Well, we've had some inquiries about the most righteous doom group Witchsorrow since posting the doom metal primer. For those too lazy and / or stoned to go to Youtube themselves, here's the lead "single" from the self-titled disc of dementia, "The Agony." If you don't think that this is some of the best leaden music of the year, you are a plone.
After the below video, be dead sure to go the the next link, where you can stream the entire new Krallice LP, "Diotima," for @#$%ing free. NYC ambient black metallers Krallice are the new cause celebre of the hipster fixed-gear cappuccino-metal set, but they're also one of the most creative bands in underground music. It's a must.
Click below to stream the new Krallice LP. From NPR. C'mon just take a sip of your fair-trade chai, don't let your greasy metal friends see what URL you're on, and click :
I really didn't have time for the usual format, I hope this will do. Please read the fact checks as they add important points and correct some details.
The epitome of the Fat-cat is back, and his name rhymes with "sacks." This is appropriate, considering that not since Lincoln's prostitution to the Railroad companies have we seen such shameless and unapologetic chrome-plated balls in our corporate governance.
A few days ago Sachs was sued by the SEC, ostensibly out of nowhere (they weren't even given the customary prior-notice to prepare). This is an unquantifiable mountain of horse-shit. I'm not saying they haven't done anything wrong, I'm saying that everybody knows it's a show-trial and nothing will come of it... well, everybody but the average American, that is.
The average American will see this as a fresh reminder of why we "need" financial reform. When Obama gets up on stage and finally signs this shit into law, most Americans will be watching it live on TV--clapping their sausage-digitted mits together, resulting an enormous orange plume of Dorito-dust which will likely be the 3rd of man's creations that will be visible from space.
Make no mistake: This isn't being done to penalize Goldman Sachs. This fact is so obvious that even the GOP is calling them out on it.
It's not just about the financial reform bill, either. What makes this particular moment in time the most strategic for distraction is that the SEC was finally forced to acknowledge 13 years of epic failure. Long story short: A guy ran a $7 billion ponzi scheme, was investigated by the SEC for 13 years and found to be extremely dirty. Four Times. They never prosecuted--that is, until now. This whole Goldman Shit-fit is almost certainly related. (131,198)
I'm ill as hell today. Still managed to finish it though!
Rough Transcript: Remember the movie back to the future 2? The villain uses a time machine to go back 30 years and change the timeline.
In the alternate timeline, the good guys are either dead or subjugated by the villain, who is so powerful he can essentially do whatever he wants.
The people of the alternate timeline are oblivious to how they ended up in that mess and just assume it's the way things are meant to be.
This is kind of the same thing we see with government stimulus. Essentially, our future could go one of two ways: with stimulus, or without. When stimulus is applied, the result is that people are in worse shape, and don't recognize what they've lost by government altering the timeline.
Let me first say that I'm talking mostly in terms of fiscal stimulus here, like the TARP, Obama's $700b stimulus, and the upcoming $15B jobs bill. However, many of the things I'm about to say could be applied to monetary stimulus as well.
Let's pretend first that you're an investor in 2008 after the stocks, housing, and other asset prices have fallen dramatically. Things are uncertain, and you want to be very careful in reinvesting your money. You're going to choose businesses that look like they have a healthy outlook. You're going to research, and you're going to pick your next investment solely based on the profit it will yield.
Government, on the other hand, does the opposite: Stimulus projects are chosen not based on what will be the biggest wealth producer in the future, but by a myriad of other factors including: - Who paid what in campaign contributions - Is the business located in my district where it will employ my constituents - What the most influential lobbyists are saying - What the politician is currently invested in*
*I bet you didn't know that it's actually legal for politicians or their friends to invest in a business they know will benefit from an upcoming piece of legislation. They can therefore use your tax dollars to bolster a stock and enrich themselves.
A lot of economists reply to this and say: "So what? It doesn't matter what the money is spent on. As long as the money is being spent, it will create jobs and help the crisis." This is what the Keynesians call boosting "aggregate demand."
The problem with this is two fold 1) Jobs are not about babysitting people or generally killing their time and handing them a paycheck, they're about creating wealth. 2) The money comes from somewhere, and invariably is shunting money away from legitimate long-term investments
Let's talk about jobs. Like I said, jobs are about creating wealth. I'm going to use a quick example of how wealth is created, so you can understand how it is our standard of living rises.
Say I save up and buy an empty plot of land and some saplings for $1,000 dollars. I spend another $1,000 on labor and grow the trees for lumber. I sell the rights to the trees to a lumber company for $5,000. Did you see that? I just created $3,000 of wealth. It doesn't end there, either. The lumber company cuts the trees down and processes them into planks and blocks at a cost of $1,000 in labor, $1,000 in machinery costs, and resells all that wood for $10,000. They have just created a net of $3,000. The company they sold the wood to makes furniture in a factory at a cost of $2,000 for the labor, $1,000 for the machinery, and resells the pieces for $20,000. Another $7,000 is created.
The laborers and capital investors of this scenario added $13,000 in value. That value is reintroduced into the economy either through consumption or yet even more capital investment. Using my profits from my tree farm, I can now choose to spend another $2,000 and double the size of my business. Then I could put the other $1,000 in the bank and they might loan that money out to someone else who might start their own businesses.
When government ties up labor for its own purposes, that labor never creates as much wealth as it would in the private sector. This can be due to the laziness of government contractors or employees, but it's also due to the fact that the investor chooses projects based on yield whereas the government does not. Essentially, government money is primarily either paying people to work less productively or paying people not to work at all.
Therefore, the biggest problem with government spending is not the taxes, it's actually the loss of the fruits of the labor we would've gotten in the alternate scenario where government was smaller and employed fewer people.
Now let's talk about the money. 100% of these stimulus packages have essentially been lumped into the national debt. People know that debt is simply deferred taxation--that we're syphoning off our children's future in exchange for a better standard of living today. What you probably didn't count on is that even in the present, large deficits have repercussions.
The national debt is composed of bonds. Bonds can be bought by anyone, and in fact despite what you may have heard, most US bonds are held domestically by Americans and American institutions. The biggest foreign bondholder is Japan, followed by China.
