HA HA HA! Ayn Rand took Social Security and Medicare!

That's fricking classing. Ayn Rand Mrs-Government-Interference-Is-Always-Evil, took Social Security and Medicare while dying of lung cancer. She was of course a lifetime smoker because smoking symbolized man's conquest over fire, and questioned how she could get cancer because she had no false premises!

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/28/ayn-rand-took-govern.html

An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand's law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand's behalf she secured Rand's Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O'Connor (husband Frank O'Connor).

As Pryor said, "Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out" without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn "despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual should take help."

 This is the darling of the right, of the tea party? She died pennyless and alone. Apparently because she was like a Uber-Man builder and creator whom the government attempts to tax to death. Because, government interference is the only reason why you aren't rich/richer right now. It's like Social Darwinism for the mentally ill telling people that they are better off because they are better off. I've met Rand whores in the past, and while some were eagarly trying to make perpetual motion machines in their garages or accepting Federal Reserve conspiracy theories and fiat currency doubters, they are almost always rather off... but never so off as Rand herself, that poor socialist evil woman who stole money from others at gun point to make up for her own inabilities (Rand philosophy as to what social programs involve).

Social Darwinism vs. Evolution on life, economy and society.

Social Darwinism is the general view of selection within societies being good for the species or that one's plight in life has to do with one's fiber, blood, character, superior breeding, genetics, race, class, etc. That the drunk who dies in the ditch earned his place in the ditch because he was somehow inferior to the businessman who inherited his father's fortune. That if we help the weak, heal the sick and educate the ignorant we are serving to weaken humanity because the weak are weak because they are inferior, the ill are ill because they are weak-blooded, the idiot is stupid because he is unteachable.

Social Darwinism suggests that somehow social situation is the principle result of ones abilities. That some people do well in business not because they had the opportunities and education and luck to succeed but because they are somehow more worthy and able in some intrinsic capacity. Social Darwinism is a hollow echo of actual evolution by natural selection.

In nature the geometric rise of populations of all organisms is checked by nature, predation, death, mate selection, starvation, illness, weather, and sometimes some of these attributes are a little better suited to a situation or a little worse and these improvements find they increase in the gene pool at a greater rate and keep doing so. So by sickness, death, and predation all organisms are naturally given to a propensity towards complexity, utility, adaption, and improvement spiraling off into the infinity of the unknown.

Now, we should notice stark differences between the two things. One is based on some nebulous idea of inferiority and the other is based on certain individuals doing slightly better as far as their genes were concerned. One has a vague idea that somehow peoples lots in life are their own fault or their lot, while the other recognizes the general struggle for existence. One asks that we withhold our mercy and condemn the victims of fate while the other asks that we do jack squat because it simply sits there explaining all the design of life. Social Darwinism is after all an argument about how we should act and general vague notions that that is how things should be or that they are somehow better that way. Whereas evolution by natural selection explains life whether we care or not.

While sometimes Social Darwinism finds political cover and adherents especially among the wealthy and affluent and gets rehashed over and over again in more modern social philosophies like Ayn Rand's Objectivism and finds strong comradeship with bizarre ideas about the need for anarchy as a system of government and deregulation to unbind the invisible hand of the market. That the world is better as a dog eat dog world because it demands we pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and become the captains of our souls and masters of our fate. Interestingly these related ideas find themselves properly opposed by the same thing that opposed Social Darwinism in the first place, actual evolution by natural selection.

Evolution, beyond simply being just a theory to explain the design of life, also finds itself properly applied in very diverse disciplines such as game theory, morality, and economics. It turns out the world isn't really best off as a dog eat dog world. In fact, one would be well advised to understand that the world isn't dog eat dog but that dogs are themselves pack animals and work together in cooperative groups. The invisible hand of the market isn't a magical wand but rather the economic equivalent of the blind watchmaker in biological evolution. And we should closely observe that the blind watchmaker doesn't craft simply efficient producers but is riddled with parasites from top to bottom. And that we should properly understand that cooperation is the natural propensity of evolution rather than necessarily competition. Markets will naturally gravitate towards parasitism or monopoly rather than simply producing the best product for the cheapest price. We should not nor cannot embrace the idea of letting the chips fall where they may while the greatest indicator for where you will end up in life is where you started in life.

