Lot 49: Greg Beaver's blog - Politics

Why health care reform is doomed in the United States

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 22:36:16 -0700

I recently remarked on my facebook status that health care reform was doomed in the current intellectual climate, and urged those reading to prove me wrong. Unfortunately, I don't see any evidence that I was wrong yet, perhaps the president's speech on Wednesday will change that view, but I am not holding my breath. There are three excellent articles that capture the essence of my skepticism. Together, they are a whopping 15 pages of prose (that's a lot for news articles). Basically, I have seen three prevailing views on health care reform amongst my friends and my facebook friends:

We have an obligation to fix the system, support universal health insurance coverage (i.e. support the various Democratic proposals)
You're crazy to believe that government-run health care is anything other than an IRS agent with a scalpel and the efficiency of the post office, plus it's a violation of privacy rights to turn over health care to the government.
market-based reforms are the only logical choice (i.e. tax credits for buying insurance, or insurance exchanges, or co-ops, etc.)

Note that I did not include in that list anything about the crazies, because none of my friends are insane. At least not the kind of insanity as represented by Jon Stewart's answer to Barney Frank's question to a constituent at his town hall meeting "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" Stewart's answer: "apparently, a planet where a mixed race president and a gay Jew qualify as Nazis."

No, my friends are rational, primarily college-educated, and mostly split between liberal-leaning musicians and conservative-leaning programmers (that split in itself is interesting to me, but is not relevant to this post). Before I go any further, I should acknowledge that yes, I am a liberal-leaning musician. In my own defense, I am liberal because of my life experiences. I am good friends with someone who was formerly homeless, have been screwed by my health insurance companies, and have lived in poverty in a poor neighborhood, as well as benefiting directly from government student loans. No, I am not a communist, thanks for asking though.

Why is health reform doomed? Not because the crazies are dominating the dialogue, far from it. It is not because the Democratic plan is too expensive, too invasive of privacy, or too government-focused and not enough market-focused. It is because we are asking the wrong questions in order to solve this, and nobody (I'm looking at you, Obama) is correcting us.

I have read large portions of both the contentious H.R. 3200 house bill, as well as nearly the entire H.R. 3400 (a little-known Republican bill that is popular amongst conservatives on facebook as a better way to reform health care). There are some obvious problems in both. Neither fully pays for itself (H.R. 3400 flat out doesn't provide any revenue in the bill, instead relying upon the hope that cutting costs will pay for it). However, the flaws in both bills jump right off of the page when one examines this article by David Goldhill in the September 2009 issue of the Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care

To summarize the salient points, the health care system does not have any kind of market mechanisms to set prices in place, and this is a direct result of the introduction of comprehensive health insurance in 1954. Unlike other forms of insurance (car insurance, for example), comprehensive insurance pays for the equivalent of oil changes, which both disguises the true cost and encourages severe inflation.

Thus, Goldhill concludes, the problem is not that not everyone has health insurance, it is that we don't pay for health care, our insurers do, and so we have no say in pricing. He also goes on to recommend both mandatory health savings accounts to replace health insurance for predictable expenses such as checkups, the occasional equivalent of a fender-bender for health, and costs associated with aging (with some ideas for managing poverty thrown in), and a mandatory single-payer catastrophic insurance with premiums pinned to age with no other factor taken into account.

At this point, those in the "Obama, get your government out of my [fill-in-the-blank-here]" camp are thinking "single payer? hell no." To you, I suggest reading this editorial:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/opinion/03kristof.html

Again, to summarize: government runs several things better than the privately managed things they replaced. The examples in the article are fire departments, police departments, post offices, libraries, and health care (outside the U.S.). I would limit this list to fire fighters and police departments: I doubt that even the most staunch conservative (again, the most staunch sane conservative) would argue that it would be better to outsource firefighting to for-profit corporations. In fact, apparently "In New York City, according to accounts in The New York Times in the 1850s and 1860s, firefighting often descended into chaos, with drunkenness and looting." Wow.

Now as for Goldhill's conclusion of how to solve the problems, there is a flaw in his reasoning as well. To get at the core, we have to examine some of his assertions:

The housing bubble offers some important lessons for health-care policy. The claim that something—whether housing or health care—is an undersupplied social good is commonly used to justify government intervention, and policy makers have long striven to make housing more affordable. But by making housing investments eligible for special tax benefits and subsidized borrowing rates, the government has stimulated not only the construction of more houses but also the willingness of people to borrow and spend more on houses than they otherwise would have. The result is now tragically clear.

