Submitted by: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
When I started as a college student about 50 years ago I took the Sociology I course as a required subject. There is little I remember from that course and less I remember about the instructor, except for his introductory words on the first day of class. To paraphrase him he said: “You will be taking a lot of courses in what are called the Social Sciences. Approach them all, including mine, with skepticism because they really aren’t science courses like those you’ve learned as a high school student. They will spend a lot of lecture time though trying to prove they are truly scientific, don’t believe them”. His clear meaning was that although the Social Sciences try to operate as if they are using the scientific method of experiments/research to prove theories, most of the work done is skewed to prove the theory of choice by those doing the research. In the five decades since that lecture my own experience and reading has taught me how true the advice from that long forgotten Sociology instructor is.
The social science that has my attention at the moment is Economics. I’ve read many an economist, from all points on the political spectrum and frankly while I favor those such as Krugman and Baker, I take most of what they say as opinion, rather than scientifically determined truth. Yes I’ve even read “Freakonomics” by Levitt and Dubner and the follow-up “Superfreakonomics” and while they were good reads I see them as not only bad science, but a conflation of economics with other social sciences that is superficial at best. This is really the problem with many economists and their theories. They presume to divine human behavior via the prism of economic theory. In the end their proofs are merely retrofitting their pre-judgments. That brings me to the “Austerity” movement which has hampered the recovery from the economic “depression” brought on by the wars and tax reductions of the Bush years, while it has also caused a crisis worldwide through its imposition upon many nations. The foundation research that has justified this “Austerity” movement came from two Harvard Professors: Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. A University of Massachusetts student Thomas Herndon found that their work was filled with mathematical errors in their research spreadsheets. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/reinhart-rogoff-austerity-research-errors_n_3094015.html Their spreadsheets were their “proofs” that economic austerity promotes economic recovery and this theory, long held by many economists, is the basis for the imposition of austerity onto so many Nation’s economies and is the source of bitter national debate in our own. Though I will present some overview and links amplifying “austerity’s” false assumptions, my interest is in presenting my view on why the powers that be have imposed this doctrine, whose effects fall squarely upon 99% of the people of these nations, leaving the wealthiest unscathed.
Thomas Herndon with others published a paper about Reinhart/Rogoff’s findings stating this:
“ The new paper, by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, set out to reconstruct the findings of an influential 2010 paper by Reinhart and Rogoff, called “Growth In A Time Of Debt.” Reinhart and Rogoff, both of Harvard, claimed that economic growth slowed fairly dramatically for countries whose public debt crossed a threshold of 90 percent of gross domestic product.
The problem is that other economists have been unable to recreate Reinhart and Rogoff’s findings. Herndon, Ash and Pollin now say they were able to do so — but only by leaving out big, important pieces of data.
Using the same spreadsheet that Reinhart and Rogoff used for their research, Herndon, Ash and Pollin found that “Growth In A Time Of Debt” was built around a handful of significant errors. Correcting for those errors changes the findings dramatically: Average GDP growth for high-debt countries jumps from negative 0.1 percent to 2.2 percent.”
What we see then is that calculation “errors” showed that GDP growth for high debt countries actual increased rather than decreased. Reinhart and Rogoff (R&R) have been arguing that debt decreases GDP as the rationale for austerity and their argument seems not only unproven, but wrong. It gets worse.
The Harvard economists have argued that mistakes and omissions in their influential research on debt and economic growth don’t change their ultimate austerity-justifying conclusion: That too much debt hurts growth.But even this claim has now been disproved by two new studies, which suggest the opposite might in fact be true: Slow growth leads to higher debt, not the other way around.
In a post at Quartz, University of Michigan economics professor Miles Kimball and University of Michigan undergraduate student Yichuan Wang write that they have crunched Reinhart and Rogoff’s data and found “not even a shred of evidence” that high debt levels lead to slower economic growth. And a new paper by University of Massachusetts professor Arindrajit Dube finds evidence that Reinhart and Rogoff had the relationship between growth and debt backwards: Slow growth appears to cause higher debt, if anything.
As you can see from the chart from Dube’s paper below, growth tends to be slower in the five years before countries have high debt levels. In the five years after they have high debt levels, there is no noticeable difference in growth at all, certainly not at the 90 percent debt-to-GDP level that Reinhart and Rogoff’s 2010 paper made infamous. Kimball and Wang present similar findings in their Quartz piece.
