Was the Globalist’s Editor in Chief, Stephan Richter, Over the Top — when He Referred to Ordinary Americans as Health Care Serfs? — I Don’t Think so

18 March 2013

Citation — to Richter’s essay

Stephan Richter, Health Care and the Road to American Serfdom, Globalist (22 February 2013)

We Americans like to ignore Reality, when it comes to choosing between it and wallowing in our national myths

This unfortunately mindless aspect of our national character seems to be sucking the life out of the American Dream.

The Globalist’s publisher and editor in chief, Stephan Richter, referred to American serfdom in addressing the trend.

What Richter said

Extracts include:

I realize that stories about frustrated employers and health insurance customers or about these firms' often-outrageous business practices are legion.

Why then tell another one?

First, isn't real insurance reform upon us? Wasn't that what the Supreme Court decided in the summer of 2012 — and what U.S. voters validated with Barack Obama's reelection the following November?

Second, how on earth could our provider come up with yet another double-digit increase? Aren't the media headlines full of worries about deflation? Why then such a steep increase?

And third, what about transparency? How could the increase be justified? Where can one look into the insurance provider's expenses and calculations?

As a general note, it is amazing to observe that in this freedom-loving country basically the only thing a consumer-citizen can do is either walk away . . . or take it on the chin.

[T]he oppression hails from a corporatist state, formed by an unholy alliance of politicians and corporations that finance their reelection campaigns.

That machine skillfully detracts from its own pattern of malfeasance by pointing fingers at supposedly malicious government "bureaucrats."

What is left unsaid is that the latter are, for the most part, thoroughly neutered to ensure that they are powerless in opposing the ways and means of the powerful and asset-rich.

As a result, it is no real exaggeration to say that Americans, by comparison to the citizens and consumers of other advanced countries, are living the lives of serfs.

American consumers often find themselves in a truly deplorable position. They have just about as many rights as the serfs did in feudalist, pre-revolutionary Russia.

Is this serf language too extreme?

I don’t think so. But I suspect that it takes a sense of History to understand the merits of the historical parallel that Richter is drawing. Essentially, Richter thinks that the American plutocracy runs our institutions just as firmly as the landed nobility did theirs during Europe’s now distant past.

The irony, he further implies, is that Europeans learned something from that experience, but Americans — who fled the continent — did not.

Where America’s often senseless ideologies come in

We hear a lot about the unremitting desirability of free markets and unregulated capitalism these days. Most of it coming from plutocratic toadies masquerading as thoughtful people. Either:

(a) These folk are too nit-witted to understand that a discussion of social goals must precede discussion about the merits of different political and economic avenues to them.

(or)

(b) They are deliberately concealing the proper conceptual order of “end and avenue there” premises, so as to profit themselves from maintaining the quasi-feudal order that Stephan Richter points to.

For people who have not thought about this, Steven Pearlstein recently provided a preliminary overview of some of the issues that need to be considered in rationally prioritizing allegedly first principles:

[W]e’ve seen another side of free markets: stagnant incomes, gaping inequality, a string of crippling financial crises and 20-somethings still living in their parents’ basements.

These realities are forcing free-market advocates and their allies in the Republican Party to pursue a new strategy.

Instead of arguing that free markets are good for you, they’re saying that they’re good — mounting a moral defense of free-market capitalism.

The conservative case against regulation, for example, is premised on the proposition that everything that has gone wrong with the markets is the government’s fault.

[However] [a] useful debate about the morality of capitalism must get beyond libertarian nostrums that greed is good, what’s mine is mine and whatever the market produces is fair.

If our moral obligation is to provide everyone with a reasonable shot at economic success within a market system that, by its nature, thrives on unequal outcomes, then we ought to ask not just whether government is doing too much or too little, but whether it is doing the right things.

ObamaCare illustrates the conundrum that Steven Pearlstein poses — when you confuse the means with the end, you get a mess

Here’s what I wrote about ObamaCare in October 2012:

The core flaw of the Affordable Health Care Act is that it attempted to improve a broken and grossly self-interested system by involving the same entities (who created and contribute to its problems) in designing the new formulation. The adage about not being able to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear seems apt.

It should be clear that individual and net health care costs will rise, when each provider or profit-motivated administrator has an added excuse to skim money from a foolishly layered chain of supply and demand.

ObamaCare arguably worsens the situation of employers (who never should have been tasked with providing health care in the first place) and their employees. Our employer-burdening system makes business success more difficult and adds another reason to make employees’ lives more miserable.

President Obama, ever the expedient conniver, conflated free market theology with social and economic desirability, simply because he wanted credit for a political achievement that he couldn’t easily get any other way.

The moral? — When your myths lose track of where you actually wanted to go, the Fat Cats “gonna” nail your sorry hide to the wall

“Serf” is not too strong a word to draw the public’s comatose inattention to what is going on.

I would even surmise that the serfs were one up on us. They knew that they were serfs. We apparently don’t.

PeteFree.com

Was the Globalist’s Editor in Chief, Stephan Richter, Over the Top — when He Referred to Ordinary Americans as Health Care Serfs? — I Don’t Think so