This paints a simple cause-and-effect picture that doesn't even begin to capture the problem. His tidy explanation doesn't explain why lenders such as Wells Fargo singled out poor people illegally to net them into sub-prime loans, or why the market of derivatives caused what should have been a localized collapse to poison the entire economy. He also states:

Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.

I don't doubt that pretty much everyone agrees with the description of how health care pricing works. The part that I want to emphasize is in bold (my emphasis, not Goldhill's) In the previous sentence, Goldhill uses this language to describe the doctors/insurers: "They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create."

This language reflects a world view of a businessman who has faith in the power of the free market. Under ordinary circumstances, this is the right view, our history shows that markets very often set the best price, and everyone wins. Unfortunately, the so-called Great Recession we are currently in did not result, as Goldhill seems to be claiming, from people making rational decisions, and markets do not solve all problems. Put on your reading glasses, this next article is the long one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html

This article by Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman is by the guy one could argue is the smartest of the three whose articles I've quoted. Although you absolutely must read the whole article - especially if you have "faith in the market" - I will try to summarize it:

You can't have 100% faith in the market because people are intrinsically irrational, and occasionally the government probably must play a role in stabilizing a market before it spirals into a depression. In short: Keynesian economics was more right than the stuff we've been using to set public policy since the 1970s.

The solution Goldhill proposes for controlling health care costs makes an assumption that people will rationally choose the best price for health care, and bases this assertion upon evidence in fields such as Lasik vision correction, which has had a price drop as the rest of health care prices have skyrocketed. This is a compelling argument, and one I believe is a very good one, but it is flawed for handling all kinds of health care.

People who are under physical or emotional stress very rarely make rational decisions, and when you are having severe chest pains, you are going to do whatever the doctor tells you to do. If the doc says get angioplasty, you get it. If the doc says we're going to open up the chest right now, you do it. Very few people will whip out the "could I see your competitor's prices?" line while clutching their chests in pain. Put simply, emergency care cannot be rationally priced by the consumers of the care. Perhaps emergency care simply cannot have a free market to set prices. This greatly complicates the issue unless one simply decides that the catastrophic insurance would have to cover certain emergency procedures with a deductible, much like what we have now (those of us with insurance, of course).

The non-emergency care portion of health care would respond quite well to a free market, but I would question whether certain procedures wouldn't suffer from the effects of things like positional monopolies (really sick people can't travel to get lower prices).

A bigger flaw is that there is no way to transition from our current system into the new one without horribly disrupting health care for at least some people. The potential for unintended consequences is horrendous, and this will be impossible to navigate politically.

So what kind of questions should we be asking? For one, how can we transform our comprehensive health insurance system into one that does is not comprehensive? After changing this, how do we provide a safety net for people who get too sick to work, for people who are too poor to pay premiums or contributes to HSAs? How can we use government to manage the market breakdowns that will occur with our irrational behavior in things like emergency health care pricing in a market-based health care economy?

As long as the question being asked is simply "How do we provide the existing insurance to everyone?" health care reform doesn't stand a chance.

What do "Batman, the Dark Knight" and Barack Obama have in common?

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:49:02 -0700

Last night, I saw "Batman, the Dark Knight" for the first time. Aside from being a great movie and featuring ridiculous good performances from the late Heath Ledger and others, it got me thinking. I've noticed a huge shift in the way movie makers are portraying both reality and fantasy since 9/11. First, there is the obvious increase in the number of movies about governmental intrigue, CIA spy junk, invasion of privacy and other things reflecting and amplifying reality. However, yesterday I noticed that the Joker was referred to as a "terrorist" several times in the movie.

Let's think about this: a comic book villain whose sole motivation is to sow chaos and destroy civilization is being equated directly with people who reap violence in order to achieve a political or military goal. The last time we saw the Joker, he was a brilliant but somewhat goofy character in Jack Nicholson who when killing people turned them into caricatures of death in a grotesquely cute way with exaggerated smiles burnt into the corpses faces. Contrast this to Ledger's Joker who tells conflicting and gory stories of how he got his smile scars before cutting people's faces open with a knife. Nicholson's Joker wants to create chaos, but for him it's all a big joke. Ledger's Joker is just scary. He enjoys chaos because it causes good people to do evil things and even become evil embodied, and says this explicitly in one scene.