Truth comes from understanding that we live in a cooperative society rather than a meritocracy and that the poor are not necessarily poor because of some vague sense of inferiority but rather more correctly because there but for the grace of God go I. That I was born in America has much more to do with my successes than my genes could ever account for. The fact that I was born to a middle class family and was able to go to college without trouble or incident, that I lived in a good neighborhood, that my country has public schools, that I went to honors classes, that both my parents are college graduates in the sciences. Dumb luck has more to do with individual success than anything else. Science has more to do with societal success than anything else. Morality has more to do with humanity's success than anything else.

Suffice it to say that Social Darwinism in all its iterations both old and modern are predicated on rather staggering errors, and evolution as properly understood within society, biology, and economics strongly indicates that our greatest prosperity will be seen not within the idea of laissez faire (hand's off economics) but in the domestication of our markets and the socialization of the essentials of modern life, the promotion of science and embracing of international cooperation.

Spork in the Eye: Round 2.

Spork replied inline to my comment on his blog post on his blog. I'll do the same but post here as well. As there's no new post on his side outside of complements on my photostream which certainly does roxxor, massive tip of the hat to the clever folks at A/A.

* Spork claims in a comment on my previous blog on this topic that the government couldn't do it better because insurance companies only make about 3% profit. This somehow reminds me of a large graphic put out by the oil industry that showed that 100% of the dollar spent on gas went to various different places and oddly none of it was profit.



The problem here is that it's simply false. Medicare, the US's current socialized medicine engine, has about a 5% overhead and private insurance has a 17% overhead (though the numbers are really closer to 3% and 30% let's just run with these numbers), that means that certainly if you weren't paying massive salaries to the top industry brass (that's an expense and doesn't count as profit) they could cut the prices rather dramatically. There's a lot more overhead due to inefficiency in the system and lack of good organization, massive departments dealing with the departments of the various other companies in order to get through different forms to get the money, because of non-single payer situations. There's none of these billing issues or any such things with the fire department. They just go where they are needed and put out the fire. Just as healthcare should fix the health problems that arise with various individuals.


Warning, addressing the point Spork bothered with is long and very involved. For your own sake you'd be better off taking the fact that he's deluded on the profits insurance companies make as the entire reply because to answer the rest of his question requires a tearing down of libertarianism and a building up of morality and to an extension socialism.

Spork continues by advocating that he's so stubborn and pigheaded that you could argue with him back and forth dozens of times and he'd never see the light (I'm paraphrasing here), and so he decides to focus on just the point of the constitution and individual rights. I suddenly smell a Rand whore argument brewing. What's next people should fix their own roads and watch establish various anarchy teams of people who go around with goop and trowels out of necessity to not have their roads completely disintegrate while other people benefit and they get nothing for their services.

This is the core of his argument. His philosophy of libertarianism and opposition to socialism as an undemonstrated group good in exchange for a real and tangible set of personal freedoms. The dismantling of libertarianism and establishment of morality or socialism is going to take a little bit to address.

How things work.

Morality, economies, and governments don't work like that. You really need to have collective rules in place to restrict the powers of businesses from ruining the lives of people. Such things are Economic Darwinism and the invisible hand of the market is the same as the blind watchmaker of evolution. Much as the hand of the market tends towards making monopolies and collusive business practices not everything in nature is benign. To the contrary, most everything in nature is a parasite living off the work of others and doing very little itself. In nature the sun provides energy and plants absorb this energy and everything lives off the plants. In a way Rand's philosophy understands this and treats the genius people who read her book as the intellectual producers who are only not rich solely because the government is around leeching off the brilliance of these intellectual producers like leeching leechers to support those who are weak and cannot support themselves.

