Kevin Drum’s favorite principled Hayekian free marketeer weighs in on the principles the right should embrace on heath care:
2. A rejection of health care egalitarianism, namely a recognition that the wealthy will purchase more and better health care than the poor. Trying to equalize health care consumption hurts the poor, since most feasible policies to do this take away cash from the poor, either directly or through the operation of tax incidence. We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor. Some of you don’t like the sound of that, but we already let the wealthy enjoy all sorts of other goods — most importantly status — which lengthen their lives and which the poor enjoy to a much lesser degree. We shouldn’t screw up our health care institutions by being determined to fight inegalitarian principles for one very select set of factors which determine health care outcomes.
They are who we thought they were.
Update. That made me so mad, I couldn’t think of anything to write. Here’s what gets me: it’s already true that people die all the time just because they are poor. They don’t have health insurance so they never see a doctor, so things get caught late so they die. The point of universal coverage is to change that. Glibertarians always want to turn it into “what if there were a 5 billion dollar life-saving treatment, would gubmint insurance cover it”? And the answer of course is “no”, anyway.
The reality is, and always will be, that the very rich can afford things that the rest of us can’t. Fine. But to make it a principle that the poor should die just because they are poor sometimes?
rikyrah
once again, with feeling:
THIS IS WHO THEY ARE.
lowlife, nogood sociopathic muthafuckas.
plain and simple.
Jinchi
I haven’t seen anyone discuss this, but if the Supreme Court strikes down the mandate, doesn’t that unravel RomneyCare in Massachusetts?
The Dangerman
We The
PeopleRich…Patricia Kayden
Source of that paragraph: “widely read and respected libertarian economist Tyler Cowen”. The libertarian part says it all.
Sounds just like “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” by our beloved Romneybot 2.0.
the Conster
There’s an Obama for President bumper sticker in there somewhere.
Joey Maloney
@Jinchi: No, because the Supreme Court case deals only with the powers of the Feds, not a state.
Napoleon
First link seems screwed up.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Jinchi: Doubt it, because they’ll make sure to set up a states rights issue. You, know, being able to restrict the movement of freed slaves and all.
zzyzx
Actually that makes sense, because if someone is about to die for no reason other than not having money, there’s no chance that their survival instincts will kick in and start making them see if they can find other ways of making a lot of money. The poor will just die quietly, y’know. Kidnapping is something that happens in other countries.
butler
The honesty is actually refreshing, in a disgustingly awful way.
giltay
“Trying to equalize health care consumption hurts the poor,” since it only makes them healthier and live longer.
beltane
We have to accept the fact that every century or so, a crop of rich people have to be sacrificed and their assets forfeited to preserve the common good. Nothing personal, that’s just the way it works.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
__
You know what hurts the poor? Not dying, that’s what. That whole continuing to live part can really mess up your whole day.
__
I hope they are holding open a slot on the US Olympic Cognitive Dissonance team, because this writer has multiple Gold Medal Winner potential.
Davis X. Machina
Jesus wept.
No, seriously, He did.
Because of shit like this.
Valdivia
To these people everything in society is a privilege that should be connected to wealth. Voting too. I am waiting for the Cowen paper on requirements to be able to vote.
Hunter Gathers
Tyler Cowen, I’m really sorry Daddy didn’t love you. I’m sorry that you didn’t get that pony you wanted when you were 8. I’m sorry that none of the girls in high school would let you get to 2nd base. I’m sorry your pot dealer in college over-charged you because he though you were a pathetic little shit. I’m sorry that Obama refuses to apologize to you in a hand written letter lamenting the fact that his dick is bigger than yours. I’m sorry that the leading members of the Libertarian movement tend to be creepy white guys with bad attitudes and shitty hairpieces.
What I will not apologize for, is this:
Eat shit and die you pathetic cocksmoker.
Brachiator
We’re all gonna die. What matters is how we live our lives while we’re here.
@zzyzx:
Actually, Drum is inviting to poor to die noisily, and to take some of the rich along with them.
TheOtherWA
Holy shit. I can’t believe one of them actually put that in writing. In plain English where there’s no chance of misunderstanding.
Damn.
Cacti
This seems like a good thread for the 24 Types of Libertarian.
Bulworth
Oh, OK. Of course. What were we thinking? Trying to help the poor hurts the poor. Next.
DougJ
@Napoleon:
It’s a link to all the times Drum has linked (usually favorably) to Cowen because otherwise his fanbois would be screaming “HE NEVER LINKS TO COWEN”.
TheOtherWA
@Hunter Gathers: Well said.
Bulworth
@TheOtherWA: In other news, in its 2012 party platform, the Texas GOP called for a repeal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
They’re getting bolder, people.
Valdivia
Just let me give you an example from the little Central American country where I grew up: Costa Rica. Everyone has access to healthcare. Yes there are waiting times and the care may not be the same as the Mayo Clinic but if you are a poor person and you get uterine cancer (this is the story of a woman I know) you will not die or go broke from it. You will get treatment. If you are filthy rich you can go to one of the many Private hospitals that exist and cater to that demographic to get your care. Or if you want you can come to the States and pay through the nose for top of the line American treatments. The basic that rich people will have better care holds, as Mr Cowen would like, but poor people don’t have to fucking die for it!
rageahol
Notice the framing of healthcare “consumption”, i.e. healthcare as a commodity, like big screen TVs, or T-bone steaks.
This is the root of the problem.
Cacti
Now, if we’re going by the almighty principle of “rational self-interest”…
If the elites or those with more resources broadly adopt this attitude, at some point, won’t the poor consider it in their “rational self-interest” to take what they need by force? I mean, history is lousy with examples of this.
Violet
It’s all fine until they become poor themselves. Then “why isn’t the GOVERNMENT DOING SOMETHING about this terrible problem?”
Chris
They always were. Remember the Ron Paul supporters cheering wildly at the notion of a letting people without health insurance die. This kind of sociopathy’s been in the movement since the beginning. Whoever it was here who said a couple days ago that being a conservative to a large extent was equivalent to being a sadistic/cruel/mean person, the kind who really gets off on the suffering of others… you were right.
TheOtherWA
@Bulworth: I saw some highlights from the TX gop platform, but missed that little gem. Doesn’t surprise me though.
Napoleon
@DougJ:
I really don’t think that he ussually favoribly links to him. He has the same problem E. Klein has in that because he doesn’t lace his post with hate for his subject some think that he is offering tacit support.
Patricia Kayden
@Valdivia: Sounds like Canada and England, both of which have universal healthcare. I’m still trying to figure out what the fuss is about the fairly conservative healthcare law passed by the Dems and signed by Obama. Unfortunately, the majority of Americans appear to be brainwashed into thinking that universal healthcare is “socialism”.
rlrr
@Bulworth:
Soon they’ll be calling for the repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment…
kth
Read that passage back closely: Cowen is saying that longer lives are no different from bigger houses or nicer cars, just a consumer item that you should get more of if you have more money. A perfect precis of libertarian psychosis if ever there was one.
General Stuck
I’m pretty much out of outrage for the cretinous behavior of the right wing. The BP demands it. All I want to focus on is how to beat them, preferably with very extreme prejudice.
Nemo_N
Which is why poor children with treatable types of cancers (or other treatable pre-existing conditions) should be left to die.
Is there a name for this kind of fallacy? The “sometimes nasty shit happens therefore we should let all nasty shit happen”?