The question that you need to ask is: where is the money for the bonds coming from? People invest in US treasury bonds because they're perceived as a secure investment. In fact, until recently, most investors wouldn't even fathom a future where US Bonds wouldn't be the most secure investment out there.
In spite of the ballooning debt, people are still buying these bonds. The question is, as an investor, if in an alternate timeline, the government weren't issuing bonds, where would your money be?
Unless these people are inclined to keep their money under their mattress, their money would either be in other, carefully-chosen investments or in a bank. What does a bank do with deposit money? It also carefully invests.
So basically, by issuing government bonds, the government ensures that those monies are not put into the wealth-producing private sector, but instead into the wealth-draining public sector.
Not only that, but there's the obvious problem with having to pay back those bondholders in the future, which is paradoxically better for the economy than the stimulus the debt was used to fund. (197,668)
In a completely unexpected turn of events, the 'yes we can have hope and change' president has vetoed hope and issued an executive order against change. Obama has apparently lied about not enforcing the federal ban on marijuana in otherwise legal situations. As Obama pays populist lip-service to medical marijuana, his minions at the DEA are continuing to raid medical marijuana growers. Some of them may never live outside of a prison cell again. If this were done on a lower level, the claim that he would not enforce certain laws and giving the go-ahead to violate them may be considered entrapment.
"Yes I can!... Be a Machiavellian despot!"--Barack "The Prince" Obama (132,841)
For those of you who don't know, Glenn Beck is a "conservative" commentator who has apparently recently discovered libertarianism. He gets on the air 5 days a week on Fox News and rants about the 'classical liberals' who we call the founding fathers. Whenever I see his show (not often), I think that it's too bad he wasn't ham-fistedly proselytizing about these things when Bush was in office, he might have actually earned himself some credibility. Beck is well-known for finding and airing buried footage of people in the administration and upper echelon of the democratic party making communist / socialist / fascist / racist / statist / scary-as-hell statements. He then spins these soundbytes into vast conspiracy theories and cries about it. With real tears. On the air.
Devil's advocate: According to Beck, he criticizes republicans too... But only if their names rhyme with Teddy Roosevelt (Seriously??) or John McCain
I've seen a few of these soundbytes made by Obama's various "czars" as well as some of the more central voices of the administration. What strikes me is not that these people exist or that their statements are so unapologetic, it's that the rest of the media aren't airing some of these clips. I'm left thinking "Are these people too insignificant to report or are these ideas just so innocuous to the press that they're not worth noting?"
The press historically gives a free ride to its favored politicians. The American public were denied critical information about FDR and Kennedy--particularly the juicy personal tidbits that would've ruined them. Even Bush was allowed to get away with a heck of a lot until the 9/11 fever broke and the press went rabid once again.
It would seem, however, that even the new liberal messiah can't walk on water forever. Left wingers around the country are waking up to the fact that their former lover and nobel laureate is actually a fraud and a danger to freedom--even as they (the left) narrowly define it. Obama has broken key campaign promises that have driven all but the most vapid party hacks from strong approval to apathy or disillusionment if not outright rage ($5 says they'll vote for him in 2012 regardless; but we're talking politics here, not reality).
With all this, Glenn Beck's muckraking over Obama's appointees is starting to bubble up from the depths of the journalistic septic tank that is "Fixed News" into the liberal press.
One of my favorite examples is a Salon article about Cass Sunstein ("one of Barack Obama's closest confidants"). It talks about 'his' idea to use government funds to pay agents to infiltrate internet chat-rooms and forums to spread the word of the state and to bolster confidence in the government. This isn't a new idea, of course, but it certainly should hit a nerve with the same groups that were upset about Bush's "propaganda" (which the article also goes into at length almost out of nowhere, proving once again that "leftwing" reporters can't say bad things about democrats without scrambling to assert "... But Bush was worse!!").
Interesting historical note: The first official propaganda ministry in the western world wasn't in Fascist Germany or Italy, it was in the United States under the progressive President Woodrow Wilson.
The Salon article goes on to point out the hypocrisy of certain liberal pundits in not jumping on this and other scaryisms drizzling out of the mouths of the Obama administration along side the drool and edamame particulates. They pass over these omens of statism while at the same time dubbing those who don't "Purveyors of Becksh*t-nuts Conspiracy Garbage."
To keep an even keel about politics (if that's even possible), I think it's necessary to look to people who actually endorse the person/group in question to see if your concerns are valid. Obviously most people just assume they're on the "right" side until the evidence piles up to the point of suffocation. However, when you see these 'sheeple' start to defy their shepherds and say the same incendiary stuff you've been saying, that's when you know you're not crazy--at least if you go by George Orwell's definition of insanity as being "a minority of one" ... although in politics it's usually the majority that's crazy, so who knows. (105,286)
As I've stated before, I'm a libertarian and a medical student currently seeing patients in the field. As such, I'm uniquely annoyed by all the goings-on in DC lately. I'm sure most people reading this think it's all over--that the socialists/corporatists in power have "won" and that there's no use even talking about it anymore. Of course if we've learned anything from these systems of central planning, we know that eventually, they all fall down. If the current health bill passes, it's likely to actually make our unsustainable system even worse for all the same reasons it's currently failing (which this article is about). The debate is not over, it's just been put on hold for a few years--until the government's new plans to screw up their mess even further can come into fruition.
I propose a different approach: not more government, but less government. Then there's the obligatory argument about the number of uninsured being "too high." I posit that the best way to reduce that number is to make healthcare less expensive and more accessible rather than just accept the huge costs and setup government programs to cover it. The easiest and most effective way to reduce prices is the free market.
84% of Americans already have some form of health insurance. If the free market were allowed to reduce costs by say, 30%, how would that "84%" figure grow?
Our system fits the classic Harry Browne line, "Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, 'See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.'" The Government is responsible for the high cost of healthcare and therefore the high number of uninsured, and the only way to fix their mess is to get them to stop doing what they're doing.
