the answer to the problem of so-called "externalities". If the actions of one violates the rights of another...causes physical harm to another's person or property as objectively determined in a court of law...then the government may properly step in to require restitution to the injured party. Such would be the case of an individual or group of individuals (i.e., a corporation) polluting the property of another. In the case of second-hand smoke, as long as a non-smoker is free to leave an area occupied by smokers, his rights are not violated. It is solely the right of the property owner...ex., a restaurateur...to decide whether his establishment will allow smoking, and whether to segregate smokers from non-smokers.
The free market is not incompatible with government action to protect individual rights. Indeed, the protection of individual rights is the only proper function of government, and is vital to the functioning of a free market. The "free" in free market means to live one's life free from coercive interference (physical harm) by others, including by government officials and politicians, as well as criminals and the economic activities of others. The protection of rights, in a free society, is accomplished through objective laws against explicit types of behavior, or through the civil courts where grievances and disputes are resolved in an objective forum...and not through the arbitrary, dictatorial powers of government regulators.
Free market capitalism, properly understood, is the only practical and moral social system because it is the only system based on individual rights and a government limited to the job of protecting those rights. People can deal with each other in one of only two ways...by voluntary persuasion and logic, or by physical force. Under capitalism, rent-seeking pressure groups would not and can not exist because the government's power of economic interference on behalf of one private entity at the expense of others would not exist. The individual is protected against the predation of those seeking to trample his rights in the name of that mystic god of every power-luster...the "collective", or "common good".
It's either a free market, tyranny, or what we have today..a mixture of freedom and tyranny, in which tyranny steadily gains and freedom slowly recedes.
I choose free market capitalism.
Other's Commentary:
Posted by boobosie on 10/19/08 at 8:51AM
Free markets are responsible for the financial melt down on wall street. Tax payer protection is needed against the likes of fraudulent CEOS, bogus math gurus who eliminate risk, and unregulated credit default swaps.
Tariffs are needed to make the free market trade a level playing field.
Consumer protection is needed against the likes of "Joe the Plumber".
Free markets are great, for criminals.
Didn't your mommy ever tell you there is no 'free' lunch?
My Commentary:
Posted by Zemack on 10/19/08 at 9:46PM
On boobosie:
Free markets are responsible for the financial melt down on wall street.
Where do you see a free market in finances? You're committing the fallacy of equating the failures of private individuals and firms with a free market.
Who controls the money supply, the raw material of banking? The Fed
Who ended the gold standard? FDR, on the domestic front, by confiscating private gold currency and replacing it with fiat (i.e., counterfeit) paper. And Nixon, who closed the international gold window.
Who controls short-term interest rates? The Fed. (The Fed's inflationary policies and sudden tightening, based on control of money and interest rates, were largely responsible for the rampant 1920s stock market speculation and crash, as well as the recent housing boom and bust.)
The current crisis is rooted in the government's massive intervention in the housing and mortgage markets, beginning with FDR's "second bill of rights", which declared every family's "right" to own a home (which was reaffirmed in JFK's 1960 party platform.) Subsequent government policies were implemented to ensure that alleged "right." The home mortgage deduction; mortgage "insurers" (at taxpayer expense) FHA and FHLBB; the government-created quasi-private Fannie and Freddie that artificially created the mortgage resale "market."
Then when it was found that many low-income folks couldn't qualify for home loans, Carter created the CRA, to "encourage" lenders to extend loans to those folks. The government's extensive regulatory control over the banks was the club with which it enforced its "encouragement." Then when that wasn't enough, Clinton imposed "flexible" lending standards through the CRA, which led to no-doc and no-down-payment, or sub-prime, loans. But when banks that dove into these loans found that by restricting these gov.-mandated standards to just low-income folks they could run afoul of anti-discrimination laws, they had to extend these standards to all customers who wanted them. (Do not take this as a condemnation of low-income folks in general. It should be stressed that many low-income folks did purchase homes the old fashioned way...by saving for a down payment and then securing conventional loans. Many low-income, sub-prime borrowers continue to make their payments on time. And many of the defaulters are high earners.)
When it was found that Fannie and Freddie, the government-created giants with the implicit (now explicit) backing of Uncle Sam, wouldn't buy those sub-primes, Clinton, and later Bush, (and with the complicity of Congress) intervened to force them to. The flood gates were open for a virtual government-created conveyor belt of bad lending. CEOs like Mozilo of Countrywide latched on to the game with a vengeance.
It was Fannie and Freddie who pioneered the practice of bundling good and sub-prime loans together into Mortgage-Backed Securities (later emulated by many Wall Street firms) for sale to the public. The implicit taxpayer-guarantee created a false sense of safety for these securities. The "bubble mentality" of ever-rising home prices, fueled by the Fed's inflationary policies, took over from there.
The government's Federal Deposit "Insurance" and the "Too Big To Fail" bailout policy...as well as the Fed's lender of last resort status...has led to an atmosphere of reward without risk, or profit without loss. In a free market, the threat of having to face up to one's own failings is a built-in protector against the kind of system-wide catastrophe we are now seeing. The free market rewards long-term prudence and penalizes irrational, short-term lenders, investors, and borrowers (I don't let the irresponsible borrowers, which included outright speculators, off the hook. Without them, there would not have been a crisis.) When profits are privatized (as they should be), but losses are socialized (as they should not be), what kind of behavior does one expect to take hold?
The fact is that the heavily controlled and regulated financial industry was responding to the policies of its own government. The sound and prudent institutions that resisted the sub-prime mania were, for a time, placed at a competitive disadvantage, leading to a loss of business. (They are now in a very good position, once the economy turns around.) According to an article by Bloomberg's Michael Lewis (NY Post, 9/17/08), "if any of these men had behaved well and resisted the pressures and temptations of the moment, his firm would have, for several years, dramatically underperformed the competition. He probably would have lost his job." He was speaking of the Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers CEOs. What created a situation where prudence is penalized and imprudence is rewarded? The quick-buck charlatans who gained a position to bring down decades-old financial powerhouses were unleashed by market distortions created by government intervention.
I could go on and add to this already too-long post. The private lenders, borrowers, and investors that participated in this fiasco are part villain, part victim. But they are only the face of this crisis. Without government's massive interventions, the imprudent would have been weeded out by bankruptcy, foreclosure, and investment losses long before they could infect the whole system. One does not have to excuse the failures of private participants in order to understand that the government-created culture of homeownership entitlement and the policies they spawned are the real culprit here. It's a simple matter of cause and effect.
In a Money magazine interview (with Janice Revell, Sept. issue, I believe), Rep. Barney Frank made this startling statement: "But we have made a mistake in this society. The assumption that everybody can be a homeowner is wrong. We pushed and encouraged people into home ownership - people who, in some cases, weren't ready for it. You can't act on wishes that are unrealistic without having negative consequences."
That is about as close to an admission of the real cause as you will find in Washington. The free market is getting tried and convicted, where no free market exists. And along with it, our freedom.
I apologize for this long-winded post. But it was necessary. I could not let boobosie's unsubstantiated statement go unchallenged.
Other's Commentary
Posted by hglindquist on 10/19/08 at 9:53PM
OK, zemack, I am safely ensconced in my hotel room in New Haven ... the traffic backup getting onto I-95 South to NYC at I-91 was too long, so I "went to Yale" and phoned home that I was staying north for the night.
It was a gorgeous day out in Connecticut's fall foliage.
Now in rebuttal: It is common knowledge that profits have been used to avoid the payment of known externalities and to hide externalities from becoming known. The market has been able to use profit to protect itself from paying costs the profit-seeking generated. And I agree with you, it is a proper role for we the people through our government to investigate the potential for harm caused by any product and to impose laws and regulations that protect we the people from such harm.
You seem to forget that in your example of the right of a non-smoking employee to leave smoking area has only been recently established ... and that I have absolutely no protection from the concentrations of tobacco smoke that sometimes accost me as I exit a building ... and that the children of smokers are still at risk in far too many cases. It is because of the market's failure to address the issue adequately that government has had to intervene with laws and regulations, and still has a ways to go to adequately protect the non-smoker. So I am pleased that you agree that we the people through our government should continue to move in that direction ... but then you go back to the free market concept.
And we continually have examples of companies hiding the harmful side effects of their products so the cost of the harm does not have to paid out of the profits, or costs are delayed or minimized.
History has shown that here in this country we are more at risk from the active pursuit of cost suppression for profit maximization than we are from "the arbitrary, dictatorial powers of government regulators."
And "the collective or common good" is not some "mystic, undefinable god of every power-seeker" -- in my opinion. We can simply start by identifying those "things" the individual has a right to expect from his/her community, and in turn recognizes that his/her community has a right to expect participation from him/her. Or to put it another way, what do we expect to share in common as Americans?
Security may be a place to start. Do we not believe it is the roll of the collective community to defend the community -- which is its members -- from its enemies? Don't we all share in our common defense against our enemies, generally speaking?
So if I expect to be defended then I expect to participate in the defense. And if I expect to participate in the defense, then I expect to be defended. That makes sense, doesn't it?
But in any case ... I really do think this latest socialization of the losses by the market fundamentalists will put the concept of a "free market" on ice for another -- what? -- 70 years. Maybe longer if we don't turn this sucker (the meltdown) around pretty quick ... which -- I'm afraid -- is looking less and less likely every day.
In any case, Senator McCain is a hypocrite for taking his second wife's largess, and he is what we used to call a low-life for the way he treated his first wife -- in my opinion after reviewing the facts.
And yes, I believe in redemption. But apparently McCain hasn't repented.
My Commentary:
Posted by Zemack on 10/20/08 at 7:50PM
Hglindquist, 10/19/08
I hope you're enjoying you're trip to New England. My wife and I plan on some day making a trip up there.
I'll address one more point...the key point...to hopefully clarify my philosophical position.
And "the collective or common good" is not some "mystic, undefinable god of every power-seeker" -- in my opinion. We can simply start by identifying those "things" the individual has a right to expect from his/her community, and in turn recognizes that his/her community has a right to expect participation from him/her. Or to put it another way, what do we expect to share in common as Americans?
I reject the collectivist premise in the entire statement. I consider the notion of "The collective or common good" to be invalid for two reasons. First; human beings...every one of us...are autonomous individuals each possessing his own independent mind, or rational faculty, which is the means by which he guides his life. This is a metaphysical fact of nature. The fundamental choice that each of us faces is...to think or not. That is exclusively a choice of the individual, and only the individual. No one can do another's thinking, nor force another to think.
Second; the collectivist, or tribal, premise is un-American. A recognition of the validity of the first reason formed the basis for the Founders' creation of a nation that, for the first time in history, was based on the premise that the individual, not the group, is the supreme value upon which a society would be organized. And they recognized that certain fundamental requirements are required for such a society...the individual's unalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of one's own welfare and happiness...protected by a government which, for the first time, was explicitly deemed to be the peoples' servant rather than ruler.
Thus, there is no such thing as the "collective", or "common" good that is separate from the good of the individual...every independent individual. And since every individual possesses the same unalienable rights, equally, and at all times, and protected equally and at all times by the government, any private or public (i.e., governmental) action that violates the rights of even a single individual is not and can not be in the "common" good.
There is no such entity as a "community". The community is a number of individuals, as described above. The "community" has no right to expect anything out of any individual, and the individual has no right to expect anything out of the "community"...save one. That one "thing" that each of us owes the other individuals that make up a "community" is to respect, and to reframe from violating, their aforementioned individual rights...i.e., to avoid compelling another person to act against his own judgement and will. In a free society based on individual rights, anyone who initiates physical force against another is a criminal, and is subject to prosecution by the government. This same principle applies to government. The government is the protector of the individual's unalienable rights. Therefor, no one in the "community" may use the legalized force of government to violate the rights of other members of that community, no matter how big his majority or how small the minority. The same principles apply to a group of ten, a thousand, a million or 320 million. This is what is meant by the principle that "Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law."
The use of the term "the common or collective good" implies that the group or society or the community is the supreme value and can do whatever it wants to its individual members. It is always the justification for any rights-violating governmental action...and of all tyrannies. There is no "collective" good in a free society. There is only the necessity to ensure, via limited government, that each member is free to pursue his own good...which means to be free from human predators.
What do we... share in common as Americans? We share the right to think for ourselves, to act on our own judgement in the pursuit of our own individual well-being, to engage in voluntary and uncoerced association with one another, to engage in voluntary trade to mutual advantage, to engage in voluntary and uncoerced charity, and the obligation to respect the rights of all of our fellow community members. We share, in other words, the principles of free market capitalism. Or at least, as Americans, we should.
Posted by Paul Mulshine October 17, 2008 12:59PM
Radley Balko of Reason Magazine has an interesting piece up on the politics of beer distributorships and how this has made John McCain a rich man.
"To be blunt, the entire industry is a farce. It's an artificial, anachronistic, government-created entity that's anti-competitive and full of lobbyists and special interests. It raises the cost of each bottle of beer you drink, though 'Joe Six Pack,' as McCain's running mate might put it, receives no value for the added cost."
