We do, right?

As such, there’s just not going to come a day when a sick or injured person is left out on the street to die if they can’t pay for their medical expenses. (People with more money can get better care than those with less money, but that’s not where I’m going here.) We won’t have (larger numbers of) people dying in the streets, if for no other reason than it’d make the news and we’d look bad (worse) internationally… our reputation survived Katrina, but it was battered. (Not as battered as the folks who were left to fend for themselves in New Orleans, but battered.) (I’m going parentheses-crazy today, eh?!)

So, there will always be the possibility of getting “free” healthcare, paid for by the government, and therefore, the taxpayers. And, there will always be those who abuse the system and go to these places for routine as well as critical care. But hey, if everyone followed the rules, we wouldn’t need a police force. If accidents didn’t happen, we wouldn’t need fire departments. If people (and the corporations and nations they run) didn’t erroneously see life as a zero sum game, we wouldn’t need armies. But there’s always going to be a minority that screw things up for the majority… I’m not optimistic enough to hope that’ll change. So taxpayers in a civilized society are going to be paying for the healthcare of others… it’s a fact, and here’s where it gets really complicated.

As a taxpayer who makes healthy lifestyle choices (I eat right, I exercise), I’m paying for people’s healthcare costs who may not make such healthy choices. Sure, they’re paying for my genetics or if I’m in an accident, but how do we level the playing field? Private insurance companies try to do this using actuaries to charge higher premiums for smokers, or the obese, or those whose parents died of cancer or a heart attack. Nice try, but how do we do it on a broader level since we’re going to be paying for universal healthcare in one form or another anyway?

The answer, goes right back to companies accepting the true cost of their products. Let’s use food as an example, since you are what you eat. The only reason a bag of highly processed chips costs so little is because the high fructose corn syrup, corn and potatoes used to make them are highly subsidized by the government. These aren’t small farm subsidies- they’re large multinational corporate subsidies. We’re right back to our discussion of pollution and the free market below… companies must be forced to internalize the costs of the crap they’re selling us to eat. Yes, I know consumers are choosing what they eat, and I am definitely the last person to absolve the individual of responsibility for his or her own choices, but the rest of us are going to be paying for their healthcare costs anyway! Why not make the “bad decision” foods more costly so that maybe the individual will make a better choice? It’s not like the corporations are going to absorb the “fat tax”- they’re going to pass it on to consumers. When faced with the choice of a $10 sugary soda or drinking tap water (hopefully provided by the municipality highly purified and free of toxins including fluoride), maybe folks will think twice.

The problem is, this is a vicious cycle… A dollar spent in a local store gets re-spent locally. Some estimates put it at $1 locally turns into $20- I get my muffler fixed down the street, the mechanic eats at the local diner, the waitress buys some corn from the farmer down the street, etc. Dollars spent at Wal-Mart and the dollar stores are removed from the community. And then they’re used to line the pockets of the corporate leaders of these companies. I’d rather help my neighbor than some rich guy exploiting foreign labor to bring me cheap crap. The alternative is like poor people supporting some guy who abused the bankruptcy system to not pay his bills and remain a billionaire (twice) reality TV star for president. Some municipalities are developing their own currencies (like Ithaca, NY’s Ithaca Hours) to further local investment.

In 2010, my wife’s 401K at Morgan Stanley earned $0.30 on the $8,000 she had managed to get into it, while the stock market boomed. You read that right, thirty cents. Those bonuses that Wall Street is taking for their responsible behavior (driving up gas prices while there’s no shortage and no excessive demand?) seem to be having a bit of an impact on our retirement plans. She could have earned more by investing in worm futures.

This is my first post in awhile. I’m feeling rusty and random. I’ll get my tranny groove back soon.

Right/left, republican/democrat, liberal/conservative, it’s really all the same the longer we play this game (some of the truly unqualified/amoral people in politics notwithstanding). Our founding fathers instituted the electoral college because the masses couldn’t truly be trusted with their vote, yet could be counted on to NOT understand the system and realize they were being marginalized by it, so long as they were placated (by TV and cell phones, and the dollar menu) and their IMMEDIATE needs were met. Those in charge could benefit in the short term, long term be damned.

I don’t know if the modern public doesn’t understand the constitution (modern government just doesn’t care what it says), it’s just that so long as their IMMEDIATE lives aren’t impacted, it’s irrelevant. Cell phone in pocket, cable TV at home, junk food in the fridge or on the dollar menu, the public is lulled/scared into thinking “we” are “free” and “they” are “communist/socialist” “terrorists” while our freedoms erode, and a few profit at the expense of many.