This contradicts the conclusion of Reinhart and Rogoff’s 2010 paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” which has been used to justify austerity programs around the world. In that paper, and in many other papers, op-ed pieces and congressional testimony over the years, Reinhart And Rogoff have warned that high debt slows down growth, making it a huge problem to be dealt with immediately. The human costs of this error have been enormous.
Even after University of Massachusetts graduate student Thomas Herndon found Reinhart and Rogoff’s work included errors and that their 2010 paper was missing important data, the researchers stood by their ultimate conclusion: that growth dropped off significantly after debt hit 90 percent of GDP. They claimed that austerity opponents like Paul Krugman have been so so rude to them for no good reason.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/30/reinhart-rogoff-debunked_n_3361299.html
What is so infuriating about R&R is the destruction that follows in the wake of there now debunked theories. The unemployment in Europe is has reached record high levels high levels, countries like Greece and Spain have rioting in the streets and a new neo Nazi movement is gaining popularity throughout Europe. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/eurozone-unemployment-record-high_n_3364881.html The cost in human suffering is incalculable, but these fatuous academic asses are not concerned with people, they are concerned with their reputations and they are concerned with catering to wealth. Their theories, rather than being the result of real research and experiment, are in effect self-fulfilling prophecies. This is NOT science; it is overweening egotism in tandem with uncaring self interest. This tale, however, gets worse. Huffington Pos contributor: Mark Gongloff wrote this article on Friday: “Austerity Fanatics Won’t Let Mere Economics Stop Them From Thinking They’re Winning” in it he writes:
“Like Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who hid on an island in the Philippines for 30 years refusing to believe Japan had lost World War II, austerity fanatics are never going to admit their failure. Instead, they are going to keep pushing the policies that are making millions of people in Europe and the United States miserable.
The latest example of their denial is a piece by Michael Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, entitled “Austerity And Its Discontents.” He declares that, far from being shamed by the recent discovery of errors in influential research by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, austerity fans have recently gained “the upper hand” in the global argument over austerity.
Rosen argues that Reinhart and Rogoff’s many loud rebuttals to their critics helped give austerians the “intellectual high ground.” He ignores that, in fact, Reinhart and Rogoff’s rebuttals have only compounded their errors. He also ignores that further research has debunked Reinhart and Rogoff utterly, revealing that their biggest mistake was in confusing the cause-effect relationship between high debt and growth. It turns out, contra Reinhart and Rogoff, that there is no evidence that high debt causes slow growth — in fact, the opposite might be true.
But then the austerians have never really needed the intellectual high ground. Their phobia of government debt is based mainly on the idea that debt is just bad because of course it has to be. It is bad when people take on a lot of debt, ipso facto the same thing is bad for government. We must eat our spinach, not our dessert!
Rosen is absolutely right when he points out that Germany, and the American Enterprise Institute, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Michael Kinsley, and the many, many other long-time fans of austerity have only redoubled their efforts to push austerity measures in the wake of the Reinhart-Rogoff debunking and re-debunking. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/austerity-failure-fanatics_n_3367787.html?ref=topbar
Now that I’ve presented the situation to you at least from my side of the fence, you can make up your minds about austerity. While I agree with many of the conclusions delivered by the writers quoted above my slant on it all is somewhat different. I believe that all economic theories and political theories, despite their validity, mask what is truly going on in our world today. It is easy of course to compare the call for austerity by conservatives under Democrats and the out of control spending and debt run up in the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations. This comparison would lead one to believe there is fiscal hypocrisy at the bottom of this and that is true. However, the fiscal hypocrisy exist as much among Democrats as Republican’s as Max Baucus proved in his terms as Senator. Bill Clinton cut government to balance the budget. He aided in the erasure of Smoot Hawley and he hurt American jobs by signing NAFTA and CAFTA. President Obama has likewise played the fiscal conservative card, while complaining it has been forced on him. He has even put cuts of Social Security and Medicare on the table, although neither is related to the national debt.