Balko adds,
"What does the candidate lecturing Wall Street about greed think about the alcohol wholesaling industry? Is it fair? Should government be subsidizing (if not outright creating) an industry by forcing consumers to pay more for alcohol--for which they get little to no added value in return? And who's greedier, the family who exploits that system to amass a small fortune, or the brokers and traders McCain derides for pursuing profits in a free market?"
To which I can only add: Let us all hoist a beer in honor of Ron Paul, the only true adherent of the free market who ran for president this year and an opponent of rent-seeking behavior.
No wonder McCain hated him so much.
Other's Commentary:
Posted by hglindquist on 10/18/08 at 8:28AM
Ah so, a clear example of negative government intervention in the market ... in terms of market dynamics.
But control of the sale of alcohol is seen to be necessary for the collective good for a variety of reasons ... (there are other goods and services that are deemed to need to similar controls) ...
So the issue is the monopolistic nature of distributorships/wholesalers in those states that have the 3-tier system (explained in the articles you reference) ...
And there appears to have been some history as to why the 3-tier system was seen as a solution.
Which gets us to root of the economic problem: How do we control/pay for the costs that are directly tied to the consumption of alcohol -- for example, the devastating effect on families of alcoholism -- when they are not paid for out of the profits from the sale of alcohol for consumption? These costs are externalities like the dumping of mountaintops into fishing streams when mining. Cancer from second-hand smoke and earlier working with asbestos are other examples of externalities,
Quoting dear ol' Milton Friedman (my favorite quote of his): "'Free markets' is a very general term. There are all sorts of problems that will emerge. Free markets work best when the transaction between two individuals affects only those individuals. But that isn't the fact. The fact is that, most often, a transaction between you and me affects a third party. That is the source of all problems for government. That is the source of all pollution problems, of the inequality problem. There are some good economists like Gary Becker and Bob Lucas who are working on these issues. This reality ensures that the end of history will never come."
Aside, what it also assures is that there is no such thing as a "free market".
My personal view is that the more directly costs can be paid out of the profits that generated the costs, the more efficient (and effective) the market will be. But I am not an economist. On the other hand while Physicists can give a reasonable layperson explanation to the way atoms work, Economists have not been able to explain how free markets work ... in relation to reality ... and not even to themselves -- in my opinion.
In any case, you -- Mr. Mulshine -- are right in labeling Senator a McCain a hypocrite ... and pwc is right in questioning the Senator's character in regards to his treatment of his first wife.
My Commentary:
Mr. Mulshine's understanding of McCain as an enemy of free markets is right on. He is dangerous because he is a statist running under the free market banner...just as President Bush waved the free market banner while destroying it the last 8 years. I had decided that rather than vote for one of the two statist candidates, that I would abstain from voting for president this year...for the first time in my 4 decades as a registered voter. But maybe I'll write in Ron Paul, who Mr. Mulshine describes as "the only true adherent of the free market".
A free market is a crucial ingredient of capitalism, and of freedom. It is based on the recognition of individual rights, in which each individual is free to think and act on his own judgement, to associate and trade with others voluntarily to mutual advantage, in pursuit of his own goals, welfare, and happiness. Rights are a guide to freedom of action, not to the productive efforts of others (ex.-a home, food, health care, a job, etc.). Philosopher Ayn Rand described individual rights as "the means of subordinating society to moral law."
The concept of individual rights...including the all-important property rights, without which no other rights are possible...contains the answer to the problem of so-called "externalities". If the actions of one violates the rights of another...causes physical harm to another's person or property as objectively determined in a court of law...then the government may properly step in to require restitution to the injured party. Such would be the case of an individual or group of individuals (i.e., a corporation) polluting the property of another. In the case of second-hand smoke, as long as a non-smoker is free to leave an area occupied by smokers, his rights are not violated. It is solely the right of the property owner...ex., a restaurateur...to decide whether his establishment will allow smoking, and whether to segregate smokers from non-smokers.
The free market is not incompatible with government action to protect individual rights. Indeed, the protection of individual rights is the only proper function of government, and is vital to the functioning of a free market. The "free" in free market means to live one's life free from coercive interference (physical harm) by others, including by government officials and politicians, as well as criminals and the economic activities of others. The protection of rights, in a free society, is accomplished through objective laws against explicit types of behavior, or through the civil courts where grievances and disputes are resolved in an objective forum...and not through the arbitrary, dictatorial powers of government regulators.
Free market capitalism, properly understood, is the only practical and moral social system because it is the only system based on individual rights and a government limited to the job of protecting those rights. People can deal with each other in one of only two ways...by voluntary persuasion and logic, or by physical force. Under capitalism, rent-seeking pressure groups would not and can not exist because the government's power of economic interference on behalf of one private entity at the expense of others would not exist. The individual is protected against the predation of those seeking to trample his rights in the name of that mystic god of every power-luster...the "collective", or "common good".
It's either a free market, tyranny, or what we have today..a mixture of freedom and tyranny, in which tyranny steadily gains and freedom slowly recedes.
I choose free market capitalism.
Other's Commentary:
Posted by boobosie on 10/19/08 at 8:51AM
Free markets are responsible for the financial melt down on wall street. Tax payer protection is needed against the likes of fraudulent CEOS, bogus math gurus who eliminate risk, and unregulated credit default swaps.
Tariffs are needed to make the free market trade a level playing field.
Consumer protection is needed against the likes of "Joe the Plumber".
Free markets are great, for criminals.
Didn't your mommy ever tell you there is no 'free' lunch?
My Commentary:
Posted by Zemack on 10/19/08 at 9:46PM
On boobosie:
Free markets are responsible for the financial melt down on wall street.
Where do you see a free market in finances? You're committing the fallacy of equating the failures of private individuals and firms with a free market.
Who controls the money supply, the raw material of banking? The Fed
Who ended the gold standard? FDR, on the domestic front, by confiscating private gold currency and replacing it with fiat (i.e., counterfeit) paper. And Nixon, who closed the international gold window.
Who controls short-term interest rates? The Fed. (The Fed's inflationary policies and sudden tightening, based on control of money and interest rates, were largely responsible for the rampant 1920s stock market speculation and crash, as well as the recent housing boom and bust.)
The current crisis is rooted in the government's massive intervention in the housing and mortgage markets, beginning with FDR's "second bill of rights", which declared every family's "right" to own a home (which was reaffirmed in JFK's 1960 party platform.) Subsequent government policies were implemented to ensure that alleged "right." The home mortgage deduction; mortgage "insurers" (at taxpayer expense) FHA and FHLBB; the government-created quasi-private Fannie and Freddie that artificially created the mortgage resale "market."
Then when it was found that many low-income folks couldn't qualify for home loans, Carter created the CRA, to "encourage" lenders to extend loans to those folks. The government's extensive regulatory control over the banks was the club with which it enforced its "encouragement." Then when that wasn't enough, Clinton imposed "flexible" lending standards through the CRA, which led to no-doc and no-down-payment, or sub-prime, loans. But when banks that dove into these loans found that by restricting these gov.-mandated standards to just low-income folks they could run afoul of anti-discrimination laws, they had to extend these standards to all customers who wanted them. (Do not take this as a condemnation of low-income folks in general. It should be stressed that many low-income folks did purchase homes the old fashioned way...by saving for a down payment and then securing conventional loans. Many low-income, sub-prime borrowers continue to make their payments on time. And many of the defaulters are high earners.)
When it was found that Fannie and Freddie, the government-created giants with the implicit (now explicit) backing of Uncle Sam, wouldn't buy those sub-primes, Clinton, and later Bush, (and with the complicity of Congress) intervened to force them to. The flood gates were open for a virtual government-created conveyor belt of bad lending. CEOs like Mozilo of Countrywide latched on to the game with a vengeance.
It was Fannie and Freddie who pioneered the practice of bundling good and sub-prime loans together into Mortgage-Backed Securities (later emulated by many Wall Street firms) for sale to the public. The implicit taxpayer-guarantee created a false sense of safety for these securities. The "bubble mentality" of ever-rising home prices, fueled by the Fed's inflationary policies, took over from there.
The government's Federal Deposit "Insurance" and the "Too Big To Fail" bailout policy...as well as the Fed's lender of last resort status...has led to an atmosphere of reward without risk, or profit without loss. In a free market, the threat of having to face up to one's own failings is a built-in protector against the kind of system-wide catastrophe we are now seeing. The free market rewards long-term prudence and penalizes irrational, short-term lenders, investors, and borrowers (I don't let the irresponsible borrowers, which included outright speculators, off the hook. Without them, there would not have been a crisis.) When profits are privatized (as they should be), but losses are socialized (as they should not be), what kind of behavior does one expect to take hold?
The fact is that the heavily controlled and regulated financial industry was responding to the policies of its own government. The sound and prudent institutions that resisted the sub-prime mania were, for a time, placed at a competitive disadvantage, leading to a loss of business. (They are now in a very good position, once the economy turns around.) According to an article by Bloomberg's Michael Lewis (NY Post, 9/17/08), "if any of these men had behaved well and resisted the pressures and temptations of the moment, his firm would have, for several years, dramatically underperformed the competition. He probably would have lost his job." He was speaking of the Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers CEOs. What created a situation where prudence is penalized and imprudence is rewarded? The quick-buck charlatans who gained a position to bring down decades-old financial powerhouses were unleashed by market distortions created by government intervention.
I could go on and add to this already too-long post. The private lenders, borrowers, and investors that participated in this fiasco are part villain, part victim. But they are only the face of this crisis. Without government's massive interventions, the imprudent would have been weeded out by bankruptcy, foreclosure, and investment losses long before they could infect the whole system. One does not have to excuse the failures of private participants in order to understand that the government-created culture of homeownership entitlement and the policies they spawned are the real culprit here. It's a simple matter of cause and effect.
In a Money magazine interview (with Janice Revell, Sept. issue, I believe), Rep. Barney Frank made this startling statement: "But we have made a mistake in this society. The assumption that everybody can be a homeowner is wrong. We pushed and encouraged people into home ownership - people who, in some cases, weren't ready for it. You can't act on wishes that are unrealistic without having negative consequences."
That is about as close to an admission of the real cause as you will find in Washington. The free market is getting tried and convicted, where no free market exists. And along with it, our freedom.
I apologize for this long-winded post. But it was necessary. I could not let boobosie's unsubstantiated statement go unchallenged.
Other's Commentary
Posted by hglindquist on 10/19/08 at 9:53PM
OK, zemack, I am safely ensconced in my hotel room in New Haven ... the traffic backup getting onto I-95 South to NYC at I-91 was too long, so I "went to Yale" and phoned home that I was staying north for the night.
It was a gorgeous day out in Connecticut's fall foliage.
Now in rebuttal: It is common knowledge that profits have been used to avoid the payment of known externalities and to hide externalities from becoming known. The market has been able to use profit to protect itself from paying costs the profit-seeking generated. And I agree with you, it is a proper role for we the people through our government to investigate the potential for harm caused by any product and to impose laws and regulations that protect we the people from such harm.
You seem to forget that in your example of the right of a non-smoking employee to leave smoking area has only been recently established ... and that I have absolutely no protection from the concentrations of tobacco smoke that sometimes accost me as I exit a building ... and that the children of smokers are still at risk in far too many cases. It is because of the market's failure to address the issue adequately that government has had to intervene with laws and regulations, and still has a ways to go to adequately protect the non-smoker. So I am pleased that you agree that we the people through our government should continue to move in that direction ... but then you go back to the free market concept.
And we continually have examples of companies hiding the harmful side effects of their products so the cost of the harm does not have to paid out of the profits, or costs are delayed or minimized.
History has shown that here in this country we are more at risk from the active pursuit of cost suppression for profit maximization than we are from "the arbitrary, dictatorial powers of government regulators."
And "the collective or common good" is not some "mystic, undefinable god of every power-seeker" -- in my opinion. We can simply start by identifying those "things" the individual has a right to expect from his/her community, and in turn recognizes that his/her community has a right to expect participation from him/her. Or to put it another way, what do we expect to share in common as Americans?
Security may be a place to start. Do we not believe it is the roll of the collective community to defend the community -- which is its members -- from its enemies? Don't we all share in our common defense against our enemies, generally speaking?
So if I expect to be defended then I expect to participate in the defense. And if I expect to participate in the defense, then I expect to be defended. That makes sense, doesn't it?
But in any case ... I really do think this latest socialization of the losses by the market fundamentalists will put the concept of a "free market" on ice for another -- what? -- 70 years. Maybe longer if we don't turn this sucker (the meltdown) around pretty quick ... which -- I'm afraid -- is looking less and less likely every day.
In any case, Senator McCain is a hypocrite for taking his second wife's largess, and he is what we used to call a low-life for the way he treated his first wife -- in my opinion after reviewing the facts.
And yes, I believe in redemption. But apparently McCain hasn't repented.
My Commentary:
Posted by Zemack on 10/20/08 at 7:50PM
Hglindquist, 10/19/08
I hope you're enjoying you're trip to New England. My wife and I plan on some day making a trip up there.
I'll address one more point...the key point...to hopefully clarify my philosophical position.