This is critically wrong in a variety of ways, not limited to the fact that the real intellectual producers of our economies are scientists making chump change. But, in a larger sense it seems to reject the the real core of what makes humanity excel. It rejects the cooperation of humanity to advocate that the best result are found in a battle for the fittest, no holds barred fight to the death. This is wrong.

In reality, we should seek for economy what the advent of morality did for humanity. We should seek to cooperate more, in social groups and domesticate the markets. Just as we're better off as a group making roads and fire stations and police because these are things that everybody needs and they can't be coherent and functional without central authority we should seek to place the health of humans outside the purview of profit businesses. We should seek to make those sections of our life, on which everybody need rely, akin to farms or hydroponic greenhouses, restricting pests and parasites and engineering the systems to provide the most bang for our buck rather than the most buck.

It is in the best interests of all people to go along with the group. Much like morality allows us to coexist in functional groups by restricting individual rights sometimes by force and preventing crime and deviation away from certain set norms. The same applies to fire departments, roads, and yes, healthcare. The fact that I seem to be drifting towards is that it socialism is an extension of morality. Which is to say that socialism is in the best interests of people, that collectively, as a group, we can make everybody more wealthy and more prosperous than we could as individuals. Just as in a group we make everybody safer and healthier when we surrender our personal rights to kill other people and steal their things.

Anarchy/Libertarianism/Objectivism

Ultimately the libertarian section of the argument boils down the the tangible difference between living in a moral society where we simply refuse to kill each other, enslave each other, or steal each other things and we are thusly endowed by ourselves the inalienable (though easy to alienate) rights of life, liberty, and property as a consequence of surrendering our rights to murder, enslave, and steal.

The difference between a moral anarchy where everybody is out for themselves but not harming others and anything else is the single difference of taxes. The moment you decide that levying taxes to protect yourselves as a group, to defend yourself as a group, both physical and economically. The moment you decide to build roads, build schools, build firehouses, build hospitals, fund science, put shows on PBS, or settle disputes between people you've moved away from the ideal anarchy and established government. But, make no mistake, without these infrastructure concerns there is no enforcement outside of the casual approximation this shares with mob rule (which one could argue is still socialized enforcement). And when prosperity dwindles the moral precepts which allow for life, liberty and property breakdown and people turn to "crimes" (of readopting rights to murder, enslave, and steal that they previous surrendered) as their personal interests are better served outside of group mores. I do not believe that anarchism in this fashion because mob-like quasi-governments would form and spontaneous groups of individuals who could in some cases go beat a rapist to death couldn't successfully defend the anarchy against larger breaches of economic and social power. I have long maintained that far left anarchists and far right neo-conservatives have the same goals but completely different understandings of the consequences of achieving those goals.

Government Utopia

With government everything changes, and everything can easily be made significantly better if it's done correctly. One can socialize industries on which everybody depends, saving the group as a whole, a significant amount of money, we can promote science which is and always has been the fuel that runs our economy. We can establish schools to give children the benefit of an education. We can regulate the markets so we do not suffer monopolies or trusts. We can endeavor as a people to be a better people. We can progress forward just as we progressed forward when we gave up our rights to murder, enslave, and steal. To work not simply with our own shortsighted goals in mind but the best interests of the group and the individual. And while we must allow for a specter of force by the government, and corruption of a government by the people, we are all easily better off for it. And while one may think that without morality we should go around killing and murdering people because we'd be out for our own selfish interests the opposite is true within group dynamics. We must seek to cooperate with others and not kill or murder people, but also as a group restrict the powers of others to kill or murder.

Ultimately we cooperate as groups for our own benefits, and this implies forming governments to restrict the rights of others. Just as we restrict the rights of people to murder others, we should restrict the rights of people to profit from the illnesses of their fellow man.

