Why Does America Hate Free Market Capitalism?

Over at Balloon Juice, mistermix reports on how America’s internet service is being left in the dust by . . . wait for it . . . Lithuania.  Lithu – fuckin – ania.  Apparently, service (10/1 Mbps) that costs $40 - $60 here (depending on where you live) used to cost only $14.72 in Lithuania.  I say “used to cost” because Lithuania just doubled its speed with no increase in cost.  Which means that right now we in America are paying 3 or 4 times what Lithuanians pay and getting internet service at half the speed. 

(Click through and read mistermix’s entire post; weep at the fact that American internet service is half-speed compared to Lithuania’s worst service, and that if you were in Lithuania and willing to pay a little more you would have access to internet speeds that you can only dream about here in America.)

Look, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the United States isn’t going to even make an effort to keep up with Korea or Japan – I mean, they’re supposed to be the high-tech havens of the world.  And I’ve even resigned myself to the fact that the United States isn’t going to even make an effort to keep up with Western Europe.  But when our tech infrastructure is being left in the dust by Lithu – fuckin – ania, a former Soviet bloc country . . . Jesus! we aren’t even trying anymore.

What really ticks me off about this is that there is absolutely no reason for us to lag so far behind the rest of the developed world.  But by our policy decisions we have chosen to do so – it didn’t just evolve this way in the United States, we picked this outcome because, basically, we don’t understand what “free market capitalism” means.

Ayn Rand Was Very Silly, But Conservatives Are Just Evil

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life:
The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish
fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable
heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood,
unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

--John Rogers
Kung Fu Monkey


Johann Hari has a new column up over at the UK's The Independent that simply is a must-read. He excoriates today's Republican party for its crass insistence on promoting only the interests of the country's uberwealthy at the direct expense of the less fortunate 99% of Americans. For example, of the Ryan Budget plan he points out that "it halves taxes on the richest 1% and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, health care for the poor and elderly, and basic services. . . . Ryan says 'the reason I got involved in public service' was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, who described the poor as 'parasites' who must 'perish', and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: The Virtue of Selfishness."

However, the vast majority of Hari's column devotes itself to Donald Trump and what it says about the modern Republican party that he is now the party's frontrunner in Presidential nominee polls. Describing Trump as "the Republican Id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality," Hari offers up a few choice quotes from the Donald about how America should deal with the rest of the world. On Libya: "I would go in and I would take the oil . . . I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq: "We stay there and we take the oil. . . In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours."

* * *

In the liberal blogosphere, which I frequent, there has been for a number of years now a good deal of focus on the new, ersatz Republican followers of Ayn Rand's writings. Alan Greenspan himself, the maestro of our current financial debacle, was one of Rand's most devoted followers -- he actually sat at her feet as a college student and was editor of one of her Objectivist publications. As a result, to this day he so objects to any government regulation of any business or financial activity that he once told Brooksley Born that he was not even in favor of prosecuting financial firms that committed fraud because that would only interfere in the market's ability to punish such firms itself. (He, Larry Summers and Bob Rubin were also instrumental in crushing Born's attempt to impose derivative regulations while she was with the CFTC; of course, given that unregulated derivatives trading is a large part - if not the largest part - of how the financial industry got into the mess it did, that decision seems in retrospect very, very stupid).

In Congress, of course, we have Rep. Paul Ryan and his plan to wage war against almost everyone in America for the benefit of his small number of rich paymasters, and we have newly elected Senator Rand Paul who makes no bones about the fact that he is an Ayn Rand devotee (although it is not true that he was named after Rand; my understanding is that his name is short for 'Randal').

And this constant reference to Ayn Rand's writings by our new Republican Overlords -- who, despite controlling only one chamber of Congress, somehow manage to decide what issues must be taken up by the government (abortion and the deficit, but not jobs or the economy) and how those issues must be framed -- and by bloviating Conservative pundits and TeeVee talking heads, has had an affect on the people who listen to such folk.

