Super Money

A few decades ago, a book called “Super Money” (by George Goodman, aka “Adam Smith”) described how American entrepreneurship was creating super money every time their start-up companies issued initial public offerings (IPOs) and then the prices of these new stocks went up ... manufacturing enormous wealth out of thin air. New products and services are imagined, created and marketed to people to propel these new companies to success. This is the power of our free-market economic system in a nutshell.

Dear reader, this is a magical way that the “invisible hand” of capitalism creates wealth ... lots and lots of wealth. Jeff Bazos has, by himself created almost a trillion dollars of super money. And he and his ex-wife have been rewarded with about 10% of this super wealth. This is not accidental. It has happened over and over to American go-getters to create our “golden city on the hill.” And yes this wealth that capitalism creates does get re-distributed to others as it is spent ... and these new companies hire people ... and their taxes pay for our government and to build infrastructure. (Hear that Elizabeth Warren and BHO?)

But there is always a problem wrapped up in capitalism. That is that the dispersion of this super money doesn’t happen fast enough and to the taste of many proto-Socialists. Jealousy, dear reader jealousy, rears it’s ugly head ... fanned by the likes of Bernie Sanders and his fellow travelers. (Funny though how Bernie seems to be enjoying his entry into the cult of millionaires.) But this super money does get spread around ... which is why America is so wealthy and can afford our social programs ... and so is where many of the worls’s needy want to live ... and some even want to be given the opportunity to prosper like Bezos, the son of Cuban immigrants.

But when these social programs become more important than capitalism and its super money ... that is when the golden goose is strangled. Funny how so few people ... even many recipients of super money ... understand this simple truth.

Death Spiral

"You really don't have health insurance if you can't afford to use it."

On TV this morning there was a representative from Tennessee (who is also a doctor) commenting on the overhaul of Obamacare. He sat me up when he related that 60-70% of hospital bills in his state were not getting paid because the deductibles on the insurance plans under Obamacare are so high that they force patients to pay these bills out-of-pocket ... for which they have not the money. In other words, even though an additional 5 or 6 million people may have gotten insurance under Obamacare (an equal number falling under expanded-Medicaid, paid for by the rest of us), these people -- along will millions more who lost what was called by Obama "bad apple" insurance and have had to purchase these high-deductible, high-premium, high-co-pay policies -- cannot use this insurance for the reasons stated above.

Now you understand why hospitals are under such financial distress, why emergency rooms have not been emptied as promised, and why Obamacare is so unpopular (except for those being subsidized under expanded Medicaid). I don't care what phony polls may say. There are still enough people receiving health insurance under their businesses or under Medicaid/Medicare that the system has not yet completely collapsed. But Obamacare is in a death spiral because it is a jackass ... a race horse designed by a committee of bureaucrats who don't believe in free markets ... and who colluded with the insurance and drug companies with the notion that they knew better than Adam Smith. Well they didn't ... and they left a pile of steaming bleep for the Republicans.

Can Obamacare be fixed by Ryan/Trump? I am inclined to agree with Rand Paul ... let's euthanize this jackass and design a transition back to the free market ... and, in the process, save our hospitals. In the meantime make the insurance and drug companies compete for our money instead of colluding with the politicians.

Capitalism

Yesterday at a block party, I was talking to the parents of a neighbor. They told me that they had just returned from a short trip to Colorado. In kidding, I asked them if they had "indulged" in a Rocky Mountain high while they were there? They relayed two interesting facts about Denver doobies ... 1) A single marijuana cigarette there costs $15 ... Wow! and, 2) When they were in the airport leaving Colorado ... by the check-in gate was a big trash bin with a sign saying, "Don't even think about it!"

I am encouraged ... apparently capitalism and the free market is still at work ...

Wouldn’t it be Funny …

... if Obamacare caused the United States to return to a free-market economy in health care?  Already many more people have lost their health-care insurance than have gained it as a result of this Harry Reid-Nancy Pelosi bit of screwed-up social engineering … see: Powerline Analysis.  And later this year, when the employer mandate kicks in and many millions more Americans find themselves with the unhappy option of either paying more for less health insurance … they might then chose to go uninsured and suffering the consequence.  And the way “Obamacare is being hollowed-out by government fiat” (a Charles Krauthammer near quote), it is increasingly unlikely that there will actually be any consequences suffered by the uninsured.

The health-care insurance companies allowed the current administration to have its way with them because they thought that they would be able to feast on an additional 45 million customers … and that they could also gouge the many millions more currently-insured who would have to pay more for less as a result of the insurance rewrites caused by Obamacare.  Perceptive people, such as Krauthammer, realize that these two windfalls for the insurance companies are now unlikely to occur … and that a government bailout of their partners-in-sin is quite likely.  So now the Republicans are pushing a bill that would make such a bailout of health-care insurers illegal … see: Fox News Story.  Wouldn’t this be poetic justice?

And wouldn’t it be even sweeter if Obamacare caused the whole health-care industry to once again return to a free market?  Then individuals would be making economic trade-off decisions about their health care without the interference of health-care insurers and the government.  Then the spiraling cost-inflation havoc that this industry-government complex has foisted on our economy might finally be reined-in.  Wouldn't it be funny?

Free Markets Suck!

President Obama revealed a little more of himself than possibly his teleprompter writers intended on Tuesday when he spoke in Osawatomie, Kansas.  In essence he launched a backhanded attack on capitalism with "the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can" (see: Speech Text around the bottom of page one).  This rhetorical flourish is clearly meant to imply that capitalism is, in fact, a free license to steal ... and the baby is now floating down the gutter along with the dirty bathwater. 

Interestingly enough, the New York Times neglected to mention this key dogmatic pronouncement in its write-up of this event (see: NY Times's Take).  Actually The Barry has said quite similar things in the past ... in particular at the Cooper Union in early 2010 ...  which went mostly ignored, I think, because he was still on his honeymoon with the American people (see: The Daily Kos Story). Now, I and many others on the right believe that this statement overtly manifests the key core value that Obama brought into the White House ... which had been taught to him on his anarchist mother's knee and reenforced by his many radical friends -- that capitalism is the source of all the world's evil.

And, despite his Elvis-like-intonings to the contrary, he also seems to view as anathema that bulwark of capitalism, the middle class.  He, after all, had signed his name to the Black Value System when he joined Reverend Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church which overtly states that "middleclassness" is to be eschewed (see: Black Value System Text, item #8).  (One could say, with tongue-in-cheek that, being the President of the United States, he clearly does live up to that disavowal.)  In essence his subtle but steady tilting toward Marxism seems to be the "change' he "hoped" to achieve when elected ... and he is doing a pretty good job of it ... by keeping the U.S. economy on life support and then by stirring the class-warfare cauldron with a vigor that would have been envied even by Norman Thomas.