Single Payer Healthcare

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/03/15/conyers-obamacare-a-platform-for-government-takeover-of-health-care/

I remember when some of us warned that Obamacare is a first step toward nationalized healthcare, and how many moderates and liberals guffawed and ridiculed us as conspiracy theorists and stated how silly it is to think of this modest change in healthcare as some "socialist" plot to control healthcare. As Obamacare unfolds, it's clear that nationalized healthcare was the plan all along -- what do the moderates and liberals say now? Are they proud of the deceit and denial?

Obamacare is a juggernaut headed directly at our economy -- our economy which is already anemic. Can the public maintain the will to overturn it?

The Closing of the Leftist Mind

The standard reply from the Left regarding the principles of a limited government and a free market has become cliche, to the point that the sameness of the anti-capitalist position can be established as group-think, a failure of free-thinking. The bottom line of the Leftist critique of classical liberalism is that the economy has to be regulated, because, if not, corporations will gain power and then control the nation. But, they also claim there has never been a free market and that corporations already control the nation even with regulations, because politicians have been bought. But, if government didn't have the power to sell favors, corporations would be powerless to affect legislation or capture regulators -- there wouldn't be regulators. There would only be law enforcers preventing fraud and theft and other types of coercion, and courts to settle disputes.

So what is the Left's answer? Well, strangely, it's not a free market and limited government -- no, they promote more regulations enforced by better, more powerful government officials, One has to wonder when we will find these better government officials. What I really believe they think is necessary is complete government control over corporations -- something like an Americanized socialism where government has much more control over profits, distribution and business decisions.

I think I'll stick with the free market, limited government answer. A handful of technocrats centrally planning the economy is a mega Key Stone Cops tragedy waiting to happen.

Faces of socialism

In his book, Socialism, Ludwig von Mises, in a chapter describing different forms of socialism, wrote in the early 20th century about the Planned Economy:

In the last few years, a new word has been found for that which was covered by the expression "planned economy": State Capitalism, and no doubt in the future many more proposals for the salvaging of Socialism will be brough forward. We shall learn many new names for the same old thing. But the thing, not its names, is what matters, and all schemes of this sort will not alter the nature of Socialism.

Most current, modern liberal, political commentators will ridicule anyone who mentions Socialism in relation to our current system of State economic management. The President and members of congress will quickly defend free enterprise as an American value which has enabled our incredible economic progress. It's true that the mixed economy has done much better than the old Socialism proper in which nationalization of enterprise was believed to be necessary to accomplish socialist ends -- however, after a little over seventy years of our "mixed economy", we're witnessing the failures of this form of Socialism. I'm not using Socialism as a pejorative term to smear the modern liberal or progressive, but rather as a real form of Socialism in its broder meaning as established by Mises. It appears that the original impulse toward State Capitalism of which Mises wrote, is still operational with China's "capitalist" success as a new justification. China strictly manages its economy, and many on the Left are impressed with this State/Enterprise partnership. There's really nothing new in the current push for State Capitalism, and Mises overestimated the State's creative ability to come up with new names. State Capitalism as the Left proposes it is just a shifting of the mixed economy toward "smarter" technocratic planning.

Recently, President Obama has called on industry to think more about the general welfare, and the administration's relationships with GE and Goldman Sachs are signs of strengthening partnerships, as was the recent get together of Obama and the High Priests of Technology. GM is partly owned by the State, and Fannie and Freddie are still government controlled. The very fact of the special relationship between government and the Fed tells us what we need to know about the extent of "State Capitalism" -- this relationship becomes more questionable and troublesome as times goes by.

It will be helpful to read Mises book mentioned above, as it contains a comprehensive critique of Socialism that I cannot go into here at much depth. The problem we face now as a result of Socialist measures undertaken for decades is the misdirection of capital and the battle between the Left's concern for gross product and the expansion of labor, and the need for market players to obey supply and demand as it relates to net product and the ability to obey signals that suggest other needs aren't being met if gross product is no longer profitable. Plus, the push by the State to "invest" in healthcare, education, infrastructure and green energy is not economically sound, and the misdirected capital will necessarily destroy the other part of the mixture, a supposedly free market. What government officials and Leftist intellectuals mean by "free market" is simply that part of the economy which is mostly left to supply and demand and the speculative judgement of capitalists. This part of the mixture becomes weaker and weaker, especially as government/corporate/union enmeshment increases. The Big Businesses now creating partnerships with the State are little more than parts of the State and have little to do with free enterprise -- the partnerships are blocking out competition from small and medium size businesses who don't have the lobbying power to gain State favor and protection.