And "the collective or common good" is not some "mystic, undefinable god of every power-seeker" -- in my opinion. We can simply start by identifying those "things" the individual has a right to expect from his/her community, and in turn recognizes that his/her community has a right to expect participation from him/her. Or to put it another way, what do we expect to share in common as Americans?
I reject the collectivist premise in the entire statement. I consider the notion of "The collective or common good" to be invalid for two reasons. First; human beings...every one of us...are autonomous individuals each possessing his own independent mind, or rational faculty, which is the means by which he guides his life. This is a metaphysical fact of nature. The fundamental choice that each of us faces is...to think or not. That is exclusively a choice of the individual, and only the individual. No one can do another's thinking, nor force another to think.
Second; the collectivist, or tribal, premise is un-American. A recognition of the validity of the first reason formed the basis for the Founders' creation of a nation that, for the first time in history, was based on the premise that the individual, not the group, is the supreme value upon which a society would be organized. And they recognized that certain fundamental requirements are required for such a society...the individual's unalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of one's own welfare and happiness...protected by a government which, for the first time, was explicitly deemed to be the peoples' servant rather than ruler.
Thus, there is no such thing as the "collective", or "common" good that is separate from the good of the individual...every independent individual. And since every individual possesses the same unalienable rights, equally, and at all times, and protected equally and at all times by the government, any private or public (i.e., governmental) action that violates the rights of even a single individual is not and can not be in the "common" good.
There is no such entity as a "community". The community is a number of individuals, as described above. The "community" has no right to expect anything out of any individual, and the individual has no right to expect anything out of the "community"...save one. That one "thing" that each of us owes the other individuals that make up a "community" is to respect, and to reframe from violating, their aforementioned individual rights...i.e., to avoid compelling another person to act against his own judgement and will. In a free society based on individual rights, anyone who initiates physical force against another is a criminal, and is subject to prosecution by the government. This same principle applies to government. The government is the protector of the individual's unalienable rights. Therefor, no one in the "community" may use the legalized force of government to violate the rights of other members of that community, no matter how big his majority or how small the minority. The same principles apply to a group of ten, a thousand, a million or 320 million. This is what is meant by the principle that "Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law."
The use of the term "the common or collective good" implies that the group or society or the community is the supreme value and can do whatever it wants to its individual members. It is always the justification for any rights-violating governmental action...and of all tyrannies. There is no "collective" good in a free society. There is only the necessity to ensure, via limited government, that each member is free to pursue his own good...which means to be free from human predators.
What do we... share in common as Americans? We share the right to think for ourselves, to act on our own judgement in the pursuit of our own individual well-being, to engage in voluntary and uncoerced association with one another, to engage in voluntary trade to mutual advantage, to engage in voluntary and uncoerced charity, and the obligation to respect the rights of all of our fellow community members. We share, in other words, the principles of free market capitalism. Or at least, as Americans, we should.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Commentary 45-Vision of a Better America
Vision of a better America becoming a reality
Posted on Wed, Aug. 27, 2008reprint print email
Facebook Digg del.icio.us AIM
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@miamiherald.com
'I knew that I was witnessing something special,' Bob Adelman says of watching Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous 'I Have A Dream' speech. 'King had put down his prepared remarks and was speaking from emotion.''
He spoke of the promise before he spoke of the dream.
In the first part of the momentous speech he gave at the Lincoln Memorial, the part school children don't memorize and pundits never quote, Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded a watching world that in writing the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, the founders were ``signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
''This note,'' said King, ''was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'' His evocation of this great American promise may be less well-known than King's description, moments later, of his great American dream, but there is, nevertheless, a straightforward clarity to it that compels.
Because where race is concerned, what is American history if not the story of how that promise was repeatedly broken? As King put it five years later in the last speech of his life, 'All we say to America is, `Be true to what you said on paper.' ''
But America never did.
Except that now, here comes Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan and a Kansan, striding to the podium to accept the nomination of his party for president of the United States. It comes 45 years to the very day after King said he had a dream America's promise might someday be fulfilled, 100 years and a day after the birth of the president, Lyndon Johnson, who helped nudge that dream toward reality. The timing requires you, if you have any music in your soul, any soul in your soul, to reappraise both the promise and the dream.
That's what we've been doing lately in our various ways in our various Americas. On the sidewalk outside a Gladys Knight concert, a vendor sells a T-shirt depicting King and Obama shaking hands above the legend, ''Sometimes, dreams come true.'' Meanwhile, they are passing around a ''joke'' on the Internet that has Obama picking Sylvester Stallone as his running mate: ''Rambo and Sambo,'' goes the punch line.
The two extremes have one thing in common: slack-faced disbelief. Could it be? Could it really be?
Apparently, it could.
The realization coalesces something some of us never dared hope and others never dared fear: the idea that one day America would take its promise seriously.
And if that realization requires African-Americans to recalibrate their cynicism about what ''they'' will and will not allow black folks to achieve, it seems plain that the greater shock and sense of dislocation is borne by ''they,'' who must now recalibrate their assessment of what black folks can achieve. Small wonder ''they'' have responded frantically, crying with ever more shrillness that this Obama character is something other, something foreign, something strange. Something not really, truly American.
They have grown used to defining ''American'' as a certain skin color, a certain religion and heritage. They have forgotten that ''American'' was, first and foremost, a certain ideal.
Thomas Jefferson stated it thusly: all men are created equal.
The Pledge of Allegiance says: liberty and justice for all. And King, in that speech 45 years ago, spoke of the day ''all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics'' would harmonize upon a song of freedom.
Not truly American, they say? On Thursday, a nation whose credo holds equality to be a birthright will see a brown-skinned man, son of Kenya and Kansas, assume leadership of a major political party. No, it is not the panacea, not the End of Race in America. But it is striking evidence of a promise fulfilled, a dream redeemed.
How could anything be more American than that?
My Commentary:
Comments
MLK's reaffirmation of America's founding ideals was a vital foundation for the success of the early civil rights movement in abolishing legal segregation. But his later embrace of socialism as an ideal seriously undermined his legacy.
That is because socialism (i.e., collectivism) in all of its forms...communism, fascism, nazism, welfare statism, et al...is incompatible with those ideals. Collectivism means the supremacy of the group, and the subordination of the individual to group whims. The "the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"... which includes property rights, without which no other rights are possible...belongs to the individual human being, and only the individual human being. Collectivism is the denial of individual rights.
Rights are a moral concept that defines one?s freedom of action in a social context...i.e., in relation to everyone else. Socially, rights impose a single moral obligation on all of us...to respect the same rights in all others. Unalienable means that each individual is free to act in his own interest according to his own judgement free from coercive predation and exploitation by others...i.e., his rights are absolute. This means that there is no right to the unearned...to healthcare, to an education, to a job...provided by someone else, except in the case of voluntary, uncoerced charity. There is only the right to be free to achieve those things by one's own effort, and in voluntary association and trade with others. To be free from coercion means to be free of all coercion, including governmental coercion. The government's proper job is to protect those unalienable rights-"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men"- which are possessed by all people, at all times.
There is only one social system under which these conditions are possible. That system is laissez-faire capitalism.
Obama embraces the opposite. He implores Americans, especially the young, to abandon their own personal pursuit of happiness...their dreams, career goals, and desires...and instead embrace the theme of his campaign. Service and sacrifice, he says, are what America is about. But a call for servitude to one's neighbor, one's community, the state or the nation...and the call for Americans to sacrifice, not to pursue, their individual values and happiness...is as alien to American ideals as one can imagine. It is the siren song of socialism, not capitalism...of tyranny, not freedom.
Obama should correct the contradiction in MLK's legacy, by calling for policies that are consistent with every individual's unalienable rights to his life, his liberty, his property, and the pursuit of his own happiness. He won't, though, because he is a collectivist through and through. Obama's America is one of servitude and sacrifice, not the pursuit of happiness. His is a vision not of a better America, but of a poorer, less free America.
Yes, it is a significant American milestone that "a brown-skinned man, son of Kenya and Kansas, [will] assume leadership of a major political party." But only when all Americans recognize the true meaning of the words "the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" will we have "striking evidence of a promise fulfilled, a dream redeemed."
How could anything be more American than that?
Posted by: Zemack
8/28/2008 6:51 PM
Other's Commentary:
Zwemack labeling any program to even out the playing field and the wealth of this rich country with names such as socialism, communism welfare state or what ever is a shameful behavior in my opinion and only play for people who already share your world view.
Here is another label for you oligarchy as in the form of government we are now enjoying under the Republicans where we have government for and by the top 1 percent of the economic population.
Sorry if I am more concern about the sick and poor then I am for the shareholders and CEO of the health insurance companies and therefore wish us to join with the rest of the Western world and get universal health care for all.
Sorry if I don?t think that anyone should need to sleep and find food in a garbage container even if they are too mentally ill to take care of themselves.
Sorry if I don?t think that we should continue a system that have the top few percent of the population owning and controlling the whole country for their and their children benefit and the hell with the rest of us.
Yes you are right we could go too far in the other direction but I will start worrying about that after we start acting like a caring society for the least people amount us and stop the decline of the middle class.
Posted by: WRM
8/28/08 8:02pm
My Commentary:
WRM
"Zwemack labeling any program to even out the playing field and the wealth of this rich country with names such as socialism, communism welfare state or what ever is a shameful behavior in my opinion and only play for people who already share your world view."- WRM
Welfare statism is based on the principle that the state, acting for the "good" of the collective, holds the unlimited power to confiscate the privately produced wealth of its individual citizens and that that principle supercedes the good of those citizens. It holds that rights are a collective (i.e., group), not individual, attribute. It is the negation of individual rights. "Any program to even out the?the wealth of this rich country" is welfare statism. It is a form of socialism different from communism or Nazism only as a matter of degree, not substance. If you can tell me how welfare statism is fundamentally...i.e., in principle...different from any other form of socialism, I'd like to here it.
"To even out the playing field" is the very purpose of the words of the Declaration of Independence that Mr. Pitts, and MLK quote. That all men are created equal possessing the unalienable rights of life, liberty, [property,] and the pursuit of happiness is intended to do just that. It means that rights are inseparable (unalienable) from each as an individual, and are held equally, by all people, at all times. You can't get a more level field than that. All wealth is produced by people exercising those rights, and "any program to even out...the wealth of this rich country" through the coercive power of the state is nothing more than legalized theft and violates the principle of "unalienable rights" and negates this country?s founding ideals.
"Sorry if I am more concern about the sick and poor then I am for the shareholders and CEO of the health insurance companies..."- WRM
That statement inverts an immutable fact of nature...production comes before consumption. The wealth that humans need to live and flourish...from nails to computers to food to healthcare...does not just materialize in nature but must be produced through a process of reason and productive work. Wealth production requires certain social conditions to occur...freedom and a rights-protecting government. Every individual must be free to think and act on his own rational judgement, to set his own goals and to strive to achieve them by his own effort, and to engage in voluntary trade with others, free from coercive interference by others. The American ideal of unalienable, equal rights is the principle that guarantees the proper social conditions for man to produce. Anyone who disregards the unalienable rights of life, liberty, [property,] and the pursuit of happiness of "shareholders and CEOs and the top few percent of the population" or any other producers cannot claim "concern about the sick and poor." Production comes before consumption, and individual rights comes before production. That is not my worldview. That is an indisputable fact of man's nature and of reality.
It is not your concern for the sick or of those down on their economic fortunes that I object to. It is your means of helping them. Charity is a worthwhile pursuit only if it is uncoerced and voluntary. Each individual, possessing unalienable rights, must be free to decide who, when, and in what capacity he will assist others based on his own value-judgements and his own available resources. Someone who wants "a caring society" would not force his own idea of worthwhile charity on others. Claiming "concern about the sick and poor" and then demanding a government program to force others to pay for the luxury of your compassion makes you out to be thoroughly PHONY.
If charitable help for the down and out and increased economic opportunity for the poor is your goal, then increased production of wealth should be your first goal. This means unalienable rights and capitalism, not welfare state programs that confiscate wealth and violate rights and thus diminish production and economic opportunity.
Posted by: Zemack
8/29/2008 6:14 PM
Other's Commentary:
Zemack the society as a whole set the structure for wealth creating and as such, we all therefore have a right to share in that wealth. No individual have the power to create wealth without using the inter-structure that the social as a whole had build.
Is it not strange that the granting of public lands by the millions of acres for example to the railroad companies in the 1800s for the public good is fine but not the transfer of some of the wealth to the poor also for the public good is somehow wrong?
It is somehow fine to grant land and share the cost of a ball park in down town Miami to a private firm to the tune of hundred of millions of dollars but not to build low income housing costing millions!
The poor should not to have to plea for health care it should be their right to not die due to being on the bottom of the economic ladder and that right is accepted by every Western Country but for our.
There is a balance in everything and maintaining a strong self interest in creating wealth to benefit you and your family is in the society interest, however so is taking care of the mentally ill and the sick even if they are on the bottom of the economic pile.
