An interesting Ayn Rand piece

Here is a very interesting piece by Johann Hari on Ayn Rand. Hari is reviewing two new biographies out on her which I plan not to read, Goddess of the Market ,by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller.

I have no intention of delving into Rand’s abhorrent philosophy. It’s enough to say, as Hari does, that it is more psychopathy than philosophy. Rand had some personal characteristics that sprang from a childhood where she was traumatized by Bolsheviks (her father, in frustration, went “on strike”). She viewed the world through the lens of that trauma. But nothing she put forth actually works. We don’t depend on supermen, free markets lead to disaster, no one is self-made, and people need and care for one another. She was wrong about everything.

Hari takes a stab at why she has such appeal in the United States.

Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct that courses through us all sometimes: I’m the only one who matters! I’m not going to care about any of you any more! She then absolutizes it in an amphetamine Benzedrine-charged reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is the only feeling worth entertaining, ever.

“All of us” is far more than the United States, where her philosophy enjoys a large following. Why the US?

The founding myth of America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind.

I think he’s getting close to it. Most of the Randites I have met have a strut about them, as in “I made it on my own. I am self-made”. It’s self-delusion – these are white guys in a society dominated by white guys, educated in public schools, probably attending land-grant colleges, using public utilities and the commons to their advantage. They don’t know what toughness is. Any minority member could tell them that making it means overcoming difficulties they never really faced.

My favorite line: Hari calls Rand a fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls.

Her disciple, Alan Greenspan, had her aboard at his swearing-in ceremony as he joined the Ford Administration. That was as close as Rand would ever come to the sort of reverence among the elite that she craved. She died alone, abandoned by all who knew her. While it is sad, it is appropriate for the promoter of a philosophy that says we need no one. She lived her dream.

Tea Party Time in Bozeman!

The Bozeman Tea Party group is organizing an event on November 6, 2009, and put out the following email:

EVENT NOTICE, FRIDAY, NOV. 6th, 12 PM NOON

OPPOSE HEALTH CARE TAKEOVER

Visit the offices of Senators Jon Tester and Max Baucus. Protest House and Senate health care bills. Bills are rapidly moving through committees of both houses. Now is the time to voice your concern.

When: November 6, 2009. 12:00 noon- 1:00 p.m.
Where: Avant Courier Building
1 E Main Street, Suite 202
Bozeman, MT 59715
Details: Bring a sign. Bring a letter. Or, simply come.

Are you alarmed by acts of Congress? Does liberal health care reform make you angry?

Are you perturbed to hear that ” ‘reform’ will double or triple premium prices”? (WSJ)

Do you sense that this bill and others are an erosion of founding principles of

* self-reliance
* individual liberty
* freedom to contract
* freedom to be left alone
* and freedom from onerous government exactions?

Does the vanity and heavy-handedness of Pelosi, Reid and Obama leave you incredulous?

We are planning to make our displeasure felt, our dissatisfaction heard, by the field staff of senators Tester and Baucus this coming Friday. Please join us.

Give your lunch hour to let your voice be heard.

These officials should know of our dissatisfaction, discontent and state of perturbation even if we don’t change their vote.

They must know!

We must not stand by mute while this catastrophic legislation gets imposed on us.

My top reasons for opposing health care reform as presently formulated:

* Fails to deliver its promise of universal coverage while lowering costs (The Impossible Dream. Duh.)
* Disproportionately expropriates from young adults
* Breaks Montana’s state budget by piling costs on Medicaid
* Forces individuals to buy something, a seemingly unconstitutional requirement
* Expands incessant government meddling in personal affairs
* Increases my costs, decreases my choices

Reminder: When: November 6, 2009, noon hour. Where: Senator Jon Tester’s office: Avant Courier Building, 1 E. Main St., Suite 202. Bozeman. We will walk the two blocks to Baucus’ office after meeting with Mr. Tester’s staff.

It’s not a bad sentiment, and organizing a protest is a nice way to spend a Friday, even if futile. Much of the email captures the fears, real and imagined, of the right wing of government oppression. It’s kind of where they live, how they think.

Most of it is hyperbole meant to inflame passions, and can be dismissed as such. One line is pure manipulation:

Are you perturbed to hear that ” ‘reform’ will double or triple premium prices”? (WSJ)

In reality, the “double” or “triple” was lifted from an opinion piece by Kim Strassel in which she cites nameless “insurers” who supposedly put forth that figure. Wording it the way they did in this email makes it appear as though it was actual WSJ reporting that produced the number. That’s misleading.

Anyway, I think we can make common cause with these folks, and perhaps should attend the rally as well. They say the proposed legislation forces individuals to buy something, a seemingly unconstitutional requirement. I agree – if government were simply to issue the insurance itself as part of its single payer program, there would be no constitutional issues, since it falls under the General Welfare clause. But forcing people to buy overpriced products from private companies is, in my view, odious and hopefully unconstitutional.