For example, about two years ago, shortly after Obama had been sworn into office and the first glimpses of Tea Party Madness were beginning to emerge among the nation's more conservative elderly, I was checking out a few books at my local library. A sizable percentage of the immediate population where I live consists of retirees. Whilst checking out my books I got into a brief conversation with the librarian, who told me that she had just started reading Atlas Shrugged as part of a local book club. She told me she thought it was important that as many people as possible read Ayn Rand's opus because the book is "so relevant, given what's happening in the world today."

Now, a couple of things about this statement struck me immediately. First, I could think of nothing that was "happening in the world" right then that would make Rand's so-called philosophy more relevant than before -- that is, unless you count the fact we now have a black man sitting in the White House. Second, the library doesn't sponsor book clubs; this apparently was something she had gotten into with some unspecified number of friends, and they all had suddenly decided they needed to read Ayn Rand. Third, I couldn't just let this statement go unchallenged, because the last thing we need is people interested in reading Ayn Rand for the lessons they think they can learn from her.

So I explained to the librarian, as gently as I could, that I had read Atlas Shrugged and nearly all of Rand's writings years and years ago, back when I was in High School, and that - like a lot of people who stumble across Rand - I had enjoyed them immensely. However, after I grew up some and gained a greater appreciation of how people work in the real world, I came to see Rand's writings as fairly juvenile. I told her (as nicely as I could) that I thought they were not writings anyone should ever make the mistake of taking seriously.

Why Medicare Kicks the Crap Out of Paul Ryan's Voucher Plan

So I was talking with a friend of mine earlier today about health care, Medicare, and the Paul Ryan plan to privatize Medicare. One important point came up that I think should be discussed more because (i) it points out how dangerous the Ryan plan is to everybody, including those already 55 or older, and (ii) it provides a simple illustration why a single-payer system (i.e., "Medicare for All") would actually do more to curb rising health care costs in this country than any other proposed health care reform. And that point is this: Medicare is entirely voluntary, not only for the patients being treated under the program but also for those physicians who provide the treatment.

The way things stand, a lot of health care providers (physicians, private hospitals, HMO's, etc.) don't really look forward to treating patients covered under Medicare. This is because the government has limits on what it is willing to pay for any particular procedure, and these payment limits make treating patients covered by Medicare less lucrative than treating patients who have a private insurance plan. However, many - if not most - of the country's health care providers cover Medicare patients anyway, simply because there are so many people in the country reliant upon Medicare. In other words, the health care providers make less per Medicare patient than they would treating patients covered by private health insurance, but there are so many Medicare patients out there who need treatment that it doesn't make financial sense to turn them away: "How can I sell these [health care services] so cheap? Volume!"

Now as to one reason the Ryan Plan is so bad . . . consider what happens to those currently 55 or older who would still remain eligible to participate in Medicare as it exists today. Everybody else would be forced to purchase private insurance in the market when they turned 65; Ryan's Plan would have the government give you a voucher to help defray the costs of that private insurance, but the voucher would be capped and -- even assuming you could find an insurance company willing to insure you at a rate you could afford after you turned 65 -- the voucher would be worth less and less each year as health care costs went up. Which means that, year after year, seniors would be forced to pay more and more just to have insurance coverage (which would not include co-pays or deductibles, which means the cost of actual health care would increase even more).

But for those 55 and over today . . . eventually, their even older cohort (say, those who are 70 and older right now) would die off. Which means that, with no additional people joining the Medicare ranks, the pool of Medicare patients needing treatment would inevitably shrink. At some point it would not be unreasonable to expect health care providers to refuse Medicare patients outright; they would be too small a pool of patients to justify the lesser charges the health care provider could expect. Which means, of course, that a significant portion of even those the Ryan Plan says could remain with Medicare as it is now can still expect, before they die, not to have access to any entity willing to treat them under that plan.