Posted by: WRM
8/29/2008 10:30 PM
My Commentary:
WRM, 8/29/08
The "structure"...the proper social conditions...for wealth creating are "set" by nature and the requirements of man's survival, not "society as a whole". Those social conditions need to be discovered, not "set" by the arbitrary whim of "society as a whole" or any group or individual. There is no "society as a whole", as opposed to its individual members. The great achievement of the Enlightenment thinkers and of America?s Founding Fathers was to discover, and implement, those social conditions. The result was the first nation on earth to be established based on the supreme value of the individual...all individuals...his unalienable rights, and a government designed to protect those rights. They recognized the power of every person's rational faculty...his reason...and established the individual freedom to act on his reason, which is nature's requirement for man to survive and thrive.
All wealth is produced by individuals, whether acting alone or in voluntary cooperation with one another. It is not produced, nor owned, by "society as a whole". There is no "whole," no supreme tribe, in America. There are only individuals possessing rights to freedom of action and freedom from predators. The only proper way to "share" wealth in a free and just society is through voluntary trade to mutual advantage...not by force, governmental or otherwise. Likewise, America's infrastructure (roads and bridges) was built mostly by private contractors and paid for by taxes. If your property rights are forfeited because you use the roads and bridges that your taxes helped pay for, as you seem to be claiming, then that is one of the best arguments for why governments shouldn't own or finance any infrastructure.
The building of the railroads was a great achievement of productive industrial geniuses who brought great benefits to their fellow men and helped lay the foundation for the great prosperity to come. Unfortunately, that achievement was marred by government interference. Some of the railroad builders used political connections to obtain government grants, subsidies, franchises, and legal protection from competition (which created the infamous coercive railroad monopolies). That was wrong and so is taxpayer funding of sports stadiums and a whole host of socialism-for-the-rich schemes. Corporate welfare handed out by politicians flush with taxpayer money in the name of "the public good" is a violation of individual rights.
There is no right to healthcare. There is no right to any manmade product of any kind. There is no right to wealth created by someone else. For a right of that kind to be ensured, the government would have to force others to pay for it through taxation, and force producers of that product to provide it...I.E., to rob and to enslave. A power of that kind in the hands of politicians is the path to tyranny, which is where we are heading. The government's only proper function is to protect individual rights, not violate them. People who are not poor should not be punished for their economic achievements, by being forced to support people who have the same freedom to achieve but didn't.
I agree on this much, WRM. Acting in your own self-interest to create "wealth to benefit you and your family" is, indeed, a benefit to "society." That is because of one simple reason?"society" is only so many individuals. And you, and every individual, is a part of society. When an individual benefits himself through his own productive work, he thus benefits society because he is society. He benefits ?society? in another very important way...by providing a product or service that others find valuable enough to buy (to trade for). By "maintaining a strong self interest in creating wealth to benefit you and your family," you are lifting others up as well. And the most productive individuals?those that grow businesses (without government favors) provide jobs as well. But you cannot reverse cause-and-effect. When the state starts violating, rather than protecting, your right to the pursuit of your own self-interest and happiness by confiscating your wealth for someone else?s unearned benefit...however needy...then the engine of prosperity and freedom is headed for destruction. There is no balance between wealth creation and wealth confiscation?between production and theft...between voluntary charity and forcible redistribution...between the protection of individual rights and their violation. Once you?ve granted to government the power to trample the people's rights some of the time, you have crossed the line to where rights are no longer unalienable. And once you?ve abandoned the principle that rights are unalienable, where do you draw the line on government?s expanding power and the people's shrinking freedom? You can't. You no longer have any principle to stand on.
Voluntary, private charity is the way to help those few who are truly unable to help themselves. Destroying the freedom that enables wealth production will not help them, or anyone else, except the rulers.
Posted by: Zemack
8/31/2008 7:58 AM
Posted on Wed, Aug. 27, 2008reprint print email
Facebook Digg del.icio.us AIM
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@miamiherald.com
'I knew that I was witnessing something special,' Bob Adelman says of watching Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous 'I Have A Dream' speech. 'King had put down his prepared remarks and was speaking from emotion.''
He spoke of the promise before he spoke of the dream.
In the first part of the momentous speech he gave at the Lincoln Memorial, the part school children don't memorize and pundits never quote, Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded a watching world that in writing the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, the founders were ``signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
''This note,'' said King, ''was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'' His evocation of this great American promise may be less well-known than King's description, moments later, of his great American dream, but there is, nevertheless, a straightforward clarity to it that compels.
Because where race is concerned, what is American history if not the story of how that promise was repeatedly broken? As King put it five years later in the last speech of his life, 'All we say to America is, `Be true to what you said on paper.' ''
But America never did.
Except that now, here comes Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan and a Kansan, striding to the podium to accept the nomination of his party for president of the United States. It comes 45 years to the very day after King said he had a dream America's promise might someday be fulfilled, 100 years and a day after the birth of the president, Lyndon Johnson, who helped nudge that dream toward reality. The timing requires you, if you have any music in your soul, any soul in your soul, to reappraise both the promise and the dream.
That's what we've been doing lately in our various ways in our various Americas. On the sidewalk outside a Gladys Knight concert, a vendor sells a T-shirt depicting King and Obama shaking hands above the legend, ''Sometimes, dreams come true.'' Meanwhile, they are passing around a ''joke'' on the Internet that has Obama picking Sylvester Stallone as his running mate: ''Rambo and Sambo,'' goes the punch line.
The two extremes have one thing in common: slack-faced disbelief. Could it be? Could it really be?
Apparently, it could.
The realization coalesces something some of us never dared hope and others never dared fear: the idea that one day America would take its promise seriously.
And if that realization requires African-Americans to recalibrate their cynicism about what ''they'' will and will not allow black folks to achieve, it seems plain that the greater shock and sense of dislocation is borne by ''they,'' who must now recalibrate their assessment of what black folks can achieve. Small wonder ''they'' have responded frantically, crying with ever more shrillness that this Obama character is something other, something foreign, something strange. Something not really, truly American.
They have grown used to defining ''American'' as a certain skin color, a certain religion and heritage. They have forgotten that ''American'' was, first and foremost, a certain ideal.
Thomas Jefferson stated it thusly: all men are created equal.
The Pledge of Allegiance says: liberty and justice for all. And King, in that speech 45 years ago, spoke of the day ''all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics'' would harmonize upon a song of freedom.
Not truly American, they say? On Thursday, a nation whose credo holds equality to be a birthright will see a brown-skinned man, son of Kenya and Kansas, assume leadership of a major political party. No, it is not the panacea, not the End of Race in America. But it is striking evidence of a promise fulfilled, a dream redeemed.
How could anything be more American than that?
My Commentary:
Comments
MLK's reaffirmation of America's founding ideals was a vital foundation for the success of the early civil rights movement in abolishing legal segregation. But his later embrace of socialism as an ideal seriously undermined his legacy.
That is because socialism (i.e., collectivism) in all of its forms...communism, fascism, nazism, welfare statism, et al...is incompatible with those ideals. Collectivism means the supremacy of the group, and the subordination of the individual to group whims. The "the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"... which includes property rights, without which no other rights are possible...belongs to the individual human being, and only the individual human being. Collectivism is the denial of individual rights.
Rights are a moral concept that defines one?s freedom of action in a social context...i.e., in relation to everyone else. Socially, rights impose a single moral obligation on all of us...to respect the same rights in all others. Unalienable means that each individual is free to act in his own interest according to his own judgement free from coercive predation and exploitation by others...i.e., his rights are absolute. This means that there is no right to the unearned...to healthcare, to an education, to a job...provided by someone else, except in the case of voluntary, uncoerced charity. There is only the right to be free to achieve those things by one's own effort, and in voluntary association and trade with others. To be free from coercion means to be free of all coercion, including governmental coercion. The government's proper job is to protect those unalienable rights-"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men"- which are possessed by all people, at all times.
There is only one social system under which these conditions are possible. That system is laissez-faire capitalism.
Obama embraces the opposite. He implores Americans, especially the young, to abandon their own personal pursuit of happiness...their dreams, career goals, and desires...and instead embrace the theme of his campaign. Service and sacrifice, he says, are what America is about. But a call for servitude to one's neighbor, one's community, the state or the nation...and the call for Americans to sacrifice, not to pursue, their individual values and happiness...is as alien to American ideals as one can imagine. It is the siren song of socialism, not capitalism...of tyranny, not freedom.
Obama should correct the contradiction in MLK's legacy, by calling for policies that are consistent with every individual's unalienable rights to his life, his liberty, his property, and the pursuit of his own happiness. He won't, though, because he is a collectivist through and through. Obama's America is one of servitude and sacrifice, not the pursuit of happiness. His is a vision not of a better America, but of a poorer, less free America.
Yes, it is a significant American milestone that "a brown-skinned man, son of Kenya and Kansas, [will] assume leadership of a major political party." But only when all Americans recognize the true meaning of the words "the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" will we have "striking evidence of a promise fulfilled, a dream redeemed."
How could anything be more American than that?
Posted by: Zemack
8/28/2008 6:51 PM
Other's Commentary:
Zwemack labeling any program to even out the playing field and the wealth of this rich country with names such as socialism, communism welfare state or what ever is a shameful behavior in my opinion and only play for people who already share your world view.
Here is another label for you oligarchy as in the form of government we are now enjoying under the Republicans where we have government for and by the top 1 percent of the economic population.
Sorry if I am more concern about the sick and poor then I am for the shareholders and CEO of the health insurance companies and therefore wish us to join with the rest of the Western world and get universal health care for all.
Sorry if I don?t think that anyone should need to sleep and find food in a garbage container even if they are too mentally ill to take care of themselves.
Sorry if I don?t think that we should continue a system that have the top few percent of the population owning and controlling the whole country for their and their children benefit and the hell with the rest of us.
Yes you are right we could go too far in the other direction but I will start worrying about that after we start acting like a caring society for the least people amount us and stop the decline of the middle class.
Posted by: WRM
8/28/08 8:02pm
My Commentary:
WRM
"Zwemack labeling any program to even out the playing field and the wealth of this rich country with names such as socialism, communism welfare state or what ever is a shameful behavior in my opinion and only play for people who already share your world view."- WRM
Welfare statism is based on the principle that the state, acting for the "good" of the collective, holds the unlimited power to confiscate the privately produced wealth of its individual citizens and that that principle supercedes the good of those citizens. It holds that rights are a collective (i.e., group), not individual, attribute. It is the negation of individual rights. "Any program to even out the?the wealth of this rich country" is welfare statism. It is a form of socialism different from communism or Nazism only as a matter of degree, not substance. If you can tell me how welfare statism is fundamentally...i.e., in principle...different from any other form of socialism, I'd like to here it.
"To even out the playing field" is the very purpose of the words of the Declaration of Independence that Mr. Pitts, and MLK quote. That all men are created equal possessing the unalienable rights of life, liberty, [property,] and the pursuit of happiness is intended to do just that. It means that rights are inseparable (unalienable) from each as an individual, and are held equally, by all people, at all times. You can't get a more level field than that. All wealth is produced by people exercising those rights, and "any program to even out...the wealth of this rich country" through the coercive power of the state is nothing more than legalized theft and violates the principle of "unalienable rights" and negates this country?s founding ideals.
"Sorry if I am more concern about the sick and poor then I am for the shareholders and CEO of the health insurance companies..."- WRM
That statement inverts an immutable fact of nature...production comes before consumption. The wealth that humans need to live and flourish...from nails to computers to food to healthcare...does not just materialize in nature but must be produced through a process of reason and productive work. Wealth production requires certain social conditions to occur...freedom and a rights-protecting government. Every individual must be free to think and act on his own rational judgement, to set his own goals and to strive to achieve them by his own effort, and to engage in voluntary trade with others, free from coercive interference by others. The American ideal of unalienable, equal rights is the principle that guarantees the proper social conditions for man to produce. Anyone who disregards the unalienable rights of life, liberty, [property,] and the pursuit of happiness of "shareholders and CEOs and the top few percent of the population" or any other producers cannot claim "concern about the sick and poor." Production comes before consumption, and individual rights comes before production. That is not my worldview. That is an indisputable fact of man's nature and of reality.
It is not your concern for the sick or of those down on their economic fortunes that I object to. It is your means of helping them. Charity is a worthwhile pursuit only if it is uncoerced and voluntary. Each individual, possessing unalienable rights, must be free to decide who, when, and in what capacity he will assist others based on his own value-judgements and his own available resources. Someone who wants "a caring society" would not force his own idea of worthwhile charity on others. Claiming "concern about the sick and poor" and then demanding a government program to force others to pay for the luxury of your compassion makes you out to be thoroughly PHONY.
If charitable help for the down and out and increased economic opportunity for the poor is your goal, then increased production of wealth should be your first goal. This means unalienable rights and capitalism, not welfare state programs that confiscate wealth and violate rights and thus diminish production and economic opportunity.
Posted by: Zemack
8/29/2008 6:14 PM
Other's Commentary:
Zemack the society as a whole set the structure for wealth creating and as such, we all therefore have a right to share in that wealth. No individual have the power to create wealth without using the inter-structure that the social as a whole had build.
Is it not strange that the granting of public lands by the millions of acres for example to the railroad companies in the 1800s for the public good is fine but not the transfer of some of the wealth to the poor also for the public good is somehow wrong?
