{For ideological balance, I have chosen one excerpt from column A and one from column B. The reader should have no trouble discerning which column I prefer.}
Although I found no mention of Obamacare—the Affordable Care Act—in Robert Kuttner’s infuriating essay “Fantasyland General,” I couldn’t help but think of how the ACA was supposed to be a first step towards simplifying and making transparent our byzantine fee-for-service healthcare system. Mission not accomplished, it seems, not even with the passage of subsequent legislation like the “No Surprises Act” of 2021 that further regulated medical pricing and billing practices. It remains the case that profit-driven individuals and corporations continue to find ways to milk our for-profit healthcare system for their own enrichment. Conservatives love to say that, in economic transactions, money is never left on the table; they usually fail to mention that “economic transactions” include emergency medical procedures, or that “the table” includes the operating table in your local hospital.
Kuttner concludes, sensibly enough, with this: “The fact that universal socialized systems have no counterpart to the U.S. system of price manipulation, with all of the money spent on administration and gaming, goes a long way toward explaining why the U.S. spends upwards of 17 percent of GDP on health care and the typical OECD country spends about 11 percent. That difference—6 percent of GDP—is about $1.5 trillion a year. Just imagine what else we might do with $1.5 trillion a year. The only solution is to get rid of prices entirely by treating health care as the social good that it is.”
It is infuriating that we are still debating this issue.
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Fantasyland General - The American Prospect
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In a mercifully brief article (at RealClearHistory), Howell Keiser performs a clever bit of intellectual prestidigitation: he links contemporary environmentalism to slavery and contemporary environmentalists to slaveholders.
Watch him pull the rabbit from the hat:
Like antebellum Southerners who, according to historian David Silkenat, used the fear of “environmental destruction” to elevate their low-population agrarian philosophy, environmentalists today see the “impact of population” and industrialization as combining to “deplete natural resources and degrade the environment.” Population and industrial growth, therefore, must be controlled.
See? The rabbit is slavery, and the hat is concerns about industrial activity and its effects on the planet:
But how can this be achieved? Vice President Kamala Harris stated that “when we invest in clean energy, and electric vehicles, and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water.” Of course, Harris leaves the best means of implementing depopulation and regulating economic freedom unanswered.
Ultimately, the perspective put forward by Vice President Harris is not entirely different in principle from some of the solutions offered by leading slaveholders.
There you have it! We should note, of course, that the phrase “not entirely different in principle” is doing quite a lot of work on behalf of Keiser’s “argument”.
In fact, the only solution ever offered by slaveholders, “leading” or otherwise, was that they be allowed to continue holding slaves; whatever else they may have said was mere rationalization. In any case, I will go out on a limb here and say that Vice-President Harris is not recommending or condoning slavery; she is recommending cleaner energy sources (i.e., non-fossil fuels) and birth control (which, for the record, is not the same thing as “depopulation”).
Keiser’s ominous reference to “the best means [of] regulating economic freedom” is the same chestnut that defenders of the free market have been roasting over the open fire of their fearmongering for the past century. Economic freedom is always imperiled, it seems; every proposed regulation is potentially the last straw that will send entrepreneurs en masse to Galt’s Gulch.
Keiser is correct in noting that, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concerns were expressed by individuals of various political and ideological allegiances over industrial capitalism and its consequences (e.g., the degradation of the environment and the exploitation of labor); nor was the rapid growth of the planet's population merely a Malthusian obsession. Such common concerns did not erase the ideological differences, nor did they render all suggested solutions morally equivalent.
It was none other than Russell Kirk, the revered Squire of Mecosta and an iconic figure for modern American conservatives, who famously noted that antebellum Southern resistance to industrialization resembled left-wing concerns about capitalism; this led Kirk to dub John C. Calhoun “the Marx of the ruling class,” but even Kirk knew better than to call Karl Marx “the John C. Calhoun of the proletariat.” Defending slavery by criticizing industrial capitalism is not the same as criticizing industrial capitalism by advocating revolution by the working class.
Keiser’s tactic of guilt-by-innuendo against environmentalists (and liberals in general) is all too typical of the modern American Right, which takes innocuous statements uttered by someone on the Left and insinuates that the speaker is a nascent Pol Pot and that genocide is on the horizon. Such insinuations are, quite frankly, both juvenile and tedious. American conservatives have apparently reverted to what Lionel Trilling called “irritable mental gestures” to camouflage their complete inability to make coherent arguments.
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Past Informs the Present | RealClearHistory
Have as many as you want! Just don't expect affordable healthcare.
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