I know many people reading this will say "but we already have a free market, and clearly it's expensive and ineffective!" Of course, those same people really don't know what a "free market" is--that is, a market where the government does not regulate, subsidize, or fix prices. Our medical system, though not outright socialist or fascist, is about as close to capitalism as the Titanic is from docking in New York.
Most people don't understand how cheaply healthcare could be done if we allowed the industry to evolve like other industries. Many of the things we as doctors do require equipment and drugs that are either cheaper than dirt or have alternatives that are. The high cost of doctors' time could be supplanted in most cases by trained nurses or even the injured/sick individual themselves. The folly of those who don't see this is a failure of imagination. Rest assured, however, Medicine is no different from other industries (eg Unlicensed individuals service their own cars all the time, and most medical procedures are far less dangerous or could at least be made that way by the demand to do so). Given the opportunity to evolve, quality care would be as ubiquitous as color televisions
I imagine a country where an uninsured person living in poverty will be diagnosed with cancer, and even the most bleeding-heart socialist will unsympathetically say "Well why the hell didn't you buy health insurance? It's cheaper than your smoking habit. Here's $10, go get some chemotherapy"
Indirect Health Care Subsidies - Tax Incentives
59% of Americans with health care receive it through their employer. The reason the employer does this is because the government taxes cash reimbursement (wages) not only through the Federal Income Tax (Median ~20%), but also Unemployment (6%), Medicare (6%), and Social Security taxes (12%). Paying for employee healthcare incurs none of these taxes. Therefore, the government is effectively partially paying for employee healthcare by so heavily taxing other forms of compensation.
This is an indirect subsidy which, again raises prices universally. In addition, like the direct subsidy, recipients of this care will use much more of it because they are not responsible for paying the premiums. (* See explanation below)
The way to end this is more complicated than ending a direct subsidy--if we continue taxing wages**, we must then start to tax all forms of employee compensation, including health care. This would start to push people towards paying their premiums directly instead of getting insurance through their employer. Sounds like a bad thing, but theoretically you could reduce the federal income tax (and other wage taxes) to match the massive influx of revenue generated by this tax.
Also, remember that "15% of Americans are uninsured" statistic? Well 1/3 to 1/2 of all people currently uninsured are uninsured because they're in between jobs that provided them with insurance. If they paid for their insurance themselves, they'd have it now. Therefore, we could eliminate the number of uninsured by 33-50% almost immediately by simply transferring the employer's policy to the employee. Eliminating the tax incentive to do otherwise would certainly fix the problem.
** Optimally, we would tax neither wages nor other forms of compensation, but that's even more of a pipe dream than any of the other things I've mentioned.
Direct Health Care Subsidies - Medicare & Medicaid
28% of Americans with health insurance have it totally paid for by the government. This is an obvious subsidy and leads to higher prices for those who do not enjoy this subsidy. Moreover, recipients of this care will use much more of it because they are not responsible for paying the premiums. (* See explanation below)
Indirect Governmentally Managed Care - Tort
This argument you've surely heard before: Health Care Providers change their care to accommodate an altered risk/benefit ratio strictly because they're afraid of getting sued. It's unknown how much this actually contributes to costs, but there are a few studies that show it being greater than 25%. That's not including the change in the culture of medicine, which may actually bring quality down in the end.
Several states have started implementing tort reform and not surprisingly it's been a complete success.
Direct Governmentally Managed Care - Health Care Regulations
Americans are universally turned off by managed care, yet they are inexplicably in favor of Government managing their care through regulations.
Health Care is one of the most regulated industries in the United States. From compulsory licensing of physicians to the drug approval process, the market is mired in government ineptitude, sloth, and corruption. Nearly every step of patient care is delivered exactly according to government edicts.
Giving people a choice between licensed and unlicensed physicians (for instance, allowing a nurse to write prescriptions and perform simple procedures without a doctor) would drastically reduce costs and therefore insurance premiums.
In addition, giving people a chance to buy drugs that haven't been through the FDA's 12-year process would save thousands of lives and allow the market to find better and faster ways of ensuring drug safety. Meanwhile, the actual FDA could be privatized and run by Ralph Nader (or some other ostensibly incorruptible person) and its approval being available for people who are untrusting of drug companies.
* 3rd Party Payer - The Bugbear of Subsidy
73% of all Americans (87% of the insured) not only receive a government subsidy for care (directly or indirectly) but are also not responsible for paying their own premiums. This is the biggest reason prices are rising both through the indifference and profligacy of the recipients (nobody "shops around" for care before they get it) as well as recipients actually taking worse care of themselves as they are not responsible for the bills that come of it.
For instance, if a private insurance company were to give breaks for people who ate right and exercised, this would start a trend that may even fix America's obesity problem. It sounds far-fetched, but that's only because you have no idea how much the actuarial tables would change for a healthy population as opposed to ours (with 1/3 of Americans being overweight and another 1/3 obese). The premiums for these "fit" people, especially in their later years, would be halved.
The current incentive structure encourages the opposite--if you're not fat, you're not getting your money's worth for healthcare. After all, by taxation or reduction in cash wages, you are paying the premiums to be fat whether you want/need to or not. It could be that our "good" healthcare is what's killing us.
The Current Healthcare Bill (Dec 23, '09) Is More of the Same
The current healthcare bill will expand all of the problems with American healthcare--direct subsidy, indirect subsidy, direct regulation, and indirect regulation:
Direct Subsidy - This bill mandates that everyone pay a private corporation for healthcare. In addition, it increases Medicaid and pays for private health insurance for people who 'can't afford it'. I thought they called this Fascism. It'll be interesting to see how they determine who gets paid and who doesn't--who draws the line between 'fully paid' and 'forced into poverty by paying obscene premiums'.
Indirect Subsidy - This bill gives money to [small?] businesses who can't afford to provide healthcare to their employees. Government giving money to private corporations... I couldn't fathom how corruption could ensue!
Direct Regulation - This bill adds at least a thousand pages of healthcare regulation, especially on insurance companies. Insurance companies make a tiny profit margin as it is. Take it away, you don't increase competition, you bankrupt competition. Many think this new bill will be a boon to insurance companies because of the compulsory addition of 30+million new customers. I'd advise those who believe this to look at the remaining 1,000+ pages of the bill and see if that makes you want to start an insurance company.