Quote for the day …

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama:

“It is self-evident that free economic activity in markets invigorates society. But it is also obvious that the idea of letting markets decide everything for the survival of the strongest, or the idea of ‘economic rationalism’ at the expense of people’s lives, does not hold true any more.”

Markets are but a tool at our disposal, but should not be the hammer that nails us.

PS: If Hatoyama can muster the courage to eject the U.S. military bases in Japan and forge stronger ties with Russia, a natural trading partner, then they will have a real leader.

Waiting for the Bronco game …

I have never read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. I should try again, but I am either not smart enough or too attention-deprived to struggle through such long bouts of dense prose.

I take comfort in knowing, however, that most who cite him have not read him either, otherwise they would cite passages like this, which I am picking up in Loretta Napoleoni’s Rogue Economics:

Commerce and manufacturing can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice, in which people do not feel themselves secure in the possession of their property, in which the faith of contracts is not supported by law, and in which thew authority of the state is not supposed to be regularly employed in enforcing the payment of debts from all those who are able to pay. Commerce and manufacture, in short, can seldom flourish in any state in which there is not a certain degree of confidence in the justice of government.

(Napoleoni is, by the way, an Italian economist and part-time resident of Whitefish, Montana.)

There are other snippets around, as well, that indicate that Smith was well-aware of the effects of power – not evil people – but all people as we behave when we have power over others.

The right wing once took to wearing Adam Smith neckties, a subtle indication to one another that they had absorbed lessons inaccessible to the rest of us, that markets flourish when left alone, and that governments impede markets, even impoverish and enslave us if left unchecked.

As Smith points out, without government, there are no markets to flourish. What we have is chaos and tyranny. That is where unregulated markets naturally lead us, as we seemingly have to learn again, and again, and again …

As my old Aristotlean football coach used to say, all things in moderation. (Yeah, that’s right – an Aristotlean football coach, an oxymoron.) Many on the right think those of us who see government as an essential part of a flourishing economy as weak people, unable to compete, fearful of freedom.

But our personal characteristics really have very little to do with any thinking about these matters. It’s not about cowardice or entrepreneurship, desk-slavery and job “security” versus risk-taking. Most people are natural followers – that’s our tribal heritage. That’s why we have survived and flourished.

It’s about living in a climate where we are protected from excess. Government can do that for us. But when government gets out of hand, as many say it did in the post-war era, we were able to vote out the people who gave us that philosophy, and usher in the era of deregulation, tax cuts, and wealth concentration.

The problem that I see now is that we don’t have the power to usher out the people that we ushered in. They have power over us, and are not going to let it go. They control the media, most of the government, the corporations and both political parties (we are only allowed two). These “free” market patrons have given us bubbles and meltdowns, unfettered greed, preventive wars, massive debt and a seeming desire to undo every good thing that came out of the New Deal.

That’s the tyranny of private power. Oddly, it is harder to dislodge than tyrannical government. That is a contradiction, on the right wing anyway.

Over here on the left, we get it. And we don’t need to wear ugly ties to demonstrate it.

What do we have left?

We have a few tools. We can still use our government-provided courts and sue the bastards, and occasionally win. (That’s why “trial lawyers” are so despised. They are a countervailing power.) We can strike, boycott, sabotage. We can organize. Sooner than later, I hope, we will rediscover the power of popular organization against entrenched private power.

Oh yeah: And we can vote. … … … … I’m joking, fer chrissakes! We have only two corporate choices when we vote. Voting is not organizing. Voting dissipates power. It’s a mere illusion of control.

To make it clear to Ed Schultz …

I’m no Ed Schultz fan – I think he’s a blowhard. Liberal talk radio has about 9% of the talk market – too bad he takes up so much of its limited bandwidth.

I just listened to a few minutes of him today, and got this: The House Health Care Reform bill, just let out of the paddock yesterday, contains a provision that health insurers must maintain a medical loss ratio of 85%. Since health insurance overhead is about 30%, Schultz says, this provision is significant reform.

“Medical Loss Ratio” is the percentage of health insurance premiums that are paid out in actual health care costs. It’s a number that Wall Street watches very closely. According to Wendell Potter, ex-CIGNA executive and active reformer, when our health care system was dominated by non-profits, the MLR was around 95%.

Today it is around 80%. The number that Schultz cites – 30% overhead, is the insurance burden on the entire system, which includes doctors and hospitals having to have staff and computers to deal with the insurers.

So what the House is proposing is a 5% shift in costs from overhead to medical cost payout, from 80% to 85%.

However, that 5% is significant. There are two ways of achieving that objective – one would be to reduce overhead. Another would be to raise premiums to add some padding to the overall framework*.

