Thomas Szasz, in his book Coercion as Care, lays out, from a psychiatrists point of view, how medicine is becoming coercive and mandatory. Of course, the next step is fines and imprisonment if you do not take the cure for which you've been obliged to pay. Under the bad old communists, they used to send the family of the person they just shot a bill for the bullet. Under capitalism, you must finance your destruction on the pre-payment plan.
In the late 1940's, when president Truman tried to nationalize medicine, the AMA and doctors fought against it, saying it would lead to lower quality, widespread fraud, rationing, unhappy doctors, unhappier patients and much higher costs (they did not see infanticide and physician-assisted suicide coming.) But using the Fabian method, slowly but surely the bad guys have taken over medicine. At the same time, as medicine degenerated in USA, certain kinds of people who use to enter medicine began to go into other fields, and the range of people who become doctors has narrowed. Those live wires and just good, intuitive people who populate every field and drive it forward are elsewhere when it comes to the field of medicine. The range of doctors left in the field is sufficienty pro-government intervention and subsidy and regulation, to the point we all are going to get what only a few of us wanted, free medicine, good and hard.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Fines if You Disagree
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Michael Jackson And Free Markets
When MTV was launched, it was a "whites only" club. Rick James famously protested the rules while other black artists knew better than to challenge the status quo, like Lebron James who knows better than to point out NBA games are fixed.
In time there may have been FCC hearings, rules written, new commissions formed, taxes raised, race identification boards convened, and so on, to solve the problem.
Michael Jackson is different. He wrote some songs that proved to be perennial bestsellers, produced by Seattle's Quincy Jones. Then Michael produced videos. Ones MTV could not ignore. No hearings, no rules, no taxes, just raw talent crushing evil. That is the free market in action.
Marshall McLuhan wrote:
“The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely “well-adjusted,” he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story , “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” “Well-adjusted” courtiers, having vested interests, saw the emperor as beautifully appointed. The “antisocial” brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the emperor “ain’t got nothin’ on” The new environment was clearly visible to him.”
Much is made of Mr. Jackson's idiosynchrosies. There is the question of his affection for children, especially boys. All artists who show affection for children get accused of child molestation eventually. Captain Kangaroo, Lewis Carroll, Cardinal Bernadin, the list goes on. Usually the accusations start with people who themselves are child molesters, but it is human nature for people to believe charges so vile. There is a difference between child-like and childish. Michael Jackson had a child-like innocence, and his detractors are childish.
Then there is Mr. Jackson's adventures in cosmetology. While I think his efforts lamentable, I always thought of a book that came out when Michael and I were youths, Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, in which a man had a dermatologist turn his skin dark enough to pass for black. The white man then experienced life in USA as a black, and wrote about it. The book was a big deal at the time.
Was Michael Jackson doing the reverse? Was he experimenting with "white like me?" I have none of Michael Jackson's money or talent, but even i was willing to experiment on myself with a risky new orthodontist technique for straightening teeth, at a super premium price.
Of course, if he was doing any such thing, he would have communicated this in his art. I'll leave it to others to analyze his music, but I think I caught something in his dance. Michael was a student of all of the greats, and embraced and extended the best. Even the moonwalk was borrowed, although Jackson will own it forever. There is one gesture in his dance that has no precedence in dance: when Michael grabs, ahem, himself. The gesture is universally insulting. But there you have it, smack dab in the middle of his act, Michael grabs himself.
Someone once joked only in America can a poor black boy grow up to be a rich white man. Maybe Michael Jackson did report back what it is to be White Like Me in America, up front, out in public, for the whole world to see.
May God grant Michael Jackson eternal peace.
Overcapacity
Mish Shedlock is reporting on a story of a chicken farm that is being shut down driving a county into a depression. The kicker is the large outfit that owns the operation does not want to sell, since excess chicken capacity is suppressing prices. This is another example of damage done during the boom, with the bust merely sorting out who loses, who pays.
You might check out ECONOMICS FOR REAL PEOPLE by Gene Callahan for a good overall explication.
I was teaching at San Francisco State last weekend and a fellow asked why if Austrian economics is so obviously correct, why do so few people embrace it? My first answer is, there is a tiny minority of Americans who wonder at "while baseball is so fun, why do so few Americans follow the game?" People follow what they follow. A first rate plumber cares nothing for economics, and when I want my pipes right, I don't care about his economic views. They don't matter. Everyone knows organic food is better for you, but Wonder Bread is still America's number one brand of bread.
In the instance of chicken ranches, we have excess supply of those chickens that become tender nuggets at KFC. During the boom, loans for everything, including chicken ranches, were cheap and easy. The big boys expanded and "modernized" (think less nutritional value, but less cost) leaving a swatch of perfectly good chicken farms redundant.
The heart of all of this is our economic system, and the Federal Reserve System. There is a move to audit it, and perhaps get rid of it. I doubt it will come to that, although I agree it should go.
If it does go there is a problem. The Fed system distorted the marketplace to the point where less than 100 years ago we had some 75% of Americans live on farms, and to day it is something like 7%. The fact that the government could control the economy, enforce "get big or get out." From there USA policy could use big ag to dominate the world by shipping cheap food overseas, in return for even cheaper resources from the countries we exploit. The Fed allowed us to become imperialistic.
But here is the problem: if we get rid of the Fed, then our system begins to fall apart, and to feed America most Americans will have to back into farming, or many Americans will starve. Does anyone see that happening?
Monday, June 29, 2009
Kids Starting Businesses
I wonder if it is against child labor laws for kids to start businesses, but anyway, we need far more of this.