Salt

Murray Bookchin, RIP

Murray Bookchin helped me articulate, in my younger days, my libertarian, anti-marxist, social sensibilities.   As a tutor in college [I tutored Eric Fromm, Milton Friedman and the anarchist tradition], Bookchin helped me think deeply about how humans actively create and destroy their environments.  He was, as Brian Tokar notes, "the Last Utopian."   

Although I have personally moved towards a Keynesian understanding of economics, and fluctuate between Burke and Marx [Burke understood the person; Marx understood conflict] in their understanding of culture, Bookchin tried to articulate a coherent form of egalitarian libertarian communalism that challenged the totalitarian and deterministic edge of Marxism.   In the end, I found his discussions of wisdom a bit dissatisfying, finding Christ along the way.   I also ended up taking a softer view of hierarchies, reclaiming my inheritance as an Episcopalian (although I think the Episcopal church potentially has the best balance between hierarchy and freedom).

Much of his prose is a bit turgid, but he resisted the mystification and idealization of ecology, while still affirming local networks, and free associations.  He was relentless in his critique of bourgeois environmentalism.    He had the humility to rethink and reconsider his positions, instinctively resisting  both the dogmatic impulses and the frivilous fads the often engulf left thinking.  Even seven years ago he gave up "anarchism." 

Warren Buffett Plans to Give his Millions Away

Buffett plans to donate 85% of his wealth.  From the Times.

"I love it when I'm around the country club, and I hear people talking about the debilitating effects of a welfare society," he said. "At the same time, they leave their kids a lifetime and beyond of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer. And instead of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds."

...His children, he said, were not at all disappointed not to be receiving the lion's share of his fortune.

"They've known all along my views on inherited wealth, and share them," he said in a news conference this afternoon. "They have money that most people would dream of. They're lucky, in that respect, when they selected their parents."

Buffett:  a man of integrity.   He offers one reason why the estate tax is the most reasonable tax the state has to protect itself against dynasties and monarchies.   

Fakes

The Financial Times reports that the European commissioner Peter Mandelson has reached an agreement where the landlords of the markets agreed to clamp down on the fakes of various labels.

My question is, if the fakes themselves become rare, does their scarcity make them valuable? Are there times when fakes are better than the real thing? Is there merit to having a fake if it is for the intention of revealing the deceptions of status and wealth? Yes – fakes rely on deception. But what of when we deceive the deceivers?

Fakes help explain the nature, and the deceptiviness of branding and capital. And I suspect, it may reveal the elusiveness of finding God.

The Health Care Crisis: What to Do About It

Krugman and Wells Demolish Our current health care system of arrangements:

Rising health care spending, then, is driving a triple crisis. The fastest-moving piece of that crisis is the unraveling of employer-based coverage. There's a gradually building crisis in Medicaid. And there's a long-term federal budget crisis driven mainly by rising health care spending.

Remember the 80–20 rule: the great bulk of medical expenses are accounted for by a small number of people requiring very expensive treatment. When you think of the problem of health care costs, you shouldn't envision visits to the family physician to talk about a sore throat; you should think about coronary bypass operations, dialysis, and chemotherapy. Nobody is proposing a consumer-directed health care plan that would force individuals to pay a large share of extreme medical expenses, such as the costs of chemotherapy, out of pocket. And that means that consumer-directed health care can't promote savings on the treatments that account for most of what we spend on health care.

The administration's plans for consumer-directed health care, then, are a diversion from meaningful health care reform, and will actually worsen our health care problems. In fact, some reformers privately hope that George W. Bush manages to get his health care plans passed, because they believe that they will hasten the collapse of employment-based coverage and pave the way for real reform. (The suffering along the way would be huge.)

Every week, Grover Norquist has a breakfast that includes many of the conservative luminaries.   This ritual demonstrates the religion of the Republican movement - not the protection of babies or marriage - but tax cuts.  It is an easy religion to promote.  It feeds on the culture's selfishness.  It elevates the myth of self-sufficiency.   It glorifies the fantasy of rationality.  It punishes those who fail.

Similarly, the left would benefit from such organization.  I submit that - more than Iraq, unwanted pregnancies, or gun control - health care is our "tax cut."  A concerted effort by activists and progressives to create a single-payer plan would benefit the country, and liberate immense resources for other services.   