Since the latter would naturally be the obvious solution, there’s another provision in the House Bill that would seek to regulate premium increases. I suppose that has some merit, but again, they have failed to address the underlying problem – the profit motive. All else is much ado about nothing.

Anyway, as seen down below, the stock market didn’t even hiccup at the House bill, so I doubt that investors are troubled by any of its contents. Anything offensive will likely be stripped out in conference or disappear before our eyes, as the Kucinich Amendment did.

*Apparently Pelosi and company thought ahead. Here’s Dennis Kucinich on one section of the bill:

“It’s on page 22 of the bill, right here, it says that rates shall be set at a level that does not ka
exceed 125 percent of the prevailing standard rate for comparable coverage in the individual market. Now … It’s very easy to understand what that means.”

“It means a 25 percent increase, they’ll have the ability to execute and since insurance companies have already raised rates for the last four years by double-digits, we can expect — based on the bill — another rate increase by the insurance companies.”

So a provision that raises the MLR payout to 85% within a 125% rate framework is, as we accountants like to say, legerdemain.

Act 3: Sealing Defeat

The problem faced by private health insurers is simple: How to avoid sick people. The business exists to siphon money off of our health care system, and sick people conflict with that objective.

Even supposed non-profit health insurers are caught up in this system – if they accept rejects from private insurers, they will end up with all the sick people. So they avoid them too.

As always, it is not about evil people. It’s about a corrupt system. People who occupy slots within that system have two choices: Play the game, or do something else for a living.

This should be well understood by this time – it’s Health Insurance 101, but it’s not. The debate is so well managed in this country that the bare naked facts are still obscure to most people.

Down below, I tracked the behavior of several insurance stocks as the debate has raged on in Washington about “reform”. There’s been no great upheaval. Those stocks are a little depressed compared to the market as a whole, but there doesn’t seem to be any investor hiatus. It’s business as usual.

And it’s not hard to know why. Any real threat to the business model vanished months ago. Politics is playing out the fate of a supposed “public option” now on the hill, but it doesn’t threaten the model.

In fact, as Congressional Budget Office Reports, the house version of the public option, supposedly more aggressive than the Senate’s, might reach about six million people, and at higher cost, than private plans. (WSJ gives a rundown here.)

Why so? Because it would operate under the same business model as private insurance, and would therefore attract private insurance rejects – sick people. And as any insurer will tell you, if your plan attracts sick people, you won’t be long in the business.

Which is why we need single payer. Health insurance is a government job, or at least needs to be made entirely non-profit, as in Switzerland and the Netherlands (and Minnesota). It’s not rocket science. It’s merely counterintuitive to people indoctrinated in “free” market ideology.

Interesting – I’ve said from the beginning that Democrats are the problem, and of course, I catch hell for that. But there was a glimmer of hope. The House Progressive Caucus put out a bold statement – it would not support any bill that did not contain a strong public option.

What happened? Politics happened. These House members have been approached behind the scenes and told that their financing will be cut off, their district pet projects threatened -Nancy Pelosi, who appears weak before the cameras (as does Harry Reid), is actually quite a ruthless bitch behind the scenes.

How do I know that? Oh, I don’t know – I guess just from following politics. One must pay close attention to detail and intrigue, as everything that happens in front of the cameras is mere theater.

P.S. Here’s some high comedy – A fellow named “Livingston, I Presume” put up a piece banging on congressional Republicans for accepting Medicare while opposing a public option. Steve W. quickly puts him in is place in the comments, reminding him that Democrats killed reform, and that the Republicans, while interesting, are irrelevant.

Flatliners

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while – I have been following several health care stocks, not to buy or anything like that, but rather because I think they are a good gauge of how much “reform” is really in store for us.

Other people do this sort of thing better than me, but below are five lines – the DJIA – I converted May 31, 2009 to $70 from $8500 so that it would fit on the graph, just to give an idea of the relative movement of several selected health insurance stocks to the overall market trends.
scan0001

The light blue line at the top is the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The dark blue line is Wellpoint, and the other three, relatively interchangeable, are Aetna, CIGNA, and United Health. Their stocks trade at very similar prices.

On October 26, Harry Reid announced that the public option would be in the Senate bill. On October 27, Joe Lieberman said he would help filibuster it. And today, the House announced their health care bill.

The market response? Flat line.

I take my cue from that. Nothing going on in Washington is going to affect the health insurance business, and from that I conclude that we will continue to be screwed.

And now for someting completely different …

This is the best laugh I’ve had all week – from Gore Vidal. One advantage of growing old is the freedom to say what you think. It’s not going to affect your income, and your freinds are either dead or senile or they are your friends through think and thin.

Megan Carpentier was nonplused at Gore Vidal’s take on the Roman Polanski affair. She trotted out the old words that feminists use whenever someone says something they don’t like … she chose “misogynist” and “despicable”. Those are good words, I’ll grant you, as they condemn without specifics, throwing a blanket over further inquiry.