It is somehow fine to grant land and share the cost of a ball park in down town Miami to a private firm to the tune of hundred of millions of dollars but not to build low income housing costing millions!
The poor should not to have to plea for health care it should be their right to not die due to being on the bottom of the economic ladder and that right is accepted by every Western Country but for our.
There is a balance in everything and maintaining a strong self interest in creating wealth to benefit you and your family is in the society interest, however so is taking care of the mentally ill and the sick even if they are on the bottom of the economic pile.
Posted by: WRM
8/29/2008 10:30 PM
My Commentary:
WRM, 8/29/08
The "structure"...the proper social conditions...for wealth creating are "set" by nature and the requirements of man's survival, not "society as a whole". Those social conditions need to be discovered, not "set" by the arbitrary whim of "society as a whole" or any group or individual. There is no "society as a whole", as opposed to its individual members. The great achievement of the Enlightenment thinkers and of America?s Founding Fathers was to discover, and implement, those social conditions. The result was the first nation on earth to be established based on the supreme value of the individual...all individuals...his unalienable rights, and a government designed to protect those rights. They recognized the power of every person's rational faculty...his reason...and established the individual freedom to act on his reason, which is nature's requirement for man to survive and thrive.
All wealth is produced by individuals, whether acting alone or in voluntary cooperation with one another. It is not produced, nor owned, by "society as a whole". There is no "whole," no supreme tribe, in America. There are only individuals possessing rights to freedom of action and freedom from predators. The only proper way to "share" wealth in a free and just society is through voluntary trade to mutual advantage...not by force, governmental or otherwise. Likewise, America's infrastructure (roads and bridges) was built mostly by private contractors and paid for by taxes. If your property rights are forfeited because you use the roads and bridges that your taxes helped pay for, as you seem to be claiming, then that is one of the best arguments for why governments shouldn't own or finance any infrastructure.
The building of the railroads was a great achievement of productive industrial geniuses who brought great benefits to their fellow men and helped lay the foundation for the great prosperity to come. Unfortunately, that achievement was marred by government interference. Some of the railroad builders used political connections to obtain government grants, subsidies, franchises, and legal protection from competition (which created the infamous coercive railroad monopolies). That was wrong and so is taxpayer funding of sports stadiums and a whole host of socialism-for-the-rich schemes. Corporate welfare handed out by politicians flush with taxpayer money in the name of "the public good" is a violation of individual rights.
There is no right to healthcare. There is no right to any manmade product of any kind. There is no right to wealth created by someone else. For a right of that kind to be ensured, the government would have to force others to pay for it through taxation, and force producers of that product to provide it...I.E., to rob and to enslave. A power of that kind in the hands of politicians is the path to tyranny, which is where we are heading. The government's only proper function is to protect individual rights, not violate them. People who are not poor should not be punished for their economic achievements, by being forced to support people who have the same freedom to achieve but didn't.
I agree on this much, WRM. Acting in your own self-interest to create "wealth to benefit you and your family" is, indeed, a benefit to "society." That is because of one simple reason?"society" is only so many individuals. And you, and every individual, is a part of society. When an individual benefits himself through his own productive work, he thus benefits society because he is society. He benefits ?society? in another very important way...by providing a product or service that others find valuable enough to buy (to trade for). By "maintaining a strong self interest in creating wealth to benefit you and your family," you are lifting others up as well. And the most productive individuals?those that grow businesses (without government favors) provide jobs as well. But you cannot reverse cause-and-effect. When the state starts violating, rather than protecting, your right to the pursuit of your own self-interest and happiness by confiscating your wealth for someone else?s unearned benefit...however needy...then the engine of prosperity and freedom is headed for destruction. There is no balance between wealth creation and wealth confiscation?between production and theft...between voluntary charity and forcible redistribution...between the protection of individual rights and their violation. Once you?ve granted to government the power to trample the people's rights some of the time, you have crossed the line to where rights are no longer unalienable. And once you?ve abandoned the principle that rights are unalienable, where do you draw the line on government?s expanding power and the people's shrinking freedom? You can't. You no longer have any principle to stand on.
Voluntary, private charity is the way to help those few who are truly unable to help themselves. Destroying the freedom that enables wealth production will not help them, or anyone else, except the rulers.
Posted by: Zemack
8/31/2008 7:58 AM
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Commentary 44-Parker on Warren Interview
A public forum in a religious context has no place in politics
Kathleen Parker | Washington Post Writer's Group
August 21, 2008
At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister -- no matter how beloved -- is supremely wrong.
It is also un-American.
For the past several days, since mega-pastor Rick Warren interviewed Barack Obama and John McCain at his Saddleback Church, most political debate has focused on who won.
Was it the nuanced, thoughtful Obama, who may have convinced a few more skeptics that he isn't a Muslim? Or was it the direct, confident McCain, who breezes through town hall-style meetings the way Obama sinks three-pointers from the back court?
Suffice it to say, each of the candidates' usual supporters felt validated in their choices. McCain convinced and comforted with characteristic certitude those most at ease with certitude; Obama convinced and comforted with his characteristic intellectual ambivalence those most at ease with ambivalence.
The winner, of course, was Warren, who has managed to position himself as political arbiter in a nation founded on the separation of church and state.
The loser was America.
In his enormously successful book, The Purpose-Driven Life, Warren begins: "It's not about you." Agreed. And this criticism is not aimed at Christians, evangelicals, other believers or nonbelievers -- or at Warren, who is a good man with an exemplary record of selfless works. Few have walked the walk with as much determination or success.
This is about higher principles that are compromised every time we pretend we're not applying a religious test when we're really applying a religious test.
It is true that no one was forced to participate in the Saddleback Forum and that both McCain and Obama are free agents. Warren certainly has a right to invite whomever he wishes to his church and to ask them whatever they're willing to answer.
His format and questions were interesting and the answers more revealing than the usual debate menu provides. But does it not seem just a little bit odd to have McCain and Obama chatting individually with a preacher in a public forum about their positions on evil and their relationship with Jesus Christ?
The past few decades of public confession and Oprah-style therapy have prepared us perfectly for a televangelist probing politicians about their moral failings. The Warren Q&A wasn't an inquisition exactly, but viewers would be justified in squirming.
What is the right answer, after all? What happens to the one who gets evil wrong? What's a proper relationship with Jesus? What's next? Interrogations by rabbis, priests and imams? What candidate would dare decline on the basis of mere principle?
Both Obama and McCain gave "good" answers, but that's not the point. They shouldn't have been asked. Is the American electorate now better prepared to cast votes knowing that Obama believes that "Jesus Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him," or that McCain feels that he is "saved and forgiven"?
What does that mean, anyway? What does it prove? Nothing except that these men are willing to say whatever they must -- and what most Americans personally think is no one's business -- to win the highest office.
Warren tried to defuse criticism about staging the interviews in his church by saying that though "we" believe in the separation of church and state, "we" don't believe in the separation of faith and politics. Faith, he said, "is just a worldview, and everybody has some kind of worldview. It's important to know what they are."
Presumably "we" refers to Warren's church of fellow evangelicals. And while, yes, everybody has some kind of worldview, it shouldn't be necessary in a pluralistic nation of secular laws to publicly define that view in Christian code.
For the moment, let's set aside our curiosity about what Jesus might do in a given circumstance and wonder what our founding fathers would have done at Saddleback Church. What would have happened to Thomas Jefferson if he had responded as he wrote in 1781:
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
Would the crowd at Saddleback have applauded and nodded through that one? Doubtful.
By today's new standard of pulpits in the public square, Jefferson -- the great advocate for religious freedom in America -- would have lost.
My Commentary:
We’ve come a long way since 1960, when JFK jumped through hoops to assure the nation that his Catholicism would not influence him in his capacity as president, thus re-affirming his commitment to church-state separation. Had Kennedy engaged in a Warren-type public interview with his priest, he would have been soundly defeated. We’ve come a long way indeed…in the wrong direction. Today we have a president who openly declares that America’s foreign policies are guided by his Christian beliefs.
That both 2008 major party candidates have agreed to this discussion with the influencial evangelical pastor Rick Warren highlights the growing cultural and political power of religion in America. Perhaps most significantly, Obama's presence here, as well as his previously announced support for so-called "faith-based initiatives," may signal the breakdown of the Left's commitment to preserving the wall of separation (one of the few areas of agreement, albeit a major one, that I have with them).
Kathleen Parker has hit a walk-off homerun here. To understand what the "wall" protects us from, one need only consider the consequences of the failure of the Founders to build a wall of separation between economics and state. America is no longer a free, capitalist nation, but a semi-free mixed economy, where an explosion of economic pressure groups battle for control of the government's ever-widening power over production, trade and commerce. Each is attempting to gain some economic advantage over all others by legislative force. The result is an ever-more-powerful state, and steadily shrinking individual freedom, in the field of economics.
Imagine now an explosion of religious pressure groups. Considering the fact that religious beliefs are based on faith, rather than reason, the consequences would be far graver than in the field of economics. At least economic pressure groups are open to rational argumentation. Religious groups would not be, having abandoned reason for faith. Religious beliefs, in essence, amount to-“It is so, because I say it is”. The Founders understood this, and explicitly disconnected religion from political power. A re-connection would lead to the same kind of bloodless civil war of pressure groups as in the economic realm, with religious factions fighting to impose their own particular creed on everyone else. The big loser, again, would be the individual and his rights.
Just as the endless array of economic special interests can now, to paraphrase Jefferson, "pick your pocket and break your leg," so to would the new array of religious pressure groups. Just as the state's growing taxing and regulatory power led to our dwindling economic freedom, so to would the state's growing power in the field of religion lead to an end to freedom in the field of ideas. An end to the "wall" would mean an end to the First Amendment, including religious freedom, which includes the right to hold no religious beliefs at all.
The Religious Right...i.e., political Christianity...is at least as great a threat to freedom in America as is the socialist left. Both lead to the same end- dictatorship.
I heartily applaud Ms. Parker's perceptive and insightful analysis of the Rick Warren interview.
Kathleen Parker | Washington Post Writer's Group
August 21, 2008
At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister -- no matter how beloved -- is supremely wrong.
It is also un-American.
For the past several days, since mega-pastor Rick Warren interviewed Barack Obama and John McCain at his Saddleback Church, most political debate has focused on who won.
Was it the nuanced, thoughtful Obama, who may have convinced a few more skeptics that he isn't a Muslim? Or was it the direct, confident McCain, who breezes through town hall-style meetings the way Obama sinks three-pointers from the back court?
Suffice it to say, each of the candidates' usual supporters felt validated in their choices. McCain convinced and comforted with characteristic certitude those most at ease with certitude; Obama convinced and comforted with his characteristic intellectual ambivalence those most at ease with ambivalence.
The winner, of course, was Warren, who has managed to position himself as political arbiter in a nation founded on the separation of church and state.
The loser was America.
In his enormously successful book, The Purpose-Driven Life, Warren begins: "It's not about you." Agreed. And this criticism is not aimed at Christians, evangelicals, other believers or nonbelievers -- or at Warren, who is a good man with an exemplary record of selfless works. Few have walked the walk with as much determination or success.
This is about higher principles that are compromised every time we pretend we're not applying a religious test when we're really applying a religious test.
It is true that no one was forced to participate in the Saddleback Forum and that both McCain and Obama are free agents. Warren certainly has a right to invite whomever he wishes to his church and to ask them whatever they're willing to answer.
His format and questions were interesting and the answers more revealing than the usual debate menu provides. But does it not seem just a little bit odd to have McCain and Obama chatting individually with a preacher in a public forum about their positions on evil and their relationship with Jesus Christ?
The past few decades of public confession and Oprah-style therapy have prepared us perfectly for a televangelist probing politicians about their moral failings. The Warren Q&A wasn't an inquisition exactly, but viewers would be justified in squirming.
What is the right answer, after all? What happens to the one who gets evil wrong? What's a proper relationship with Jesus? What's next? Interrogations by rabbis, priests and imams? What candidate would dare decline on the basis of mere principle?
Both Obama and McCain gave "good" answers, but that's not the point. They shouldn't have been asked. Is the American electorate now better prepared to cast votes knowing that Obama believes that "Jesus Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him," or that McCain feels that he is "saved and forgiven"?
What does that mean, anyway? What does it prove? Nothing except that these men are willing to say whatever they must -- and what most Americans personally think is no one's business -- to win the highest office.
Warren tried to defuse criticism about staging the interviews in his church by saying that though "we" believe in the separation of church and state, "we" don't believe in the separation of faith and politics. Faith, he said, "is just a worldview, and everybody has some kind of worldview. It's important to know what they are."
Presumably "we" refers to Warren's church of fellow evangelicals. And while, yes, everybody has some kind of worldview, it shouldn't be necessary in a pluralistic nation of secular laws to publicly define that view in Christian code.
For the moment, let's set aside our curiosity about what Jesus might do in a given circumstance and wonder what our founding fathers would have done at Saddleback Church. What would have happened to Thomas Jefferson if he had responded as he wrote in 1781:
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
Would the crowd at Saddleback have applauded and nodded through that one? Doubtful.
By today's new standard of pulpits in the public square, Jefferson -- the great advocate for religious freedom in America -- would have lost.