DougJ
@Napoleon:
I don’t have the same problem with Ezra at all. Drum is especially bad about it.
Brachiator
Goddamn, this shit is pissing me off.
Who is this “we” who have inegalitarian principles?
And when did status, by itself, become some magical life extender?
This shit about the wealthy magically having or being able to buy life extenders is as utterly false as the idea that insecure men can easily buy dick extenders guaranteed to thirill the ladies and to provide mighty orgasms.
The greatest health care innovations saved everybody, often at very modest overall costs. This goes from sanitation to vaccinations. Penicillin and other drugs aren’t prohibitively expensive, nor is there any point in the wealthy trying to horde drugs or vitamins.
And the plain hard historical fact is that the rich often paid physicians to provide them with useless placebos or to use fad or quack cures, because of their egos. Real medical advancement often came from doctors who had to deal with and to treat poor patients, who only wanted to be made healthy, not flattered.
Or health insurance.
And what is this bullshit about “our health care institutions?”
What, are institutions, like corporations, now people, too?
Fuck these people and their ignorant revisionism.
lacp
It’s probably because I’m not a widely read and respected libertarian economist, but I don’t understand why, if universal health care is so expensive, they spend so much less per capita in western Europe than we do…with equal or better health outcomes.
Linnaeus
@Cacti:
Aux armes, citoyens!
JPL
@Valdivia: That’s my thinking. If you live in small town WV, your care is not as good as if you live near MAYO or NYC. This is and always will be the case. Even with ACA or universal coverage, this will be the case. Wealth buys plane tickets and accessibility to the best doctors. There will always be a two tier system but it does not mean some will have to go without care.
Marcus
Push it a little further…why don’t the rich go fight their wars….
Mark S.
This should be good
That extra $20 in your pocket more than makes up for having no health care!
I’ve never met an intelligent libertarian. Here’s their favorite argument:
Me: I think we should have a progressive tax system.
Libertarian: But do you really want to live in a society where everyone has the same amount of money?
Valdivia
@Patricia Kayden:
yep, I think it is because they really do see access to healthcare as a privilege. The poor don’t deserve it, so offering is communism. It’s enough for any of us to want to blow a gasket.
@JPL:
it really is incredible that he can’t see that. And in effect it reveal everything that is wrong with their mindset.
General Stuck
I love Mellisa Harris Perry, and would love to have her babies. She just gave a perfect description of why ‘the mandate’ causes so much angst with the public, to include many democrats. Americans just don’t like for the federal government telling them what to buy, or do. At least at first.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
It’s all about that economic predestination bullshit, per usual. That’s all these assholes are about. Money = Virtue, Money = Right. If you don’t have the money, you don’t have rights, you have privileges, privileges that can be taken away for your lack of virtue. Life is not a right, life is a privilege, and your continued poorness proves you can’t be trusted with it.
Culture of Truth
Aren’t poor people edible?
rlrr
@Mark S.:
The conservative (and libertarian) mindset is something somehow loses value if it is available to all (or too many). This goes for healthcare, education, etc…
Citizen_X
Nice “principles” you have there, fucking psycho.
mathguy
@Hunter Gathers: Damn, I can’t stop laughing. Nice post.
Quarks
I’m probably not going to say this well.
But the thing is, it’s not just a question of compassion or what the historical Jesus would have done or what’s morally right, which to me does not include letting poor people die just because they are poor.
It’s also a question of social stability. Income inequities and attitudes of “just let the poor die” and so on are the sorts of things that lead to armed revolution and violence. I’m not even talking ancient history here. I’m talking about last year.
The inability of certain of the very wealthy to realize that small steps towards social and economic equity actually helps them never ceases to amaze me.
scav
Well, the side you’re on seems to be attempting to ensure they more consistently die off from being poor instead of as little as possible.
ETA: Oh, and while you’re so busy accepting things, please remember to accept the principle that the rich just sometimes get strung up on lamposts. Don’t struggle.
Nick
He’s correct. The poor WILL die because of facts related to their being poor, including bad diet, poor health and dental care, increased stress.
All of those problems cannot be addressed.
What’s the cutoff point for a benefit (death panel alert!)?
How much of our scarce resources are we going to spend making the poor better off?
Part of the problem is that we keep breeding, thus putting a greater strain on the ecosystem.
Part of the problem is that technology is increasingly making many of us irrelevant in the workforce, and thus the number of humans getting aid must increase. People increasingly have no part in the productive world, being replaced by computers and robots, which will only increase.
General Stuck
@Culture of Truth:
Stringy meat. Low protein. If you fatten them up some first, then yes, very edible.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Fortunately the Invisible Hand of the Freemarket(r) is there to provide a solution to this problem;
Poor people just need to kidnap affluent media hacks, torture them for their money and use that money to purchase health care.
I am sure any TRUE Libertarian would agree kidnap and torture is a reasonable, (strangle others) with your own bootstraps solution.
beltane
@Valdivia: I can accept that rich people will have access to glitzier hospitals and expensive, state-of-the-art treatment. What I cannot accept is a system that leaves humans to die without any form of succor or treatment. A system that treats human beings like unwanted vermin is a system that all decent people have a moral imperative to overturn and destroy.
If Tyler Cowen wants to live in a might-makes-right world, fine. But then he shouldn’t look for pity when the poor, who greatly outnumber the rich, eventually rise up and liquidate their oppressors. A brutal system always invites a brutal backlash.
Davis X. Machina
@lacp: The most expensive place in the EU and environs is Switzerland, which — surprise, surprise — has a purchase-mandate-and-support system.
Of course, it’s still cheaper than the US, just not half as expensive as the US ‘system’ (12% of GDP instead of 10%, the OECD average) and has better outcomes. And my BC/BS policy, which is by American standards pretty good (unionized public employee) didn’t meet their minimums when my son went to Switzerland to study for a year. We had to buy a gap policy.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Patricia Kayden:
__
It is tribalism at work as much as ideology. “Socialism” is just a tag indicating which side you are on.
__
If they wanted to, the leadership of the GOP could propose universal healthcare tomorrow and get away with it, and the next time they controlled Congress and the WH it would pass, and the conservative (so-called) faction on the SCOTUS would do cartwheels in the streets out of the sheer joy of it passing, and the GOP would be acclaimed for doing it by the same scooter-riding idiots chanting “Obummercare” today, and the talking heads in the news media would explain to us why Nixon had to go to China and that this means that the Dems totally suck and will never get another vote again ever from anybody who counts (aka old upper class white people and assorted useful bigots in other demographic groups).
__
US politics is the continuation of civil war by other means.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Jinchi: Romney Care was implemented by a Republican so the decision won’t cover it.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
Oh, well, eggs and omelettes and all, eggs and omelettes. You know, collateral damage, that’s all it is…
This guy writes like a guy who not only has never been poor himself, but somebody who doesn’t even know any poor people–at least not well enough to care what hapens to them. He writes about them like they were some intriguing new kind of virus he found in a laboratory somewhere. Fuckweed.
Culture of Truth
We need to accept the principle that sometimes rich people will die just because they are ounumbered.
not endorsing, just observing
JPL
If Kevin thinks it is okay to just let the poor people die, who is going to clean up after his shit?
Chris
@Valdivia:
It’s quite remarkable that life, which was defined as an “inalienable right” not by a modern-day liberal activist, not by a 1900s Progressive, but by Thomas Jefferson himself, is now considered a luxury and a privilege.
beltane
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: If the Bush/Cheney regime had implemented universal healthcare there is a very good chance we would have seen a Permanent Republican Majority for reals.
