Hike the gas tax

Wednesday midday I was at National Airport drinking a coffee that tasted like boiled shoe leather at the end of a bar. An outlet lured me there. National strikes me as the worst airport in America for keeping your laptop charged before you get onto the plane and can't recharge. Why so few outlets?

So there I am, answering emails and trying not to listen to the bartender talk up a couple who were slurring a bit before they even sat down. They plowed right into slugging back beers and mixed drinks. The Metro's not so bad, the bartender says to them. That's a recent discovery for her, forced by the fact that she's got an SUV. She's going to buy something smaller when she can afford it. Yep, her customers agree. They may need a few more before flying, but they're no fools. "Those SUVs," the guy says, "we all just bought 'em because they looked so cool."

Charles Krauthammer, one of the Washington Post conservatives, has a great column on how Americans have shot ourselves in the foot - or the bicycle tire, or something - with our refusal to tax gas. He doesn't mention the fact that big business and the Republican Party have engineered that situation by instilling fear and distrust of the very government that we're supposedly so proud of. Democracy or republic or whatever.

We've crippled ourselves regarding healthcare and transportation alike - both of which are essential for a vigorous economy.

If, however, you're wedded to the YoYo ideology - you're on your own - that cowboy mythology of individualism over community, then it's hard to get behind any kind of scheme that would benefit everyone - including future generations. Like, for instance, universal healthcare or a gas tax. That's despite solid data from elsewhere that it strengthens the middle class and makes children's lives better. Not a problem in America, where we're all on the verge of winning the Powerball, and will no longer be part of that middle class anyway. And our kids? YoYo.

Enough ranting. Here's Krauthammer:

Unfortunately, instead of hiking the price ourselves by means of a gasoline tax that could be instantly refunded to the American people in the form of lower payroll taxes, we let the Saudis, Venezuelans, Russians and Iranians do the taxing for us -- and pocket the money that the tax would have recycled back to the American worker...

Want to wean us off oil? Be open and honest. The British are paying $8 a gallon for petrol. Goldman Sachs is predicting we will be paying $6 by next year. Why have the extra $2 (above the current $4) go abroad? Have it go to the U.S. Treasury as a gasoline tax and be recycled back into lower payroll taxes.

Announce a schedule of gas tax hikes of 50 cents every six months for the next two years. And put a tax floor under $4 gasoline, so that as high gas prices transform the U.S. auto fleet, change driving habits and thus hugely reduce U.S. demand -- and bring down world crude oil prices -- the American consumer and the American economy reap all of the benefit.

Let God sort them out

Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, has spelled out the healthcare solution for Republicans. They've got to come out strong against the pernicious idea that healthcare is some kind of right. This is the only thing that will get government out of healthcare and allow people to die in the streets. Where hopefully their families will remove the bodies, since that's not exactly an appropriate government function either, is it?

Gotta love those libertarians. They see things so clearly. I bet no amount of carnage could persuade Yaron differently Let them all die, he won't be moved. Yaron writes:

The solution to this ongoing crisis is to recognize that the very idea of a "right" to health care is a perversion. There can be no such thing as a "right" to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services. Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action.

You are free to see a doctor and pay him for his services--no one may forcibly prevent you from doing so. But you do not have a "right" to force the doctor to treat you without charge or to force others to pay for your treatment. The rights of some cannot require the coercion and sacrifice of others.

So long as Republicans fail to challenge the concept of a "right" to health care, their appeals to "market-based" solutions are worse than empty words. They will continue to abet the Democrats' expansion of government interference in medicine, right up to the dead end of a completely socialized system.

Contrast that with this sensible article that Don McCanne of PNHP sent out via his wonderful Quote-of-the-Day service:

JAMA
January 2, 2008
Market Justice and US Health Care
By Peter P. Budetti, MD, JD

In the United States, health care competes for consumers with other items in the marketplace. Individual resources and choices determine the distribution of health are, with little sense of collective obligation or a role for government. Known as market justice, this approach derives from principles of individualism, self-interest, personal effort, and voluntary behavior. The contrasting approach, social justice, allocates goods and services according to the individual's needs. It stems from principles of shared responsibility and concern for the communal well-being, with government as the vehicle for ensuring equity. Social justice in health care requires universal coverage and ensured access to care, whether through social insurance, private insurance, or some combination.

