Health Care - Part 1: The Four Strawmen of the Apocalypse

Recently I've been constantly embroiled in a never-ending series of discussions on a broad array of liberty oriented topics. One of the most prominent has been the massive debate over whether or not the government should increase its (already quite sizable) role in health care in the United States.

This essay will be the first of a two-part series. While I agree that there is a problem with the high cost of medical care in the United States, the bulk of the solutions currently being pedaled by agents of the Federal Government will - I believe - exacerbate, rather than alleviate, those problems.

So in the first part, I shall address the main arguments in favor of a government-run health care system and then in the second, I will be offering solutions to the problems facing us as individuals living in this nation.

Part 1

Not surprisingly, much of these discussions devolve into me repeatedly addressing some of the same arguments made by many of the supporters of whatever version of socialized, nationalized, government-run, (whatever-you-want-to-call it) imposed "reform" to the health care system. It seems to me that the bulk of these arguments fall into 4 specific categories:

• Classism
• Appeal to Authority
• Anti-Capitalism
• Anecdotes

I will attempt to discuss each of these in more depth over the course of this essay and explain why each of these four arguments are essentially straw-men. I fully intend to give each objection a fair hearing, and I do not wish to be engaging in arguments against straw-men. If a reader believes I have done this, please feel free to present a new argument or explain why I have failed to adequately address a topic. To that end, I will try to present as many arguments that have been directly posed to me verbatim.


Classism:

1. "You must be on the payroll of the insurance/pharmaceutical/hospital management/etc. companies!"
2. "So you think it's ok for rich people to get health care but no one else!?"
3. "You're putting profits over people!"

Appeals to Authority:

1. "Obama promised that he would reduce costs & expand coverage, who are you to disagree?"
2. "But Harry Reid/Nancy Pelosi/Henry Waxman/etc. said ___, they know what they're talking about."
3. "The AMA/PhRMA/American Cancer Society/etc. endorses the new legislation!"
   

Anti-Capitalism

1. "For profit health care is EVIL!!"
2. "Health care should be free for everyone."
3. "'Free market' health care naturally results in inequality."

Anecdotes:

1. "My sister's insurance company dropped her because of ___, we shouldn't allow this to happen."
2. "I have a pre-existing condition that prevents me from getting insurance, that's not fair!"
3. "Insurance Execs are greedy!"

There are other arguments of course, but these are some that I hear most often and are most perpetually annoying to me because they are all asinine strawmen... Just so we're clear, let's briefly examine why.

Classism

Classism is one of the most rampant, and one of the most common across all humanity. It's a favored "argument" of populists in many areas as well, not just health care... Surely you've heard someone arguing against restrictive energy policy, or in favor of various types of deregulation, etc. get called a "corporate shill", or "on the payroll of Big Oil!". This is merely a variety of ad hominem, and doesn't actually qualify as an argument... What's worse is that it's almost never true, either!

Sure, insurance companies & pharmaceuticals give money to politicians & advocacy organizations - all major corporations do, because government & politicians have supreme power to effect their industries and they need to be sure to be on the "winning" side of all new laws. But generally, they give money to politicians across the political spectrum to hedge their bets, not just to one party or one organization. For all the populism & anti-business rhetoric surrounding Barack Obama, his second highest campaign contributor was Goldman Sachs. Funny how well they're doing now compared to the rest of Wall Street too, isn't it?

So yes, sure... Corporations pay people to advocate policies that would benefit them... So what? So does the AFL-CIO, Teacher's Unions, the AMA, the Auto-Worker's Union, and hundreds of other profit and non-profit organizations. When government has the authority to drastically alter the outcomes of people's lives, interested parties will always be there vying for control.

However... Companies & other organizations rarely, if ever, pay individual, unconnected people to advance their views!

I sure as hell have never been paid by an insurance company to argue against government run health care any more than I've ever been paid by an oil company to question the validity of exaggerated global warming hysteria. Furthermore, the vast majority of us aren't rich... So exactly why would people standing up against socialized medicine only want rich people to get health care??