Violet
@Patricia Kayden: In the UK rich people can afford to, and do, go to private doctors for faster or sometimes more current/better treatment. So there’s definitely a two tier system there. But at least everyone has coverage via the NHS. No one is left out.
Cassidy
Conservatism, libertarianism, Republican…
The zombie apocalypse can’t come soon enough.
R. Porrofatto
Never forget that by poor they really mean working and middle class. The majority of those without health insurance are children; the majority of adults without health insurance are, or used to be, employed.
Corey
Hey DougJ – for a lot of reasons that’s sort of an unfair reading of what Cowen’s trying to say, I think.
Cowen’s point is that access to healthcare isn’t the only thing that could/would benefit the lives of the poor, and that “equalizing health care consumption” would lead to the poor spending a larger-than-optimal percentage of their incomes on only one of the things you need to live a safe, happy, secure life.
You can tell this is where he’s headed by the next bullet – where he endorses a “modest bundle of guaranteed coverage and services”.
dj spellchecka
think he meant to say “We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people should die just because they are poor.”
Brachiator
@Nick:
I presume, then, that you have never bred. Or, if you mistakenly kept breeding, you have had your offspring put to death.
I presume then, that you have scheduled your self-termination so that you can reduce the strain on the planet and deal with your ultimate inevitable redundancy.
End of problem.
Frankensteinbeck
@Mark S.:
I’d be okay with that. It’s not what I’m shooting for, but everyone has the same income? Sure, doesn’t sound so bad.
Deb T
And by poor they mean whoever fell out of the middle class through joblessness. Hell, the middle class are the poor in health care even if you have insurance – which if you are really lucky covers 60-80% of your inflated medical bill. So a common procedure may end up costing you $5000 or $10,000 even with insurance. I had to pay $2000 to have a benign thyroid tumor removed and I have good insurance. I don’t know about you, but that was a real kick in financial pants for me.
Culture of Truth
beltane beat me to it, by a hair
Mardam
@lacp:
Why do you people insist on interjecting facts into this obviously subjective debate?
Mardam
@lacp:
Why do you people insist on interjecting facts into this obviously subjective debate?
Lyrebird
Hm.
Maybe facts do have a liberal bias, after all, given the contortions this Cowen person is going through to take a fact and twist it into a principle, some wacked-out sort of ideal. (and UGH he has a fan following: “In February 2011, Cowen received a nomination as one of the most influential economists in the last decade through a survey by the Economist.[1]” – Wikipedia)
How would you call his maneuvering with “sometimes”, turning it from something that can vary or be minimized into again a rigid fixed immutable quantity?
People with less access to money are going to continue to — sometimes — die sooner than they would’ve if they could’ve had more money to buy more treatments. Single-payer is unlikely to make that “sometimes” into a “never”, but ethical people who actually act on their consciences can demmwell try! ! !
Davis X Machina was right, Jesus wept over this kinda stuff.
Or in my tradition,
Thank goodness for Balloon Juice!
Violet
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
So true. I would be willing to bet that if you asked the people screaming about soshulism to define is, the large majority of them would not be able to do so.
Cargo
Not only do they see this as inevitable, but they WANT it to happen. Feature, not a bug.
Never met a “libertarian” who doesn’t, on some level, wish the poors would just hurry up and die already.
Beauzeaux
When I first moved to Canada I had occasional moments when I wondered if we’d done the right thing. The relative size of the Canadian economy means that some conveniences like overnight deliveries aren’t here in rural BC. Wine is too expensive. Gas is ridiculous.
Now I am grateful every day that I’m here. I had an ultrasound yesterday to check on a possible kidney problem. And yes, I’m concerned about it. But I don’t have to worry how I’ll pay for whatever treatment might be needed.
That feels good.
beltane
@Brachiator: Notice how the people who complain the most about overpopulation and over breeding always want it to be someone else who gets the ax for the benefit of humanity?
Cacti
@JPL:
It’s the old “who scrubs the toilets in Galt’s Gulch?” problem.
Bob The Angry Flower had the best take on this problem.
negative 1
We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will grab pitchforks and torches and drag the wealthy into the street and tear them asunder so they can eat.
Some of you don’t like the sound of that, but wealthy people once upon a time tried some balance to the system in order to avoid this. Now, they pretend it never existed.
Nick
It’s fine to complain about a problem, but I don’t see any specific solutions being offered.
In what ratio should wealth be redistributed, into what goods and services, and why? That’s the basic economic question that is constantly debated, yet nobody advances a measurable and optimal formula.
It’s easy to complain about callous indifference, unfairness, greed, etc. But without a viable plan it’s just useless bitching.
Elizabelle
Anybody else in the DC area want to show up at the Supreme Court tonight for a candlelight vigil?
David Hunt
@Patricia Kayden:
You just answered your own question. It was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic President. Axiomatically, it must be work a pure evil designed to destroy America!
shortstop
@Valdivia: There are already a number of wingers proposing that we tie voting rights to property ownership.
@scav: Your rush to incite class warfare saddens me.
lacp
@Nick: The rest of the world seems to have figured out a variety of very workable solutions. Of course, none of them would apply here because we’re Americans.
Cassidy
I suspect this is more accurate.
bodacious
OK, I’m going to take a boat load of hurt for this, but stepping back there is a critical point here (though I wouldn’t phrase it the same way). Progress is oft made incrementally, and to only accept that an entire and fully equitable health care reform is going to be completely income neutral is unrealistic at this stage of the war. What prevents overwhelming support of health care reform? Well, many things, but I think the biggest fear from those who’ve got theirs thank-you-very-much crowd is the idea that the ‘HAVES’ will have to sink to the lowest parity with the current ‘have-nots’. I mean, look at studies that ask – how much income is enough???? Answer: As long as it’s more than my neighbor.
Frankly, right now I’m working for,voting for, and hoping that our health care can just move into the sphere of decency for all. It’s not humane or decent right now. It’s not even cost efficient in the least. Nothing comes close to appearing that we can hope for anything more. It’s not right, but it is reality.
I won’t be satisfied if only a pittance is thrown our way, but it would be a move in the right direction.
fuzed
I believe we have the first principles of Morelock’ism
shortstop
@Violet: You don’t even need to bet. I’ve personally asked a number of them to do so, and not one has gotten within a mile of a correct answer.
beltane
Even the arch-Christian Bryan Fischer wants poor people to die
http://wonkette.com/476561/bryan-fischer-shares-jesuss-plan-for-the-poor-hospitals-turn-them-away
The fact that this ghoul hasn’t been dragged off to hell by a pack of angry winged demons is proof that God does not exist.
cckids
@Nemo_N:
No, no, no. We treat the poor CHILDREN. We let their parents die.
Also, we treat those kids with long term, chronic conditions (such as congenital heart problems) pretty darn well till they become adults, then – f*ck em’. Even if you look at it as purely an investment, it is asinine.
BenA
His argument is wrong period. I’m not poor. I run my own company and can afford expensive cars and stuff… but I can barely afford health insurance. I pay out of pocket since I’m a sucker and don’t actually want to be indentured to a corporation… and for my gaul I get to pay 40% more than most people I know for worse coverage. The current health care system is a huge huge drag on the economy… it’s economically unfeasible for most people to start their own company and our corporate masters love it.