What is happening here is the result of the wealthiest people and the largest corporations becoming international entities. The rise of the multi-national could well herald the decline and fall of the nation state. From the perspective of the “Haves” it makes perfect sense. Why be bound by the laws of a particular nation, when you can break free and roam the world as you please? Truly, to these multi-nationals and the people behind them, the world is their oyster. The only problems they have are government regulation, taxes and those pesky workers who want more wages. The solution is to bring the 99% to a level slightly above starvation. This ensures that they will work for any amount that helps them put some food on the table. It necessitates that social assistance programs be destroyed so the peasants will have no choice but to seek shelter from devastation at some low paying job that keeps them little above subsistence.
Imagine yourself as one of the Super Rich, or as the CEO of a huge multinational corporation. My guess is that most of them see themselves as extraordinary people, chosen by fate or God to be in their exalted positions. They are able to go anywhere in the world on a whim. They don’t have one palatial home they have five, some in the world’s greatest Cities and others in the world’s most beautiful places. They don’t have one luxury car they have twenty collectibles and a fleet of limousines to take them place to place, flanked by bodyguards. While it’s true some wealthy eschew these outward signs, usually it is done as some sort of reverse snobbery, like the Kennedy penchant for driving Oldsmobiles, or J.B. Hunt driving to work every day in an old Chevy, with a paper bag lunch prepared by his wife.
The rich are not like your and me and moreover they know it. The truth is austerity is one more step on the road toward worldwide feudalism. Our wealthy class has helped to plot this out and they are served by people like Reinhart and Rogoff as courtiers and henchmen. They are leading us to a chaos they believe will result in solidifying their hold on the world and their eventual Nobility. However, when chaos descends on society through the discontent of so many, even wealth might not be protection against the violent psychopaths that gain control. That’s what I think about austerity, what do you think?
Which clockwork lemon epiphany led to recalling Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce’s sardonic definitions of:
“patriotism, combustible rubbish ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name” and
“patriot, the dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.”
Hence:
A slightly different take on the waste of permanent war, from one of those wasted in the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-72):
Mike S.,
Tony C. and I do not disagree that some people or factions always find a way to profit from war. As the old proverb goes: “It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow anyone some good.” And war, the vilest wind that blows, always presents opportunities for making money. In this regard I always think of the character Milo Minderbinder in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. A fictional exaggeration, but essentially true to type. I could also cite the real-life example of former Vice President and Halliburton, Inc CEO Dick Cheney, but why belabor the obvious? War-profiteering used to result in jail time or a hanging, but now simply passes for business-as-usual. But again, I don’t consider this the principal issue behind “permanent war.”
The modern “permanent war” — and I employ the scare-quotes advisedly — as Orwell and (many) others have noted, has the goal of freezing history at the precise moment when a particular ruling group has seized power — as with the Bush II / SCOTUS coup d’ état in year 2000 — and intends to remain in power indefinitely. A “permanent Republican majority,” if you will. No doubt you’ve heard the phrase and shudder at its naked threat to upwardly mobile and meritocratic democracy. Only death remains the same forever, or “permanent.”.
Former Army Colonel and now Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich has written an entire book on the subject of “America’s Path to Permanent War” from 1945 to the present. He calls it Washington Rules. He uses slightly different terminology than Orwell — like “Long War” and “permanent national [in]security crisis” — to describe what he calls “semiwar, … a condition in which great dangers always threaten the United States and will continue doing so into the indefinite future.” Thus those who wage permanent “war” — ostensibly against faraway nebulous demons and “traitors” at home — predict no end to their “war” and therefore no end to their own role in carrying it out regardless of “victory” or “defeat,” both of which basically mean the same thing: nothing. In view of this endless and never-conclusive “war,” I propose a fourth Orwellian slogan for America’s single Property Party, the one with two right wings:
Ignorance is Strength
Freedom is Slavery
War is Peace
Defeat is Victory
War without end. Not ever. And this interminable “war” will require assuring that no able, educated competitive group arises from the working and/or middle classes to threaten the privileged oligarchy or its descendants who — as they keep telling us — must remain on the top of the greasy pole even though climbing to the top of it has only left them slippery and covered with grease. The most expensive brand, of course.
More on this in prose and verse as time allows.
“I always think of the character Milo Minderbinder in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. A fictional exaggeration, but essentially true to type.”
Michael M.,
I’ve never been in the Armed Forces and when called in 1967 by the SSS, I flunked the physical two years running due to high blood pressure. However,
it always seemed to me that Catch 22 was a perfect satire of what life in the Armed Forces could be. Having worked for 32 years in a bureaucracy whose structure followed the military model, it seemed Heller captured the essence.