More to the point, since increasingly liberalized markets have consistently proven to reduce costs and increase access to goods & services in all cultures and in all industries they've ever been allowed, it makes vastly more sense to ask why supporters so-called "health care reform" want to continue down a road which has been shown to be disastrous for the poor & middle class hundreds of times?

Regardless - the truth is, no one (or very few people) want to see anyone go without medical care - everyone wants "universal coverage". So attempting to discredit those of us who disagree that government is the best means of accomplishing those goals by attacking our motives is not only factually wrong, but is morally repugnant to boot.

Appeal to Authority

Unfortunately, this one is both incredibly common and also hard to combat. Most people are incapable - both in terms of skills & knowledge and simply as a matter of limited time - of parsing each new proposed piece of legislation and their impact on the economy. This is why we elect representatives after all... Though there are a few people out there who do, almost no one advocates "pure" democracy for this very reason. We all understand that we have to entrust other people with the task of learning these things for us, then reporting back so that we can make relatively informed decisions without having to spend our lives studying things we have no interest in and no aptitude for.

Problem is... There is a difference between using a legitimate authority to bolster an otherwise sound argument and replacing a sound argument with the assertion that someone authoritative said that the conclusion is correct. For instance, if I make an argument like "bonobos & humans share a remarkably high percentage of the same genetic code, therefore we are likely to be closely related species", I may need to support this argument by citing authorities. I may cite geneticists and enlist the help of primate researchers to give credence to my assumptions and facts. But this is patently different from skipping the argument entirely by suggesting that Dr. Scientist X said it was true, therefore it is true.

Yet that is what many within the health care debate consistently do.

Claiming that because President Obama promised a certain outcome, that is the outcome which will be delivered is not only a bad argument, it's also historically absurd. Even if it was acceptable to forgo making actual arguments by citing an authority, politicians & other government officials are tremendously bad sources! The incentive for politicians is to win popularity contests, not to tell the truth. Elections aren't won by telling people hard facts and explaining complex ideas... And they most certainly don't win them by telling people bad news. Obama, for instance, has repeatedly talked about "sacrifice", while promoting all manner of bailouts, "stimulus" packages, massive government spending and campaigns telling individuals to consume which does everything possible to prevent people from actually tightening their belts.

In the political world, promises & reality are almost always 180-degrees off of each other...

The worst aspect of this, perhaps, is budget projections. As Steven Hayward and Erik Peterson wrote in a 1993 Reason Magazine article:

"At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion... The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was supposedly a 'conservative' estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion."

As of 2008, the US government spent $386 Billion... And the unfunded liabilities over the next several decades are currently estimated in the realm of $37 Trillion.

So let's not pretend that governments are any kind of authorities at all on anything but forcibly collecting money from their citizenry and yet still spending more than they take in.

Anti-Capitalism

At least this one doesn't necessarily rely on flawed logic - only its premises are wildly inaccurate... And thus, it's still one of the worst arguments of all time, especially within the realm of health care. We do not have a free market health care system, so demonizing markets as the cause of our health care woes makes absolutely no sense.

The health care system in the United States is one of the most highly regulated industries we have - and what isn't dominated by command & control legislation, mandates, subsidies & government granted monopolies is controlled outright by our government being involved in the payment of over 50% of the health care used by Americans. So crusading against "capitalism", and especially against the purer laissez-faire variety is a failure of initial premises. The thing with bad premises is that once one is accepted as true, all logical reasoning that flows from that premise will be flawed.