A single payer plan would have the deepest economic ripple effect in the nation's economy.   It would allow businesses to hire people without paying into insurance plans; single mothers wouldn't have to worry about pre-natal care; the poor would get reliable health care; and the working poor would not have to live so precariously.  Krugman and Wells state:  it would be politically smarter as well as economically superior to go for broke: to propose a straightforward single-payer system, and try to sell voters on the huge advantages such a system would bring.

I am a Christian Too has written a four part series on health care, with scripture and data!

They argue:

The first is that the US health care system is extremely inefficient, and this inefficiency becomes more costly as the health care sector becomes a larger fraction of the economy. Suppose, for example, that we believe that 30 percent of US health care spending is wasted, and always has been. In 1960, when health care was only 5.2 percent of GDP, that meant waste equal to only 1.5 percent of GDP. Now that the share of health care in the economy has more than tripled, so has the waste.

This inefficiency is a bad thing in itself. What makes it literally fatal to thousands of Americans each year is that the inefficiency of our health care system exacerbates a second problem: our health care system often makes irrational choices, and rising costs exacerbate those irrationalities. Specifically, American health care tends to divide the population into insiders and outsiders. Insiders, who have good insurance, receive everything modern medicine can provide, no matter how expensive. Outsiders, who have poor insurance or none at all, receive very little. To take just one example, one study found that among Americans diagnosed with colorectal cancer, those without insurance were 70 percent more likely than those with insurance to die over the next three years.

The Budget

Bush has submitted his budget.  Here are some highlights from the CBPP.

The Administration’s own numbers indicate that the President’s budget proposals would increase deficits by $192 billion over the next five years, compared to what deficits would be if current laws and policies remained unchanged.[1]  Indeed, data contained in Administration budget materials show that deficits would total $760 billion over the next five years without the policy changes the Administration is proposing, but would total $952 billion with those policy changes.

What's the problem with deficits? 

Here are some things we surely don't need:

• The Commodity Supplemental Food Program,     which provides nutritional food packages for less than $20 a month to more     than 400,000 low-income elderly people, one-third of whom are over age 75;

Perhaps they should start working again.   For Wal-Mart, if they can't get a job with Halliburton.

• The Preventive Care Block Grant, which is operated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and provides grants to states for preventive health services for underserved populations;

As long as they stay out of my gated community.  They probably eat and smoke too much anyway.  The trick - eat more fruit and vegetables.  Just get a bunch of flyers and post them everywhere.  Cost $100 bucks. 

• The TRIO Talent Search program, under which     colleges and universities — in many cases, Historically Black Colleges and     Universities — assist disadvantaged secondary school students (two-thirds of     whom are minority) by providing them with academic, career, and financial     counseling so they will better be able to finish high school and attend     college.
  

Look - then they'll compete with advantaged students.  Is that fair?

• The Community Services Block Grant, which     provides funding for a range of social services and other types of     assistance to low-income families and elderly and disabled individuals.

I thought Wal-mart was doing this. 

The poor, the elderly and disabled - always wanting something for nothing.   If they come to my church, I make them WORK!  "God helps those who help themselves."

That's not in the bible, but God would have put it there. 

Oh - and no, there's nothing about Iraq and Afghanistan after 2007.  Those will be "emergency" appropriations" or something. 

Irresponsible.

And it looks as if the administration is ready to do some dirty tricks in Bolivia.  Woo Hoo!  A coup!

Bruce Bartlett tells how....  Daniel Gross reports.  Via.
 

Blog Review

De Long quotes his father on Google's decisions regarding China. 

... what should Google do? Google should do what Google does, which is search engines. Google is not a Chinese leader, and it is not the role or duty of Google to tell China how to rule itself... even when [it] goes against the grain of American views of free speech. ...search engines, even truncated ones, will contribute to the economic and political development of China...   So Google should happily contribute to this effort, doing what it does, and avoiding the hubris of thinking it is responsible for China...

The State of the Union by Annenburg:  ...  nothing factually incorrect, just selective use of statistics and... omission of facts that would make thee state of the union "less rosy."  