You’ve been there, what do you think?
Tony C.,
Some people do profit monetarily from war. True, but trivial.
You talk of rich men but you think like a poor man. I have pointed out to you the significance of the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. It applies to all economic phenomena, including the consumption of lives and money. If you do not understand this, then you don’t understand why the “demand” curve slopes downward and to the right. After so much of anything, any more of it simply bores. You can choose to believe the contrary, if you like.
As for “waste,” perhaps you have heard of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, who cut a swath of destruction through the Old Confederacy during the Civil War, his army of “bummers” eating everything they could and then burning everything else just so “the enemy” (their own countrymen) could not make use of these resources. In Vietnam, the American military pursued a similar strategy: namely poisoning the crops of the Vietnamese peasantry, impoverishing them and driving them off their land so as to metaphorically “dry up the water in which the [guerrilla] fish swims.” Think of millions of Southeast Asians flopping around like fish out of water, gasping futilely for air and dying, all while their American attackers spouted “strategic metaphors” in hopes of disguising what they had done.
In Vietnam, too, many American soldiers even used the term “wasting” as a substitute euphemism for the killing of “surplus” millions of Southeast Asians who, as General William Westmoreland notoriously proclaimed: “do not value life the way we do.” He meant by this, of course, that Asians did not value their own lives as little as we Americans did in taking them. Believe me, I understand the deliberate policy of wasting what one cannot use or value but does not want someone else to use, either. Here, relative value systems — or invidious comparisons — come into play.
As you no doubt know, the common expression “money to burn” refers to the actual practice of wealthy snobs setting $100 bills on fire and using them to light fancy cigars, all to impress their impoverished fellow citizens for whom $100 mean rent and food for a month. Genghis Khan reportedly expressed this philosophy of relative wealth when he said: “It is not enough that I succeed. Everyone else must fail.” Once one cannot accrue any further wealth for the moment, one can always ruin what little someone else has so as to increase the relative feeling of difference, or “utility” that truly matters.
I once read about fantastically wealthy Chinese Mandarins who sported these ridiculously long fingernails on their little fingers (with pure silver protective sheaths), as an ostentatious sign that their wealth meant not having to work with their hands. Then one day I found myself walking down the streets of a Vietnamese city watching all these middle class Vietnamese boys walking by, holding hands, their little fingers sporting these ridiculously long fingernails. The peasant conscripts of the Vietnamese navy with whom I worked sometimes had no fingernails at all. And even though America paid for their food and salaries, they seldom saw any of these because their officers appropriated them for their relatively wealthy selves. We Americans considered this wrong and wasteful, but the wealthy Vietnamese figured we Americans had so much that we didn’t care how much of it anyone stole. The Iraqis and Afghans who have scammed our incompetent, crooked rulers of hundreds of billions of dollars, understands this, utterly. The ruling corporate oligarchs of the United States do not place the slightest value on the lives or money of the common American citizen — considering them “surplus” commodities that no one of any importance would miss if they disappeared tomorrow.
Oh, yes. And the wealthy ruling oligarchs of America — just like the ruling class oligarchs of South Vietnam — had no problem wasting the lives of working class kids like me so their own offspring didn’t have to break off any of their manicured fingernails serving in the US military in Vietnam. I know deliberate waste — especially when my own government thought that the term referred to me in particular.
You talk about the “real world” but I don’t think you have much experience of it. Your understanding of history, fundamental economics, sociology, language, and psychology also could use a little help. See anything written by George Orwell for assistance in rectifying these shortcomings.
I could further multiply examples, but I’ve gone on long enough. I know from whence I speak and I consider George Orwell a masterful and profound observer of the human condition. When you’ve written even one justifiably classic literary masterpiece, do let me know. I’ll happily give it a read. Until then, as Count Dracula said to the upstart psychiatrist Doctor Rosenberg (in the movie Love at First Bite): “Do not try and teach your grandmother how to suck eggs.”
Orwell was both right and wrong. He was right in observing an effect of warfare, but he was wrong in identifying it as causal. The primary motivation for wars but especially wars of aggression are (as Tony states) economic and/or religious – historically the two leading causes of war – followed in distant third by tactical or strategic gain against the other party or a third party and retribution tailing the pack in fourth.