I've often referenced a comprehensive article on the history of health care in the United States by Terree P. Wasley entitled, "Health care in the twentieth century: a history of government interference and protection" in the April 1993 volume of the journal, Business Economics on this topic, so I'll pull a quote or two here to make my point. First, a little background on insurance in the US:

"By 1930, the United States had as many or more medical, nursing, and dental schools and hospital beds per unit of population as it has today. The Great Depression, however, slowed the expansion of health care facilities and personnel. Many Americans had trouble paying for the medical care they needed. Doctors tried to make allowances for patients in financial straits, but hospitals, with higher fixed costs, had much less flexibility. Between 1929 and 1930, average hospital receipts plummeted from more than $200 per patient to less than $60. Hospitals then began to turn to insurance plans as a way to guarantee a steady cash flow by spreading the financial risk."

As the Great Depression wore on with FDR continuing more and more asinine & quite useless economic policies, price & wage controls were imposed. Contrary to what anti-capitalists would have you believe, uninhibited markets bid prices for qualified labor higher (up to market equilibrium, of course), not lower... Alas, fixing wages in the 1940s prohibited employers from finding direct ways of enticing quality employees to their businesses. But soon enough, employers found an alternative in offering health insurance "benefits":

"However, in 1942 the War Labor Board decided that fringe benefits up to 5 percent of wages would not be considered inflationary. Employers began to offer health benefits as a way of providing additional compensation. Total enrollment in group hospital plans grew from less than 7 million to about 26 million subscribers from 1942 to 1945.(4)

Concurrently, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that the purchase of health insurance for workers was a legitimate cost of doing business and could be deducted from taxable business income. The IRS also ruled that workers did not have to include the value of health insurance benefits in calculating their taxable income. These rulings amounted to a giant tax incentive for both employers and taxpayers and did much to institutionalize employer-provided health care into the system."

Then, of course, Labor Unions jumped on board and started demanding insurance benefits as part of their contract negotiations... When the Office of Price Administration & its wage controls were finally abandoned in 1947, the employer-provided health insurance system was firmly in place. Now, of course, as society has shifted away from the single-corporation style employment that dominated much of the mid 20th Century and people are starting to work for shorter amounts of time with any given company, having insurance tied to employers is an incredibly large problem for modern Americans. But as the above information details, it wasn't at all an outcome of the "market", but of government intervention into the market.

Now, it's tempting to think that simply changing the tax code to make all health care expenses tax deductible (rather than just for employer-provided care), we would see a large increase in options for health insurance consumers... But that ignores the rest of the interventions government has imposed on the market for health care over the last 60 years.

"Besides enacting tax incentives that skewed the insurance market, government intervention generated another problem in the industry -- "experience rating." Because the Blues were protected by government due to their exemption from taxes and reserve requirements, they had a competitive advantage over commercial insurers. Commercial insurers turned to "experience rating" their insurance plans as a way to compete against the Blues [Blue Cross & Blue Shield - ever wonder why they're often the only options in your city or state?]. They began to sell insurance to employers with relatively healthy, low-risk employees at cheaper rates than the Blues. Since the Blues often were required by law to use a "community rating" system, they responded to this competition by receiving permission to use a "modified" community rating to reflect experience.(7)"

Then we had the addition of Medicare & Medicaid... But because of the incentives in place making health care "free" and tax-exempt in the minds of consumers; doctors & patients were both expecting the government or the private insurers to pay for top coverage - with no sense of weighing opportunity costs.

"The third-party payment system now dominated the health care industry. Most Americans were covered either by private health insurance or a government program for their hospital and physician costs. But Medicare and Medicaid brought the same defects found in the private insurance industry to the health care landscape, accelerating the rate of medical price inflation already set in motion by cost-plus reimbursement, lack of patient incentive to control costs, and first-dollar coverage."

Thus the 3rd party payment system, combined with the various other interventions into the market have provided an environment tailor-made to see prices balloon, over-consumption of existing health care resources, and increasingly slowed production of new resources (like how we've gone from 26 producers of vaccines down to only a handful).