H.E. Baber solves the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:  Make the West Bank like Orange County, CA.  Convert Palestinians into Californians.   The Parish analyzes Southern Baptist politics [fun!].   Radosh sees Brokeback, which is doing well in Montana.  Pam Spaulding on Alito's unexpected (!) supporting of a death-row inmate, with delightful feed back from "freepers" [?!] [via].   Bono Speaks Truth To Power [like Nathan to David?] [via].  Bob takes notes at Trinity's conference on reconciliation [Alison, I think, is the theologian - even more than Williams - informing progressive Anglicanism these days.  It just had to be a openly Gay Roman Catholic].  Rainy Day comments upon "God-Fatigue" and the freedom to bash Catholics, and Storytelling comments on this cartoon-Islam controversy.  Reverend Ref reminds us what is really important in light of the Super Bowl.  It's not the Steelers... Holy Weblog on Thurgood Marshall's possible sainthood. 

Cassandra writes on the via negativa.  The via negativa does not negate beauty, life, light, and love; in fact it is a way to begin to see and embody them as they really are, existing side-by-side with their opposites, no longer denied but accepted and held, gently, in the other hand. 

But last, the Blog from the Episcopal Diocese of Washington has become my favorite Episcopal blog.  It is extraordinarily well done, and is now on my regularly read column.  It is up there with Thinking Anglican website. 

Unfortunately, I've been quite sick for the last two days.  Had to miss the Bishop of Washington play in his blues band.  Hopefully I'll be well enough to avoid the bowl and hit the dance floor.  We'll see....

A Coherent Anti- Abortion Policy

There are several ways to handle the issue about terminating unwanted pregnancies. 

Here are ones I consider unreasonable.

Make abortion illegal.  This might not reduce abortions, although it would remove them from public consideration.   As there would be fewer regulations around how abortions are made, women who have abortions would be exposed to greater risk.  Now women would be criminalized, AND fetuses would still be destroyed. 

Why People Become Terrorists

An interesting study by an Israeli professor at UCSD [where I almost went to graduate school in Poli Sci]

Throughout history, people willing to join groups far outside the mainstream, and to take their own lives and the lives of others in service of those groups, have been thought of as irrational, motivated only by extreme hate or abstract ideas of rewards in the afterlife.

Berman, in a series of papers dating to the late 1990s, has challenged that assumption. He instead offers a theory stating these people may be motivated as much by economic self-interest as they are by the holy texts.

He further argues that the success of groups such as Hamas and al-Qaeda are more due to the advantages of their organizational structures than their theology.

"I'm not saying theology is not important," said the 45-year-old professor in his small, sparsely appointed office in the UCSD economics building.

"(But) if you put theology aside for a moment, and just apply the usual tools of empirical economics, quantifying people's choices, and analyzing them statistically, we can understand a lot about these communities that we can't understand otherwise."

Krugman: Pride, Prejudice, Insurance

This is the one political issue of which Christians should be addressing immediately.  A single payer plan would be one of the greatest ways to establish justice and some semblance of equality in the country.  It would be hard work- but eventually one that would help everyone - from small businesses to the... sick.

General Motors is reducing retirees' medical benefits. Delphi has declared bankruptcy, and will probably reduce workers' benefits as well as their wages. An internal Wal-Mart memo describes plans to cut health costs by hiring temporary workers, who aren't entitled to health insurance, and screening out employees likely to have high medical bills.

The typical response to this is - why should we offer health insurance?  Noone has a right to health care.

These aren't isolated anecdotes. Employment-based health insurance is the only serious source of coverage for Americans too young to receive Medicare and insufficiently destitute to receive Medicaid, but it's an institution in decline. Between 2000 and 2004 the number of Americans under 65 rose by 10 million. Yet the number of nonelderly Americans covered by employment-based insurance fell by 4.9 million.

The funny thing is that the solution - national health insurance, available to everyone - is obvious. But to see the obvious we'll have to overcome pride - the unwarranted belief that America has nothing to learn from other countries - and prejudice - the equally unwarranted belief, driven by ideology, that private insurance is more efficient than public insurance.

Let's start with the fact that America's health care system spends more, for worse results, than that of any other advanced country.