Milton Friedman was always railing against 'central planning' for its inherent immorality. However, he also said that we were lucky in that these systems had the added detriment of inevitable failure. Our healthcare system is like Frankenstein--sewn together from all manner of dead and dysfunctional parts, then artificially reanimated and left to run amok. Eventually, the people will grow wary of its rampage and destroy it. The question is: how many people will die in the interim. (219,201)
This is a draft I posted to reddit that seemed to go over pretty well, so I decided to post it here. ----------------------- I am a 3rd year medical student seeing patients about 50 hours a week. I am also a libertarian. The news these days, as you can imagine, has been a bit of a distraction.
Back to Reality
With health care, the first thing you have to accept is that there is literally not enough wealth on the planet to give everyone the best and most convenient healthcare possible. There is medical technology out there so advanced and on the bleeding edge it makes NASA look like a 7th grade science class.
Even if we had the money, there are other things we'd much rather be spending our money on than our health. It ends up the case that health care can never be cheap enough, fast enough, or good enough.
Think of it this way--The following is what I want from my health care:
* Fast * Effective * Cheap
Now pick two.
What We Get For Our Money
People look at this system and say that it's way too expensive--that it's bleeding money from every orifice and needs to be patched up by government.
People use life expectancy as evidence for this. Since we're not number 1 (or even number 10), surely this means that our system's results are inferior.
However, using life-span as a measurement of health care is wrong.
Americans, as we all know, are fat. Only about 1/3 of Americans are not fat. Moreover, 1/3 of Americans are not only fat but obese. This fact alone has some huge effects on health care costs, but when you factor in the general lack of health in America due to lack of diet moderation, exercise, and weight control, that's when things get a little heavy (pun intended. deal).
Complications from weight excess, bad diet, and exercise deficiency dwarf even tobacco in morbidity and mortality by several fold. Heart disease is the number 1 cause of death, 8% of Americans have diabetes (+90% of which is type 2), CVA and stroke are up there too. Not to mention the fact that nearly all cancers have increased morbidity and mortality in the obese. This lack of self-maintenance of health has cascading effects on nearly every biological process in the body.
Death is cheap. If people would simply just up-and-die from every heart attack or diabetes exacerbation, it'd save the system a lot of money. However, as our life-expectancy indicates, people don't die from these diseases much in our country. Only a few years of life span is shaved off our average. This is an amazing feat: to actually bolster our abysmal lifespan with the might of our economy.
When people point out that 15% of our GDP is spent on healthcare, I'm actually surprised at how little that is.
Insurance Companies
Nothing would make me happier than to tell you that just removing profit from the insurance companies would make things cheap. I'm a libertarian, but I'd support it if it were just that simple a sacrifice. The problem is, that's totally wrong.
You would be hard-pressed to find a medical insurer in the US that makes more than 7% net income. Up until the past few years, 5% was an astronomical profit and insurers were hovering at cost.
People like to blame insurance companies for the high cost of care. Would cutting 7% off your medical bills be all that earth-shattering?
In a recent interview with Bill Moyers, one former executive at Cigna stated the hideous practice of trying to disqualify high-cost beneficiaries by technical flaws in their paperwork. Indeed they did do that, but it doesn't actually happen that often.
People decrying our system seem to think that nobody with an expensive and potentially deadly disease gets healthcare. If that were true, my health insurance as a fit, healthy young student with no prior conditions wouldn't be $2,000 a year. More than enough people dying of horrific diseases in this country are covered. I know, some of them are my patients and family members.
Insurance companies pay 97% of all claims. (by the way: Many of those claims are made with the health care practitioner knowing full well that they wont be reimbursed, but do so anyway)
HMO Vs PPO
If you saw Michael Moore's Sicko, you know about HMOs. One of the not-so-subtle implications of Mr Moore's movie is that insurance companies to this day still manage care. He even took footage from 10-year-old congressional committee meetings that made a convincing case against managed care.
The problem with this is: we don't have managed care anymore, and we haven't for some time now.
You can look up the "HMO Act" yourself, but basically this act of congress under Nixon made HMOs the standard of American care until it expired in the mid 1990's. HMOs fell by the wayside and PPOs took over. That, combined with a decline in healthy lifestyle, is why health care costs skyrocketed.
HMOs (AKA Managed Care) basically tells doctors straight away which procedures are allowed to be used for each set of symptoms. If you have a cough, you may be able to get a chest x-ray, but you can't get a kidney function test (even though you can have kidney ailments that are involved with cough, they're just rare).
If you had a devastating illness, HMOs did an okay job of covering you most of the time. It's by no means perfect, but remember: it was cheap!
The HMO tells you which doctor you can see (the doctor had to agree to work under the plan), and tells the doctor what they're permitted to do.
In contrast, if you come to a doctor's office with a PPO backing you, it's basically a free-for-all.
One thing I will say for HMOs is that they were cheap, and they provided most of what you want out of a health care plan.
Since the advent of PPOs, it has become very hard to even find a company willing to sell you a HMO plan. When you find a plan, you have to jump through several hoops to qualify. However, even now, HMO's usually cost 30-40% less.
Because HMO's so tightly managed care, they became vehemently opposed by Americans. When the HMO Act came up for renewal, it was voted down by congress and lead to the extinction of the practice.
HMOs Vs Single Payer
Single payer systems are managed care, by definition.
The single payer manages what physicians can do for their patients, puts conditions on care (eg "Quit smoking if you want your arteries fixed"), and sets prices.
When countries allow the single payer to compete with private insurers, some patients and doctors choose not to participate in the single payer program at all. This is why many systems do not allow private competition.
Latest Health Care Plan By Obama Et Al
As far as I can tell, the new health care bill on the table now is going to make it illegal to not have healthcare.
Even if I weren't a libertarian, I'd probably still say that forcing people to buy health insurance is about the most fascist thing this government has done in a long time.
More Health Care = Less Personal Responsibility ?
It's no coincidence that the people who put the least amount of effort into maintaining their health are usually those who have the best healthcare.