The scene that got me thinking about the connection to politics was (cover your eyes if you haven't seen the movie yet) when the massive prisoner seems to be about to blow up the innocents' ferry boat and instead throws the detonator out the window, showing one of the only moments of redemption and hope. What has exploded Barack Obama's political stature from non-existent to presidential nominee of the Democrats is "Hope" as political platform. Go back 8 years to the post-Lewinsky election. Can you imagine any politician even being able to raise the slightest amount of money based on "hope," let alone win the nomination of either party? What gives Barack's message such potency is that it is the extreme opposite to what we see from the Dick Cheney camp. Continuous war against an enemy that has neither a defined name, a defined country, or a clear target is a guaranteed recipe for despair and extreme paranoia. Especially when the only unifying things for this enemy is that they are a few thousand people amongst the 1 billion plus who practice the world's most populous religion, and they are out to get us.

Barack's successful message of hope is a direct extreme opposite of the fear and militarism practiced by the establishment, and thus it is very, very important for us to understand what this could mean to us as citizens. Why? Extremes sometimes balance each other out by pulling towards the middle, but when they remain separate and intensely opposite, they create what we used to know as "extremists," those who cling to the far fringes of an idea where the air is thin, intense and rational thought disappears into distant memory. To be blunt, if you support Barack because he makes you feel hopeful, this is only slightly less scary to me than supporting Bush because he makes you feel safe. These emotions have the same root: escaping fear.

I happen to personally enjoy both feeling safe and feeling hopeful, but more important to me as a voter is how the candidates will handle themselves in day-to-day workings. Do they have the intellect to differentiate between opinion and fact? Can they understand the importance of peer-reviewed science and how to translate this into public policy? How do they handle conflict amongst the people around them, and how do they handle external conflict imposed upon them by circumstance? Do they have the ability to see long-term consequences and understand short-term methods of handling them? Answering these questions for me means looking both at their positions, how they have evolved (especially convenient changes in the past 2 years based on polling), news on how their campaign has been run, and what was important to the candidates before they had any idea of burnishing their public image in order to run for political office.

Returning to the movies, the best example of how our psyche has changed with regards to thrillers comes from the 1998 movie "The Siege" starring Denzel Washington, Annette Benning and Bruce Willis with Tony Shaloub in a supporting role years before he hit it big time with "Monk." Willis plays the evil power-hungry general who takes the law into his own hands and is ultimately punished by the strength of the Constitution. The movie starts out with terrorist bombings in New York City that escalate from a bus to destruction of a building by a car bomb. In a key moment, Washington walks in on an interrogation of an Arab who is sitting naked in a shower room of a Brooklyn football stadium and Willis starts to discuss "alternative protocols" like waterboarding. Washington here delivers his big speech that concludes with "what if what they really want is for us to bend the law a little bit, shred the constitution just a little bit? Because if you torture this man, they will have won. They have already won!" At the time, this seemed to be the most remote, horrendously extreme possibility, that an American would even consider torturing a detainee, and it is this act (and the subsequent execution of the prisoner by Willis) that Washington cites in the arrest warrant at the conclusion of the movie (sorry to spoil another one).

Fast forward to today, where in the Republican primary, all but a couple of candidates publicly supported using torture as an interrogation method - and tried to use it to become the nominee for president, and torture was authorized by the Justice Department, the vice president and the president, none of whom have faced even a trial for their decisions. Is it any wonder hope has been transformed from an ideal into a powerful political tool?

an example of responsible government from a guy I don't even like much

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 23:41:18 -0700

Here is an interesting example of how screwed up the political process is: Mike Huckabee, Republican of Arkansas, is being heavily criticized for having raised taxes during his term as governor. For years, the rallying cry of so-called "fiscal conservatives" has been decreasing taxes, under the premise that government is always less efficient than private enterprise at solving problems.

Of course, as with all one-sided issues, the question of taxation versus private enterprise is a canard. It is more than foolish to blame high taxes for all of the problems in this world.

