The schedule for next month’s ISIL conference/retreat in Phoenix is gloriously online. I’m doing an equality dance and a Rand/class-conflict dance.
Tag Archives | Left and Right
The Land of We All
Check out Charles’ latest Freeman article, this one on the healthcare debate.
(The title of this blog post comes from a piece by Richard Mitchell.)
A People’s History of Pandora, Part 2
Libertarians are divided on Avatar (which I haven’t seen yet); check out Peter Suderman, Stephan Kinsella, Peter Klein, David Kramer, and Lester Hunt.
Lester writes, inter alia:
What makes the business corporation in this movie so evil? Well, it engages in the following practices: using military force to invade and conquer foreign lands, slaughtering wholesale numbers of the inhabitants and burning their dwellings, all in order to steal their property. … Gee, I thought, I can’t think of a single business corporation that engages in those particular practices. Office Depot doesn’t, and I’m pretty sure Microsoft and Dell Inc don’t either.
So in the comments section I responded:
I can’t think of many businesses that engage in those particular practices all on their own. But I can think of plenty of businesses that have either gotten governments to engage in those practices on their behalf (examples range from the East India Company to the United Fruit/Brands Company) or have themselves engaged in those practices on some government’s behalf (e.g. Blackwater, DynCorp).
Healthcare Con
The following letter appeared in this morning’s Opelika-Auburn News:
To the editor:
To understand the current debate over healthcare, one needs to see past the rhetoric of both parties and look at the policies they actually enact.
Republicans promise to protect us against big government, while Democrats promise to protect us against big business.
But in practice, both parties consistently support a partnership between big government and big business, at the expense of ordinary people. They bicker over which partner is to be dominant; but neither party ever seriously threatens the overall partnership.
The healthcare bill is a case in point.
Democrats have portrayed it as an assault on the power of insurance companies – as if those companies won’t benefit enormously from a provision requiring everyone to buy health insurance (with or without the public option).
The Republicans, for their part, portray their defense of the status quo as a defense of the free market. But the status quo in healthcare is no free market; it’s a system of massive, ongoing government intervention on behalf of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and the medical establishment.
Democrats and Republicans disagree only over the precise flavor of intervention, not the amount. The question is always whether decisions about your healthcare should be made by bureaucrats, or instead by plutocrats – never by you.
A century ago, a vibrant system of health cooperatives, run not by bureaucrats or plutocrats but by the working class, was dramatically reducing healthcare prices and boosting patient autonomy – until government regulation shut the system down. (University of Alabama history professor David Beito documents the story in his book From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State.)
If Republicans really care about free markets, and if Democrats really care about the poor, why doesn’t either party work to repeal those laws and allow the cooperative system to return?
Roderick T. Long
Further reading: See my How Government Solved the Healthcare Crisis, Poison As Food, Poison As Antidote, and Remembering Corporate Liberalism; Kevin Carson’s Meet the New Healthcare Boss and Honest Statism Beats a Fake Free Market; and Gary Chartier’s State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree and Wherein They Differ Regarding Healthcare Reform.
A People’s History of Pandora
Apparently the statist Right is exercised because Avatar is an “America-hating, PC revenge fantasy,” a “thinly disguised, heavy-handed and simplistic sci-fi fantasy/allegory critical of America from our founding straight through to the Iraq War.” So hey, another reason to see it.
Amazon versus the Market
The Huffington Post reports on the working conditions at Amazon.com, including the fact that workers are:
- Warned that the company refuses to allow sick leave, even if the worker has a legitimate doctor’s note. Taking a day off sick, even with a note, results in a penalty point. A worker with six points faces dismissal.
- Made to work a compulsory 10-hour overnight shift at the end of a five-day week. The overnight shift, which runs from Saturday evening to 5am on Sunday, means they have to work every day of the week.
- Set quotas for the number of items to be picked or packed in an hour that even a manager described as ‘ridiculous’. Those packing heavy Xbox games consoles had to pack 140 an hour to reach their target.
- Set against each other with a bonus scheme that penalises staff if any other member of their group fails to hit the quota.
- Made to walk up to 14 miles a shift to collect items for packing.
- Given only one break of 15 minutes and another of 20 minutes per eight-hour shift and told they had to notify staff when going to the toilet. Amazon said workers wanted the shorter breaks in exchange for shorter shifts.
Predictably, the reaction at LRC (see here and here) has been unsympathetic: “Do you mean to tell me that Amazon employees actually have to work?”
But a better question would be: “Is it likely that Amazon would be able to get away with this crap in a non-oligopsonistic labour market?
