Ever Thus

At Unqualified Offerings, blogger Thoreau has a note that says, as I read it, that were we able to build a free market for health care from the dust of the earth and first principles, Awesome!, but as we cannot, and as the current soi-disant-mais-pas-tellement system of "private insurance" with government plans for the very poor and the elderly exists, it is conceivable that some reform could burble up that would create a modestly more robust public sector, lower some barriers that currently prevent many millions of people from receiving adequate coverage or care, and marginally improve the status quo even if it falls short of the ideal. This is very reasonable, with the exception of the very long caveat that I will write in all the subsequent paragraphs of this post. Kevin Carson, our favorite mutualist, shows up early in the comments and says something sensible. Shortly thereafter, something called "The Angry Optimist" appears and total hilarity ensues as he cavils, wails, moans, falls writhing on the floor, berates heaven, speaks in tongues, swallows swords, levitates, rends his garments, weeps, rails, anathematizes, coruscates, has visions, and then accuses everyone else of "emotionalism." QED. Exit. As fine an example of the taxonomy of Blog as you will find.

Well, Even the Libertarian Friedrich Hayek™ believed that there was such a thing as a reasonable provision for public health, although to be fair, I was recently taking a shit and flipping through The Road to Serfdom, which I keep on the tank along with Freemasonry for Dummies, a Stephen Baxter paperback, a book of daily AA affirmations, and Left Behind: Assassins: Assignment—Jerusalem, Target—Antichrist, and it occurred to me that, properly understood, Serfdom should be read in the same vein as one reads Nineteen-eighty-four. Or 2001. Or Revelations. Not a criticism--I am a fan of "speculative fiction"--but a critique, perhaps. In any case, Even the Libertarian Friedrich Hayek™ believed that there was such a thing as a reasonable provision for public health, and given such illustrious ancestry, we're obliged to take arguments that public health options traduce the fundamental spirit of liberty with the same seriousness that we would take arguments that Arlen Specter, the Democratic Senator from Dorian Gray's closet, plans personally to garrote Grandma in her sleep, shake infants to death, poison the wells, etc.

But no, the usually useful idiots are engaged in their usually useful idiocy, as Washington stages another shell-game debate in the name of transferring more private wealth to the state-partnered corporate class. Headlines warning that the so-called public plan may be "dropped" entertain the same fallacy as The Obama's liberal supporters engage--those on the left-hand side of the idiot corpus as it were. They assume that there exists a "public plan" to be dropped. Meanwhile, the rightards engage in some supremely amusing agitprop, creating a fictional groundswell of chimerical grassroots opposition to a proposed system of socialized medicine that was never really proposed. The whole thing is a sham, and in the end the circular genius of state capital will again reward itself by reforming a system in favor of the system already in place. The rules of this game are simple, and I refer everyone once more to The Ratchet Effect.

This is the sort of literary-cosmic irony that I love. The human boot stepping on the human face forever became a series of Roman-ish border wars by a great, pseudocapitalist hegemon seeking to spread its ideology of democracy, whiskey, sexy to the world's benighted peoples. The Road to Serfdom did not run through cozy, consensus-socialist post-war Europe, but through an increasingly Tsarist America, which has succeeded in turning its lower 95% into a legit peasant class through false-credit-ownership residential tenancy and a variety of other financial and political scams, from the Ballot Initiative to the low introductory APR. It is the most genius system of concentrated ownership in the history of human political organization--formerly, a serf at least knew he was a serf. When "health care reform" means a mandate for purchase of at-minimum high-deductible insurance, or some similar transparent mechanism for moving dollars in the usual direction, everyone will claim victory, mirabile dictu, the righteous victorious, the villains defeated, and the Dr. Ken Melanis of the world still pulling three million a year.