Roger Moore
We need to accept the principle that sometimes rich people will die just because the poor people decide to kill them all.
Chris
@Violet:
“Socialism: The things I want for myself, given to people other than me.”
Nick
“beltane Says:
@Brachiator: Notice how the people who complain the most about overpopulation and over breeding always want it to be someone else who gets the ax for the benefit of humanity?”
That’s bullshit. I never said nor implied that.
Overpopulation is a problem and it needs to be addressed in any real solution. How many people should be on the planet and why? Set the figure based on whatever goals one has for what is rapidly becoming a redundant human race.
geg6
@Mark S.:
This. I’ve lived 53 years on this planet and have yet to meet one or even view one on tv. Psychopaths, every single one of them, but stupid psychopaths for all of that.
Citizen_X
@Beauzeaux: Clearly, we need to invade Canadia, to liberate you. And your water. And oil and gas. For Freedom!
shortstop
@Beauzeaux:
And yet, you’re in rural BC, one of the most beautiful places on this earth.
Best of luck with the test results — thinking good thoughts.
Rafer Janders
@lacp:
Because shut up, that’s why.
Deb T
@Culture of Truth:
Culture of Truth Says: Aren’t poor people edible?
Yeah, but they are sickly, probably disease ridden. Wiser to eat our healthier betters.
Deb T
@Culture of Truth:
Culture of Truth Says: Aren’t poor people edible?
Yeah, but they are sickly, probably disease ridden. Wiser to eat our healthier betters.
Elizabelle
This is who they are.
And they don’t think about it, either.
They mouth platitudes about “there must be some charity” to take care of Americans without healthcare.
Greatest country in the world.
Valdivia
@beltane:
this is the thing that totally burns me.
@Chris:
and I am sure that very soon breathing will be a privilege of the rich too.
scav
@shortstop: Prepare to sob uncontrollably, I barely made it to the counter before the rush, and that only because of an ETA-based temporal anomaly.
They really do need to read all that teeny fine print in the historical descriptions of the Good Ol’ Days instead of watching re-runs of the Waltons and Father Knows Best.
Cassidy
If they keep this shit up, it will be a privilege if they’re allowed to continue breathing.
The Moar You Know
The lucky fuckers still get to eat cake, though. Who doesn’t love cake?
Carolus
George Mason Univ. becomes more of a joke every day.
As a commenter mentioned upthread, many of the uninsured are children. Children aren’t poor by choice or bad decision-making–they’re poor because they had the bad fortune to be born to poor families.
Cowen operates under the premise that ACA will “equalize” healthcare options for all. If only that were true. The wealthy will be able to avail themselves of far superior healthcare options.
Zach
“The point of universal coverage is to change that.”
I think it’s useful to replace the words “poor people” in Cowen’s statement with “poor children.” Do that, and it’s easy to see the argument for universal healthcare and universal public education (both primary education that’s free of the de facto segregation wrought by local control of school funding and higher education). If Libertarians are comfortable with public education and public healthcare spending in any sense at all (and not persuaded by The Bell Curve), they cannot be comfortable with the very non-laissez-faire outcome of some children being put at a disadvantage through circumstance alone.
Linda Featheringill
@Bulworth: #23
http://s3.amazonaws.com/texasgop_pre/assets/original/2012-Platform-Final.pdf
Page 5
Davis X. Machina
@negative 1: Three orders of magnitude between the richest and the poorest should be enough to distinguish the Lord’s anointed from the preterite damned.
Everything else is making the rubble bounce. If they really want, the stinking rich can have special clothes — in Rome, only Senators (curule and ex-curule magistrates would be adlected into the Senate automatically) and equestrians could wear purple, but in different ways. That way we would know…
mathguy
@Corey: You’re right. I went back and looked at it and he isn’t quite the monster we’re billing him as. Nonetheless, what a stupid thing to say, reflective of his attitudes about society in general. The econ creeps at GMU-where would they be without the Kochs? (Damn, I forgot, University of Chicago.)
burnspbesq
OT: In which Fortune magazine, a serial offender in this regard, commits willful acts of journalism with respect to Fast and Furious. What you think you know may not be accurate. Money quote:
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/
Nick
“lacp Says:
@Nick: The rest of the world seems to have figured out a variety of very workable solutions. Of course, none of them would apply here because we’re Americans.”
There are solutions. I’m just saying that a reality based solution will be based on what’s possible in response to what’s desired, in the most efficient way available (that’s more or less a utilitarian response to the problem).
Ruckus
@beltane:
I like this.
negative 1
@Nick: I’m having a crap day so I’ll feed the troll…
I know right? This stuff is unknowable! It’s not like there’s a whole science called economics where they run econometric models that show potential or past effects of policy on production. And too bad there’s not a thing called GDP that measures national production. Golly I sure wish there were about 100 years worth of data where we could see what the effects of excess labor capacity did to GDP, or what government spending did to boost GDP the last time we had such horrifically bad wealth distribution, or what the bad wealth distribution did to consumption? Too bad there isn’t something called a ‘living wage’ to determine exactly what a person needs to live on! You’re right, begging the question really is an argument!
Valdivia
@shortstop:
and this does not surprise me at all. I am putting money of this being the next boundary. If they challenge the Voting Rights Act in front of the Court you will begin to hear this again and again and again. And our idiot media will come up with focus piece on how the poor are better off not voting.
@Elizabelle:
if I weren’t just getting out of a killer flu I would so be there.
schrodinger's cat
@Patricia Kayden: One of the commenters here was hurt when I pointed out that Tyler Cowen’s department was a nest of glibertarian nut cases.
Brachiator
@beltane:
Oh, yes. Funny little “coincidence.”
lacp
@Nick: IIRC, there are studies out indicating that people with higher incomes tend to have fewer children than those less well-off. So, increase prosperity and over-population becomes less of a problem. Win-win, no?
schrodinger's cat
I am beginning to understand why communism had such attraction for many at the turn of the last century.
Roger Moore
@Linda Featheringill:
Cognitive dissonance at its finest.
Rafer Janders
@Nick:
Oh, if only there were other advanced industrial democracies that offered universal single-payer health care that we could look to as a model! If only places such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and all of Western Europe were able to be used as examples so we could see how workable it is in practice!
Ben Cisco
@General Stuck: Yup, that’s all I want/need to know.
Beat them so badly, and so repeatedly, that the phrase “I am a Republican/Liberterian” becomes synonymous with “I am a fucking psychopath, do NOT let me near your kids, a vehicle, anything sharper than a spork, and ESPECIALLY a voting booth of any kind whatsoever.”
I get that, I’m golden.
shortstop
@scav: That wouldn’t work, because they never correctly gauge how that history would apply to them. I know a totally bent local political figure who loves to wax enthusiastic about the “Victorian” period (just using that term in the U.S. cracks me up), and how he’d love to have lived in it here in Chicago or New York. He’s Italian American and would have been thoroughly shunned by the social class he views so sentimentally. I have an Anglophile friend who yaks about the golden days when the monarchy meant something. Had he been of that time and place, he’d have been harvesting mud with the other peasants.
Like reincarnationists who all think they were Marie Antoinette or Henry Frick, instead of scullery maids and sharecroppers, people like this cherry-pick history no matter how they read it.
Chris
@beltane:
This.