In 2002 the United States spent $5,267 per person on health care. Canada spent $2,931; Germany spent $2,817; Britain spent only $2,160. Yet the United States has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than any of these countries.

...

Above all, Americans are far more likely than others to forgo treatment because they can't afford it. Forty percent of the Americans surveyed failed to fill a prescription because of cost. A third were deterred by cost from seeing a doctor when sick or from getting recommended tests or follow-up.

You see, Paul, medicine is generally quackery.  They should try vitamins. 

Why does American medicine cost so much yet achieve so little? Unlike other advanced countries, we treat access to health care as a privilege rather than a right. And this attitude turns out to be inefficient as well as cruel.

Isn't it possible to be cruel to be kind?  And besides, we don't want anyone to get anything for free.  offering health care to everyone would lead to fornication, bad hairstyles and dope peddling.  We might encourage a nation of hypchodriacs.  And that's much worse than having people who are really sick....

The U.S. system is much more bureaucratic, with much higher administrative costs, than those of other countries, because private insurers and other players work hard at trying not to pay for medical care. And our fragmented system is unable to bargain with drug companies and other suppliers for lower prices.

You mean that capitalism CREATES bureaucracies? 

Taiwan, which moved 10 years ago from a U.S.-style system to a Canadian-style single-payer system, offers an object lesson in the economic advantages of universal coverage. In 1995 less than 60 percent of Taiwan's residents had health insurance; by 2001 the number was 97 percent. Yet according to a careful study published in Health Affairs two years ago, this huge expansion in coverage came virtually free: it led to little if any increase in overall health care spending beyond normal growth due to rising population and incomes....

The economic and moral case for health care reform in America, reform that would make us less different from other advanced countries, is overwhelming. One of these days we'll realize that our semiprivatized system isn't just unfair, it's far less efficient than a straightforward system of guaranteed health insurance.

But who will care for the insurance companies?

Krugman Answers a Couple Questions

Krugman is brilliant as usual.  One questioner asks how Bush might regain popularity given his incompetence. 

He replies:  If Bush does make a comeback, it will be because the media are, once again, complicit in joining the sales job. I'm just guessing it won't happen.

Krugman then answers question from someone who argues the following: 1. The invasion of Afghanistan was successful. 2. Libya abandoned nuclear weapons and terrorism. Libya was close to developing a nuclear weapon. 3. Israel withdrew from Gaza. 4. Syria's withdrew from Lebanon. 5. The nuclear disarmament agreement with North Korea was a major success. 6. Relations with China and Russia are now good. 7. Iraq is a mess, but so was the American South in the 1860's. Bush deserves credit for destroying a very heinous and potentially dangerous regime.

Paul Krugman: Not mostly my area, but here's what I understand: 1. The capture of Kabul was well done. But the victory was squandered; Osama got away at Tora Bora, and Afghanistan is still on the boil. 2. Libya was nowhere close to a bomb. My understanding is that a deal along the lines we concluded had been on offer from Libya for a long time, but the Bush administration refused to take it until they needed something to offset the bad news from Iraq. 3 & 4: Some good things have happened in the Israel-Lebanon area, but it's not at all clear whether U.S. policy played much role. [And I would disagree.  Now more Israeli troops can balkanize the west bank} 5. Again, we could have had a similar deal with North Korea five years ago — before they withdrew the fuel rods. 6. China and Russia are authoritarian regimes that make deals when they think it's in their interest. What, exactly, have we gotten from them? 7. I thought Iraq was Philadelphia in 1787 — or was it Germany in 1945 — or, um, some historical parallel (none of which involved a comparably bloody guerilla war) that obscures the fact that America's armed forces are being ground down, and its soldiers killed, in a war we didn't need to fight.

In a previous column Krugman wrote, "By Bush administration standards, the choice of Ben Bernanke to succeed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve was just weird. For one thing, Mr. Bernanke is actually an expert in monetary policy, as opposed to, say, Arabian horses....  Last but not least, Mr. Bernanke has no personal ties to the Bush family. It's hard to imagine him doing something indictable to support his masters. It's even hard to imagine him doing what Mr. Greenspan did: throwing his prestige as Fed chairman behind irresponsible tax cuts."