There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. The free market spawns efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste. Waste is pollution, so in a true free-market economy you would eliminate, as nearly as you can, pollution. In a true free-market economy you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. Polluters make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market and forcing the public to pay their production cost. You show me a polluter, I’ll show you a subsidy. Corporations are externalizing machines; they are constantly trying to figure out a way to avoid their own costs and foist it out on the public.

I’ll give you an example. When the coal companies, the utilities, discharge mercury into the air [or when gold refineries leach cyanide into the water table, or when Nestle or Pepsi suck an aquifer dry to bottle their water or soda forcing those living nearby to go without water they had been getting from their wells, or when Monsanto's GMO corn or canola contaminates a neighboring field, or when...] they are avoiding one of the costs of bringing their products to market, which is the cost of properly disposing of a dangerous processed chemical. When they avoid the costs they can out-compete their competitors, they can out-compete gas and oil and wind power. But the costs don’t disappear. They go into the fish, they make children sick, they permanently injure children’s lungs, they put people out of work, they acidify the lakes in the Adirondacks and they’ve destroyed the forest cover of the Appalachian Mountains all the way from Georgia up into Quebec. Those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that should be reflected in the price of that product. All of the federal environmental laws are meant to restore free-market capitalism in America. I don’t even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I’m a free marketeer. I go out into the marketplace, I track down the polluters and I say to them, We are going to force you to internalize your costs the same way that you’re internalizing your profits. Americans have to understand that there is a huge difference between free-market capitalism which democratizes our country, that brings us prosperity and efficiency, and the kind of corporate crony capitalism which is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.

According to MTA ads, 1,944 New Yorkers saw something and said something in response to their “if you see something, say something” anti-terror campaign in 2007. According to a January 7, 2008 New York Times report, no one knows what they saw, what it resulted in, or even how this number was determined. How can you call this an anti-terror campaign when its sole purpose appears to be to cause terror? The goal of terrorists is to have people live in terror. Masked government troops with machine guns now patrol the NYC subway, where it is repeatedly posted and announced that “backpacks and other large containers are subject to random search by the police.” Do you think subway riders feel safer, or have the “terrorists” won?

Now, my bag search upon entering the subway is different from a search at the Pentagon, or even at the airport. At the Pentagon or airport, my friend Mike the pilot’s explanation of how retarded it is for his bag to be searched when he’s holding the stick of the plane during the flight notwithstanding, it’s not the “casual terrorist” who’s being dissuaded, and the rules are applied to everyone (regardless of how silly or ineffective they may be). I contend that my subway bag search is actually NOT intended to dissuade the casual terrorist (for a determined terrorist certainly would not be), but rather, to engender fear among the general populace so that when Cheney or some other government wonk says “thank God for our actions, they worked, we’ve not been attacked since 9/11/01″, there’s a collective sigh of compliant fearful subservient relief from an unthinking majority willing to sacrifice the freedoms the founding fathers fought to establish. Jefferson said “a society that will trade a little freedom for a little security loses both and deserves neither.”  After all, protection of the World Trade Center was perfect from its construction through 2/26/93, and equally stellar thereafter until 9/11/01 despite the lack of our modern erosion of civil liberties.  Clearly, most have forgotten that, or foolishly think that “these times” are different, when obviously, history only repeats itself.

I call this blog “Liberty and Tranny” because I think it’s funny, but also because I believe the modern “us vs. them” debate (whether that’s the US vs. the world, or liberals vs. conservatives, or blue vs. red, it doesn’t matter) is merely a carefully orchestrated distraction from the real issues.

Much has been made of saying that conservatives value the individual while the Liberal values the power of the state, but this is a gross oversimplification.  The modern conservative and liberal alike have been distracted by superficial individual vs. state arguments while a limited few individuals, hiding behind corporate anonymity and lack of personal responsibility, profit to a disgusting degree.  These individuals both ignore their duty to respect the inalienable rights of others and to voluntarily contribute to the welfare of his community while at the same time abusing the power of the central government to insure their continued supremacy.

So maybe one chapter here will be a great love story between a pair of folks, one named Liberty and the other a cross-dresser. Not likely, but maybe their story would serve as an allegory for American politics.

We’ll see…

– Mark Robert Levine, New York City