No matter how brutal communism was in the last century, it’s worth noting that it only ever* came to power in revolutions against systems that were as brutal or more (Czarist Russia, Nationalist/warlord-controlled China, colonial Indochina, quasi-colonial Cuba, etc). Healthy democracies with strong safety nets don’t breed revolutions or violence against the rich – ever, to the best of my knowledge. Brutal and oppressive systems that let people starve in the streets while the masters use their wealth to build palaces do.
There’s a pretty good scene at the beginning of “Les Miserables” where a bishop and a former revolutionary have an argument, the bishop condemns the excesses of the revolution, and the revolutionary responds that the entire monarchy was made up of nothing but that kind of excess, and that it’s absurd to condemn people for finally lashing back in kind after grinning and bearing it for fifteen hundred years.
* Excluding places where it was imposed by foreign conquest, of course, like Eastern Europe or Tibet.
scav
And, as semi-topical chum, we’ve apparently discovered what will make a banker give up a years bonus: Evidence of multiple-year widespread maniupulation of a fundamental international baseline (LIBOR and Euribor) with real-world consequences touching nearly everyone. Somebody get shortstop some kleenex, I’m being a meanie again.
Culture of Truth
Yes but you need less than we do.
MomSense
When I read that excerpt you posted I started to cry. I can’t help it I just cannot believe the cruelty we have to confront. What kind of sick person can justify this sort of inhumanity in such a casual fashion. Makes me want to break Godwin’s law with abandon.
This wait for the supreme court’s ruling feels like waiting for a stay of execution.
Corey
@mathguy: Why is it stupid? He’s right. I mean, the principle underlying his point is that people systematically overvalue access to marginal healthcare procedures, an overvaluation he thinks is distorting. The point is that a modest package that, say, takes care of 80-90% of the medical problems people typically have in life would do more to help poor people than a package that takes care of 100% of things that happen in life, but that distorts spending away from other, non-healthcare related things required for living a better life.
slag
@Corey:
That’s quite A Modest Proposal. Is he intentionally being funny, or is he so completely engulfed in the haze of uppermiddleclasswhiteboy privilege that he can’t see his own reflection in a mirror?
Brachiator
@Nick:
And again, I ask why you are not addressing the problem personally?
It’s a simple question.
Funny thing about overpopulation. You have countries like Japan where an increasingly aging population is not replacing itself and countries where female infanticide and abortion skews male/female ratios resulting in all kinds of nasty social problems. I’ve never seen anyone come up with the “ideal population” figures on a country by country basis. Would some countries, states, cities, be better off de-populated?
And let’s say that we get the population down to some wonderful ideal number, and robots and other technology then make the remnants irrelevant. What then?
Could there be an overpopulation of robots and technology?
Are we really looking at the entire “problem” in the appropriate manner? Don’t know.
But I do know that people who talk simplistically about a “global population problem” are blowing it out of their asses.
shortstop
@Culture of Truth: So good.
Rafer Janders
@Nick:
So you’re saying…nothing at all, really. That’s just pablum, approximating something that sounds intelligent but really isn’t. Oooh, a solution will be based on a balance of what’s possible against what’s wanted? What a stunning insight! Amazing that no one has ever thought of this utterly basic and banal point before!
schrodinger's cat
@shortstop: Next they will want to stop women from voting. If GOPers have their way only white men who own property will be allowed to vote, hence making sure that GOP wins elections in all perpetuity.
The Moar You Know
@Violet: My office wingnut – an educated woman with a master’s – couldn’t come up with any other answer other than “what Obama does”.
Which was pretty educational – for me.
She had no idea that it meant state ownership/control of certain industries.
Same woman yesterday, when shown the Texas GOP platform on education (without being told where it came from) said “oh my God, that’s horrendous”. On being told where it came from, you could watch the lights shut off as she said “oh well. Both sides do it.”
Chisel that on the headstone of the US and let’s get on with building a new nation.
Chris
@shortstop:
That’s exactly it. That’s what “American Exceptionalism” means: we don’t need to worry about the history of all these faggy foreign countries because our system is exceptional, divine, totally unlike any other, and therefore, the laws of God and nature don’t apply to us.
RossInDetroit
Rich people do and always will get the best of everything, and that’s fine.
Since when is establishing a minimum level of essential health care for the poor attempting to ‘equalize’ anything?
Jesus H Christ in an emergency room! The logical errors in that paragraph practically shout in your face to be recognized.
Catsy
No, we fucking well don’t.
There are things we do have to accept. For example, that the world is not fair. That the rich will be able to afford better care than the poor, simply because they have more resources. That with the current state of medical technology, people will still die when they shouldn’t, even with care. Or that to worthless sociopathic fucks like this, the purity of their ideology is more important than human life.
What we do not have to accept is that we are powerless to change all of those things.
We can’t make sociopathic fucks like Cowen grow a soul, but we can subject them to the ridicule and social ostracism their IGMFY ideology so richly deserves, so as to discourage others from taking that road to hell.
We can’t stop everyone from dying, but we can fight for advances in preventative care that will extend life and increase its quality.
We can’t stop the poor from being poor or the rich from being rich, but we can either throw up our hands and smugly declare that the poor are just going to have to suck up the way the world is, or we can recognize that it is within our ability as a society to ensure that no one has to die just because they can’t afford health care.
We can’t make the world fair, but we can choose to make it a better place.
shortstop
@schrodinger’s cat: Who was the female wingnut who suggested that women voting is a bad idea? Was it K-Lo? Coulter?
kay
I’m hoping they go to “let them die!” tomorrow, like they did in the debates.
It’s what they believe, and now they feel comfortable saying it.
We could have saved a lot of time had they announced this “principle” at the outset, but better late than never.
ericblair
@Davis X. Machina:
What I think you’re insinuating here, wicked creature, is that things we can call “sumptuary laws” for the wealthy we can also point out as a thing called “target identification” for the not so wealthy. Very handy.
schrodinger's cat
@shortstop: I think it was Coulter.
Shane Taylor
It’s the old, familiar Libertarian Inversion: The Market did not fail the poor; the poor failed The Market.
Their logic often reminds me of the deranged gynecologist in _Dead Ringers_. The doctor made a fetish of a gold-platted instrument he’d invented, and he persisted in using it on one of his patients in spite of her shouts of pain. When the doctor was forcibly removed from the examining room, the doctor defended himself by saying, “There’s nothing the matter with the instrument, it’s the body. The woman’s body is all wrong!” What was monstrous, to him, was not the device, but the patient’s mutinous body.
Corey
@slag: No, he’s just saying that healthcare isn’t the only important thing in living a happy life.
It’s a banal point, but it isn’t monstrous.
Violet
@The Moar You Know: Yep. That’s pretty much how it is with those kinds of people. It’s about tribalism, not facts and the real world.
RossInDetroit
@lacp:
One big problem with overpopulation is overuse of resources rather than just too many people. The wealthy vastly over consume compared to poor people. So you probably weren’t making a serious argument, but wealth increase seems to offset population density. Slums are extremely resource efficient. Gated suburban communities are among the worst.
schrodinger's cat
@Davis X. Machina: Well they already have designer brands, to do that. Bags that cost more than a small car, are the new purple, I guess.
Chris
@schrodinger’s cat:
Correct.
“If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women.” – exact quote
slag
@shortstop: I’m pretty sure it’s been all of them at one point or another. That they don’t seem to even appreciate the paradox inherent in their stated position on women and politics is just classic wingnut.
Brachiator
@Rafer Janders:
There are a number of countries that have universal health care.