Tony C. All this “waste money” seems to be going into the pockets of the CWMIC, Corporate Wallst Military Industrial complex. …. One middle class wastes is another oligarchs profits.
MIchael M: And Orwell is still wrong, because he thought the idea romantic or something, but in the real world waste is stupid, even among the filthy rich. As they say, you know what a man worth $750 million is? A frustrated billionaire wannabe.
In the real world, digits stand in for status, and a man worth ten million is jealous of the man worth a hundred million, and he’s jealous of the man worth a billion, and he’s jealous of Gates and Buffett and Soros and other world shakers.
Orwell is wrong, wasting money is not admired by the wealthy, in fact they turn their noses up when new money (like entertainment stars) show off by wasting their money; it is gauche.
War is not waged for the purpose of wasting money or resources, war is waged on behalf of sociopaths for profit. The wars we are engaged in now are being waged over the control of oil resources, period. You can keep pushing this idea, but it will remain as wrong as the first time you pushed it.
Mike S.,
We have affordable single payer health care here in Taiwan. My wife and I pay the equivalent of $45 per month (after a slight raise in fees this last year) for good medical and dental care. We do have some modest co-payments for doctor’s visits and some prescriptions, but nothing unjustifiable or outrageous. The system has saved my life twice since I moved here in 2003. I would have died in the United States had I remained there without any health care insurance. I never would have even reached the age of 62 and my first “reduced rate because of ‘early’ retirement” Social Security check. Now I realize full well what the oligarchs have in mind by constantly raising the retirement age — get it high enough so workers will die before collecting.
I understand American “austerity” and the particular demographics targeted by it: namely, me. “Austerity” almost killed me, but didn’t I got away just in time. “Home from America,” as I like to say. Get out if and while you can. Many modern countries have much better national health care systems than the United States does. I have absolutely no idea what President “Body Count” Obama keeps babbling about when he talks of “affordable health care.” Neither of my two working sons in America have seen any evidence of it.
I get so sick and tired of President “Battlefield Earth” murdering illiterate foreign peasants, not to mention American citizen peasants, somewhere over the horizon in his personally selected free-fire zones wherever he desires them — all while Americans do not have decent educational and health care systems conducive to their own prospects for a better life.
Time for a national Constitutional Convention along the lines of the teach-ins of the 1960s? I think so. The United States doesn’t work very well for the non-corporate “people” anymore. The fact that you have to specify just what you mean by “people” pretty much explains the contemporary state of affairs in America. Thank you for “Citizens Unidentified,” SCOTUS.
I say abolish the standing Army, the “Intelligence Community,” the Department of Homeland Insecurity and the AUMF, just for starters. The 50 state militias can easily handle the Taliban or Al Qaeda should a few hundred of these individuals emerge from their caves, flap their arms, and fly over vast oceans to attempt the invasion and occupation of the United States. Gore Vidal had it right when he called Americans “among the most easily frightened people on earth.” Even the prospect of having decent educations and health care scares them shitless.
Michael M. & Tony C.,
Reading you both on this thread is exhiliratingly informing and in my view you both agree on the essence but disagree on how to describe the result. The essence, which also describes my own thinking is that what we see in the supposed conflicts that surround us is smoke and mirrors covering up the fact that the dydfunction is all about ego and status. This too was the essence of feudal systems past and present. The elite, the oligarchy if you will wants to feel superior to their peers and much more so to us their peasantry. They play deadly games to ensure their place in the hierarchy and push philosophies that cause conflict among the masses who similarly to rabid sports fans in espousing their causes. The antidote is information about their true nature a de-programing billions of people. A daunting but worthwhile task.
If this does not describe the United States of America and its “government” as presently constituted, then nothing does.
“All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.”
Everything else follows as the night the day. Evil on autopilot.
As Orwell noted, war provides a psychologically acceptable way to waste economic productivity so that it will not generate a rise in the general standard of living sufficient to threaten the ruling oligarchy’s hold on power.
David Halberstam provides an example of this phenomenon from the early years of America’s undeclared War on Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos):
In short, President Johnson understood economics in “guns or butter” terms. He realized full well that the country could not have both. He knew that informing the Congress of how much war would cost would not frighten them away from war spending but would only give them the excuse they wanted not to spend money on the domestic economic, educational, and health concerns of the general public. The ruling oligarchy has always hated the idea of allocating national resources — which they regard as their own birthright — to the “undeserving” proles. And war spending has always given the corporate oligarchy — or divinely commissioned aristocracy — the psychologically acceptable means to their ends.