My Commentary:
We’ve come a long way since 1960, when JFK jumped through hoops to assure the nation that his Catholicism would not influence him in his capacity as president, thus re-affirming his commitment to church-state separation. Had Kennedy engaged in a Warren-type public interview with his priest, he would have been soundly defeated. We’ve come a long way indeed…in the wrong direction. Today we have a president who openly declares that America’s foreign policies are guided by his Christian beliefs.
That both 2008 major party candidates have agreed to this discussion with the influencial evangelical pastor Rick Warren highlights the growing cultural and political power of religion in America. Perhaps most significantly, Obama's presence here, as well as his previously announced support for so-called "faith-based initiatives," may signal the breakdown of the Left's commitment to preserving the wall of separation (one of the few areas of agreement, albeit a major one, that I have with them).
Kathleen Parker has hit a walk-off homerun here. To understand what the "wall" protects us from, one need only consider the consequences of the failure of the Founders to build a wall of separation between economics and state. America is no longer a free, capitalist nation, but a semi-free mixed economy, where an explosion of economic pressure groups battle for control of the government's ever-widening power over production, trade and commerce. Each is attempting to gain some economic advantage over all others by legislative force. The result is an ever-more-powerful state, and steadily shrinking individual freedom, in the field of economics.
Imagine now an explosion of religious pressure groups. Considering the fact that religious beliefs are based on faith, rather than reason, the consequences would be far graver than in the field of economics. At least economic pressure groups are open to rational argumentation. Religious groups would not be, having abandoned reason for faith. Religious beliefs, in essence, amount to-“It is so, because I say it is”. The Founders understood this, and explicitly disconnected religion from political power. A re-connection would lead to the same kind of bloodless civil war of pressure groups as in the economic realm, with religious factions fighting to impose their own particular creed on everyone else. The big loser, again, would be the individual and his rights.
Just as the endless array of economic special interests can now, to paraphrase Jefferson, "pick your pocket and break your leg," so to would the new array of religious pressure groups. Just as the state's growing taxing and regulatory power led to our dwindling economic freedom, so to would the state's growing power in the field of religion lead to an end to freedom in the field of ideas. An end to the "wall" would mean an end to the First Amendment, including religious freedom, which includes the right to hold no religious beliefs at all.
The Religious Right...i.e., political Christianity...is at least as great a threat to freedom in America as is the socialist left. Both lead to the same end- dictatorship.
I heartily applaud Ms. Parker's perceptive and insightful analysis of the Rick Warren interview.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Commentary 43-The Real America
'Real' America has been here all along
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@miamiherald.com
A few words about the search for America.
Meaning not the piece of land bounded by Atlantic and Pacific but, rather, the one that exists as a fixed point in the communal psyche, the one that registers true north on our shared moral compass. It is the America where Beaver Cleaver lived, the America of manicured lawns and neat three-bedroom homes bordered by fences made of white pickets. It is the monochromatic America where dad worked and mom kept house and the family went to church together every Sunday, the America of once upon a time and never was. Some of us have been trying to get there (get back there?) for a very long time.
Conservative bloggers and pundits have exploited the longing for this America with shrill desperation to make voters fear Barack Obama, he of the ''funny name'' and exotic parentage. The lies have been brazen and prodigious, vivid illustration of the axiom that untruths big enough, repeated persistently enough, become true. So the airwaves and the Internet swarm with mendacity: Obama is a Muslim; Obama does not salute the flag; Obama mocks the Bible; Obama is not a citizen; Obama is the anti-Christ. Amazingly, the lies do not crumble under the weight of their own fatuity. Amazingly, they fester instead.
It is not surprising to see such tactics from the people who managed to paint a war hero as a traitor in 2004. But last week brought news that similar tactics were considered by one of Obama's fellow Democrats: Sen. Hillary Clinton. According to a story in the Atlantic Monthly, Mark Penn, one of Clinton's senior strategists, issued a memo urging her to attack Obama's ''lack of American roots'' during the party primaries.
'' . . . [H]is roots to basic American values and culture,'' wrote Penn, ''are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American . . . '' In other words, Obama was born in Hawaii (is that even a real state?), spent part of his childhood in Indonesia and does not resemble the presidents on the currency. Ergo, Obama is not American.
It is to her credit that Clinton never picked up on this line of attack. It is to Penn's lasting dishonor that he, even in the midst of a hard-fought campaign, offered it. He is toying with dangerous forces.
Perhaps it's enough to note by way of illustration that according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups in this country has risen by almost half since 2000.
Yes, economic dislocation drives that rise, as do terrorism and a rancorous debate over immigration. But that rise also reflects the bone deep terror of those who feel that the further you get from true north -- true normal -- on the compass, from picket fences and church on Sunday, from a white middle American wholesomeness of once upon a time and never was, the further you get from America. To them, anyone who doesn't fit that America -- Muslims or Mexicans or gays or liberals or businesswomen or American Indians or India Indians or any guy with a funny name and exotic parentage -- represents a clear and present danger.
That's wrong, of course. And Penn knows it's wrong, but thought to exploit it anyway. That's beyond cynical.
One can only imagine how that cynicism plays with the Muslim who fights for this country because he thinks this country is worth it, or the gay man who petitions for change because he knows that here, change is possible, or the Indian woman who came here because, she felt, this is where opportunity lives. Their faith gives the lie to the cynicism of political calculation.
And proves that some of us have no need to search for America. Some of us know it's been right here all along.
My Commentary
The America that always was…however imperfectly…is a nation founded on the revolutionary premise that man the individual…every individual…has a natural inalienable right to be free from the exploitation of, and servitude to, any king, the state, the theocrat, the democratic majority, the “humanitarian with a guillotine,” the “social justice” totalitarian, or his neighbor.
America is a nation in which, philosophically, each is his own person, not his brothers’ keeper, who is free to pursue his own welfare and happiness under his government-protected rights to life, liberty, and property.
Obama is a threat (as is McCain, who holds the same fundamental premises but with a pseudo-free market veneer) because he is at root anti-American…not in the sense that he doesn’t love America, which I’m sure he does…but in the philosophical sense. He is the champion not of individual rights, but of collective “rights”…of the power of the group over the individual.
Mr. Pitts is right about the various false stereotypes offered up as what America was (or is). But Obama (and McCain) offers up his own false stereotype…that of an America built on sacrifice and service to each other or the nation. The exact opposite is true. America’s great strength is built on the tremendous productive energy released by free individuals pursuing their own self-interest by their own effort and through voluntary association and trade with each other.
I do not claim here that America’s ideals have ever been fully attained. From its founding, many have been legally barred from access to those ideals. But those ideals, now forgotten by most, are none-the-less real…and waiting to be rediscovered.
For the first time in my 41 years as a registered voter, I will not pull the lever for either major party candidate, because in my view, neither stands for the real America.
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@miamiherald.com
A few words about the search for America.
Meaning not the piece of land bounded by Atlantic and Pacific but, rather, the one that exists as a fixed point in the communal psyche, the one that registers true north on our shared moral compass. It is the America where Beaver Cleaver lived, the America of manicured lawns and neat three-bedroom homes bordered by fences made of white pickets. It is the monochromatic America where dad worked and mom kept house and the family went to church together every Sunday, the America of once upon a time and never was. Some of us have been trying to get there (get back there?) for a very long time.
Conservative bloggers and pundits have exploited the longing for this America with shrill desperation to make voters fear Barack Obama, he of the ''funny name'' and exotic parentage. The lies have been brazen and prodigious, vivid illustration of the axiom that untruths big enough, repeated persistently enough, become true. So the airwaves and the Internet swarm with mendacity: Obama is a Muslim; Obama does not salute the flag; Obama mocks the Bible; Obama is not a citizen; Obama is the anti-Christ. Amazingly, the lies do not crumble under the weight of their own fatuity. Amazingly, they fester instead.
It is not surprising to see such tactics from the people who managed to paint a war hero as a traitor in 2004. But last week brought news that similar tactics were considered by one of Obama's fellow Democrats: Sen. Hillary Clinton. According to a story in the Atlantic Monthly, Mark Penn, one of Clinton's senior strategists, issued a memo urging her to attack Obama's ''lack of American roots'' during the party primaries.
'' . . . [H]is roots to basic American values and culture,'' wrote Penn, ''are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American . . . '' In other words, Obama was born in Hawaii (is that even a real state?), spent part of his childhood in Indonesia and does not resemble the presidents on the currency. Ergo, Obama is not American.
It is to her credit that Clinton never picked up on this line of attack. It is to Penn's lasting dishonor that he, even in the midst of a hard-fought campaign, offered it. He is toying with dangerous forces.
Perhaps it's enough to note by way of illustration that according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups in this country has risen by almost half since 2000.
Yes, economic dislocation drives that rise, as do terrorism and a rancorous debate over immigration. But that rise also reflects the bone deep terror of those who feel that the further you get from true north -- true normal -- on the compass, from picket fences and church on Sunday, from a white middle American wholesomeness of once upon a time and never was, the further you get from America. To them, anyone who doesn't fit that America -- Muslims or Mexicans or gays or liberals or businesswomen or American Indians or India Indians or any guy with a funny name and exotic parentage -- represents a clear and present danger.
That's wrong, of course. And Penn knows it's wrong, but thought to exploit it anyway. That's beyond cynical.
One can only imagine how that cynicism plays with the Muslim who fights for this country because he thinks this country is worth it, or the gay man who petitions for change because he knows that here, change is possible, or the Indian woman who came here because, she felt, this is where opportunity lives. Their faith gives the lie to the cynicism of political calculation.
And proves that some of us have no need to search for America. Some of us know it's been right here all along.
My Commentary
The America that always was…however imperfectly…is a nation founded on the revolutionary premise that man the individual…every individual…has a natural inalienable right to be free from the exploitation of, and servitude to, any king, the state, the theocrat, the democratic majority, the “humanitarian with a guillotine,” the “social justice” totalitarian, or his neighbor.
America is a nation in which, philosophically, each is his own person, not his brothers’ keeper, who is free to pursue his own welfare and happiness under his government-protected rights to life, liberty, and property.
Obama is a threat (as is McCain, who holds the same fundamental premises but with a pseudo-free market veneer) because he is at root anti-American…not in the sense that he doesn’t love America, which I’m sure he does…but in the philosophical sense. He is the champion not of individual rights, but of collective “rights”…of the power of the group over the individual.
Mr. Pitts is right about the various false stereotypes offered up as what America was (or is). But Obama (and McCain) offers up his own false stereotype…that of an America built on sacrifice and service to each other or the nation. The exact opposite is true. America’s great strength is built on the tremendous productive energy released by free individuals pursuing their own self-interest by their own effort and through voluntary association and trade with each other.
I do not claim here that America’s ideals have ever been fully attained. From its founding, many have been legally barred from access to those ideals. But those ideals, now forgotten by most, are none-the-less real…and waiting to be rediscovered.
For the first time in my 41 years as a registered voter, I will not pull the lever for either major party candidate, because in my view, neither stands for the real America.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Commentary 42-Model health legislation
Early warning system for ailing hospitals becomes law
Corzine signs four-bill package aiming for improvements in health care
Saturday, August 09, 2008
BY ANGELA STEWART
Star-Ledger Staff
Hospitals suffering financial trouble would come to the attention of authorities much sooner under a bill signed yesterday by Gov. Jon Corzine.
The bill is part of a larger health reform package that also seeks to protect the uninsured and increase accountability in hospital management.
The package of four bills signed by Corzine at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton puts into practice several key recommendations made by the Commission on Rationalizing Health Care Resources, a panel appointed by the governor to review the state's health care delivery system. Corzine said the bills signed yesterday would "ensure there is increased transparency, better financial management and long-term planning in place for all hospitals."
One of the bills, S1796/A2608, creates an early warning system that provides the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services with the authority and needed information to adequately monitor the finances of the state's hospitals, allowing it to identify distressed hospitals and take action before a crisis strikes.
The action comes on the heels of legislation signed by Corzine back in June appropriating $44 million in a special fund to provide critical support and a mechanism for working with hospitals and other financially distressed health care facilities that face closure or significant service reductions.
"New Jersey has faced an epidemic of hospital closures in recent years," said Sen. Robert Gordon (D-Bergen), a prime sponsor of the early warning bill. "Through this legislation, the Department of Health will have an early warning when a hospital becomes fiscally unstable and will be able to intervene before the fiscal instability gives way to fiscal insolvency, and yet another health care facility in the Garden State has to close its doors forever."
Already this year, four acute-care hospitals have closed: Barnert in Paterson, Saint James and Columbus in Newark and LibertyHealth Greenville in Jersey City. A fifth hospital, Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center in Plainfield, plans to shut its doors on Wednesday.
Last year saw three hospitals close due to financial problems: PBI Regional Medical Center in Passaic, Union Hospital in Union and Pascack Valley in Westwood, according to the New Jersey Hospital Association.
Association leaders, while pleased with yesterday's signing, stressed that much work remains to be done to address the problems plaguing the state's 75 acute-care hospitals. Such issues include inadequate reimbursement and what the association calls the state's "chronic underfunding" of hospital care for the state's poorest patients.