Single payer is not the solution in most of them. And how you pay for it is only one of the many issues that have to be dealt with.
Single payer is the particular fetish of American progressives.
That said, you are right on the money to note that universal health care is not some theoretical model that has never been tried anywhere.
schrodinger's cat
@Corey: If you are sick, it doesn’t matter what other basket of goods you have. Why are you defending Cowen, are you his grad student or something?
Elizabelle
@Valdivia:
Be well soonest, Valdivia.
Anybody else up for a vigil?
PS: Valdivia: I’m in on “The Moviegoer.” Great book. Love Walker Percy. Time for a reread.
Citizen_X
@Corey:
Oh, for fuck’s sake. That’s what the ACA does. Stop defending this idiot.
RSA
@Nemo_N:
I think it’s the naturalistic fallacy, which is related to Hume’s law about distinguishing “is” from “ought”. Ayn Rand is maybe the most famous libertarian who adopts the naturalistic fallacy; her defense of it basically involves talking louder.
Nick
Rafer Janders Says:
“@Nick:
So you’re saying…nothing at all, really. That’s just pablum, approximating something that sounds intelligent but really isn’t. Oooh, a solution will be based on a balance of what’s possible against what’s wanted? What a stunning insight! Amazing that no one has ever thought of this utterly basic and banal point before!”
My point is that nobody is providing specific solutions pegged to specific values. What percentage of GDP should be paid for what goods and services and why? Saying, this is not acceptable, without giving a realistic alternative, is just fucking wanking.
Upthread people are arguing that other countries have more effective and less expensive health care systems. Okay, which one are you going to choose and why? You have to sell it, and simply whining about unfairness isn’t going to get you far.
What are the goals? Human happiness? How you gonna measure it? What are the limits to health care? Quadruple bypasses for everyone while people in the third world can’t get clean water? Can’t do that, since it’s unfair.
Davis X. Machina
@ericblair: Bug….. or feature? (Cackles sardonically…)
muddy
@shortstop: Coulter.
Bob2
Tyler Cowen is of the Mercatus Center that produces hacks like Veronique De Rugy. He’s of the George Mason University school of libertarian hack economists that follows basically Austrian principles of economics. There are quite a few of them
Basically he’s tried to become a media star He has posts in Grantland with hacks like Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer. (I’m surprised it doesn’t include Steven Levitt)
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7559458/cte-concussion-crisis-economic-look-end-football
http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/tag/_/name/tyler-cowen
Written a book on being a hipster foodie.
http://tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com
Posts favorably about Megan McArdle and vice versa.
Basically he dabbles in other shit because he’s not really a good economist.
Corey
@schrodinger’s cat: No, I just don’t think it’s teh worst thing anyone has said evar.
@Citizen_X: I’m pretty sure Cowen supports the ACA or, at least, thinks it’s better than the status quo.
Corey
@Bob2: For a thread full of people going on about “tribalism”, there sure is a lot of it on display.
Ash Can
@JPL:
@Cacti:
Kevin isn’t saying this. He’s citing someone else. Look at it again.
scott
@Rafer Janders:
Great point and one that illustrates something I’ve observed about libertarians and neo-liberal apologists as well: Their preference to resort to meaningless word salads and alternative facts (ie not the ones on planet Earth) to get themselves out of defending their indefensible moral positions. If he thinks that social class distinctions are so important that making poor people die is worth it, well, he’s a monster, but he should own that. He shouldn’t suggest that it’s required by economics when (as you point out) every major industrialized country has managed the feat of basic universal health care without making the poor die.
shortstop
@Davis X. Machina: No, no, for this to work you must preserve your doeface.*
*Got this term from a friend who brilliantly employs a mask of cheerful non-understanding while sticking it to the highly deserving.
Nick
Brachiator Says:
“But I do know that people who talk simplistically about a “global population problem” are blowing it out of their asses.”
You’re a fucking idiot. Let me know if you ever get a tether to reality.
shortstop
@Corey: The Norwegian judge gives a 3.5. The Russian, a 2. And the French judge thinks 1.7 is all you deserve for that lame effort.
Brachiator
@Shane Taylor:
Very cool Dead Ringers reference.
BTW, it wasn’t that the instruments were gold plated, but that the doctor and his twin brother developed specialized instruments that more resembled torture devices than medical tools.
Very strange movie, with Jeremy Irons playing both twins.
schrodinger's cat
@Corey: May not be the worst, but it is quite bad. Especially for someone posing as a neutral scholar, analyzing facts and not shilling an ideology
Davis X. Machina
We already chose.
Brachiator
@Nick:
You began with inanity and end with an insult.
What a waste of time.
Kane
We would be fooling ourselves if we thought that addressing health care was simply about our concern for the health of poor people.
The primary reasons that it is so vital to address the issue of health care is that the current system is economically unsustainable, and it impedes the economic freedom of US companies, small businesses and individuals.
Yes, ensuring that the poor have access to health care is important, but first and foremost health care is an economic issue.
Davis X. Machina
@Corey: Cowan has supported something much like ACA, that much I can tell you. You can find people in Forbes who did the same.
Turgidson
The next thing the glibertarian and Randroid wankers will say, albeit maybe in a kinda-sorta polite way is:
“It’s secretly a good thing if poor people die early because that way the costs of the safety net will go down a bit because those leeches won’t be around to collect food stamps or use Medicaid.”
Maybe they’ve already said that and I missed it. But you know they’re thinking it.
slag
@Corey: Some of us here actually think that words matter. You can claim banality on the part of the author all you wish, but the language he’s employing to make his supposedly banal argument indicates, at best, an extreme amount of obliviousness. The fact that that doesn’t bother you should give you some cause for concern.
JPL
@burnspbesq: I hope someone front pages this article. The whole scandal appears to be leave my guns alone.
@Ash Can: Thanks.. I didn’t link but Doug was clear in his first sentence..duh!
Kevin Drum’s favorite principled Hayekian free marketeer
Valdivia
@Elizabelle:
oh awesome! I am going to get this going officially then and speak to the powers that be. :)
and thanks for the good wishes. almost all better.
Jim Pharo
Dear Mr. Cowen:
I don’t need to accept any such thing. Neither do you.
Dick.
Sincerely,
A Human
Citizen_X
@Corey:
His post is not called “Why my fellow Righties are batshit insane about the ACA,” it’s called “The Right’s health care principles.” In it, he sets up a left wing straw man, that we want to “equalize” access to health care. As many have pointed out, that has not been achieved by any approach, anywhere in the world. So fuck him and his sicko righty pals.
Too tribalistic? Fuck off. A lack of tribalism means you’re engaging this argument in some ethereal, “both sides do it” netherworld. Nobody lives there.
becca
@giltay: Yeah,but they’re still poor so there’s really no reason to go on living, is there?
J. Michael Neal
@DougJ:
You’re lying. There’s no other word for it. On the Google search you linked to, I clicked on the first six links. In three of them, Drum disagrees with Cowen. In one he neither agrees nor disagrees; the post is actually about the Kindle and Cowen is mentioned only incidentally.
He sort of agrees with him in one, in that he and Cowen agree that a paper that argues that overleveraged European banks pose a threat to the US economy is interesting if true.
In the *only* one of those six posts where he can really be said to agree with a position Cowen has taken, the position in question is that we ought to be skeptical of a vision of hard work leading to success. This isn’t a case of Drum adopting a libertarian position in order to agree with Cowen; it’s a case of Cowen adopting a liberal position.