The full article is definitely worth reading, as are the dozens of others you can find on the history of medical care in the United States... There is nothing particularly controversial or disputed about the facts Wasley presents - nearly all of them are even found on Wikipedia if anyone cared to look, but few people bother to learn the history of government involvement in health care and thus are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

And honestly, this isn't even scratching the surface. I've skipped mandates on insurance companies, special government protections for the big players, special Intellectual Property provisions guaranteed to major pharmaceutical companies, the government-granted authority given to the AMA on number of medical licenses given out... There are thousands upon thousands of ways in which well-meaning (and not-so-well-meaning) politicians have distorted and destroyed anything even remotely like a private "free market" in health care.

The real trouble for the anti-capitalists is that since the 1940s, the most crucial aspects of why free markets work have been destroyed by government. Freely shifting Prices, profits & losses are the most important part of a functioning market! They are what provide information to consumers & producers about the relative value of scarce goods... I've covered this ad nauseum lately, but it could not be more important to understand this. When prices & wages are controlled, they cause unnatural surpluses & shortages wasting valuable resources on products that the market isn't demanding. When the health care consumer no longer has to think about the price of health care, they quit making decisions about relative value and instead just start demanding everything...

Now, some people would say that people shouldn't have to make decisions about relative worth when it comes to their health - except that regardless of what system you employ, this is an unavoidable part of reality. Doctors, hospital beds, medicines, MRI machines - these things are all limited! So we have to have some method of answering questions about what those resources go to... Wishful, and incredibly childish, thinking about just pretending that they're all infinitely available and that everyone should just get everything for free doesn't change that fact.

Without fluid prices and the market feedback provided by profits & losses, accurate information on what health care consumers demand cannot be acquired and the market itself cannot function.

What anti-capitalists fail to recognize is that a market as distorted by government intervention as health care is not, in any meaningful way, "capitalism". So when they complain that health care is representative of reasons we shouldn't allow free markets, they are arguing against a strawman that doesn't exist!

Anecdotes

Finally we have the issue of anecdotes... Yes, they are sad. Yes, a few of them are true. And...?

And nothing. Anecdotes are not meaningful points of debate!

Plenty of people experience tragic events, and insurance companies aren't always going to be perfectly nice... But then, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of cases of insurance fraud over the years as well and while it's really easy to villainize the insurance industry still 90% of Americans are insured and the vast majority of us navigate even the current, rather problematic, system successfully and relatively painlessly. So for all the anecdotes that you can find on people with pre-existing conditions, rescission and sob stories about people who went bankrupt due to some medical catastrophe or another - there are a far greater number of stories (perhaps 95%) which end extremely well.

My mother, and three of my aunts have had breast cancer. They each are healed, and not bankrupt. All four of my grandparents dealt with medical issues and effectively succeeded in overcoming them without massive, entirely unmanageable debt during their lives. I've had my own experiences... All generally good.

So what!?

Nancy Pelosi wouldn't accept my "good" stories as evidence that everything is A-Ok (and she shouldn't, nor is everything totally fine with US health care), because they are invalid as evidence one way or another.

* * * * *

I hope all this clears up a lot of the major complaints and "arguments" floating around about health care. There are other arguments, but these are a few that I have spent the majority of my time dealing with in discussions about this issue. I'm sure it will be too little, too late, but "Part 2", will be real - economically viable - solutions. Basically, I'll repeat everything John Mackey said a few months ago, but since I don't run a major company favored by the rich ex-hippie crowd I doubt I'll take too much flak for it.

In the meantime, don't let any of the above arguments sway your opinion on health care. They are each horrible additions to the "debate" on health care. I can only hope it's not too late for America.

Jonathan Kent: Worst Farmer EVER!

Ok... OK!

I promise, this will be my last Smallville related post for a while. And this one should be brief... But here goes.

