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typically, cimmaron, you only see what you want to see. it's kinda irritating that no matter what anyone actually says, you manage somehow to superimpose a one-dimensional libertarian la la-land interpretation. except this time you prove my point.
first off, it's clear that happy face markety-land mechanisms, whatever they are, has not, cannot and will not provide adequate health care access for all americans.
access to basic health care is a *political* matter. demands for it are *political.* so they are necessarily directed at the state, the function of which is not to do what libertarian dissociation would have you imagine, that is to "give people stuff" but rather to impose regulations and/or other mechanisms and institutions that change the ways in which economic agents operate. the state can and does control the rules of the capitalist game.
it's far **more** democratic to have the state explicitly occupy such a steering role than not to because the state is theoretically subject to political pressure. private firms are not. corporate oligarchy---which is the actually existing alternative to what actually existing capitalism looks like----is far less desirable and far less free than the current state of affairs---which is already not desirable and already not free.
providing free access to health care is a political goal that the rest of the industrialized world has embraced for 75 years or more in some cases as a way for capitalism to be forced to leave behind the dark ages of the 19th century.
and it was state intervention that has controlled most of the epidemics that used to work alongside capitalism to make sure that the lives of most people were alot more nasty, brutish and short than they are now. think about cholera. think about the health consequences of running water and sewage systems, of infrastructure development that was way outside the scope and vision of those heroic captains of industry blah blah blah.
if you want to argue against the need for state intervention in health care, at least have the integrity to embrace what it really means rather than substitute some absurd libertarian happy-face markety daydream for it.
but i don't think you can do it because if you did so, you'd likely not be able to maintain your own position.
i'm not terribly concerned about your objections to the way in which the tea party people are characterized. personally, i think there's a wide range of people who for whatever reason take leave of their senses and find aspects of tea partyness compelling. the one thing they share is that they're chumps. they're being used by the same old money people who funded the rise of the previous two waves of ultra-rightwing america. it's the same old same old, the principle function of which is to enable conservatives to pretend to themselves that they're somehow not the same old same old, which would require they accept responsibility for what conservatives have done once the american system had the tremendously bad judgment to let them near power.
and it's about to happen again.
so yeah, a whole happy diversity of people and viewpoints, from lots of places, all brought together by their commonality as fucking chumps.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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