"Clearly, we cannot rest on the package of bills signed into law today," said Betsy Ryan, association president and CEO.
Another bill signed yesterday, A2609/S1797, will ensure that working poor families without health insurance are not overcharged for needed hospital care by requiring hospitals charge no more than 15 percent above the Medicare rate.
Corzine also signed a bill, A2607/S1794, requiring each acute-care and state psychiatric hospital to annually conduct a public meeting for the community it serves.
Hospital board members will also be required to undergo comprehensive training in their role and responsibilities as a result of another bill signed yesterday, S1795/A2606. New Jersey becomes the first state to have such a requirement.
"The state has a responsibility to the taxpayers to ensure that the billions in public dollars distributed to hospitals are spent as efficiently as possible," said New Jersey Health and Senior Services Commissioner Heather Howard.
Angela Stewart may be reached at astewart@starledger.com or (973) 392-4178.
Model Health LegislationModel health legislation
Posted by Star-Ledger editorial board August 09, 2008 10:30PM
A long-overdue measure to limit what hospitals can charge uninsured working people is the best of a package of health bills that Gov. Jon Corzine signed into law last week -- and the others aren't bad.
They include a measure that gives the state more authority to poke into hospital finances and take corrective action before a public bailout is necessary. Another requires hospital trustees, no matter how long in the post, to take a course on how to do that job. These laws say that hospitals and those who run them will be held accountable for bad management, something that is also long overdue.
In fact, as noted at the signing ceremony, the New Jersey health care package incorporates the kind of measures that Congress should study as it searches for national health care solutions.
Overcharging the uninsured is a national problem, but a study published last year found New Jersey hospitals pile on the most. Government controls the rates paid to Medicaid and Medicare, and big private insurance companies negotiate prices with hospitals. That leaves the uninsured prey to "charges" that have nothing to do with the actual cost of services rendered and everything to do with making up losses and maximizing revenue.
It is patently unfair to put such a burden on lower-income families. The new legislation says that New Jersey families with incomes less than 500 percent of the federal poverty level cannot be charged more than 15 percent above what the federal Medicare program for the elderly is charged. That protection is sorely needed. Health care bills are the No. 1 cause of personal bankruptcy in the country.
Many hospitals are also in trouble. One provision of the new law allows the state to look at a hospital's books and appoint a representative to the board of trustees, or a monitor, at the hospital's expense, when there is evidence of financial peril. That measure provides some hope of correcting financial problems -- rather than waiting for a crisis that might require a public bailout. This should help distinguish hospitals that fall victim to market forces from those with bad management.
The New Jersey Hospital Association, which did not criticize the package, contends that health reform in New Jersey will be incomplete until the state addresses the problem of so-called charity care.
New Jersey requires hospitals to take all patients, regardless of their ability to pay, but the state has fallen behind when it comes to adequately reimbursing hospitals for that charity care. The solution, however, must be in the same vein as this new set of health reforms, which put what is best for the patient and the taxpayer first. The charity care problem will best be solved by finding ways to provide health insurance coverage -- including preventive care -- to more people rather than constantly increasing the subsidy to hospitals.
That's another idea Congress should take seriously.
My Commentary
Posted by Zemack on 08/10/08 at 10:14PM
What is "patently unfair" is to ignore the cause of the current health insurance and healthcare crises...the government itself. It is absolutely ludicrous to now turn to government for the solution, which is akin to swallowing a full glass of the poison that has been killing us in small doses for decades.
There is Medicare, which violates the rights of everyone by forcing people to pay the healthcare costs of others while making them simultaneously dependent on others for theirs in retirement.
There is Medicaid, which forces people to pay the healthcare costs of the "poor," thus denying them the right to make their own decisions on charitable giving based on their own values and determination on what they can afford to give.
Both Medicare and Medicaid impose massive price-fixing on the healthcare industry, thus violating a fundamental human right...the right of producers (health care providers such as doctors, drug makers, etc.) and their customers (the patients) to contract for products and services based on mutual agreement to mutual advantage. Those price controls are now being extended outside of those programs.
There is the government-imposed third-party-payer system, in which the employer chooses the health insurance plan and the insurer (which works for the employer) determines services covered, co-pays, etc. Under this absurd system, the employee, who actually pays for the coverage (because it is part of his compensation package), is completely disconnected from the doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, etc., who actually work for the third-party payer and are beholden to them.
There are the hundreds of health benefit, community ratings, and guaranteed issue insurance mandates imposed on the industry, thus destroying anything even resembling a free market. There is the virtual ban on the interstate sale of health insurance products, thus destroying any semblance of competition in the health insurance market. As a result, the insurance market is dominated by a government regulated and protected cartel of quasi-private companies that, like the government run "insurance" programs, wield enormous control over the healthcare decisions of individual Americans.
I have only scratched the surface here. The problems in healthcare in America have grown in lock-step with government intrusions and controls. The solution begins with acknowledging this fact, not with compounding it with more of the same poison. Roe v. Wade is justified on the grounds that abortion is a private matter between a woman and her doctor. Fair enough. The same logic, then, applies to all healthcare decisions...whether medical procedures, prices paid, insurance coverage, or charitable giving. All issues concerning healthcare are private matters between each individual and his doctor, healthcare products or insurance company, and conscience. The government has no right to coercively interfere in those private decisions.
It is not the proper function of government to favor one group of citizens at the expense of the rights of others (to "put what is best for the patient and the taxpayer first"). The proper function of government is to protect the rights of all citizens...equally and at all times. This includes the doctors and other healthcare professionals who actually provide the healthcare. The current system, and the "reforms" being enacted by New Jersey, represents a massive and immoral violation of the rights of doctors, patients, insurers, taxpayers...i.e., of everyone.
We are cascading toward total government control of healthcare based on a dangerous fallacy...the alleged "right" to healthcare. Healthcare is a need, not a right. There can be no right to any man-made product, aside from what one produces himself or acquires through voluntary trade (or charity). If healthcare is a right, then the government is ablidged to guarantee that right. And there is only one way government can guarantee to anyone a "right" of that kind...by forcing others to pay for and/or provide it. In other words, to loot (tax) the productive and enslave the providers. In other words, socialism.
It's time to stop evading the true nature of where we are heading, and of those who are pushing us there in the name of "lower-income families, taxpayers, and patients." The only practical and moral solution to America's healthcare crises is to begin unwinding the labyrinth of government intrusions and re-establish something that hasn't existed for decades...free market capitalism in medicine.
Corzine signs four-bill package aiming for improvements in health care
Saturday, August 09, 2008
BY ANGELA STEWART
Star-Ledger Staff
Hospitals suffering financial trouble would come to the attention of authorities much sooner under a bill signed yesterday by Gov. Jon Corzine.
The bill is part of a larger health reform package that also seeks to protect the uninsured and increase accountability in hospital management.
The package of four bills signed by Corzine at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton puts into practice several key recommendations made by the Commission on Rationalizing Health Care Resources, a panel appointed by the governor to review the state's health care delivery system. Corzine said the bills signed yesterday would "ensure there is increased transparency, better financial management and long-term planning in place for all hospitals."
One of the bills, S1796/A2608, creates an early warning system that provides the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services with the authority and needed information to adequately monitor the finances of the state's hospitals, allowing it to identify distressed hospitals and take action before a crisis strikes.
The action comes on the heels of legislation signed by Corzine back in June appropriating $44 million in a special fund to provide critical support and a mechanism for working with hospitals and other financially distressed health care facilities that face closure or significant service reductions.
"New Jersey has faced an epidemic of hospital closures in recent years," said Sen. Robert Gordon (D-Bergen), a prime sponsor of the early warning bill. "Through this legislation, the Department of Health will have an early warning when a hospital becomes fiscally unstable and will be able to intervene before the fiscal instability gives way to fiscal insolvency, and yet another health care facility in the Garden State has to close its doors forever."
Already this year, four acute-care hospitals have closed: Barnert in Paterson, Saint James and Columbus in Newark and LibertyHealth Greenville in Jersey City. A fifth hospital, Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center in Plainfield, plans to shut its doors on Wednesday.
Last year saw three hospitals close due to financial problems: PBI Regional Medical Center in Passaic, Union Hospital in Union and Pascack Valley in Westwood, according to the New Jersey Hospital Association.
Association leaders, while pleased with yesterday's signing, stressed that much work remains to be done to address the problems plaguing the state's 75 acute-care hospitals. Such issues include inadequate reimbursement and what the association calls the state's "chronic underfunding" of hospital care for the state's poorest patients.
"Clearly, we cannot rest on the package of bills signed into law today," said Betsy Ryan, association president and CEO.
Another bill signed yesterday, A2609/S1797, will ensure that working poor families without health insurance are not overcharged for needed hospital care by requiring hospitals charge no more than 15 percent above the Medicare rate.
Corzine also signed a bill, A2607/S1794, requiring each acute-care and state psychiatric hospital to annually conduct a public meeting for the community it serves.
Hospital board members will also be required to undergo comprehensive training in their role and responsibilities as a result of another bill signed yesterday, S1795/A2606. New Jersey becomes the first state to have such a requirement.
"The state has a responsibility to the taxpayers to ensure that the billions in public dollars distributed to hospitals are spent as efficiently as possible," said New Jersey Health and Senior Services Commissioner Heather Howard.
Angela Stewart may be reached at astewart@starledger.com or (973) 392-4178.
Model Health LegislationModel health legislation
Posted by Star-Ledger editorial board August 09, 2008 10:30PM
A long-overdue measure to limit what hospitals can charge uninsured working people is the best of a package of health bills that Gov. Jon Corzine signed into law last week -- and the others aren't bad.
They include a measure that gives the state more authority to poke into hospital finances and take corrective action before a public bailout is necessary. Another requires hospital trustees, no matter how long in the post, to take a course on how to do that job. These laws say that hospitals and those who run them will be held accountable for bad management, something that is also long overdue.
In fact, as noted at the signing ceremony, the New Jersey health care package incorporates the kind of measures that Congress should study as it searches for national health care solutions.
Overcharging the uninsured is a national problem, but a study published last year found New Jersey hospitals pile on the most. Government controls the rates paid to Medicaid and Medicare, and big private insurance companies negotiate prices with hospitals. That leaves the uninsured prey to "charges" that have nothing to do with the actual cost of services rendered and everything to do with making up losses and maximizing revenue.
It is patently unfair to put such a burden on lower-income families. The new legislation says that New Jersey families with incomes less than 500 percent of the federal poverty level cannot be charged more than 15 percent above what the federal Medicare program for the elderly is charged. That protection is sorely needed. Health care bills are the No. 1 cause of personal bankruptcy in the country.
Many hospitals are also in trouble. One provision of the new law allows the state to look at a hospital's books and appoint a representative to the board of trustees, or a monitor, at the hospital's expense, when there is evidence of financial peril. That measure provides some hope of correcting financial problems -- rather than waiting for a crisis that might require a public bailout. This should help distinguish hospitals that fall victim to market forces from those with bad management.
The New Jersey Hospital Association, which did not criticize the package, contends that health reform in New Jersey will be incomplete until the state addresses the problem of so-called charity care.
New Jersey requires hospitals to take all patients, regardless of their ability to pay, but the state has fallen behind when it comes to adequately reimbursing hospitals for that charity care. The solution, however, must be in the same vein as this new set of health reforms, which put what is best for the patient and the taxpayer first. The charity care problem will best be solved by finding ways to provide health insurance coverage -- including preventive care -- to more people rather than constantly increasing the subsidy to hospitals.
That's another idea Congress should take seriously.
My Commentary
Posted by Zemack on 08/10/08 at 10:14PM
What is "patently unfair" is to ignore the cause of the current health insurance and healthcare crises...the government itself. It is absolutely ludicrous to now turn to government for the solution, which is akin to swallowing a full glass of the poison that has been killing us in small doses for decades.
There is Medicare, which violates the rights of everyone by forcing people to pay the healthcare costs of others while making them simultaneously dependent on others for theirs in retirement.
There is Medicaid, which forces people to pay the healthcare costs of the "poor," thus denying them the right to make their own decisions on charitable giving based on their own values and determination on what they can afford to give.
Both Medicare and Medicaid impose massive price-fixing on the healthcare industry, thus violating a fundamental human right...the right of producers (health care providers such as doctors, drug makers, etc.) and their customers (the patients) to contract for products and services based on mutual agreement to mutual advantage. Those price controls are now being extended outside of those programs.
There is the government-imposed third-party-payer system, in which the employer chooses the health insurance plan and the insurer (which works for the employer) determines services covered, co-pays, etc. Under this absurd system, the employee, who actually pays for the coverage (because it is part of his compensation package), is completely disconnected from the doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, etc., who actually work for the third-party payer and are beholden to them.
There are the hundreds of health benefit, community ratings, and guaranteed issue insurance mandates imposed on the industry, thus destroying anything even resembling a free market. There is the virtual ban on the interstate sale of health insurance products, thus destroying any semblance of competition in the health insurance market. As a result, the insurance market is dominated by a government regulated and protected cartel of quasi-private companies that, like the government run "insurance" programs, wield enormous control over the healthcare decisions of individual Americans.