As always, Doug, your perpetual insistence on smearing Drum reflects poorly on you.
MomSense
Ok, now that I have had a good cry. I say we need a 21st century version of stoning and pitchforks.
All of us poor people can collect our microwaves, televisions, refrigerators, and granite countertops and hurl them at these a$$holigarchs.
chrismealy
When it comes to getting inside the heads of liberals who are old enough to know better, Tyler Cowen is even worse than Andrew Sullivan. Following the links back from DougJ’s post I saw the thread led to Matt Yglesias. I gave up on Yglesias and Ezra Klein because every time they called Cowen “smart” I risked destroying my computer in rage. So I was not surprised to see Yglesias say this:
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Corey: The thing is, Corey, is that while I understand that the poor will not have access to the kind of healthcare that the rich do, it does not mean that I have to accept it. No one should. We should be trying to find ways to make healthcare, food, and shelter available to everyone. Notice I did not say 70inch TVs. But for the basics, we should always be trying.
John M. Burt
@lacp: @lacp:
Those studies were done decades ago. People who actually study the matter have given up on the idea that raising standards of living was the most effective (let alone cost-effective) way to control population. It’s been demonstrated since then that empowering women, encouraging democracy and plain old direct incentives to have fewer children (a free radio, a tax break, &c.) are all superior.
Citizen_X
@Citizen_X: I will add: what Freddie, and this scumbag Cowen say, here.
RedKitten
Remember our erstwhile friend on this blog, TallDave?
Look at this little gem of a comment he made about the whole thing:
Damn those doctors and lawyers, refusing to agree that poor people should have substandard care!
kay
Poor people do feel healthier and happier when they have health insurance.
Or so they say:
Joey Maloney
@Culture of Truth:
Not if they’re riddled with cancer, silly!
Corey
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Fine, but in the here and now there are a) limited healthcare resources and b) other things that would help people that are not healthcare.
We know that people (irrationally) value insurance plans covering them in case of some very remote illness over things that would actually improve their lives right that very minute. That is Cowen’s point. It is not evil or sociopathic or anything of the sort.
Nylund
I think this points out just how far the political divide has become.
It used to be that both sides agreed that “not dying” was the bare minimum goal. It’s just that one side thought that you shouldn’t have to lose everything you’ve ever earned or acquired to pay for that ability to not-die and the other found it perfectly acceptable that many people had to lose everything just to stay alive. But now, apparently even that is a standard too high.
Older
“We need to accept … that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor … we already let the wealthy enjoy all sorts of other goods — most importantly status ”
How about if we trade them — we’ll take the better health care, and they can have all of our status. They can look down on us and call us — what? “poor?” — oh, whatever. So long as we get the health care.
Oh, and special to the guy who moved to BC: There are places in the states that don’t have over night delivery, because they’re, you know, rural. I’d love to move to Canada, but I’m old; they wouldn’t want me. I’m hoping Canada will annex us. At least us in the Pacific NW.
chopper
you see, if poor people for the most part stop keeling over dead from perfectly preventable diseases, then the rich will feel a little less better than the rest of us. the rich man at the top of the mountain doesn’t care about how high the peak is as much as he cares about how much further down the slope everyone else is.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Corey: Except Cowen stated: “We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor.” Notice he didn’t say, “We need to accept the principle that sometimes slow people will die just because they are to slow to get to the doctor.”
As for a finite amount of medical care, get back to me when we’re paying about the same as other countries. For what we’re paying, everyone can have medical care.
Nylund
Tyler better hope none of the rundown “dives” that he loves to eat at have any cooks or waiters with any communicable diseases given his dream of poor people just dying if they get sick.
That’s the really odd thing about this sort of Libertarian thinking. It’s like they believe that being surrounded by a whole bunch of sick poor people (like the kind they pay to care for their children, clean their house, and cook and serve their food when they go out) won’t possible effect them in any way. I mean, who ever heard of sicknesses spreading to other people, right?!
El Cid
__
Exactly. That’s why all the Founding Fathers made sure to sound like and to write like a bunch of callous douchebags, to enshrine the founding of a nation upon the principles of fuck you, pal, you don’t like it, fucking die.
Principled believers in capitalism and entrepreneurial competition value having a wider population from whom entrepreneurs could arise with market innovating solutions.
The notion that capitalism is about entrenching prior achieved advantages and avoiding competition because your potential business rivals are dying earlier and suffering from curable illnesses would be abhorrent to anyone who really believed that a true market based upon the success in the market of the most innovative competitors.
This is an argument for aristocracy, not capitalism.
Roy G.
“Who cares about poor people? I’ve got a brand to build!”
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Jinchi:
We do have right-wing cranks here (Grover Norquist has a home here for krissake), and in 2002-3 civil suits much like the one against ACA were brought up.
Except here, we have a mostly functional judiciary, so the suit was summarily dismissed.
I do expect the cranks to come out of the woodwork again if SCOTUS overturns.
Failing that, they might be able to get it on referendum if they get enough signatures… now won’t that be interesting.
Rob in CT
I’ve been wondering for some time why Cowen got popular amongst some folks who should know better. I’ve read him. I’ve never been impressed.
Rafer Janders
@Nick:
Then your point is idiotic. Specific solutions have been provided ad infinitum. Whole books have been written. Conferences have been held, papers have been published, studies have been undertaken, real world examples have been tried, etc. etc. The fact that you don’t know this means that you either are (a) lying, (b) wilfully ignorant, or (c) playing at being igorant to satisfy some obsure psychological impulse. It is not up to everyone here, though, to educate you on the basic details of one of the most discussed public policy debates of the past four years.
TenguPhule
On principle Republicans need to die quickly because they are evil and stupid all the time.
schrodinger's cat
@Corey:
The reason to have insurance is precisely to cover against catastrophic events that have a small but non zero probability of occurring. This is true about all types of insurance not just health insurance. To say that you don’t need health insurance if you are poor because you can use you can use the money for something else is callous.
Mnemosyne
@Corey:
So who, exactly, is Cowan arguing against who thinks that everyone should get exactly the same healthcare regardless of cost?
Cowan basically set up a ridiculous strawman so he could try to claim that he has the best solution, which magically and mysteriously bears a close resemblance to the one we already have in PPACA, but somehow isn’t really PPACA because his solution is better and shut up, that’s why.
Barry
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: “I hope they are holding open a slot on the US Olympic Cognitive Dissonance team, because this writer has multiple Gold Medal Winner potential.”
The last several years have been an exercise in reality proving that 99 times out of a hundred, the most cynical and left-wing explanation for right-wing behavior is either correct, or an understatement.
Ruckus
@scav:
Oh, and while you’re so busy accepting things, please remember to accept the principle that the rich just sometimes get strung up on lamposts.
Wouldn’t that be too bad.
PIGL
@Nick: thanks for your concern, and for drawing these novel questions to our attention. I for one have never considered of them before. I am sure that, once I have accepted your framing, you and your fellow Economist-reading fucktards who are fit only for hanging will have no trouble in showing me that the smug Libertarian position was correct all along.
Now go DIAF.
Keith G
In the first article of that link, I find Drum being critical of Cowan’s conclusions. Do you read the stuff you argue about?