As unions, and the Left in general, hold on to past gains and disregard changes in the market, we're setting ourselves up for a new Big Battle between Socialism and Capitalism, not "State Capitalism", but the non-socialistic Capitalism necessary for a truly free market. The market is naturally dynamic, and we have to have flexibility to adjust when signals are present, especially in a global economy. No matter how smart the handful of Technocrats are in Washington DC, they can't read the signals -- they can only try to work in a static, planned system, which is impossible. The Left is shooting itself in the foot -- if people on the Left are truly concerned about the welfare of average workers, this is a self-defeating way to work for them. Also, it's not only about economic reality -- it's about liberty and equal opportunity, the possbility for someone to work from the bottom up to build the life many have dreamed of and accomplished in America -- it's about individuals choosing freely, competing and cooperating with others who freely choose. It's the opposite of collective "security" under the "smart" management of technocratic Rulers.

Okay, so he's not Fidel Castro

The old communist combination of romantic struggle among the proletariat and a respectable scientific foundation has been relegated the past by the majority of Americans. The left is bereft of romanticism, and the scientific tenets of communism no longer make any sense -- all that's left is socialism morphed into a technocratic progressivism which upholds redistribution to maintain a welfare state, social justice in the form of positive rights to enhance equality and opportunities which they mantain have been suppressed by the power of wealth. There are no dramatic protests, just the day to day government operations of boring bureacrats performing the business of the welfare state and overseeing industry's compliance with regulations. 

Many on the left say "What's the problem -- you act as if Trotsky is leading wild-eyed revolutionaries down the the streets of Peoria and Bangor. It's just a boring form of modern liberalism which still allows the wealthy to keep most of what they make!" They point to Obama and say "Does he really look and act like a young Fidel Castro?" They have a point, but it doesn't make our reality any better.

The dull, technocratic statism of the left, and, also, the Big Government Republicans, might be worse, because it doesn't inspire concern among average liberals, the ones who haven't signed completely on to the progressive agenda. This general apathy and centerish lack of passion among the average liberal allows the State to fall futher into debt and the government to avoid rolling back regulations which are killing the economy. If liberals are concerned about the little guy and the poor, they sure are apathetic about the current plight of the little guy and the poor. This hot mess of stagnation, unfunded liabilites and decline we call the American economy is not good for anyone. Individual states are on the brink of having to cut social programs, and real unemployment is 20%.

Is the image of the President really more important than the real lives of those who are suffering all across the nation? Perhaps, rather than worrying about heated rhetoric and labels or no labels, liberals and moderates should start worrying about if the current criticisms of the government are warranted or not. Rather than defending government against charges of socialism with assurances that it's really just a boring, centrist, technocratic, group of status quo gatekeepers, maybe liberals should take stock of our reality and ask if this is really what we really want.

A lack of good choices

The defenders of progressivism and modern liberalism have, for the most part, denied any direct relationship to communism or socialism. Communism and socialism as they were in the early to middle 20th century are no longer viable, so most people believe they are matters of the past, or mad countries like North Korea or Cuba or Venezuala. When fascism was defeated in WWII, and as Europe settled into a long period of rebuilding and establishing stability, the great battles of ideologies supposedly died away, and there was a long period where European countries existed in a mediocre, humdrum, heads-down daily trudge to recovery and anti-drama. The Super Powers of the USA and the USSR still represented an ogoing cold war struggle between capitalism and communism, but 'cold' is the operative term, and most people began thinking in different terms in spite of the lingering communist-scare -- communism was isolated mainly to the USSR, Cuba, South America and some small Asian countries, although France, Germany, Britain, among others in Europe, had their communist movements. If our government, through people like McCarthy, had not stoked the embers, not many people in the US would have thought about communism or socialism, even as it was affecting our form of governance.