I have only scratched the surface here. The problems in healthcare in America have grown in lock-step with government intrusions and controls. The solution begins with acknowledging this fact, not with compounding it with more of the same poison. Roe v. Wade is justified on the grounds that abortion is a private matter between a woman and her doctor. Fair enough. The same logic, then, applies to all healthcare decisions...whether medical procedures, prices paid, insurance coverage, or charitable giving. All issues concerning healthcare are private matters between each individual and his doctor, healthcare products or insurance company, and conscience. The government has no right to coercively interfere in those private decisions.
It is not the proper function of government to favor one group of citizens at the expense of the rights of others (to "put what is best for the patient and the taxpayer first"). The proper function of government is to protect the rights of all citizens...equally and at all times. This includes the doctors and other healthcare professionals who actually provide the healthcare. The current system, and the "reforms" being enacted by New Jersey, represents a massive and immoral violation of the rights of doctors, patients, insurers, taxpayers...i.e., of everyone.
We are cascading toward total government control of healthcare based on a dangerous fallacy...the alleged "right" to healthcare. Healthcare is a need, not a right. There can be no right to any man-made product, aside from what one produces himself or acquires through voluntary trade (or charity). If healthcare is a right, then the government is ablidged to guarantee that right. And there is only one way government can guarantee to anyone a "right" of that kind...by forcing others to pay for and/or provide it. In other words, to loot (tax) the productive and enslave the providers. In other words, socialism.
It's time to stop evading the true nature of where we are heading, and of those who are pushing us there in the name of "lower-income families, taxpayers, and patients." The only practical and moral solution to America's healthcare crises is to begin unwinding the labyrinth of government intrusions and re-establish something that hasn't existed for decades...free market capitalism in medicine.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Commentary 38- Dionne on Capitalism
Capitalism's Reality Check
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, July 11, 2008; Page A17
The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.
Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.
You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to "grow the pie" is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is "protectionism."
The old script is in rewrite. "We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation," Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.
He noted that in 1999 when Congress replaced the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act with a set of looser banking rules, "we let investment banks get into a much wider range of activities without regulation." This helped create the subprime mortgage mess and the cascading calamity in banking.
While Frank is a liberal, the same cannot be said of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yet in a speech on Tuesday, Bernanke sounded like a born-again New Dealer in calling for "a more robust framework for the prudential supervision of investment banks and other large securities dealers."
Bernanke said the Fed needed more authority to get inside "the structure and workings of financial markets" because "recent experience has clearly illustrated the importance, for the purpose of promoting financial stability, of having detailed information about money markets and the activities of borrowers and lenders in those markets." Sure sounds like Big Government to me.
This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early '80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What's becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.
What's striking is that conservatives who revere capitalism are offering their own criticisms of the way the system is working. Irwin Stelzer, director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies at the Hudson Institute, says the subprime crisis arose in part because lenders quickly sold their mortgages to others and bore no risk if the loans went bad.
"You have to have the person who's writing the risk bearing the risk," he says. "That means a whole host of regulations. There's no way around that."
While some conservatives now worry about the social and economic impact of growing inequalities, Stelzer isn't one of them. But he is highly critical of "the process that produces inequality."
"I don't like three of your friends on a board voting you a zillion dollars," Stelzer, who is also a business consultant, told me. "A cozy boardroom back-scratching operation offends me." He argues that "the preservation of the capitalist system" requires finding new ways of "linking compensation to performance."
Frank takes a similar view, arguing that CEOs "benefit substantially if the risks they take pay off" but "pay no penalty" if their risks lead to losses or even catastrophe -- another sign that capitalism, in its current form, isn't living by its own rules.
Frank also calls for new thinking on the impact of free trade. He argues it can no longer be denied that globalization "is a contributor to the stagnation of wages and it has produced large pools of highly mobile capital." Mobile capital and the threat of moving a plant abroad give employers a huge advantage in negotiations with employees. "If you're dealing with someone and you can pick up and leave and he can't, you have the advantage."
"Free trade has increased wealth, but it's been monopolized by a very small number of people," Frank said. The coming debate will focus not on shutting globalization down but rather on managing its effects with an eye toward the interests of "the most vulnerable people in the country."
In the campaign so far, John McCain has been clinging to the old economic orthodoxy while Barack Obama has proposed a modestly more active role for government. But the economic assumptions are changing faster than the rhetoric of the campaign. "Reality has broken in," says Frank. And none too soon.
My Commentary:
Zemack wrote
Does the term disingenuous come to mind? I’d be surprised if Mr. Dionne kept a straight face while writing this article. There is no “capitalism, in its current form.” There is only laissez-faire capitalism; the social system based on individual rights and a government that protects those rights…or statism, the social system of dictatorship. What we have today is a mixture of the two…i.e., a mixed economy.
The part that is failing today is not capitalism. Where do you see it?
Not in medicine, where 87% of America’s health care spending represents people spending other people’s money. And where the insurance market is buried under hundreds of government coverage mandates. And where the absurd government-imposed third-party-payer system leaves the individual who ultimately pays at the mercy of his boss or the state. And where massive government price-fixing through medicare, medicaid, and other wealth redistributionist schemes masquerading as “insurance” makes a mockery of market pricing. And where a new form of slavery has been created…EMTALA…which forces hospitals and their doctors to treat free of charge any free-loader who walks through an emergency room door demanding free healthcare.
Not in energy, where the industry is beset by government-imposed restrictions on production across the board, from exploration and drilling, to refinery construction and expansion, to nuclear power plants, to electricity transmission, to the laying of new pipelines. And where virtually every new energy infrastructure project is delayed or stymied by litigation-happy “environmentalists.” And where special government tax brakes and subsidies to politically connected companies with the latest “alternative energy” scheme are rampant. And where productive companies who produce and supply the energy we need are lambasted and threatened with theft by taxation of “excess” profits earned through market prices, while other companies…utilities…enjoy legal monopoly status and guaranteed prices and profit margins while being protected from competition.
Not in finance, where the banking industry is protected from bankruptcy by a government central bank that controls the money supply, interest rates, reserve and margin requirements, etc., and then acts as lender of last resort. And where the Community Reinvestment Act “encourages” lenders to offer mortgages to “sub-prime” (i.e., low-income) borrowers based on “flexible [i.e., lower] underwriting standards.” And where those same lenders can then sell those mortgages into a market artificially inflated by two government created and backed corporations, Fannie and Freddie. Where excessive housing “investment” is encouraged by tax policy. And where sound, prudent banking is penalized while reckless, unscrupulous lending is encouraged because of federal deposit insurance and the “too big to fail” bailout policies.
Mr. Dionne is attacking a straw man. Capitalism and free markets don’t exist today, except in bits and pieces here and there. Massive government intervention and control in our lives now approaches or exceeds the elements of freedom that still exist. The original Founding principles of inalienable individual rights protected by government are all but forgotten. The minimal “pseudo-deregulation” of recent decades pales in comparison to the size and scope of government.
Attacking alleged “free market failures” without investigating the coercive government policies, regulations and controls, some of which trace back decades, that preceded them is a sham. Today, it is not the distorted and shackled free market remnants, but ever-growing government interventions in private economic decision-making that has failed. Yet, Mr. Dionne and other statists blame free market capitalism, then call for even wider government powers to close whatever “loopholes” of freedom still exist. Well, some of us are on to the game. It’s not hard to see where this is all leading. If our freedom means anything, it is those who use government power to “regulate” the productive activities of private citizens that needs a reality check.
7/13/2008 2:44:56 PM
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, July 11, 2008; Page A17
The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.
Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.
You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to "grow the pie" is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is "protectionism."
The old script is in rewrite. "We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation," Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.
He noted that in 1999 when Congress replaced the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act with a set of looser banking rules, "we let investment banks get into a much wider range of activities without regulation." This helped create the subprime mortgage mess and the cascading calamity in banking.
While Frank is a liberal, the same cannot be said of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yet in a speech on Tuesday, Bernanke sounded like a born-again New Dealer in calling for "a more robust framework for the prudential supervision of investment banks and other large securities dealers."
Bernanke said the Fed needed more authority to get inside "the structure and workings of financial markets" because "recent experience has clearly illustrated the importance, for the purpose of promoting financial stability, of having detailed information about money markets and the activities of borrowers and lenders in those markets." Sure sounds like Big Government to me.
This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early '80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What's becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.
What's striking is that conservatives who revere capitalism are offering their own criticisms of the way the system is working. Irwin Stelzer, director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies at the Hudson Institute, says the subprime crisis arose in part because lenders quickly sold their mortgages to others and bore no risk if the loans went bad.
"You have to have the person who's writing the risk bearing the risk," he says. "That means a whole host of regulations. There's no way around that."
While some conservatives now worry about the social and economic impact of growing inequalities, Stelzer isn't one of them. But he is highly critical of "the process that produces inequality."
"I don't like three of your friends on a board voting you a zillion dollars," Stelzer, who is also a business consultant, told me. "A cozy boardroom back-scratching operation offends me." He argues that "the preservation of the capitalist system" requires finding new ways of "linking compensation to performance."
Frank takes a similar view, arguing that CEOs "benefit substantially if the risks they take pay off" but "pay no penalty" if their risks lead to losses or even catastrophe -- another sign that capitalism, in its current form, isn't living by its own rules.
Frank also calls for new thinking on the impact of free trade. He argues it can no longer be denied that globalization "is a contributor to the stagnation of wages and it has produced large pools of highly mobile capital." Mobile capital and the threat of moving a plant abroad give employers a huge advantage in negotiations with employees. "If you're dealing with someone and you can pick up and leave and he can't, you have the advantage."
"Free trade has increased wealth, but it's been monopolized by a very small number of people," Frank said. The coming debate will focus not on shutting globalization down but rather on managing its effects with an eye toward the interests of "the most vulnerable people in the country."
In the campaign so far, John McCain has been clinging to the old economic orthodoxy while Barack Obama has proposed a modestly more active role for government. But the economic assumptions are changing faster than the rhetoric of the campaign. "Reality has broken in," says Frank. And none too soon.
My Commentary:
Zemack wrote
Does the term disingenuous come to mind? I’d be surprised if Mr. Dionne kept a straight face while writing this article. There is no “capitalism, in its current form.” There is only laissez-faire capitalism; the social system based on individual rights and a government that protects those rights…or statism, the social system of dictatorship. What we have today is a mixture of the two…i.e., a mixed economy.
The part that is failing today is not capitalism. Where do you see it?
Not in medicine, where 87% of America’s health care spending represents people spending other people’s money. And where the insurance market is buried under hundreds of government coverage mandates. And where the absurd government-imposed third-party-payer system leaves the individual who ultimately pays at the mercy of his boss or the state. And where massive government price-fixing through medicare, medicaid, and other wealth redistributionist schemes masquerading as “insurance” makes a mockery of market pricing. And where a new form of slavery has been created…EMTALA…which forces hospitals and their doctors to treat free of charge any free-loader who walks through an emergency room door demanding free healthcare.
Not in energy, where the industry is beset by government-imposed restrictions on production across the board, from exploration and drilling, to refinery construction and expansion, to nuclear power plants, to electricity transmission, to the laying of new pipelines. And where virtually every new energy infrastructure project is delayed or stymied by litigation-happy “environmentalists.” And where special government tax brakes and subsidies to politically connected companies with the latest “alternative energy” scheme are rampant. And where productive companies who produce and supply the energy we need are lambasted and threatened with theft by taxation of “excess” profits earned through market prices, while other companies…utilities…enjoy legal monopoly status and guaranteed prices and profit margins while being protected from competition.
Not in finance, where the banking industry is protected from bankruptcy by a government central bank that controls the money supply, interest rates, reserve and margin requirements, etc., and then acts as lender of last resort. And where the Community Reinvestment Act “encourages” lenders to offer mortgages to “sub-prime” (i.e., low-income) borrowers based on “flexible [i.e., lower] underwriting standards.” And where those same lenders can then sell those mortgages into a market artificially inflated by two government created and backed corporations, Fannie and Freddie. Where excessive housing “investment” is encouraged by tax policy. And where sound, prudent banking is penalized while reckless, unscrupulous lending is encouraged because of federal deposit insurance and the “too big to fail” bailout policies.
Mr. Dionne is attacking a straw man. Capitalism and free markets don’t exist today, except in bits and pieces here and there. Massive government intervention and control in our lives now approaches or exceeds the elements of freedom that still exist. The original Founding principles of inalienable individual rights protected by government are all but forgotten. The minimal “pseudo-deregulation” of recent decades pales in comparison to the size and scope of government.
Attacking alleged “free market failures” without investigating the coercive government policies, regulations and controls, some of which trace back decades, that preceded them is a sham. Today, it is not the distorted and shackled free market remnants, but ever-growing government interventions in private economic decision-making that has failed. Yet, Mr. Dionne and other statists blame free market capitalism, then call for even wider government powers to close whatever “loopholes” of freedom still exist. Well, some of us are on to the game. It’s not hard to see where this is all leading. If our freedom means anything, it is those who use government power to “regulate” the productive activities of private citizens that needs a reality check.
7/13/2008 2:44:56 PM
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)