On the show, Jonathan Kent (Clark Kent's adoptive father for those with no barometer for American culture) is constantly portrayed as being poor - often teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. As I noted in the previous blog, this serves as a lazy writing tool to build instant sympathy with him as the underdog character. But I don't get how Jonathan Kent could possibly be poor... And I'll tell you why. But first, here are some facts & my assumptions:

1. The Average farmer makes approximately $76,000 a year according to USDA statistics. In rural Kansas, this is definitely a very good living.
2. The average farmhand earns $44,000 according to SimplyHired. This may vary, and depending on whether or not the Kent family would employ illegal immigrants to work for a cheaper wage, perhaps this is an over-estimate, but for the sake of argument, let's use this figure.
3. The Kent farm is average in most respects, and there are not significantly more overhead expenses for this farm than others (machinery, supplies, buildings, etc.) and so I am treating it as more or less equal to any of its competitors in this regard.
4. Clark Kent (Superman) works for free.
5. Clark Kent with his unique abilities - including superhuman strength, faster-than-sound speed, infinite sun-powered endurance, invulnerability and a host of other powers - can do the farm work equivalent to at least a dozen hired farm-hands.
   

So now... We do the math.

(Bo Duke as incurable complainer & superhuman loss-making farmer,
Jonathan Kent)

Because Clark works for Mr. Kent for free, and because his abilities are so extremely valuable, he saves the farm an immense amount of money. Given the above estimates, deducting the salaries of a dozen farmhands (which for the sake of simplicity - and because I've never actually seen any on the show - we'll assume is the number required for a farm of comparable size), Clark saves the farm $528,000 per year in labor costs.

I repeat: $528,000 per year!

Thus, since no one else presumably gets their labor for free, or have superhuman children to help out; Jonathan Kent has a greater-than half a million dollar advantage over any of his competitors. In theory, because the other operating costs are identical to other farms, the $528,000 per year is pure profit. Also in theory as a result of this bonus, Jonathan Kent could offer his goods at a far cheaper price than any of his competitors - thus conceivably making his farm the preferred choice for consumers.

Now, granted, this profit can go to any number of capital investments... Expanded operations, marketing, upgrades to facilities. But each of those options would be a way for the farm to make even more money... Regardless, it might be reasonable to assume that Mr. Kent wouldn't want to expand his operations and would prefer to stay a smaller farm simply to protect Clark's true identity. In such an event, that $528,000 in excess profit could go directly into his own salary.

So... If the Kent farm was average in all other respects, the Superman free labor bonus would produce annual earnings of $604,000 for Jonathan Kent.

No one in their right mind would consider earning $604,000 a year the salary of a poor man. So I will not insult anyone's intelligence by pretending that this is the salary that Mr. Kent is unceasingly whining about episode after episode. "Poor" in this instance (factoring in the poverty line for a given family size of 3 people) according to Health & Human Services would mean that Mr. Kent is only earning $18,310. Now, I'll be generous here and say that with college payments looming, and other ordinary middle class expenses, the HHS figure would be more "destitute" than "poor"; so let's assume that one might still complain when earning double that amount with a family of three.

So let's imagine that Jonathan Kent's financial woes & endless kvetching stem from earning $36,620 a year... That's less than I make with no family, so I could certainly see whining about it. But what does it mean...? It would mean that Mr. Kent, with all his amazing special advantages, is actually losing $567,380 a year!!!

ON WHAT!??? WHERE THE HELL IS HIS MONEY GOING!!!?

How can a person make such poor economic decisions that his business could lose enough to not only negate over a half million dollars in essentially free money, but also to cause his personal earnings to be less than 50% of the national average for his field!??!?!??????????!??


ANSWER: Worst. Farmer. Ever.

S-S-Something from the Comments: Smallville Edition

Recently, I wrote a short blurb about a tremendously stupid speech on "advanced" economics given by the character Lionel Luthor on TV's "Smallville".

Last night a buddy of mine, Monte, commented on my post and I feel like his response is worth sharing, and responding to. What Monte said was this:

"Sean, I really don't think that anyone ever watched Smallville for Lex [sic] Luthor's speech on economics. Getting pissed about that is really kind of silly. People watch it to be entertained, not to learn about economic theory, which I agree, can be a problem. But I don't think that "think tanks" are any better for intelligent decisions. They are every bit as cut off from reality as you claim University professors are. They are every bit ensconced in echo chambers and same sided opinions and shut off from dissent as any other group. I like academic settings, but realize that there are egos and group think even there. All of my experience and contact with think tanks is much much more one sided and shut off from the rest of the world. that is part of where I get so annoyed with the majority of the links you site.