The group good is neither unseeable nor unprovable. In fact, it's quite demonstrative. We can see the benefits such restrictions in places where profiting from illness and death is unacceptable. And see that all the metrics of quality of life are improved and with 44,000 deaths from lack of medical care, it's pretty easy to see that there's certainly room for improvement. That there's definite advantages for non-profit government run monopolies. Though to be fair, the advantage is from non-profit monopolies and you don't really need the government to run it.

Purpose of the Constitution

The constitution was more oppressive than the Articles of Confederation and gave greater central authority to the government which, in turn, had more powers. The Bill of rights were added to restrict the power of the government in very specific ways. The fact is the Constitution was written to give more central authority because decentralized authority was a complete failure. The opposition shouldn't be against government power but corruption, inefficiency, lack of accountability, failure, and intrusion on public rights. We shouldn't oppose universal single-payer healthcare, we should oppose the war on drugs and the fact that as a people we can't do away with that unneeded largess or legalize marijuana or somehow have citizens have veto powers on the rights of marriage of certain individuals. There are problems with government, with this there is no disagreement, however those problems aren't with socialized programs like, schools, healthcare, or fire departments but rather more tangible problems like corruption, inefficiency, and failures.

And bringing it back to the actual argument.

As for the original point, yes fire departments are very much the same as medicare.

Fire department analogy, a response. Spork in the Eye.

I have a few actual readers and commentators and I check out some of their blogs (they have the good taste to check out mine, so do you for that matter). And well Spork In the Eye had an interesting blog post as to how socialized medicine would be nothing like a socialized fire department but rather more akin to socialized fire insurance (which by the way exists in many areas along with socialized flood insurance and others, but lets ignore that). Since burying a long reply on a distant forum for a post made about half a month ago is a bit off... let me repeat the point here. First it'll give you something to read. Second if Spork cares to reply and I don't happen to make it back to his board there's one here.

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Real Universal Health Care IS like the fire department.

Insurance shouldn't enter into the picture and is only there because of a lack of actual fortitude and actual political will to make the system into what the system should be, a real universal health care system. Where the government pays hospitals and doctors for services rendered and there's no payment without services.

Insurance is a business model whereby we mitigate risks (in theory) and pay for services as such. There are actual insurance plans which cover you in the case of illness to get you back to where you were. If you become ill they pay you for lost wages and make sure you don't get hurt. Much like fire insurance will pay for your lost stuff when your house burns down. -- The fire department in this situation really is like real universal health care.

The difference is largely like the fire department before socialization. It was previously the case that fire brigades would put out fires and charge the person helped or loot their property and such. Insurance companies would pay the brigade that put out the fire for those properties with insurance. The system was haphazard and lead to large losses in property rather than a centralized system where fire departments put out fires and it didn't really matter whose stuff was saved.

Further you argue disanalogy due to the idea that the fire departments are localized. This is certainly the case for hospitals and doctors as well. Further it holds true for medicare as such as much of the reimbursement rates and businesses are conducted regionally. Additionally fire departments have very regional operations as well where fire departments are used to fight fires across state boundaries on federal land and as part of a much larger and national effort and presidential and gubernatorial declarations of disaster.

Ultimately any real universal health care plan would require, local, regional, as well as national support.

You aren't reimbursed for your lost health. You aren't paid for getting sick, your doctors are paid for mitigating the situation. And the constitution is established to "promote the general welfare".

There are certain requirements that everybody has and that need to be conducted at above the individual level. We have need for water, housing, health, security, electricity, roads, and a number of other projects and needs that cannot be elsehow conducted on an individual basis. If we do not own these utilities as a people they will end up owning us.

Much of your analysis seems dependent on staying on the obviously failed system we currently endure. Rather than making a clean break towards Medicare for all. Insurance is a terrible way to cover healthcare. Just as it was a terrible way to conduct fire departments prior to the Civil War. Your objection seems to be largely that we shouldn't half-ass this socialism and nationally pay for insurance but rather nationally pay for health-care; I couldn't agree more.