Anyway, read and enjoy.

Question: So what’s your take on Polanski, this many years later?

Vidal: I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?

Q: I’ve certainly never heard that take on the story before.

Vidal: First, I was in the middle of all that. Back then, we all were. Everybody knew everybody else. There was a totally different story at the time that doesn’t resemble anything that we’re now being told.

Q: What do you mean?

Vidal: The media can’t get anything straight. Plus, there’s usually an anti-Semitic and anti-fag thing going on with the press – lots of crazy things. The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew, Polacko – that’s what people were calling him – well, the story is totally different now from what it was then.

By the way, Vidal’s photograph at the above link virtually defines the word “sardonic”.

Bill Maher on the Democrats

Below is taken from Bill Maher’s Real Time, June 18, 2009. (I’m a little behind on my Real Time.) Maher (or his writers) seem to have a good understanding of politics in 2009 America. I hear very few people who understand so well the real differences between the two parties and the ideas and aspirations of most Americans.

His most poignant words are “properly argued and defended.” There are many good, solid liberal and progressive positions that are easily defended by competent people, but far too often we get mealy-mouth appeasers like Max Baucus and Chuck Schumer, not to mention Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. These people haven’t a clue what we-the-people want. But we’ve been stripped of all choice, and are stuck with them.

Anyway, Maher did a bang-up job.

By the way, Maher would not even be known to us were it not for the fact that HBO is subscription-based. That network on occasion runs some truly controversial programming. He’d never be allowed to say what he says in an advertising-based medium like ABC, FOX, or NPR. In fact, ABC booted him in 2002 for saying something that was true.

Now last week in this space I criticized Obama for not fighting corporate influence enough. I made some liberals very angry. My phone rang off the hook, my email filled up, and Nancy Pelosi got so mad that her face moved.

Look, folks, I like Obama too. I’m just saying let’s not make it a religion.

And as far as you folks on the right who think that we’re now somehow in league, we’re not in league. I was criticizing Obama for not being hard enough on the corporate douche bags you live to defend. I don’t want to be on your team. Pick another kid.

So I stand by my words, but there is another side to this story, and that is that every time Obama tries to take on a progressive cause, there’s a major political party standing in his way – the Democrats. Now, people talk a lot about a third political party in America. We don’t need a third party. We need a first party. You go to the polls, and your choices are the guy who voted for the first Wall Street bailout, or the guy who voted for the next ten.

This week we’re hearing that a public option for health care is unlikely, because it doesn’t have the support of enough … Democrats. Even Ted Kennedy’s plan (Ted Kennedy – yeah) leaves 37 million uninsured. This is because we don’t’ have a left and a right party in this country anymore. We have a center-right party, and a crazy party. And over the last thirty-odd years, Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital.

So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby – that’s the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers and Civil War re-enactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans. And who actually worry that Obama is a socialist.

Socialist? He’s not even a liberal.

I know he’s not, because he’s on TV. And while I see Democrats on television, I don’t see actual liberals. And if occasionally you do get to hear Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky or Dennis Kucinich, they’re treated like buffoons. OK – these are not three of the world’s most charismatic men, but then no one is going to confuse Newt Gingrich’s for Zac Efron, and I have to look at his fat face on TV more than that free credit report song.

Shouldn’t there be one part that unambiguously supports cutting the military budget? A party that is straight-up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, legalizing pot and steep direct taxing of polluters?

These aren’t radical ideas. A majority of Americans are already either for them, or would be if they were properly argued and defended. And what we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren’t being served by the Democrats.

Because, bottom line, Democrats are the new Republicans. It’s like when some Chinese company buys the name of some old American brand and slaps it on some cheap crap. You buy it out of reflex and it’s only later that you think Wow! I didn’t even know Woolworth’s made dildos!

Fifty-eight and counting …

Note: I originally wrote this post in December of 2008, and am feeling a little smug about it (like it was so hard to predict what was in store for us). So consider this gloating.

—————–

With Saxby Chambliss winning in Georgia, Democrats will not have a filibuster-proof senate. No surprises there. I never thought that idea had much merit anyway, as there are enough right wing Democrats to kill and progressive measure that comes afoot. Think … Joe Lieberman. I doubt they’d be able to muster sixty votes on anything. Even with a working majority last time around, Republicans ran the show, and the Democrats did not put up much of a fight.

The nomination of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General is a fine example. Democrats were poised to bottle up the nomination in committee, and then had two timely defections – Chuck Shumer and Diane Feinstein. They got it out of committee. Interestingly, the nomination vote had 40 votes against – yet there was no talk – none – about a possible filibuster. (Probable there were some hidden pro-Mukasey votes nestled among that forty – that’s another problem. You never really know what you’ve got there.)

That’s just how Democrats roll …. over.