Yes, so Hollywood is filled with stupid people, but they make what sells, and capitalism says that what sells is best for humanity. How do you plan to fix it?"

Monte's right; people don't watch Smallville for lessons on economic theory, they watch to be entertained, but ultimately I think he's missing the point.

It's *precisely* because people watch Smallville to be entertained that it's such a concern.

• Consider that most people will not actually take the time to learn any decent economics or read any books on the topic.
• Consider also, that most people will never take a class on the subject outside of perhaps one semester in high school.
  
• Consider as well that in total, most people will spend only a few hours of their lives thinking about these things critically - and in a setting that, let's face it, doesn't really hold any particularly high standards for even doing that.
  

Now realize that most people watch on average 5 hours of TV A DAY. And that 99% of the American populace owns at least 1 TV, with over 70% owning more than one.. People are influenced by those attitudes and ideas they are exposed to most often and most consistently.

This is why choosing the right friends is so important - the people you spend time with make a big difference in the kind of person you become.

If it was only Smallville that did this crap, I'd laugh at it - in fact, we all might just laugh at it - and not think anything of it. But it's not. It's virtually *ALL* of scripted television that fails like this. As a result, it is a subtle way in which the average person is constantly hearing a set of ideas - in a non-critical environment, no less - that are simply wrong. This doesn't just apply to economics either - it applies across the board; with shows on psychics, computers & internet issues, genetics (where do you think the whole "frankenfoods" concept really comes from?), and a dozen other fields.

I have struggled for many many years to convince people like Monte that it is a real problem, because most intelligent people write it off as just being "TV"... For a person like Monte, the TV isn't that big of an influence, because he does actually read books, papers, and study topics like this. But Monte is not in the majority...

As for Think Tanks - I agree wholeheartedly!

Many think tanks and academic settings do wind up being filled with group-think and turn into echo chambers. And I have commented on that innumerable times over the years. It's one of the biggest frustrations I have with the whole education establishment.

The difference, however, is that when people read an article from a think tank or from a political advocacy organization, they do so very critically. Especially if it doesn't fit their preexisting views on government or history (which tend to be the majority of papers I ever point to for most of my "audience").

This means that people are actually more likely, in general, to engage their brains when reading these kinds of things in ways that they simply do not do when watching television.

Granted, there's a lot of potential for confirmation bias as well, but speaking broadly, those kinds of papers tend to spark debate which can effectively counter bad reasoning - whereas the ignorance perpetuated by narrative television goes unnoticed. For a prime time show that's relatively successful, ratings of 12-15 million viewers per episode are common, compare that with 3-5 million viewers of news on any given night (and most TV news certainly isn't much better intellectually anyway).

My point is that a large percentage of people obtain their beliefs about business, economics, science and even many of their operating philosophies & moral values from years of uncritical television viewing. This has given the writers of television an immense amount of influence over the attitudes & views of the nation over the decades. And if you think I'm wrong about that, then ponder for a minute that Barack Obama has had vastly more TV time than any politician in US history and has done so deliberately.

Think also, way back to the 1960 presidential election with John F. Kennedy & Richard Nixon... Those who only heard their televised debate thought Nixon clearly won on the issues - but those who saw them on TV (roughly 80 million people!), preferred JFK and thought that he was the winner.

Politicians know that this stuff matters.

They try to use it to their advantage. This is why the smart ones hire people from my industry to do their promotional work. They don't hire political people, campaigners & speechwriters to produce their media, they hire entertainment people... Because they know that we are the experts in moving people emotionally and are the ones capable of actually influencing the hearts and minds of potential voters. Just ask Will.I.Am how that works.