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Basically if we half-ass it and using insurance as our model, ofcourse everything will suck. If we somehow did away with the whole thing and paid for the required care of anybody in need of care all of the problems would melt away. There'd be no need to saddle small businesses with the burden of providing insurance, there'd be no need for insurance, the prices would drop, the overhead would drift away, and we'd be able to assemble some more efficient system of regional support. Not every hospital needs an MRI machine. You only need them every once in a while but while everybody is out on their own without any centralization there's going to be more and more lost costs and opportunities, we'll have terrible procedures and unneeded tests, and little help from various. We need a much better system and insurance is never going to build such a system, it's going to build a system of making money by hoping people die.

Save People Not Corporate Debt.

The US government is wrong dealing with the credit crisis. They are making the same mistake that lead to this current financial problem in reverse.

Joe Blow buys a house for $200,000 suddenly people say Joe Blow's house is worth $500,000 and offers Joe Blow a 125% second mortgage to let him buy a boat. Now Joe Blow owes around $550,000 dollars but has a boat. Suddenly, the market realizes that Joe Blow's house is only worth about $250,000 and starts panicking and raises Joe Blow's interest rates and he's having a really hard time making his payments. They say they are going to foreclose on Joe Blow's house! Joe Blow figures out that $550,000 is less than $250,000 and it's about $300,000 in his interest to let them keep the house. Joe Blow lets the dumbasses keep his house. As do all the Joe Blows who find themselves in the same situation.

So now all these places which suddenly took millions upon millions upon millions of dollars worth of hits because they were giving really bad loans to people who couldn't pay them back and no longer had anything worth what the price of the loan was started to crumble and die. They simply weren't worth what they paid for them. -- Now isn't that a lot like what the government is trying to do. We're trying to prop up a bunch of companies with large sums of money when the companies themselves aren't worth anything. The reason they are heading towards bankruptcy is because they aren't worth anything much less the $1 trillion dollars we're going to end up paying.

Do we really want to buy up all the bad debt? Why? Isn't acquiring bad debt the reason these giant corporations are dying? Why don't we actually embrace the capitalistic thing to do and let them die? We want capitalism when it comes to raking in a profit without any hint of so much as making sure the numbers add up. But, when it comes to losses we're suppose to socialize them? No, we shouldn't. Let the Earthquake happen.

We shouldn't be risking the solvency of the United States government in order to prop up corporations which cost more than they are worth. We're ten trillion dollars in debt and we're suppose to dig ourselves another trillion with war and another trillion with bailouts. The Chinese should stop lending us money. We're a bad investment at this point. We should ignore the corporations and focus on saving the people. We need to make sure they have a roof over their head, food so they don't starve, opportunities in life and a modicum of privacy. We should save the least among us, not the richest. We should, like Joe Blow, walk away from trying to fight the untamable monster of bad debt and simply focus on the Joe Blows of society.

We're making the same mistakes the companies are by letting this debt move up the ladder from bad debtors, to bad lenders, to bad lender conglomerates, to bad business propped up by bad lender conglomerates and trying to fight this with bad government policy. There is an old saying, the solution to pollution is dilution. If we just put enough bad stuff in a large enough area we'll be okay. It'll get to low enough levels that we'll be perfectly fine. In practice, this works fine until it doesn't. There's a point where the toxic contamination just like the toxic debt is enough to overwhelm the entire system and cause it all to come tumbling down with far worse consequences than it would have been if we just cut our losses and dealt with the problems head on.

1 trillion dollars is $3000 dollars from every man woman and child in the United States. In reality, you can live on about $1200 a year if you're mindbogglingly poor and covering all your very basic needs. We can far more easily catch the people with endless welfare checks if need be than we could catch the corporate giants who brought this on themselves. The government will not go broke or collapse saving our own people from starvation, but buying up massive amounts of toxic debt from corporations who spend millions to save themselves billions by using lobbyists to avoid paying taxes.

And while you're at it, legalize pot, living in crappy government housing with crappy government food and crappy government attempts to find you a crappy jobs would be far more tolerable if you were totally high. Ever faced a great depression? Ever faced a great depression on weed?