I know libertarians are up in arms over medicare, but the fact remains that these patients get superb care. There's a reason why the medicare program is on a rocket-sled to bankruptcy, and it's not that they pay out too little. Medicare pays more per capita than any socialist system in the world. They get everything they want from motorized chairs to unnecessary joint replacements. No private or public managed care system hold a candle to Medicare.
It's true that there's a lot of red tape and that doctors routinely get paid less (or are unexpectedly denied payment)--a lot more than a PPO. However, recipients still live like kings on the plan.
It's no wonder, therefore, that the obesity rate in the elderly is higher than any other demographic, with a close second being the poor (who get coverage under Medicaid).
Yes, it's harder to take care of yourself when you're old, but it's a mistake to think that these people are incapable of diet and even a modicum of exercise. Proof of this is simply by comparing our elderly obesity rates to those of other countries.
It really doesn't matter who pays for it, having a lot of health care makes you lazy about your health. The government directly subsidizes the poor and the elderly, but employer-provided health care is also indirectly subsidized. Basically, government made it more lucrative to both sides to give more reimbursement in the form of health insurance than wages. Just like with wages, employee health care reduces profit, which reduces corporate tax. In addition, it is currently untaxed by the labor tax (aka the personal income tax), nor is it taxed by FICA or Social Security. In fact, employers didn't start providing employee care until government started heavily taxing other forms of employee reimbursement (wages).
Torn
As a libertarian, I'm mortified by the prospect of government manipulating care. However, as a future physician, I can't shake the feeling that maybe having managed care will bring back personal responsibility for health in the US.
It's very conflicting, but in the end, you just can't argue in favor of slavery, even if it will make people safer from themselves. (112,518)
In a bold move, the White House announced today that there would be harsh repercussions for the brutality of the Iranian government against the protesters. Because the US is already sanctioning Iran, and military intervention is basically off the table, Obama was forced to go for the jugular.
"He made clear that one recent overture to Iran — the authorization for U.S. embassies to invite Iranian officials to Independence Day parties — was likely to disappear without changes."*
"That's a choice the Iranians are going to have to make," Obama said.
I hate politics. I happen to believe that whenever someone writes about political issues they actually care about, their IQ drops at least 35 points before they put the first word on the page. This is why most comments on political YouTube videos are fragmented and incoherent: Someone with an IQ of 110 decided to jot down a thoughtful political opinion, and was temporarily deprived of the ability to form sentences. This is simple emotion clouding over reason and intellect. It's just human nature.
To therefore write effectively about politics, you've got to either not care at all, or just not have human emotion to begin with. This is why most professional political pundits are actually sociopaths. The pundit's ability to look apocalypse in the face and say "Fuck it." is the secret to readable copy. It's not that these people are especially smart, it's that they're emotionally distant enough to keep their heads on straight when writing about the metaphorical rape of all their espoused beliefs.
I, on the other hand, can't even be in the same room with a TV with a talking head on it without getting acid reflux and foaming at the mouth. I had to stop watching televised news years ago for the sake of my physical health. And that is the reason why this article is going to suck. I did it anyway though, and I may never know the reason why.
The problem with the vast majority of voters is that they know a sum total of "dick" about history. This is one of the many reasons it's totally pointless for any intelligent person to vote (less intelligent people may enjoy the free stickers, so it's a good deal for them). In the case of economics, the US has made so many ridiculously idiotic mistakes that we have plenty of past experiences to draw wisdom from, provided we look at history through the right lens. The Great Depression should have been the end of economic intervention. Unfortunately it's apparently become the beginning. Part of this stems from the total distortion of the history of the Great Depression, which is what will be addressed here.
Popular History
The popular view of the Great Depression is as follows: It started with the crash of 1929 and lasted up until World War II. According to the history books, our economy was "unequally distributed" to rich people and the crash of 1929 was the culmination of the inequity of the "bubble" in markets such as luxury goods (think dot com era). Moreover, our president at the time, Herbert Hoover, was against interference in the markets and therefore passed up his opportunity to save the day through intervention, which lead to the deep depression that lasted "over a decade." After Hoover's beleaguered term ended, idle government gave way to FDR's promises of interventionism and reform. FDR's activities, combined with that of the Federal Reserve and the seemingly fortuitous entrance of the US into WWII lead to the end of the depression.
To be clear: The above paragraph is total bullshit, with a few spacklings of horseshit and "WTF".
Pseudo-Austrian Theory on What Went Wrong
First of all, the Great Depression didn't start in 1929, it started in the credit bubble of the 1920's. A "credit bubble" is where lenders, on a massive scale, lend too much money without taking proper care to see that the borrower can pay it back. Giving more money to people who are going to waste it means that the useless goods that these people buy are going to have an "increase in demand" (DEMAND = more will be sold, and they will be sold at a higher price). Investors will see this rise in prices (caused by the artificially-inflated demand) and think this is an exploding market and haphazardly stuff their money in as fast as they can, maybe even borrowing to do so. This will further drive up demand until such time as the supply of credit goes away. 1) Lower supply of (inflated) credit -> 2) Higher interest rates ---> 3) less borrowing -----> 4) less money for buying (overvalued) crap -------> 5) less demand for crap ---------> 6) price of crap declines -----------> 7) investors cash-in to avoid losses -------------> 8) Go to 5 and repeat for a while ---------------> 9) investors go bankrupt, can't pay back loans -----------------> 10) Lenders lose money -------------------> 11) Go to 1 and repeat until prices are normalized.
This violent return to normalcy is referred to as a "crash." As you can see, interest rates are a key component of normalization, and that's exactly what the Fed messes with.
The stock market crash of 1929 was not what started the Great Depression, it simply signaled the start of a market correction. The crash of 1929 was the solution to the bubble. The falling prices and the deflation were necessary forces in stabilization of the economy. These forces were fought tooth and nail by the Hoover and FDR administrations (I'll talk about this later), because they meant a decline in economic activity over the short term.