And the “secrecy” surrounding “war” makes it especially appealing as the ultimate waste.
“War” has all the advantages over domestic spending as a way to waste economic productivity that would otherwise result in a rise in the general standard of living sufficient to threaten the ruling corporate oligarchy’s hold on power. All economic choices contain an implicit “opportunity cost”: namely, what one could have done with resources devoted to other projects. And war has the greatest opportunity cost of all. Which accounts for its primacy among all other means of keeping the bottom down where they belong while keeping the top on top.
War — as a waster of “surplus” human life and labor — has a utility that few ruling oligarchies can resist exploiting for their own purposes. By “surplus” in this case, we must understand: “not required for the ease and comfort of the privileged ruling oligarchy.” Yes, the ruling oligarchs will squeeze whatever wealth they can from the middle and working classes, but after awhile the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility sets in and twelve more yachts (or US Senators) just don’t impress the other oligarchs the way the first several dozens of yachts and US Senators did. Ho hum. Another two dozen classic cars and the Speaker of the House for the collection. Whatever. But getting to conspicuously waste entire nations and the majority of one’s own fellow citizens, now that</b impresses. Even extremes of monetary wealth can't come close to the conspicuously wasteful utility of war.
As Orwell put it:
Economics plays an important part in the affairs of nations, but it does not constitute — as contemporary political dogma in the United States contends — the only important part. The desire for social status and power over others plays at least as important, if not far more important, part, especially as concerns the attitudes and motivations of the ruling oligarchy who judge the world only in relation to themselves. And nothing says status and power like “Leader of the Free World” and “Commander in Chief of the World’s Only Superpower.” Next to the status and power to order the deaths of anyone, anywhere, anytime — with an impenetrably secret blank check against the future to pay for it — money means relatively little (once one has enough of it).
More on this “war as the chief means of imposing austerity on the proles” shortly. In the meantime, enjoy your Victory Mansions, Victory Cigarettes, and Victory Gin.
Well you can’t let operational efficiencies get in the way of artificial and arbitrary profit taking at the expense of patient treatment. After all, money is the most important thing in the universe and property is the only real absolute right other than the freedom to screw people over for it without fear of repercussion. 🙄
Objectivism is the ethical equivalent of a hemorrhagic fever. Mostly fatal and dangerous if allowed to get out of control. Greed is stupid, selfish and myopic – none of which are virtuous but especially so when engineering a society. So by all means, let’s keep catering to the private for profit health care insurance industry so they can pay for their management junkets, perks and stock dividends with money stolen from, er, denied for patient care.
Yikes,
Medicare is far more efficient than the private insurance companies, but it is not working according to Ms. Blevins and Bron????
“Mike: Plus, what really made us the most powerful nation in the world was government “interference” in the private sector, in the form of the massive industrialization buildup to and execution of WWII, which devastated the infrastructure of the then richest countries in the world, but left us an industrial, scientific, and military powerhouse in a world of far more severely bloodied and ruined combatant nations.”
Tony,
That is quite true, but Mr. Williams sees the world as ending with FDR’s election. 🙂
Mike: Plus, what really made us the most powerful nation in the world was government “interference” in the private sector, in the form of the massive industrialization buildup to and execution of WWII, which devastated the infrastructure of the then richest countries in the world, but left us an industrial, scientific, and military powerhouse in a world of far more severely bloodied and ruined combatant nations.
“Why can’t people form mutual aid societies like they used to to provide for those services?” — Bron
People do. We call them “governments.”
Bron: As I said, the problem with your philosophy is that 97% of us aren’t sociopathic enough to let our parents starve or go homeless in time of need, and we personally do not have the ability to force them to provide for themselves while we are children, so social security benefits us by making their personal responsibility the law of the land, via withholding taxes. They aren’t receiving a boondoggle, they are receiving their due for paying into a system their entire life and reaping the rewards. It is a mandatory insurance system that ensures they will be secure (not well off, just secure) if and when they reach the point where they can no longer work. If they do not make it that far, then like all insurance programs, their “premiums” are distributed to those that do; and like all insurance programs, those premiums are used to pay current claims, they are not a savings account or investment account for the individual.