The End of Market Justice

The dominance of market justice as the vehicle for allocating health resources in the United States has been associated with numerous troubling characteristics of its health system. The US population has clearly rejected using pure market justice to apportion health care goods and services, yet has expressed no collective demand that
society achieve equity through social justice. The general public has insisted on the buffer of insurance, but has focused on coverage for individuals and their respective families, not the population as a whole. Consequently, health care coverage, although desired by the vast majority of Americans, is incomplete. Now, the key element, employment-based insurance, is disintegrating in both the population that is covered and the benefits provided.

Simultaneously, health care has become a valuable commodity that created enormously influential vested commercial interests with little motive to abandon market justice. Medicine, which might have played a role in promoting social justice, has not done so, and has been transformed by the imperatives of market justice. Fragmented and struggling to come to terms with externally imposed pressures, medicine is losing both its political force and moral compass. The medicalization of health has simultaneously enhanced the investment in health care goods and services while distracting clinicians and policy makers from attention to the needs for health promotion and disease prevention and constraining the capacity to meet the expanding challenges to public health. Market justice may have outlived its role in US health care.

That appeared in JAMA, but there's a firewall.

Spoilers and "communitarians"

The National Catholic Reporter's Rich Heffern has a nice piece on the good values of the Green Party. Now the Greens are going to frame things better, so that they won't be "largely ignored or viewed solely as presidential election 'spoilers.'"

Actually, I doubt many Republicans see them as election spoilers.

The best part of the piece leans on James Kunstler, who told a conference at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas last September:

“So many Americans believe the only thing wrong with America is George W. Bush, and that if only we could wiggle out of ‘his’ war and his presidency, every day would be Christmas.”

In reality, there’s a lot more wrong with how we live and how we think about how we live than the mere presence of George Bush in the White House.

Our dependence on foreign oil, for example, is not the real problem. It’s the living arrangements and consumerism that depend on that oil, and in that we’re all implicated. This failure to make connections between how we all live and resulting public and foreign policies goes down to the grass roots.

The trick is to say this in a way that you don't sound like a crazed Old Testament prophet. The Greens, for instance, are now calling the fight against corporatization as the need “to tame giant corporations in the interest of small businesses."

That's very good, eh?

Obama does this instinctively. And for that, the right-wing is now testing attacks against him. David Brooks' column today posits that McCain celebrates "classical virtues like honor," whereas Obama celebrates "communitarian virtues."

I've seen less spin after losing a drinking game.

Would another way of saying that be that Obama celebrates traditional community values, whereas McCain celebrates patriarchal values? Ironically, the right-wing bloggers are playing up gruesome honor killings these days. I suspect that those fathers who killed their Westernized daughters also thought they were celebrating the classical virtue of honor. Or at least defending it.

Brooks claims that Obama never breaks from his own group — something easily rebutted — not that that facts matter in these things. It's rather about finding a negative story that has traction, whether it's a haircut or windsurfing. Nonetheless here's a rebuttal fact: Obama insists the failed health insurance industry has to have a seat at the health reform table.

Brooks writes, "In the Senate, [Obama] didn’t join the Gang of 14, which created a bipartisan consensus on judges, because it would have meant deviating from liberal orthodoxy and coming to the center."

The center as in Sam Alito getting a seat on the Supreme Court? Again with the drinking games. Hangovers feel better.

And yet, although Obama didn't go as far as putting a right-wing justice on the Supreme Court, coming to the center — or actually the right field place that Americans call center — is exactly what Obama has done, time and again, to my personal dismay. It's why a number of pundits have described Obama as the candidate of non-change, because he's so focused on finding consensus. Brooks wonders how Obama can build a "trans-partisan coalition" (Is that cross dressing? Or have they actually had the operation?) when his policies are "reliably on the left."

