My “stupid point” is that it’s useful to actually have conversations on the topic at hand (health care, in this instance) without having a half-hour pre-discussion about how, no, you’re not really trying to say that your conversation partner’s aunt Minnie should have hung at Nuremburg because she’s not quite keen on losing her subsidized pills.

What I am striving for is a method of having a conversation that neither disturbs societal taboos against tossing fascism around lightly nor concedes the fight that there is something very wrong with the way the prices for medical services are set in the United States of America.

I never met Aristotle, either. What’s your stupid point?

What you write makes the thing obvious enough, most certainly in the instance that I’ve pointed out. I don’t have to make your personal acquaintance. Solzhenitsyn once pointed out: “To taste the ocean requires but a single drop.” He was pointing out the power of principles and concepts. He was absolutely right, and you’re a good exhibit.

And corporate greed is often best satisfied by producing a product (coke, Walmart) that actually satisfies the needs of its customers. When corporate greed lusts for a monopoly, the government regulates heavily; the big player is more likely to both influence the regulations and be able to meet them. A government that manipulates the market place may be fascist.

Then there is tribalism: small businesses have other ways of establishing monopolies – the father of one my daughter’s friends went to jail for hiring a hit & then fire bombing a competing night club. Maybe I’m crazy, but I dn’t think coke or Walton’s kids do that.

I’d rather give up the advantage of the label and argue from first principles, demonstrating the anti-fascist economic case all over again, rather than let that genie out of the bottle and risk an uptick in legitimacy for fascism, the whole ball of wax. Unfortunately, that still leaves me stuck for a label that’s at least somewhat respectful of the poor deluded fools that believe this sort of economics actually works over the long haul.

Greed is part of the human condition. The laws should direct greed so that it produces activites that benefit the greater good.

Sounds good to me.

“But if we admit that we’ve been cribbing notes from the fascists in our economic policy, maybe some of those Holocaust deniers who’ve been saying that “Hitler had his good points” weren’t so crazy after all.”

Or maybe we say “How about we stop cribbing notes from the fascists in our economic policy”? We know the fascists were all about stamping out individual freedom wherever they could find it; their brand of economics was another variation on that basic theme, and those who embrace it should be called on it.

This doesn’t mean we should do things like denounce vegetarianism because Hitler was a vegetarian, or the Humane Society because Hitler was nice to his dogs. It means that the fascist economic model had the same goal as the fascist political model, to strictly control and regiment all the people and make their goals and their very lives subordinate to the almighty state, and cribbing policies that were designed by the fascists to strictly control and regiment their populations is a pretty good sign that you have a similar end in mind yourself.

Billy Beck – I think that you have no idea of my ability to draw broad principles and stick to them. I’m reasonably sure that we haven’t met enough times to draw such a personal conclusion.

Regarding your “unifying theme” idea, discussing combat explosives is all very well and good but you had better be prepared to make quick and sure distinctions between the hand grenade and the 500 lb bomb in real world combat. The linguistic point is that we seem to be rather ill equipped to do so and it is serving the cause of economic reform in general and medical economic reform more specfically (which I suspect we’d be on the same side on) poorly.

Ginny – My wife is accepting patients. She’d love to have you on board.

Tyouth – You’re essentially proposing the reversal of the blanket demonization of fascism. Nobody wants a repeat of the Nazi death camps so anything fascistic must be drummed out of the public square. But if we admit that we’ve been cribbing notes from the fascists in our economic policy, maybe some of those Holocaust deniers who’ve been saying that “Hitler had his good points” weren’t so crazy after all. We end up then seriously considering hitlerian policies without a lot of practice at fighting them. We haven’t had to for 60 years.

Unwinding a taboo this explosive is best done very carefully.

TM and Shannon,

When the meaning of a word is popularly abused I suppose that the only defense against Orwellian double-speak is to be aware of the abuse and explain and give examples of what “facism” (in this case) is and has been.

This is a drag but necessary. Experience indicates that this can be difficult when talking with emotional leftists (“good grief we’re having a conversation here, not the prologue of a fist fight!”) but one must keep cool and gently instruct, I guess.

I seldom see the same doctor twice in a row at our local managed care; the diagnoses are often a bit wrong and sometimes quite wrong. And meanwhile, one of the last doctors started on what was clearly a rote tirade about the evil of the vast corporations of pepsi/coke and how the government doesn’t control them because they make so much money. (I pointed out that they probably wouldn’t make so much money if we didn’t like to drink them.)

Perhaps I spend too much time around Chicagoboyz but I’m beginning to not trust people who think corporate greed is behind all our problems – especially when I’ve just spent five days in the hospital because this managed/socialized care meant no one was competent – or at least responsible. (The anti-coke doctor wasn’t the one who misdiagnosed me, but he’ll do to complain about; he also hates Walmart – don’t you just love it when a guy on a doctor’s salary complains about Walmart?)

The answer to that question is in the difference between a hand-grenade and a five hundred pound bomb. What’s the unifiying concept between the two of them? Something like “combat explosives” would do. That’s what they both are, despite their differences of degree.

This is what principles do. It’s what they’re for.

And it is laughable for you to complain about “granularity” while you’re unable to get past an instance-to-instance epistemology in order to order things according to their principles.

Eh, just call it price controls. Indirectly it could also fairly be called Doctor Wage controls. “Remember Nixon’s brilliant wage freezes? Think rent control is a great idea? Welcome to modern medicine!”

Clusterf**k

That is a tough one. I’ll have to think about it.

1. liability reasons – If Medicare sues the doctor for pricing too high you’re going to be involved in the suit even if the doctor changed the pricing on his own.
2. complexity – Pricing changes in the county of treatment. If the installation is for a practice that spans counties, that can mean two entirely different price lists.
3. don’t ask, don’t tell – They just don’t want to go near the mess even absent liability reasons.

Shannon Love – I believe that there is such a thing as liberalism that describes the policies of Washington, Jefferson, and the vast majority of the founding fathers. If I say that I’m a liberal, that’s not the message that gets conveyed. I have to say classical liberal to get my meaning across. As a term of art, I don’t doubt that what I described fits the fascistic economic model (right along with the disturbing cost shifting and careening towards collapse aspects of it) down to a ‘T’ but the question that I’m after is what should it be called in communications with laymen when the term fascistic has undergone such debasement? How do I get my meaning across?

Billy Beck – I think that you’re simplifying things down to an non-useful level of granularity. If the entire world is a bastion of socialized medicine, what was all the fuss about regarding Hillarycare?

My god, how long is this going to go on? Look:

There is no essential moral or political difference between “own[nership]” of goods and the authority to dispose them. If you cannot do what you want to with what you “own”, then you don’t own it.

Lutas: you are describing “socialize medicine”. That’s what it is. You are perplexed over the degree of the applied socialism. That’s all.

When are you people going to start thinking in principles?