Where did this credit bubble come from? Well something happened during the 1920's that had never happened before in American history. A massive, mismanaged lending force came into play that would haunt the American economy the next 90 years (and counting). Of course I'm talking about the Federal Reserve. Though the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913, they did not participate in open market operations until 1922. The stated objective of "The Fed" is to stabilize the economy by injecting money when markets are down, and deflating when markets are up. They do this by printing money that doesn't exist and loaning it to banks, which it trickles down in a massive, cascading manner (through loan after loan after loan) to consumers who use it to buy crap with. This sounds simple enough, except that in doing this, they flatten out the market corrections which are necessary for normalization. It also makes the arrogant assumption that a handful overeducated academics can make God-like pontifications based on whatever criteria they feel like. All The Fed seems to be able to do is create credit bubbles, which lead to bubbles in everything else. This is exactly what happened in the years prior to the market crash of 1929.
Think about it: It's true, by 1929, the US had seen a few depressions and recessions over its ~150 year history. However, just 7 short years after the Fed starts tinkering with the money supply, we see the largest and deepest depression ever...?? That's coincidence in the same sense that 90% of lung cancers being found in the bodies of smokers is coincidence. What's also not coincidental is the biggest economic intervention in US history (at the time) occurred right at the beginning of this--the longest depression in US history. [Did you see that segue? Was that not awesome?]
Herbert Hoover: The Interventionist
The next myth I'mbout-ta-bust about the Great Mf'ing Depression is that President Herbert Hoover was some kind of coward who refused to intervene. This is almost certainly a case of politics totally f'ing up history. Pay attention boys and girls: this is what it looks like. These 'Court Historians' [*cough* Paul Krugman *cough*] want to blame the "free market" for the Great Depression, and to do that, they have to paint Hoover as a slimy, good-for-nothing, free market Republican (to be fair, he was a Republican, and he looked pretty slimy). Presumably, they're distorting history so they can blame the depression on Hoover and also so they can attribute this country's salvation to FDR's "economic reform." This lends credence to the government power-grab ("bailout") that's going on right now, since conceptually FDR's stimulus was the same thing. Luckily, the claims about Hoover's "non-interventionism" are so ridiculously false that the debate ends in the 2 seconds it takes to load the Wikipedia article.
One thing the pop-historians like to point out (apparently to further this myth) is that the chairman of the fed at time (Andrew Mellon) was pushing to let the recession run its course. Can you imagine? After years of tinkering with the economy, the Fed acknowledges it had 'screwed the pooch' and clamors for natural free market correction. Amazingly, that's totally true. At first, the fed was quite reluctant to intervene*. In fact, according to Hoover's memoirs, Mellon (Fed guy) strongly suggested to Hoover that he stay out of it. Not to be swayed by little things like reality, Hoover ignored Mellon and promptly embarked on the largest ever peacetime increase in government spending. He even brags about it in a speech he made near the end of his term:
We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead, we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action. - Herbert "Give Me a Kiss, Krugman" Hoover
Convinced yet? Too bad, I'm not done! To pay for this "fiscal stimulus," Hoover ran huge deficits until 1932, at which point he doubled the income tax (Revenue Act of 1932) and instituted a tax on checks (this is a lot worse than it sounds, by the way). He even pushed forward a bill to force the Fed to inflate the money supply. Finally, not content to leave it alone, Hoover rammed through congress the largest import tax of the 1900's, the infamous "Smoot-Hawley Tariff." Non-interventionist my ass! Hoover's plans were basically slightly less ambitious versions of "The New Deal" (which would occur later, under President Roosevelt).
If you want to place some blame on Hoover for the Great Depression, you can't blame him for doing too little.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: The Non-Interventionist ... What?
Sort of a fun facet of the whole Hoover Vs FDR thing is that history remembers it as a standard run-of-the-mill socialist Vs free-market debate. The reality, of course, is slightly more complicated.
By the end of Hoover's presidency, it seemed that voters were pretty fed up with all this progressive interventionist hogwash. They knew what Hoover did, they knew it didn't work, they wanted "change," and they wanted it in the form of economic freedom. It seems strange then that they elected FDR--probably the most "progressive" president of all time, according to the history books.
How we explain these ostensibly contradicting facts is not actually all that complicated: FDR was a liar.
FDR ran on a platform of economic non-interventionism. During his 1932 campaign, he berated Hoover for his stimulus actions. FDR's own running mate in 1932 (and later Veep), John Nance Garner said that Hoover was "taking the country down the path of socialism." In fact, the stated Democratic party platform of 1932 was to reduce federal spending by an astounding 25%. No wonder FDR won by such an enormous landslide (57% to 39%)!
Heck, I would've voted for him. Did you know FDR publicly referred to Hoover as a "fat, timid, capon" (a capon is a castrated rooster which is fattened up and raised for eating)? How awesome is that!?
Naturally, the first thing he did was ignore his campaign promises. Starting the very same year he was inaugurated (1933), FDR started creating hundreds of different massive government programs designed to 1) extend government's control over the economy and 2) stimulate it back to health at the same time. Only one of those goals ended up coming true, can you guess which? Hint: the depression continued for 13 years after that, so that leaves...
This package of economic clusterfuck is what is commonly referred to as "The New Deal."
As an aside: In a particularly despicable "dick move," a disproportionately larger amount of the New Deal money was poured into the swing states, which kept them relatively fat and happy while the depression trotted along. FDR effectively bought his first two re-elections this manner. As the New Deal raged on, FDR lost some control over it (legislators found their balls and got in on the money train), which directly correlated with a wider distribution among the other states. Funny how that all works.
Yeah, These Clowns Raped the Free Market, but... Did it Work?
Of course it worked! Why wouldn't it? It's so brilliant: I'm going to inflate the currency through printing, suck tons of money out of the economy through taxes, pour it into wealth-destroying projects, and I'm going to do it all while we're in the heat of a freakin depression!... I mean, where's the problem, am I right guys? WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
Well, what ended up going wrong is that our depression lasted roughly from 1929 to 1946. Popular history says our numbers were turned around at the start of WWII (1941), but that's totally ignoring the fact that you can't ship 11 million unemployed men out of the country and call the ensuing fall in the unemployment rate a "turn-around."