Brooks thinks that McCain's weakness, in contrast, has something to do with flying by the seat of his pants. I don't know what that means either. Maybe it's some kind of neocon code.

In any case, Brooks is just probing now, gently, gently, to see if this sticks. And though the word itself, "communitarian," sounds suspicious, he defines it as neither bad nor good:

Obama emphasizes the connections between people, the networks and the webs of influence. These sorts of links are invisible to some of his rivals, but Obama is a communitarian. He believes you can only make profound political changes if you first change the spirit of the community. In his speeches, he says that if one person stands up, then another will stand up and another and another and you’ll get a nation standing up.

That reminds me of the work civil society groups were doing in Cambodia, trying to get people to work together again, to build community, amid the ruins of Pol Pot. That was going on in 2005, by the way, 30 years after the killing fields. It takes a long time to rebuild community after an ideology has ripped it apart.

On the other hand, says Brooks:

[McCain] is most moved by examples of heroism and individual excellence. His books are about individual character and patriotism, not networks or community-building.

He is not a loner (in fact, he dislikes being alone), but whether he is a prisoner of war or a senator, he is acutely aware of how corrupt social pressures encroach on individual integrity. While Obama seeks solidarity with groups, McCain resists conformity. He fights fiercely, though not always successfully, against political pressures in order to remain honest, brave and forthright.

Wow. There you have it. One man stays true to his values ("though not always successfully") because he's "honest, brave and forthright," whereas the other man stays true to his values because of group think.

Which do you choose?

What hogwash. Over the past year and a half or so I've made a ridiculous attempt to read everything ever written on U.S. health care systems in comparison with other systems. Just trying to figure out how the hell we got into such a mess, because it killed my brother — along with 160,000 others at a minimum during Bush's tenure — and how we can change it. Kunstler is right. Bush is just a symptom of the problem, as are our sprawling cities, our dependence on oil, the chasm that is eating the middle class and now separates wealth and poverty, the divorce rate and most other American woes you can name.

Tony Judt brilliantly deconstructs part of what's led us to this place in his review of Robert Reich's Supercapitalism. Judt is so good you should read the whole thing. But here's a central kernal:

...in reducing (and implicitly discrediting) the state, in forsaking public interest for private advantage wherever possible, we have also devalued those goods and services that represent the collectivity and its shared purposes, steadily "reducing the incentive for competent and ambitious persons to join or stay in state service." And this carries a very considerable risk.

The market requires norms, habits, and "sentiments" external to itself to hold it together, to ensure the very political stability that capitalism needs in order to thrive. But it also tends to corrode those same practices and sentiments. This much has long been clear. The benign "invisible hand" — the unregulated free market — may have been a favorable inaugural condition for commercial societies. But it cannot reproduce the noncommercial institutions and relations — of cohesion, trust, custom, restraint, obligation, morality, authority — that it inherited and which the pursuit of individual economic self-interest tends to undermine rather than reinforce.

What's going on here is the poisonous libertarian and "supercapitalist" ideal that all that counts is you, the horrible imbalance that puts individualism absolutely ahead of the community.

Obama, for all his centrist tendencies, gets it right when he celebrates community. Progressives have to do that far more successfully than we have in the past. Conservatives should embrace Obama — he's leading the way back towards some kind of balance and civility that can save market capitalism. Oh, and perhaps democracy as well. Afterthought.

When Brooks whispers "communitarian" values, we need to respond, "Do you mean community values, Mr. Brooks? Don't you think those values transcend 'left' or 'right'?"

Educating for democracy

C-Span's on downstairs, with educators talking about how they can better educate for success.

They're right — we do have to educate for success, teach children the math and language skills they'll need to be good employees. Unemployment and homelessness and shiftlessness are no substitute even for that job at Wendy's.

However, if we're only educating to train workers for the marketplace, we've lost the foundation of democracy, which requires educated and informed citizens able to reason and question, not just follow directions and give the right change.

Voters have to be able to distinguish between fear-based appeals and real threats. We have to understand the moral underpinnings of working for the common good, whether Christian, Muslim, or atheist.

We can't just educate for success.