As I mentioned last time, I am making my way through the excellent book The Spirit Leve: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. When I'm done, I'll put up a longer piece on inequality, the most under-treated but most important trend in understanding the current American dilemma. Initially though, what is most surprising is how many social and economic variables are negatively impacted, in huge ways, by increased inequality, even when adjusted for overall levels of wealth. In other words, even amongst rich countries, it's the socioeconomic spread between top and bottom that makes the difference, not the absolute levels of wealth. Relative outcomes are far more important than absolute ones, which is surprising. But we'll come back to that later. For this piece, I just wanted to highlight a little blurb as relates to health care:We are left, finally, with a so-called health care system so cruel and unjust that the Devil himself in consultation with the most demonic lobbyists, and perhaps a little input from historical politicians such as Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Heinrich Himmler, and Pol Pot could not construct a worse way of deploying the fruits of modern science. It has gotten to the point for most of us where we dread a visit to the doctor more for the bureaucratic consequences than the health issues themselves. Your gall bladder may have to come out, but it's much harder to face the booby-trap clause in your health insurance that will result in you getting stuck with a $123,000 bill for surgery and attendant procedures (including the $500 tylenols). Three months later, of course, the re-po man is towing your car and the mortgage "servicer" has foreclosed on your house, and your life (even without that pesky gall bladder) has become a permanent camping trip next to a drainage ditch.I am personally not confident that we will do anything to address the failures and inequities of so-called Health Care. As a general thing, I have to say that this recent exercise only seems to prove the now permanent impotence and impairment of the federal government. In The Long Emergency we have entered, real governance is likely to devolve downward to the community level, and it may be unrealistic to expect any real action from on high. Things have just gone too far at this point. We have blown past the thresholds of hyper-complexity so that further hyper-complexity only make things worse. At more than 2,000 pages, the current Health Care Reform bill is surely an exercise in the diminishing returns of grotesque additional hyper-complexity.
Let's consider the health of two babies born into two different societies. Baby A is born in one of the richest countries in the world, the USA, home to more than half of the world' billionaires. It is a country that spends somewhere between 40-50 per cent of the world's total spending on health care, although it contains less than 5 per cent of the world's population. Spending on drug treatments and high-tech scanning equipment is particularly high. Doctors in this country earn almost twice as much as doctors elsewhere and medical care is often described as the best in the world.
Baby B is born in one of the poorer of the western democracies, Greece, where average income is not much more than half that of of the USA. Whereas America spends about $6000 per person per year on health care, Greece spends less than $3000. This is in real terms, after taking into account the different costs of medical care. And Greece has six times fewer high-tech scanners per person than the USA.
Surely Baby B's chances of a long and healthy life are worse than Baby A's?
In fact, Baby A, born in the USA, has a life expectancy of 1.2 years less than Baby B, born in Greece. And baby A has a 40 per cent higher risk of dying in the first year after birth than Baby B. Among developed countries, there are even bigger contrasts than the comparison we've used here: babies born in the USA are twice as likely to die in their first year than babies in Japan, and the difference in average life expectancy between the USA and Sweden is three years, between Portugal and Japan it is over five years.
Isn't it remarkable that we don't hear stats like this, explained so clearly, in all the brouhaha surrounding the health care bills? I guess it's not that unusual, since most mainstream news programs rely on ubiquitous ad spots for boner pills.

Visualizing things this way, we can see that not all people on the left want big government, centralized control, and top-down direction of our economy. I myself tend towards the decentralized view from the left, which can roughly be labeled "anarchic," although I prefer decentralist as a general term, due to the pejorative connotations associated with anarchy. As a decentralist liberal, I believe in limited government, localized control, and individual freedom, much as "libertarians" do. So I really can identify with much of the Tea Party agenda, in principle. I understand where they're coming from, because I also feel that huge, top-down bureaucracies are inherently inefficient, bloated, and liberty-sapping. Centralized control usually reduces the freedom and power of small-scale actors, and should thus be avoided whenever possible.
Unfortunately, liberals of my persuasion are now in the position of Lt. Moe Tilden (Robert DeNiro) talking to the local sheriff (Sylvester Stallone), who has finally come around to help out, but too late. "You had your chance, and you blew it." There have been radical lefties warning of the dangers of bloated government and runaway spending for years now. We have been detailing the corruption of federal politicians, the dangers of pay-for-play policy-making, the capture of the electoral system by "special interests" -- the whole shebang. From this perspective, the current Tea Party enthusiasm is a couple decades late to the game. As such, their groping around for a platform to address our current difficulties is ill thought-out and inconsistent. So while I admire their finally coming to grips with the big picture, their incomplete understanding of what's happening will probably end up doing more harm than good, and will certainly not do anything to change the entrenched status quo.