For example, Huckabee raised taxes approximately $500 million net (once you take into account taxes eliminated) as a governor. However, at the same time, the state's $200 million budget deficit turned into a $844 million surplus in the same time. Tax advocates might argue that the increase would be even greater had taxes been lowered, but let's look at the truth of the matter. Reagan and both Bush presidents cut taxes, and the deficit rose in both cases. Clinton raised taxes, and the deficit decreased at the same time as the economy flourished. For citations, see here, here, here, and here. The last citation is particularly interesting, as it discusses the long-term effects of budgets based on deficit spending (living off the government credit card is another way of thinking of it). The standard economic effect is that as you borrow, your interest rates climb to compensate. An interesting side note is the end of the article predicting that interest rates will only rise 1.12% after 2004's record deficit spending. In fact, the sub-prime mortgage lending crisis we currently find ourselves in was caused by a very slight increase in the interest rate as dictated by the Federal Reserve. The rate increase itself should have been harmless, but when combined with the obsessive anti-regulatory credo our current administration lives and breathes, we have thousands of unethical predatory adjustable rate mortgages suddenly increasing monthly payment by several hundred dollars, and foreclosures by the thousand affecting the entire economy with a ripple effect. Another interesting side note is that the only reason our economy continues to function is because China is literally supporting our system by buying huge numbers of government bonds. The new question nobody is asking is what does this really mean? The obvious answer is that should China wish to do so, it could squeeze the U.S. government and shift our policies in its favor just by threatening - behind the scenes - to stop this process. What it really means is that very quietly, and unnoticeably, the control over the U.S. economy and even policy is shifting to Asia. This is not intrinsically bad, and in a perfect world, allows our economy to function with the help of our benevolent neighbors. What it also does do is allow a bad apple government to exert undue control over the U.S. from afar, much as a bad apple U.S. government has run amok over the Iraqi people, but in a far more subtle way with profound implications for everything here, including the military and other national security issues.

So, coming back to our main story, Huckabee raised taxes to fix horrendously ill-maintained state highways, to pay for nursing homes for poor seniors, to pay for strapped school districts, supporting tuition breaks for children of illegal immigrants, and improving the state parks system. In case you've been living in a hole, these are all liberal issues, and yet they all passed with huge bi-partisan support in Arkansas.

So why don't I like him much? Actually, much of what he says on his issues page resonates with what is really important. His views that the environment actually kind of matters, that education is a serious priority for providing vectors to move from a poorer life to a richer one, faith as a non-prescriptive but important part of life - all of these sound great. However, he then proceeds to turn right around and say it is just fine to proscribe that his personal view of homosexuality and faith allows him to legislate the lives of gay people in a highly intrusive and discriminatory way. He also blindly lumps together Iraq in with Al Qaeda, conveniently ignoring the fact that it was the United State's own imperial hubris that led to the creation of "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" - an organization that did not exist prior to 2003. His demonification of illegal immigrants, pandering to white racists who see "those Mexicans" as a problem and finally have an excuse to get rid of them is pure opportunism, especially considering his actual stance as governor supporting the children of illegal immigrants.

Ultimately, however, this is a candidate who understands that government has a purpose that serves to rectify the natural inequities inherent in the capitalistic system. I'd never vote for the guy because it takes more than an effective manager to unify a country that has thrived on division under the worst manager in the history of the nation, but it is comforting to see that even social conservatives are starting to recognize that the Bush/Reagan paradigm of economic management and governmental anarchy is the worst thing to ever happen to the United States economy. It would give me no end of pleasure to be *only* arguing about domestic issues of personal privacy, health insurance, education, and all the other things that really matter to day-to-day living. With an effective manager at the helm, the United States can finally pull out of this tremendous quandary that is the Bush legacy.

"The torture presidency," why impeachment is the only remedy

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:06:29 -0700

More fuel for the fire - it appears that the CIA, under the explicit direction of the executive branch of the U.S. Government (translate: Bush administration) tortured at least three suspects in interrogation. The "technique" used is waterboarding, a medieval torture technique designed to convince the person experiencing it that they are drowning and about to die a horrible death. This in turn is expected to convince the person being waterboarded to give up information on terrorists.

The Attorney General nominee explicitly says in his testimony before Congress:

He said that while he personally found waterboarding and similar interrogation methods “repugnant,” he could not call them illegal. One reason, he said, was to avoid any implication that intelligence officers and their bosses had broken the law.
“I would not want any uninformed statement of mine made during a confirmation process to present our own professional interrogators in the field, who must perform their duty under the most stressful conditions, or those charged with reviewing their conduct,” Mr. Mukasey wrote, “with a perceived threat that any conduct of theirs, past or present, that was based on authorizations supported by the Department of Justice could place them in personal legal jeopardy.”