By that notion, Obama could just wait until midnight tonight, use his Santa Claus magic, jump in his reindeer-driven Escalade, and do a drive-by on every unemployed household in America, killing at least half the unemployed in one fell swoop. Wouldn't it be great if it were just that easy? Too bad it isn't (though that may not stop him from trying...). Yeah, it'd make that particular economic indicator jump back into the green, but the smell would be horrendous after a few weeks, plus it wouldn't exactly restore consumer confidence.
No, by most relevant measures, our economy did not reach pre 1929 numbers again until 1946, and this was due to one reason and one reason only: Our shit didn't get fucked up during the war.
Imagine: all of europe and lots of Asia, even including some of the shitty little islands (England), had planes flying over it for YEARS bombing factories used to make war toys as well as necessary consumer goods. What happens after the war when trade barriers are lifted and everyone needs to buy shit? They turn to the one country who still has factories all clean and shiny with no unexploded munitions lodged in the roofs: America. We exploited the living crap out of these countries who needed stuff they couldn't build, it was awesome.
There's a reason why the US forgave most of the loans they made to Europe to rebuild: They made out like bandits.
The production capacity of Europe was shot to shit by the end of the war. By the time everyone had caught up to speed, the United States had become an economic superpower. They would remain that way until idiotic politicians of latter half of the 20th century (and 21st, it seems) could mess all that up. Way to go!
Good Thing This is All Ancient History... Right?
If you accidently leave your TV on for any length of time these days, you probably know that what they did back then to try and "fix the problem" are the exact same types of things they're doing now. You hear about a new Bailout plan just about every month now, and every idea they have isn't exactly new.
You'd think that maybe they would've learned something.
* UPDATE/CORRECTION [Dec. '09]: I left this passage as it was originally for simplicity's sake. I recently completed Bob Murphy's Politically Incorrect Guide to The New Deal (which, btw, can be used as a source/reference for all the material in this article). Subsequently, I found out that the advocates for monetary intervention (eg Krugman, Bernanke, and yes, Milton Friedman) have twisted history and I had been unwittingly duped by it. They would have you believe that The Fed did essentially nothing to correct the MASSIVE monetary contraction at the beginning of the Great Depression. In fact, the Fed of 1929 and the 1930's expanded the money supply more than any American central bank ever (until Greenspan/Bernanke). Krugman, Bernanke, and Friedman basically either deny this or pretend like the actions of the Fed at the time were "too little, too late." The facts, however, speak for themselves. (237,567)
In a radical upset of the smart money, lanky upstart Obama buries wasted husk McCain in the polls.
The Latewire odds had been shortening from 45:1 (in favor of McCain) since the debate season started and McSlain started to act crazy and erratic, finally slipping to 10:1 in his favor on Election Day. These odds were based on three major trends that have consistently shown up in American politics :
1) Those with lower levels of income and education tend to vote Republican because they are ruled by fear. Fear is used very adoitly by Republican marketers to manipulate public opinion.
2) The old and the rich, who typically turn out in force, tend to vote Republican because they are ruled by greed; the young, who are typically ruled by hormones and reactionism, tend to get drunk instead of voting
3) Obama is black, and white Americans tend to fear black people
The powerful victory of Obama tells us that at least some of these trends did not hold. My analysis is :
-The disadvantaged saw through McCain's tax cut rhetoric to his fundamental affinity for debt spending on the one hand, and were duped by Obama's promise to rob the richest 5% for the benefit of the remaining 95% on the other. Also, people quaked at the thought of the weird Palin stepping in when McCain keeled over from exhaustion on the second day of office.
-The rich and old failed to mobilize, probably due to complacency OR defeatism
-America at large has finally come to grips with the reality that black people are perfectly viable citizens.
It's this last factor that is most staggering. Based on the amount of racist horse feathers I hear on the street, I have been saying that it'd be another 10 to 15 years before there would be a chance for a black president. It is the case that the destructive blight of race antipathy still lurks in the hearts of many Americans. The election results, however, demonstrate that a good chunk of folks are, in plain fact, getting over it.
This is a landmark day. Obama may not represent policies that are tolerable. But he surely represents the political victory of tolerance. Who can deny that it's a triumph?
George Clinton must be happy on this day. Obama is Ali, and maybe we shouldn't be surprised that he is in the White House. Richard Pryor didn't live long enough to claim his post as Minister of Education, but he must be grinning with satisfaction that all those chants of "Gainin' on ya!" were more than just some jive talk. (39,302)
Well, if anything is to be said about Barack Obama, let it be that he really knows how to squander an opportunity.
This guy, this &^%##* guy, just went one-on-one with the frayed, decrepit, ibogaine-addled 'Penguin' stand-in known as John McCain, and managed to get his individual ass handed to him by sheer virtue of his lack of focus.
Obama is widely mocked in the press for being 'professorial' in tone and prone to digression, but this wasn't professorial. This was more like second-year-grad-student TA. He forgot th' questions before he even started to answer them, and instead repeated vague anti-"last eight years" saws that were tangential at best.
The classic moment was when some goateed ex-Navy guy asked plainly whether, if Iran attacked Israel, we'd wait for UN approval or just blow them I-ranains up real good tout de suite. McCain emerged from his 3rd plateau drug haze long enough to say "we won't wait" before spiralling into a whirlpool of his own jabber. Obama, on th' other hand, completely ignored the question and started to talk about whether or not Iran should have nukes. Wha-wha-whaaat? It's a truism that Democrats are weak on foreign policy questions, but this guy wasn't even trying. He droned on until the heads on the audience very literally started to droop.
Now, McCain was barely able to stop waddling around the stage and forgetting whether his hero is Ronald Reagan or Teddy Roosevelt for long enough to utter any statement of substance, and when he did, it was likely to be the stuff of fantasy such as his assertion that we can tackle health care, entitlements, and some other huge issue simultaneously (the question was 'prioritize these please"). But for McCain, showing that he can communicate in English rather than lecherous quacks can be counted as a victory, whereas Obama came into the ring with a clear public opinion advantage (on paper at least) and tossed it out th' window by digging his own rhetorical grave in exactly the same manner that his detractors say he tends to do. Obama can put together an English sentence, McCain can't. But when Obama puts them together, his credibility falls apart.