What do I mean? Let's look at the Tea Party platform more closely. These are "Non-Negotiable Core Beliefs," as listed on www.teaparty.org.
We'll leave aside the illegal alien thing for now. I have never been too involved in the immigration debate, so I can't speak too well on that that. Suffice it to say that it seems to be a staple of many conservative platforms, and I'm fine with enforcing the laws as strongly as possible.
So we're on to "Pro-Domestic" employment, which is a fairly unusual formulation. I assume that this means that we should prevent global outsourcing of jobs and enact policies that reinvigorate domestic production. This is of course a worthy goal, and would likely be accepted all across the political spectrum, in that limited wording. But how do we do that? Clearly, this would involve the repeal of free trade agreements and the enactment of protective tariffs, to allow higher labor-cost American businesses to compete. While not an expert on international trade, I have a feeling that we would get pummeled by China were we to try and enact such a protective agenda. But then again, maybe there are other ways of getting Pro-Domestic employment going, especially in the taxation realm, which we'll deal with below. I just wanted to point out that encouraging domestic production is not as simple as it sounds.
So lets move on to the next one: "A Stronger Military is Essential." The word 'stronger' is an interesting one. Certainly, no one would object to a 'strong' military. But a 'stronger' one? That implies that the one we have now is too weak, which is simply not the case. The base Pentagon budget in 2009 was $653 billion, but when we add in the supplemental costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, and other aspects of veteran care and loan servicing, the actual military budget is around $1 trillion -- PER YEAR. This represents 54% of the annual federal budget and, staggeringly, 47% of global military spending.
{NOTE: The government and many commentators try to cook the numbers by lumping in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid with regular outlays. This is a misrepresentation, because these are trust fund programs, sourced separately from discrete taxation regimes. And while they may have their own funding problems (which are also generally exaggerated by pundits), they should not be included with the ongoing expenditures of non-trust fund budget items, like the military. This tactic of conflating trust fund and regular spending started during the Vietnam War, to make military spending seem smaller. Source: www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm}
And just a reminder: we still have over 900 official military installations around the globe. Our military spending is roughly as much as the rest of the world combined. We spend more that all of Europe, China, Central/South/East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Russia, and Latin America put together. It thus seems a little strange that the Tea Party crowd would want a stronger military, considering their other goals for small government. But we'll get to that too.
We can cover the economic points together, since they are all really one complex of problems. But first, let's dispense with the other one-offs.
But in the late twentieth century, the language of the corporate boardroom and the consulting firm replaced the language of Lockean republicanism. The individual was a firm, and the child was a start-up. Teachers were venture capitalists tasked with the mission of how best to invest "human capital" in a classroom full of fledgling enterprises competing with billions of other human firms in the new, borderless global marketplace.
Never mind that in reality, four-fifths of the U.S. workforce toils in the domestic service sector, engaged in activities that can only be performed in the United States and are immune to foreign competition. Never mind that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the jobs to be created within our borders require only a high school education plus brief on-the-job training. To continue in the vein of our age's overmastering marketing rhetoric, policymakers regard such data as lagging indicators. In the financialized discourse of post-Cold War America, the human capitalist has supplanted the citizen, to be equipped with tools by the investor-state and then sent out to flourish of fail in competition with legions of unseen rivals in the new global economy.... We have witnessed the financialization not only of the American economy but also of the American mind.
Michael Lind, "The O-Word" (The Baffler, Vol 2, No 1)
As great an orator as Obama is, we should recognize that he is but the most eloquent advocate of this worldview. I believe the strands of this social form are coming apart, and our paramount task as a nation is to either create something completely new or suffer the protracted buffeting of entropic collapse.
"When there's trouble in Massachusetts, there's trouble everywhere -- and now they know it."
-- Scott Brown (Victory Speech from 1/19/10)
There has been much weeping and gnashing of teeth across the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts this week, as well as a lot of proud conservative swagger. Both are well-earned or well-deserved, depending on your perspective. The amount of national ink spilled over the recent special Senatorial election, in which Republican Scott Brown upset Democratic dauphine Martha Coakley, has also been prodigious. Only hindsight will tell us whether or not this remarkable event was a historic bellweather for epic political change, or simply a one-time confluence of unique factors.
"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business."
-- John Dewey
We had fed the heart on fantasy,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare.
-- William Butler Yeats
Well, I guess it's time to do the obligatory review of the last decade: the Oughts, or the Naughts, or the Zeds, or whatever they're called. I don't really have any desire to do a chronological laundry list of the ins and outs of the last ten years -- there are plenty of those reviews out there already. Instead, let's look at a few events through the lens of inertia and illusion, two of the most salient features of the last decade.