That's right - the Department of Justice explicitly authorized waterboarding. Mukasey is right on one point - the CIA operatives carrying out orders will not be expected to answer to their crime of following orders on this earth, as Congress has passed a law forbidding prosecuting of interrogators following protocols set forward by their bosses. This, incidentally, was the most common defense by Nazis in the Nuremberg trials after World War II: "I was just following orders when I pulled the trigger and shot men, women and children over a trench they had dug." This leaves us with only one recourse: prosecuting their bosses, namely the Bush administration people who authorized the torture.

At this point, that leaves us with one recourse - impeachment. On what grounds can the House impeach?

The Constitution, Article II reads:

Section. 4.
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Treason is explicitly defined as waging war against the U.S., or aiding an enemy of the U.S., and it must be explicit, so that is out of the question. Bribery is not a known problem, so that is out as well. This leaves high crimes and misdemeanors. What's that? It's intentionally vague. For a guideline of precedent, Nixon was indicted for illegal wiretapping, misuse of the CIA, perjury, bribery, obstruction of justice, and other abuses of executive power.

This raises another question: is torture even illegal?

The Bill of Rights reads:

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

This, unfortunately, does not discuss interrogation, only punishment. However, this Amendment is quite explicit:

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Unreasonable search of person can be construed clearly to mean interrogation techniques that are unreasonable, as the purpose of interrogation is to search a person's memory for wrongdoing or information on other wrongdoers. In other words, the Bill of Rights does not explicitly mention torture by name, but it does explicitly forbid its use as an interrogation technique.

The truth is that president Bush has already explicitly authorized warrantless searches of American citizens, and most likely had to approve the torture techniques used to interrogate terror suspects. Cheney is famous for micro-management, look at his pre-Iraq war intelligence manipulation efforts. Rumsfeld is obviously directly implicated in these schemes as is Gonzales. Rove most likely was not involved as his role was purely political horror shows.

The evidence is clear: our president and vice president are guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, and there is no one in the legislature stepping up to the plate with the guts to propose an article of impeachment.

Some might argue that impeachment is "bad for the country" but the fact is that injustice is far worse. When a private citizen commits a high crime such as murder, there must be a trial and justice, or it rips a hole in the fabric of society. For years, the United States has been able to take a high road when dealing with other countries that have perpetrated terrible human rights abuses. By avoiding punishment for the crimes of the Bush administration in the name of "the good of the country" we will be encouraging unscrupulous leaders of other countries to use the United States's conduct as justification for their own evils, and they would be right. If we fail to appreciate this dilemma as a nation, then we do are implicitly authorizing foreign powers to torture our soldiers and CIA operatives when they are captured, as well as private citizens who are mistakenly accused of spying or terrorism like the Canadian citizen the United States mistakenly arrested and tortured in Syria.

Once again, this is not a liberal versus conservative issue, it's a basic fact: we don't torture people in the United States. Those who do it and those who authorize it are criminals. In fact, it could very well be more of a conservative than a liberal issue, as ignoring this torture implies a kind of relativistic view of morals. If it is OK for the president of the United States to authorize torture of terrorism suspects, but it is not OK for a police officer to torture a burglary suspect, and not OK for parents to torture their children, we have a moral dilemma that can only be explained by saying that the concept of right and wrong is incorrect, that there are cases where "wrong" is "right." You don't need me to explain why that is the path to absolute evil. Please call your representatives in Congress and let them know that you expect them to uphold the law independent of political considerations, and that you want impeachment and justice for the American people to rectify the egregious abuses of executive power by this administration.

Bush administration bungles an obvious choice AGAIN

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:10:14 -0700

I just read in the New York Times that the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Nancy A. Nord, has written to Congress asking that current legislation to double the size of the CPSC be scrapped. This is in the wake of great ideas like selling children's toys from China that were painted with lead-based paint, putting industrial waste into pet food and toothpaste, and other fantastic situations.

This brilliant idea from Nancy Nord follows the consistent pattern of the Bush administration's goal to eliminate government altogether. The theory is that by systematically dismantling the government, all of our lives will be simpler, better, and happier. Unlike other administrations, Bush's has even extended this theory to the military, outsourcing "security" in a warzone to companies like Blackwater. Perhaps the theory is correct.