Bron: Why does government have to do that?
Because private enterprises can go bankrupt, they can be robbed, they can be mismanaged and lose their funds in a market crash or financial disaster. The government has to do it because the government is the only entity that will not go bankrupt. Or at least, the chances that a government that really can just print money will go bankrupt is as remote as our country being conquered by another country; if it happens all bets are off, and all our money is worthless anyway.
Bron: I am saying there is a better way to provide for those who truly need help.
Not that you have ever detailed; all your solutions require the trust of a private entity that can lose everything. All your solutions are voluntary and not mandatory, and the vast majority of the middle class does not have the discipline or intelligence to save or invest in anything remotely likely to provide the same benefit to them, as long as they live, as social security and Medicare. As a general rule, people in the middle class live paycheck to paycheck, the 10% or so they would get by not paying SS/MC would not be saved, it would be spent.
Further, as soon as they started receiving it, it would evaporate in inflation within five years; because contrary to your theory, people work for their take-home pay. So right now Employer A knows worker B is willing to work for $1000 a week. If worker B suddenly gets $1100 a week because SS/MC is repealed, Employer A will slow-roll the raises for worker B until, in inflation adjusted dollars, worker B is once again working for $1000 a week, and spending his whole paycheck maintaining the same standard of living he had before the SS/MC repeal, but now with no future security. The difference will be pocketed by Employer A as additional profit.
Because Employer A would be stupid to pay worker B more than he needs to pay him to get work out of him. That is how business and human psychology work. Worker B has a standard of living he is used to, that works for him, that he does not want to drop beneath, and he demands enough money to cover it. If there are taxes to be paid, he doesn’t care, he will demand more gross so his take-home pay is enough to cover his standard of living.
The only sociopathy going on is in your Aynish philosophy of phuck everybody else as long as you are happy. Fortunately, this is a majority rule state, SS and MC are the most popular government programs ever with something like 75% approval of everybody, and your minority inability to understand the benefits of that system, or the gaping holes of your preferred system that led to a new system, are just unfortunate. At some point, the majority just has to say we decided, and if you don’t like it, it is okay with us if you want to “game” this system by earning so little you do not have to pay in to get the benefits.
Tony C:
Social security and medicare are a boondogle.
Why are my parents your responsibility? Why are they mine? I dont expect my children to support me in my old age, why should they? They have their own families to support. They did not ask to be born, they were born because my wife and I wanted children.
Why do we need SS and medicare? Why cant people form mutual aid societies like they used to to provide for those services? Why does government have to do that? They just p*ss the money away.
SS is a joke, most people make a small amount from it and had they put the money aside themselves, they would have 2 or 3 times the amount they receive.
Who is saying deny a needy person anything, I am saying there is a better way to provide for those who truly need help. And at the same time force those who are gaming the system to get out of the wagon and start pulling their own weight.
The only sociopathy going on is those who want to take from those who work and give to those who can work but refuse to because they like hanging out.
Only about 15% of the people are in poverty and that has held steady since the 60’s. It might be a little more now because of Keynes but most people work and are tired of Washington taking the King’s share of their efforts. To be distributed by politicians who want to be re-elected.
This system has become immoral.
“Why are my parents your responsibility? Why are they mine?”
Sociopathy.
“Why do we need SS and medicare? Why cant people form mutual aid societies like they used to to provide for those services?”
Fantasy.
“The only sociopathy going on is those who want to take from those who work and give to those who can work but refuse to because they like hanging out.”
Counter factual misinformation used as “evidence”, but lacking any proof except anecdotal suppositions made to escape guilt for being sociopathic in political outlook.
Bron,
Three strike……yer out!
Bron: only problem with your shopping mall analogy is that most of us only get to use the roads for our taxes and the police, fire and military, the courts of course. But most of use never use the majority of what the government does.
On the contrary, the majority of what the government does is military, Social Security and Medicare, which virtually everybody uses eventually, and virtually everybody benefits from immediately, because without that income and insurance for their retirement age relatives, the burden of their support and care would fall to them. The same is true of public schools, almost all of us used them, it is just that our payment for that schooling has been time-shifted to our adulthood and in one sense is predicated upon how much good the schooling did us (more successful people pay more).