It's also not true, in my opinion, that TV writers are just responding to market demand for dumb ideas. There is a market for being entertained. In the context of that Smallville episode, Lionel Luthor could have easily said something sane about economics - and the average viewer would have been just as happy, and the plot just as easily advanced. So while Monte is right that capitalism provides the people with what they want, he's not necessarily right that people's wants in television are so specific (or specifically known to television producers) as to demand to hear economic idiocy in throw-away scenes. What people want out of a show like Smallville is a teenage soap-opera about superheroes, messy relationships, mysteries & lies, and all with some decent special effects and explosions thrown in for fun. The underlying subtext is up to the writers and moral lessons being expressed is something typically left up to the writers.

(See? It's Soap-opera Superman!)

And what do you know, the writers tend to beat their views into their audience with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer...

Strangely, you only see the villains with their general purpose international conglomerate "LuthorCorp" and "LexCorp" businesses making deals, and earning those nasty "profits" by illegal means. Clark Kent's father, Jonathan, however is just your average salt-of-the-earth family farmer who is constantly broke because, as we all know, farmers never make any money. I mean, my god... The USDA estimates that the average farmer is going to be making a meager income of only $76,065 for 2009, how could anyone in rural America live on such a pittance!? And of course, unlike the billionaire crowd, farmers and the farming industry don't have any connection with the political elite - that's why the US political primaries don't begin with a farming heavy state like Iowa or anything like that! Naturally, being rich means you cheat, and being broke means you are honest. Only honest people are poor, and only thieves & murderers are rich... It's a false dichotomy that leads many people to supporting remarkably stupid ideas purely because they've been conditioned to emotionally respond to this type of paradigm.

The funny thing is, I'm not even going to just blame it on writers' ignorance of economics (which is no doubt a major aspect of this issue) so much as it is actually a product of writer laziness.

All stories need heroes & villains. Underdogs make for sympathetic heroes, and what better underdog are you going find than a poor, well-meaning farmer (David) vs. a billionaire corporate tycoon (Goliath) with all the resources in the world? So... I mean... I get it. It's easy, and when you only have a couple weeks to write an episode of a nationally broadcast television show, sometimes you have no better option than resorting to the basics. However, it's both obnoxious and intellectually damaging for such a poorly-constructed world-view to find its way into the homes of millions of people night after night after night.

Finally; responding to the "What are you going to do about it?" question: I'm going to do exactly what I've been doing the last two months!

I'm going to keep trying to explain what I've written above to organizations who promote better ideas to get them in the game - and consulting with them to help them step up their media presence and to actually recognize that they're losing the intellectual battle not because of bad ideas, but because of bad presentation. I'm also going to keep producing and working on that type of media production as I have done. And, lastly, I'm going to keep writing and exposing these ideas to whatever audience I might have. I can only hope that that's enough.



Note: "Capitalism" doesn't actually say anything at all about what sells being "best for humanity". Capitalists don't either. What we actually say is that the free enterprise, laissez-faire, version of capitalism provides people with what they want and need. Success in that system comes from effectively providing for your customers with the things that they place in highest value - and doing so more effectively than anyone else. I've explained this at length in previous blogs; i.e. The Profit "Motive", ObamaCare & Corporatism, A Tale of Two Burgers, People Actually Still Believe in the Labor Theory of Value!? and others... So I don't really need to do it again, but the term "best" is always and entirely dependent on one's values. Value is subjective and differs from individual to individual, and thus there is no "best" for the whole of humanity.

At any rate, the "market" is just the term we use to describe the exchange of goods within human populations, much like the way we use the term "society" to describe people living & communicating with each other under shared geography or culture. These are just concepts with no ability to have an independent consciousness or will of their own and which most certainly cannot make moral judgments or select levels of value for different things - only individual people can do that. It's just a morality-neutral platform for people to engage in mutually beneficial trade while peacefully respecting each others' right to property.