After all, for the first time ever, the standard deviation from the median income in the United States is nearly zero - there are no poor people, and no super-rich people! Our military is spending less money and less time in conflict zones, inspiring other governments to follow the United States' lead and hire mercenary forces to do their dirty work for them! For the first time, all products and chemicals brought to market are being evaluated for their potential detrimental effects. Also, surprisingly, every American has full access to health care and private insurance with no danger of bankruptcy from a single hospital stay. In fact, every small child has guaranteed access to essential care, cutting down dramatically on future health care costs when these children get ill later in life. Perhaps the next best step is to turn over our interstate highway system to private companies, so that we can truly reap the benefits of lower taxes.

Oh wait, scrap that, for the first time since the late 1800s, we have a huge disparity of the super-rich and the poor, a shrinking middle class, and the U.S. is the only "rich" country in the world experiencing this fact. The stock market is at an all-time high, and yet millions of new home owners are about to lose their homes. Private security firms contracted by the U.S. government to do the military's job do so at double the cost or more, with no oversight or accountability, resulting in callous disregard for the lives of civilians in the countries they work in. The European Union is leading the way in safety of chemicals on the market, forcing U.S. manufacturers like Dow to conform to standards much higher than those in the U.S., and the U.S. dollar continues to drop relative to the Euro, suggesting that these increased safety standards don't hurt economic development at all. The EU is also leading in environmental regulation. Health care is obviously a disaster because it is private - compare costs and benefits to any other country with systemic government-sponsored health care for your evidence.

What most self-described conservatives fail to appreciate is the total cost of things. Taking into account only taxes and regulations is short-sighted at best, and dangerous at worst. When comparing costs, one must take into account how much things would cost if you have to pay for them yourself. Health insurance is a good example. Your employer can take advantage of economy of scale to get you a much lower rate for the same thing than you can get yourself, sometimes hundreds of dollars lower. The government is on an even larger scale, and can therefore smooth over large differences between groups with minimal pain to those on the extreme edges.

For an obvious example of how government works successfully, the interstate freeway system was entirely government-funded, and has worked with minimal interruption or problems with thousands more miles of concrete than other countries.

The truth is that saving a few bucks now by reducing the size of government has a huge impact on the cost of living, especially for lower-income brackets, resulting in not only worse living conditions for low-income households, but increasing unstable political environments as a result. Organized crime or corruption/fiefdoms steps in to fill the void of an absent government, much as we have seen in countries like the former Soviet Union.

It's time for Americans to wake up and smell the toxic waste. Voting "for the other guy" is the knee-jerk reaction, but won't do anything substantive. You need to contact your current representatives in the government, your senator and representative, and let them know that you understand the importance of government as a service to the people, and oppose dismantling government as a principle. Take some time out of your day to do some research into how smart people who have studied the effects of government versus privatization have documented the way the world actually works, don't take my word for it. Be a real citizen already!

The evil that is fear: banning religion from US prisons

nospam@example.com (Greg Beaver) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 10:58:16 -0700

The past 6 years have seen an unprecedented rise in the institutionalization of fear as public policy in the United States. This is of course primarily due to the attacks of 9/11, but not because of the terrorist attacks. The institutionalization of fear is entirely due to our political leaders, led at the top by a president but followed by the many lawmakers within the legislative branch independent of political party. The unprecedented abuse of fundamental clauses of our Constitution such as the right to have no unreasonable search and seizure, the right not to be tortured, and now even the freedom of religion all result from the institutionalization of fear as a policy of government. This New York Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/us/10prison.html) details the latest in the long string of evils committed in the name of preventing terrorism. The article has a great deal of information, but the most important portion of the article is the first paragraph:

Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.

Yes, it really is true, books that might foment radical muslim ideology or other terrorist ideas are being removed from prisons.

I almost don't know what to say. Prisons already by design remove one of the three rights so often shouted from the hilltop when quoting the American Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Removal of liberty is of course the point of a prison, but removal of the possibility of spiritual enlightenment is a dangerous game to play. It falls under the category of "medicine is worse than the disease." It is impossible to decide in advance what will result in a prisoner's transformation into a new person. The mindset of creating an underclass of people with fewer rights has never resulted in long-term good. Just ask those whose ancestors have been enslaved, or those who live today in a caste system. It's not just morally wrong, it's bad for everyone. This has been known for thousands of years. The ChNew Testament includes dozens of examples of Jesus reaching out to people universally reviled, whether because of their profession (prostitutes and tax collectors), disease (leprosy) or because they were imprisoned. Of course, many Christians argue that you should be nice to prisoners because who knows - maybe Christ will return as one of today's underclass just as he was first a lowly carpenter. The real reason is not so self-serving. The real reason is that it is wrong to consider other humans to be worth less than your own self-worth, regardless of your reasoning. This is above religious teachings, above secular laws, and demonstrably bad public policy by a quick scan of the reasons for past governments' demise.