This is the flaw in your philosophy, Bron, it requires a level of sociopathic denial to those in need that about 97% of us cannot muster, when talking about our elderly parents and their siblings or our grandparents and their siblings. Social Security relieves us of most of that responsibility in a way you should appreciate, it demanded they take responsibility for their old age care when they were young and working, so their children and grandchildren would not have to. It doesn’t enslave us, it frees us.
Universal Health Care Won’t Work — Witness Medicare
By
Sue A. Blevins
April 11, 2003
They’re back. The single-payer advocates are out in full force, again, calling for universal health insurance for all Americans. This time they’re backed by a bipartisan coalition including Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Some of the current proposals are as coercive as Hillary Clinton’s infamous national health plan. The new push carries the same message, but more “moderate” messengers deliver it.
At first glance, many Americans might find the idea of single-payer health insurance appealing, given current economic conditions and high health insurance costs. However, before we accept such a drastic shift in national health policy, we should examine how single-payer health insurance could affect all individuals’ health care costs, choices and privacy.
If history is any indication, any single-payer initiative will end up costing much more than advocates claim. That, in turn, will lead to higher taxes and/or rationing under which the government will determine which medical treatments will and will not be covered. How do we know this will happen? Because single-payer health care has already been empirically tested on seniors in the United States. Many people may not realize it, but the Medicare program is one of the largest single payers of health care in the U.S. and in the world. An examination of Medicare’s 38-year-old track record provides evidence of what happens when the government controls the financing of health services for millions of U.S. citizens. Consider the following facts.
When Medicare was debated in 1965 (the year it was signed into law), business and taxpayer groups were concerned that program expenditures might grow out of control. However, single-payer advocates assured them that all seniors could easily be covered under Medicare with only a small increase in workers’ payroll taxes. The federal government’s lead actuary in 1965 projected that the hospital program (Medicare Part A) would grow to only $9 billion by 1990. The program ended up costing more than $66 billion that year.
Just three years after Medicare was passed, a 1968 Tax Foundation study found that public spending on medical care had nearly doubled in the first few years of Medicare. In subsequent decades, Medicare payroll taxes and general taxes have continued to rise to pay for skyrocketing health care costs.
Tom Miller, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, explains the main problems with Medicare (single-payer) financing. “As fiscal pressures mount, the federal government does not ‘negotiate’ with medical providers for lower prices for covered services,” says Miller. “It dictates below-market reimbursements with its near-monopoly power as a purchaser of health care for seniors. The full costs of such price discounts eventually reduce access to quality care and hold health care markets hostage to political exploitation.”
Before Medicare was passed, seniors were promised that the program would not interfere with their choice of insurance. However, existing rules force most seniors to rely on Medicare Part A to pay their hospital bills — even if they can afford to pay for private insurance. Additionally, today’s seniors and doctors must abide by more than 100,000 pages of Medicare rules and regulations dictating what types of services are covered or not under the program.
Currently, many Americans choose to pay privately for health services to maintain their medical privacy. However, a single-payer health plan would eliminate that option and all citizens would be forced to give up their ability to maintain a confidential doctor-patient relationship. Just look at what has happened with Medicare.
Under Medicare rules established in 1999, patients receiving home health care are required to divulge personal medical, sexual, and emotional information. Government contractors — mainly home health nurses — are directed to record such things as whether a senior has expressed “depressed feelings” or has used “excessive profanity.” If seniors refuse to share medical and lifestyle information, their health care workers are required to act as proxies. This means total strangers will be permitted to speak for seniors.
Medicare officials stress that the government protects patients’ privacy. However, the General Accounting Office reported to Congress several years ago that at five of 12 Medicare contractors’ sites, auditors were able to penetrate security and obtain sensitive Medicare information. At a time when citizens are concerned about high health care costs, fewer choices and loss of medical privacy, a single-payer health plan could exacerbate these concerns. Given our empirical evidence from the single-payer Medicare program, a single-payer health insurance program for Americans of all ages would most definitely lead to increased costs, reduced choices and less medical privacy for everyone. These are warning signs that no American — including the moderates pushing universal health care — can afford to ignore.
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Sue A. Blevins is president of the Institute for Health Freedom and author of “Medicare’s Midlife Crisis” (Cato Institute, 2001).
“Universal Health Care Won’t Work — Witness Medicare
By
Sue A. Blevins”
Bron,
This is what you call non-partisan?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_freedom_movement