The influence of communism and socialism in America has been somewhat muted but always present, manifesting itself in large welfare programs, powerful unions and anti-capitalism on the left. The communist/socialist influence even affected the Right as they became defensive from constant association with the Fat Cats of capitalism -- in order to rehabilitate their image, Republicans began showing their acceptance of the welfare state and downplayed their relationship to Big Business. Briefly in the 80s Ronald Reagan proudly defended free market principles, but in the end, when he left government, he left it bigger and more powerful -- and this is the point I want to make.

I'm not concerned with associating Democrats or Big Government Republicans with socialists or communists, even though on the left many in the US proudly claim an association with socialism and communism. The point I want to make is about statism -- the idea that a powerful State is needed in modern society to control capitalism and help plan and engineer the economy -- since economic matters touch every area of our lives, so does statism. 

Trotskyism was probably the first break from Stalinist communism that had an impact in America. David Priestland, in his book The Red Flag, writes:

Trotskyism was a leftist, Radical branch of Bolshevism, and its ideas were typical of the various left oppositions that had existed within the Soviet Party since 1917. It championed a revival of 'social democracy', and denounced Stalinism for its authoritarianism. But it did not advocate pluralist, liberal democracy. It adhered to the Marxist-Leninist committment to the single, vanguard party, though politics and the economy were to be run in a participatory way. Trotsky was also reluctant to be too harsh on the Stalinist system itself. He argued that a 'bureacratic caste' had emerged under Stalin, but he insisted that this was not a 'new class'; the USSR had not become a 'state capitalist' system, but was still a 'workers' state', even if a 'degenerated' one. In the international sphere, Trotskyism was more optimistic and revolutionary than Stalinism, and it was deeply hostile to the nationalism underlying Popular Front politics. His theories of 'permanent revolution' and 'combined and uneven development' both justified a revolutionary politics in the developing world. Unlike Stalinists, who stuck more rigidly to Marxis phases of develpment, Trotskyists believed that underdeveloped, agrarian societies could skip phases and make rapid revolutionary leaps to socialism. They always, however, insisted that only the proletariat could be in the vanguard, even when leading the bourgeoisie and the peasants in their 'permanent revolution'.

Almost half of Trotsky's Fourth International, founded in 1938 by Trotsky, was made up of Americans - the Socialist Worker's Party of the United States -- even though this didn't total but a little over 2000 members. The discipline-based Second and Third Internationals didn't appeal to America as much as Trotsky's 'worker-council democracy'.

Priestland writes:

And Trotskyism was to be highly influential amongst American intellectuals, especially the 'New York' group. Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson all at one time had connections with Trotskyism.

But even Trotskyism was too understanding of Stalinism for Americans to support for long, so the influence morphed into a uniquely American reaction to capitalism which can be called progressivism at the far end and liberalism closer to the middle. It's not so much a militant anti-capitalism, although on the far left, it has gotten rather heated at times, but rather it's an acceptance that free markets are undesirable, and likely impossible, and that statism is the route to social justice for the victims of capitalism and equality for those oppressed by the remnants of the free market philososphy, requiring redistrbution of wealth, a healthy welfare state and heavy regulation of enterprise.

It is, indeed, hyperbolic to call Obama and the modern progressives socialists or communists, especially when compared to Stalin and Trotsky, but there's a connection, an influence passed down through past communist and socialist movements, intellectuals and labor unions. The main comparison is that both are forms of statism, relying on the State to manage society and the economy. The romanticism of communism faded a long time ago, and the statist impulse is technocratic, a cold, calculated attempt at order according to beliefs which are socialist in nature -- the communist idea that the proletariat will someday rule is no longer part of the scheme, not even as a carrot -- it all stopped at the level of power and control. Those who are hard-core statists will likely never change, but they can be thwarted if enough people who can change are convinced of the benefits, including rights protection and more freedom, of a limited government and free market. Most people fall into the category of being capable of change -- the future will be a battle between statists and anti-statists, just as domination and freedom have always been our basic choices, whether everyone acknowledged it or not. It's not a matter of choosing between one form of statism or another, which is really not a choice, just a preference of masters. 

This battle will be played out in differing degrees between many different political categories, alliances and private sector efforts -- moderates, liberals, conservatives, libertarians, businesses, unions, minority groups and all sorts of special interests, but the bottom line will be whether we're headed toward more control over our lives and the economy or less. This is good to keep in mind when voting.