One could of course argue that prisoners are to be punished in prison and violating basic civil rights doesn't matter. One could argue that all of the changes made to our society are necessary evils such as the warrantless monitoring of hundreds of phone conversations overseas, the re-instatement of guilt by association (providing material support to a group that may engage in terrorism is illegal, even if you were funding charitable efforts of that group like providing food to starving families in Palestinian territories), pre-emptive invasion of countries not threatening any harm to us, holding prisoners without charges because they might someday engage in terrorism if released. One would be wrong.

All of these policy decisions were based on pre-conceived fears, and not on evidence that they can actually work to prevent the criminal act of violent terrorism. In fact, the evidence suggests that wasting time on broad dragnets like warrantless surveillence actually decreases the chance of finding a real threat, and instead results in the innocent being treated as guilty without a trial and often the guilty being completely overlooked. Guilt by association was the hallmark of the McCarthy hearings in Congress. Not many people remember today the famous "I have here in my hand a list of suspected Communists..." line of Joseph McCarthy. In retrospect, the threat of communism seems absurd. In fact, the United States was the one instigating military agression by vastly expanding the nuclear arsenal, developing submarines that could deploy missiles to major population centers in the USSR within 15-30 minutes, and creating NATO to counteract the perceived threat of the Eastern bloc. The USSR was reacting to the very real threat of the United State's perceived military aggression, which was ironically the result of the United State's fear of communism. Sound familiar?

Torturing prisoners, removing freedom of religion, unreasonable search and seizure - all of these are not the ultimate problem. The reason these are enshrined in our Constitution as no-nos for our government is because all of them have been known tools of despots and dictatorships for hundreds of years. Every freedom in the Constitution is there to guarantee that we do not have a despotic system of government, and the reason is simply because despotism does not work. Putting too much power in the hands of too few results in far worse decisions being made about the lives of those who are governed. This isn't rocket science, but it requires the minimal ability of self-recognition on the part of those in power.

I challenge our leaders to ask themselves the real reason why they feel compelled to remove so many essential liberties. Is it really to free America from the tyranny of terrorism and the fear that it engenders? Perhaps it is to "temporarily" enslave Americans to fear in order to bring a speedier death to nameless faceless "terrorists" for the greater good of society? Or maybe it is because the American system of government has failed, and liberty cannot result in true happiness, only total control, total monitoring of the populace for potential threats can ensure the safety of the public.

Sound familiar? Substitute "bourgeois capitalist" for "terrorist" and "class injustice" for "fear" and you have the exact rationale used by communist dictators for enslaving and murdering their own people in order to bring about the greater good.

Fortunately, in the United States of America, citizens still have the full right of freedom of speech without fear of imprisonment (as long as you don't divulge classified information like how the advisor to the president tried to expose an active duty CIA agent for political reasons), and if our leaders fail us, it is then only up to us to remove them and hope that their replacements will understand why the old guys were kicked out. The question then, is what are you going to do? Will you condone the deaths of innocents because your leader has provided you some selfish benefit, or will you do the right thing and let your congresspeople and your senators know what you think about these issues and how your vote will be cast?

The tyranny of fear is all-corrupting, it results in not just fewer liberties but more deaths to innocent people. The number of civilians killed in Iraq is unconscionable, and far exceeds the number of murders of Iraqi citizens perpetrated by Saddam Hussein. Focusing all resources on anti-terrorism directly resulted in the unpreparedness of FEMA to deal with Hurricane Katrina, which is empirically a much greater threat to the life and liberty of Americans than terrorism (many more hurricanes hit the US than do terrorists). Please help America put a halt to the madness of fear-governed policy, and minimally participate in government by calling or emailing your representatives. It is time for U.S. citizens to turn the empty rhetoric about freedom and democracy so often foisted upon other countries into true freedom and democracy at home.