Obama : didn't even try in '08
{ gotta love how McCain dated himself with that repeated 'hand on the tiller' metaphor though! This guy is ready to go full sail ahead; I like th' cut of his jib.... WHAT TH' &^%$ } (40,549)
Presidential candidatin' time once again, and for some people, it's time to ignore what actually matters and pick the dumbest issue possible to vote on.
In 2000, it was re-introduction of Pogs as a national trend. In 2004, it was gay marriage.
Now, it seems to be the economy. Except not. No it's about Change... no wait, it's about Hope!
That's it, hope!
Can you tactilely feel hope? Can you unfold some hope from your wallet and buy bread when it costs $40 a loaf?
As we're seeing, people chosen to head government agencies like "The Fed" have a bigger impact on your life than your perception of the president.
Unfortunately, that will have no bearing WHATSOEVER on who is elected in November.
Let's do a summary of economic policy from the 2 (3? No) frontrunners:
Obama's economic policy (at least, from his website) is an unending litany of nonsensical and mostly nonspecific populist cliches and exploitation of common economic misconceptions. It's kind of like a checklist of stereotypical democratic voting blocks.
I'm not going to go through all of it. Just bring it to any econ professor who's a fan of monetarism (PS, Alan Greenspan's a monetarist). Bring tissues, it'll be emotional.
Meanwhile, you have McCain who will probably soil his adult diapers and have a stroke in an inhuman surge of glee and vomit if he ever gets elected. Mainly I see him as retaining the Bush policy for the most part but I don't see the budget expanding by as much. This would mean four more years of stupidity and keyensian tomfoolery.
Hillary's out so I'm not going to bother looking up her stated views on the subject. Not like it'd matter anyway, as it's probably a lot of BS.
Neither candidate will balance the budget. Neither will fix the Fed.
What matters more than the president is going to be the people he puts in his cabinet, especially in the treasury and federal reserve. The current people (Bernanke, Paulson) are like a couple of 10 year olds trying to salvage a pot of spaghetti sauce they just drowned a cat in. Since it's pretty much a crap shoot, and hard for either of these idiots to be worse than it already is, I simply don't care.
If you need me November 4th, I'll be at the bar. (41,071)
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The epitome of the 
I'm not talking about the fact that most of the commissars and stooges in our government's interventionary nightmare have either 
In a completely unexpected turn of events, the 'yes we can have hope and change' president has vetoed hope and issued an executive order against change. Obama has 
For those of you who don't know, Glenn Beck is a "conservative" commentator who has apparently recently discovered libertarianism. He gets on the air 5 days a week on Fox News and rants about the 'classical liberals' who we call the founding fathers. Whenever I see his show (not often), I think that it's too bad he 
Interesting historical note: The first official propaganda ministry in the western world wasn't in Fascist Germany or Italy, it was in the United States under the progressive President Woodrow Wilson.
As I've stated before, I'm a libertarian and a medical student currently seeing patients in the field. As such, I'm uniquely annoyed by all the goings-on in DC lately. I'm sure most people reading this think it's all over--that the socialists/corporatists in power have "won" and that there's no use even talking about it anymore. Of course if we've learned anything from these systems of central planning, we know that eventually, they all fall down. If the current health bill passes, it's likely to actually make our unsustainable system even worse for all the same reasons it's currently failing (which this article is about). The debate is not over, it's just been put on hold for a few years--until the government's new plans to screw up their mess even further can come into fruition. 
Our system fits the classic 
Direct Health Care Subsidies - Medicare & Medicaid
The current healthcare bill will expand all of the problems with American healthcare--direct subsidy, indirect subsidy, direct regulation, and indirect regulation:
Trial and Error
In a bold move, the White House announced today that there would be harsh repercussions for the brutality of the Iranian government against the protesters. Because the US is already sanctioning Iran, and military intervention is basically off the table, Obama was forced to go for the jugular.
To therefore write effectively about politics, you've got to either not care at all, or just not have human emotion to begin with. This is why most professional political pundits are actually sociopaths. The pundit's ability to look apocalypse in the face and say "Fuck it." is the secret to readable copy. It's not that these people are especially smart, it's that they're emotionally distant enough to keep their heads on straight when writing about the metaphorical rape of all their espoused beliefs.
The next myth I'mbout-ta-bust about the Great Mf'ing Depression is that President Herbert Hoover was some kind of coward who refused to intervene. This is almost certainly a case of politics totally f'ing up history. Pay attention boys and girls: this is what it looks like. These 'Court Historians' [*cough* Paul Krugman *cough*] want to blame the "free market" for the Great Depression, and to do that, they have to paint Hoover as a slimy, good-for-nothing, free market Republican (to be fair, he was a Republican, and he looked pretty slimy). Presumably, they're distorting history so they can blame the depression on Hoover and also so they can attribute this country's salvation to FDR's "economic reform." This lends credence to the government power-grab ("bailout") that's going on right now, since conceptually FDR's stimulus was the same thing. Luckily, the claims about Hoover's "non-interventionism" are so ridiculously false that the debate ends in the 2 seconds it takes to load the Wikipedia article. 
By the end of Hoover's presidency, it seemed that voters were pretty fed up with all this progressive interventionist hogwash. They knew what Hoover did, they knew it didn't work, they wanted "change," and they wanted it in the form of economic freedom. It seems strange then that they elected FDR--probably the most "progressive" president of all time, according to the history books.
By that notion, Obama could just wait until midnight tonight, use his Santa Claus magic, jump in his reindeer-driven Escalade, and do a drive-by on every unemployed household in America, killing at least half the unemployed in one fell swoop. Wouldn't it be great if it were just that easy? Too bad it isn't (though that may not stop him from trying...). Yeah, it'd make that particular economic indicator jump back into the green, but the smell would be horrendous after a few weeks, plus it wouldn't exactly restore consumer confidence.
If you accidently leave your TV on for any length of time these days, you probably know that what they did back then to try and "fix the problem" are the exact same types of things they're doing now. You hear about a new Bailout plan just about every month now, and every idea they have isn't exactly new.
