The Angry Economist

It's not a conspiracy if they don't need to conspire. For an example in the natural world, consider that raindrops fall. The natural laws that apply to them ensure that this happens. No doubt if the molecules in a raindrop could conspire to form themselves into the shape of a glider, and locate an updraft, they could fly forever.

So why don't public school teachers teach good economics to their students? Why don't they teach that minimum wages just hurt the least qualified workers? Why don't they teach that unions mostly serve the employees and leaders of the union? Why don't they teach that unqualified amateurs (homeschoolers) teach better than trained professionals (themselves)? These are all documented facts.

Are public school teachers conspiring to suppress these facts? No, they aren't. No conspiring is necessary. No consultation, no coordination. It is in the interests of each and every teacher to fail to teach these things. No conspiracy exists because no conspiracy is needed.

Contrast this with your favorite conspiracy theory, e.g. the 9/11 truthers. They claim that the U.S. Government faked these attacks in an attempt to cause people to give them more power. Such a conspiracy would require the continued cooperation of at least a hundred people. Not likely that they would continue to cooperate for 8 years.

No, no conspiracy is needed to get people to cede power over their most intimate parts of their lives to governments, e.g. health care.

I fail to understand why any economist (Nobel Prize or not) can say with a straight face that "the public option" is competition for the private insurers. And Krugman says it, again and again.

A marketplace with competitive entrants, is one in which success or failure exists. Think of a competitive footrace (well, one without Usain Bolt!). Someone comes in first, someone in second, someone in third, and the rest are not named presumably to be counted as losers (except of course that any loser in such a race is faster than 99% of the general population). Failure is an option; in fact it's guaranteed for all but the top three medal winners.

In a marketplace with private insurance companies, any of the companies could go out of business at any time. In a free market system (which ours barely approximates) you have profit and loss. You have success (growth in market share, growth in profits), and you have failure (loss of market share, loss of income). Ultimately, if a market participant loses all their income, they go bankrupt.

Does anybody think the public plan for insuring people would ever lose all its income? Go bankrupt?

I thought not.

So I ask you again, how can any economist say that a company which is guaranteed not to fail be competing with companies that can fail? The obvious answer is: they're not competing; they're not even participating in the same market.

And that puts paid to Krugman's assertion that the argument against the public option boils down to the fact that it's a government program (his emphasis). No. I argue against it because it cannot fail. Without the discipline of potential failure, the program will never succeed, either.

Wilson is right. Obama IS lying. He says that none of the people opposed to his plan have an option to offer. Well, that's just a steaming pile of bullshit. How about this option: everyone pays for their own health care up to 20% of their pre-tax income? Effectively, then, the rich will pay for all of their own health care and a lot of other people's, the poor will have a single-payer socialist health plan, and the middle-class will largely pay for their own health care but nobody will be bankrupted.

Michael Moore says that capitalism is evil. Oh? Why is he selling admission to his movie, then? If he believed his own propaganda, his movie would be free for the downloading off, say, Youtube, or Archive.org.

Michae Moore has gotten rich off of telling other people that they shouldn't be rich like him. A pox on his house!