Oh right. Last night you said you didn’t.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Barry:
__
And every time a new person emerges to lead the contemporary Right, they make the right-wing monsters of the past look reasonable, sane and even a bit liberal by comparison. Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, even GWB, all of them are looking better each year. No matter how bad they are, just wait and eventually you’ll miss them, by comparison with whatever the Right has to offer up next.
Chris
@El Cid:
Do all systems regress back into aristocracy/feudalism if left unchecked? Seems to me that they do. It’s clearly happened in capitalism here. It happened in communism in Russia and China – the “inner party,” as Orwell would’ve called it, using its status to entrench itself as a privileged and unaccountable ruling class. No matter what the system is, the rich, powerful and connected in it inevitably conspire to gain more, more and more power, money and status for themselves, while shutting the doors to prevent outsiders from breaking into the club.
Aristocracy seems to be the natural, default setting for all politics, and it has to be fought in each generation if government is to remain “of the people, by the people, for the people.” (Needless to say, we as a people have been shirking that obligation for thirty or forty years).
celticdragonchick
@beltane:
Quoted for truth.
PurpleGirl
@Quarks: I think you said that quite well and it is something they haven’t thought about.
The rest of us want stability, more money would be nice but really what we want is stability and some amount of knowing we won’t live and die in poverty. I just want enough money to live well, not like a Trump or a Rockefeller, just well with enough.
Ruckus
@Corey:
If cowen had wanted to make the point you have been trying to defend the entire post why the hell didn’t he make it in place of the one he wrote?
Or are you cowen in disguise and are just now realizing how full of shit the original was but need to attempt to rationalize it?
BTW it isn’t working. Still full of shit.
Tom_23
I recognize one of my favorite “coaches” rant.
The bears were who we thought they were.We played them in preseason. I mean, who the hell takes the third game of the preseason like it’s (expletive)? (Expletive)! We played them in the third game, everybody played three quarters … the Bears are who we thought they were! That’s why we took the damn field! Now, if you want to crown them, then crown their ass! But, they are who we thought they were, and we let them off the hook!
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
What a waste of time.
That’s Nick!
mtraven
Once again, Cowen and the other GMU economists put the ass in Asperger’s,
Don
I’m not a Cowen fan (his comments about the value of college being tied to prestige (clearly an obsession for him) rank among some of the dumbest assertions I think I have ever read) but I think this tempest over his statements is not aimed right.
The very first thing he says out of the gate on the actual post – not the quoted piece – is a statement that conservatives should have pursued a mandate for a single class of coverage and he cites the Swiss system as a model to emulate – one that mandates purchases and caps individual expenditure at 8% of annual salary.
The third paragraph says he believes in a package covering basic needs, and says that doesn’t include “small probability chances of delaying death from prostate cancer.” (emphasis mine)
If you needed proof this is just ham-handedness, not malice, here’s your smoking gun. Cowen is assuming a knowledge about the nature of prostate cancer – that it strikes the very old for the most part and often presents in circumstances where there’s good odds the patient is going to die of old age or other more imminent illnesses before the PC becomes an issue. Or it presents when other physical conditions make treatment as likely to kill the sufferer as the cancer is.
Cowen may be a boob but he’s speaking out in favor of mandates – a diversion from the current conservative talking point – and in favor of a guaranteed level of care for all. He should be so far down on our list of people to rebut that you couldn’t get to him in a dozen years. He’s advocating positions that we can’t even get some of the blue dogs to embrace.
RaflW
Excellent Cowen rebuttal from (gasp!) a doctor.
neil
Nothing we do can eliminate the problem of poor people dying because they’re poor. Therefore, we should do nothing to reduce its incidence.
Do i get to be a professor at GMU now?
KS in MA
@Quarks: You said it very well. Thank you.
PQuincy
@beltane: If only we could just figure out a way for this historically repeating re-set to happen without the catastrophic collateral damage, much of it to the poor, that prying the cold dead hands of the bondholders off the throat of society entails. Problem is, each of the last 4-5 centuries’ re-sets have only briefly changed the power structure, while painfully demolishing security and peace for all. It’s hard to swallow, but when the alternative is “meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” maybe trying to constrain the old boss (and if possible, get his kids to go to a good liberal arts elite college, where a proportion of them can be deprogrammed) is the best option we have.
David Alexander McDonald
@Jinchi: It doesn’t affect RomneyCare in MA, because that’s a states rights issue, not a Federal mandate. What might be of more concern is that various Reichwing run states will try to disassemble their Medicaid connections, as has been happening here in Arizona.
pluege
2 things are startling about the people of the right:
1) their monstrous indecency: that they have the ability to help others, but refuse to. THAT, is the very definition of indecency. They’d rather spend every last cent working to deny anything to others than to spend a lesser amount helping those in need.
2) their sick psychosis that nothing is ever enough for them no matter how much they have. If the damage they do wasn’t so catastrophic for humanity you’d almost feel sorry for them for the sick disease that has destroyed their fetid souls and enslaved them to a life in which it is impossible to ever to be fulfilled, and which can only increases in unfulfillment over time.
SiubhanDuinne
@lacp:
Because just shut up, okay?
Jim Treacher
:(
pragmatism
@Jim Treacher: here comes sunny jim to “win” the thread. so brave jim. so brave. watch out for cars.
pseudonymous in nc
Yeah, where is that black SUV when it’s needed?
I’ve always considered Tyler Cowen a slightly eloquent sociopath, although he’s more explicit in his sociopathy on this one than usual.
John Jay
@Jinchi:
I agree.
I also feel the ‘mandatory charity care’ should have been the main topic of Supreme Court review long before Obamacare. Perhaps no hospital or insurer wanted to be seen as the plaintiff in this, but an insured healthcare consumer could claim to have suffered injury by increased cost demanded of mandatory charity care and made a case to challenge the mandatory charity laws. Imagine if a restaurant were forced by law to feed anyone who showed at the door and said they were hungry?
If we accept the principle of mandatory emergency care, then we must accept the principle of mandatory participation in insurance.
Debbie(aussie)
Why is it that assholes like this ignore the fact that the rest of the developed world+ has some form universal health care that costs less than in th US. Was a truly repugnant thing to say!
Yutsano
@Debbie(aussie): Yes but you’re all Communists. So nyah.
fuckwit
I used to get very angry about this, because I took it personally– being poor and having no medical insurance. But now I’m kind of desensitized to it; I have accepted the fact that my life is literally worthless to this corporate-capitalist society. The anger fades in a brief homicidal/suicidal instant, and then I’m back to the stark but rather mundane reality of just trying to get through my day.
What the wingnuts and libertarians are trying to do is just EUGENICS. Plain and simple.
If they could get away with just lining all of us undesirables up against the wall and shooting us, they’d do that. No, wait, that’s horrible! They couldn’t bring themselves to do that. They’d HIRE some of us to line the rest of us up against the wall and shoot us! Yes, that’d be much more efficient.
And isn’t that what they’ve been trying to do for decades? Isn’t what all this is about, when you strip it of all the bullshit and rationalization?
Shall I take the next step here and invoke Godwin’s Law? This kind of dehumanizing of “undesirable” parts of the population, and cutting them off from the benefits of the society they live in, hasn’t this been done before?
What the 1% are trying to do is to literally kill off every one of us 99% who are either unable or unwilling to enslave ourselves to them and make them even richer. That’s all this is.
Gawd, I need to take an Alka Seltzer now. Damn.
Trilln451
@Valdivia:
You have him confused with Steve King (R-IA)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpJsTlKSaUU