Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

One of the ideas that has been floating around for a few years now is that if universal health care is ever established in the United States it will be due to pressure from big business rather than the efforts of socialist do-gooders. I’m not an economist so forgive me if I’m completely mistaken here, but my general understanding is that American business faces a competitive disadvantage when going head to head against businesses based in nations with subsidized health care. This is due to the huge cost of insuring employees. Some of that burden has been shifted to the employees over the last few decades, but even with those concessions the cost of insurance makes American workers very expensive. This is exemplified in the current dire financial plight of both General Motors and Ford. Needless to say, the self proclaimed Libertarians of the world will fight any effort to establish universal healthcare tooth and nail. Most will say that this is because they are morons, but I’d also add that they are immoral, spiteful and hateful.

That brings me to a bit of personal history and a strategy for recouping some money I never thought I’d see again. This is a bit embarrassing, so forgive me if I’m not totally forthcoming. You see, I have an entire warehouse of these things rotting away in Shanghai.

That, my friends, is the ProjectGastro Self Surgery Kit. The plan was to sell them for $299 to those with no access to affordable healthcare and to companies looking to cancel their employees’ healthcare coverage. It was the late 90’s and do-it-yourself was all the rage. Why not self surgery? Here’s the original marketing pitch:

The ProjectGastro Self Surgery Kit marks a Major Breakthrough in over the counter consumer health care. Utilizing cutting edge surgical techniques, devices and pharmaceuticals the ProjectGastro Self Surgery Kit allows anyone to perform major surgery on themselves, their loved ones and their neighbors. This remarkable product is designed with the average consumer in mind and is so easy to use that even children and the feeble-minded will be performing major surgery on themselves in days.

Sounds perfect doesn’t it? I bet you’d love to get your hands on one. The thing is, you can’t. Not a chance. The damn things are illegal. My initial mistake was in approaching the Food and Drug Administration for approval during the Clinton administration. Clinton had packed the FDA with goody two shoes pencil necks with degrees from accredited universities and a serious grudge against the kind of innovation I was bringing to the table. Wimps.

Along comes January of 2001; a new administration in office and a fresh chance. These people didn’t care about delusional notions of public safety - surely not where money was involved. At the time I wrote these hopeful words.

Unfortunately, if you live in the United States you can’t get the Self Surgery Kit. This is due to the extreme left wing, anti-capitalist leanings of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Our hope is that the incoming Bush administration will significantly weaken consumer protections and allow the approval of the Self Surgery Kit. At present, the only area of the world where one can legally obtain a ProjectGastro Self Surgery Kit is in Southeast Asia, where consumer protections are very nearly nonexistent. ProjectGastro encourages interested consumers to call their Senators and Congresspersons to protest the communist, anti-corporate leaning of the FDA.

Alas, it was not to be. As it turns out, when you elect people into government who hate government, they aren’t so effective at the whole governance thing. Last I heard, my application to the FDA was being used as a paper hat in an interdepartmental game of cops and robbers. Such is life.

I listened in on a discussion the other evening about establishing a futures market for vaccines. Sort of an Enron of pandemic prevention and it seemed a brilliant strategy, though I must admit to being shade north of too intoxicated to really participate in any meaningful way. Nevertheless, it reminded me of that little warehouse in China and dreams I thought long dead. If we can have an Enron of vaccine, surely we can have self surgery. Perhaps now is the time?

Addendum, clarification and a little madness after the jump.

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Bob Herbert:

“If the United States were to look into a mirror right now, it wouldn’t recognize itself.

The administration that thumbed its nose at the Geneva Conventions seems equally dismissive of such grand American values as honor, justice, integrity, due process and the truth. So there was Alberto Gonzales, counselor to the president and enabler in chief of the pro-torture lobby, interviewing on Capitol Hill yesterday for the post of attorney general, which just happens to be the highest law enforcement office in the land.

Mr. Gonzales shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near that office. His judgments regarding the detention and treatment of prisoners rounded up in Iraq and the so-called war on terror have been both unsound and shameful. Some of the practices that evolved from his judgments were appalling, gruesome, medieval.

But this is the Bush administration, where incompetence and outright failure are rewarded with the nation’s highest honors. (Remember the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded last month to George Tenet et al.?) So not only is Mr. Gonzales’s name being stenciled onto the attorney general’s door, but a plush judicial seat is being readied for his anticipated elevation to the Supreme Court.

It’s a measure of the irrelevance of the Democratic Party that a man who played such a significant role in the policies that led to the still-unfolding prisoner abuse and torture scandals is expected to win easy Senate confirmation and become attorney general. The Democrats have become the 98-pound weaklings of the 21st century.”

Krugman says:

So the Bush administration wants to scrap a retirement system that works, and can be made financially sound for generations to come with modest reforms. Instead, it wants to buy into failure, emulating systems that, when tried elsewhere, have neither saved money nor protected the elderly from poverty.

The failure he’s referring to was British and Chilean and may soon be our own if Mr. Bush has his way. In a progressive society one would imagine that the goal would be to increase benefits and stability over time as a means toward increasing the overall quality of life enjoyed by the citizens of that society. We can’t even have that conversation. Instead we’re hearing the cries of a false ‘crisis’ over and over again, to cynically sell decreased benefits, less security, and profligate long-term borrowing. Why? Does Mr. Bush believe that he really needs to fuck up every single thing before his term is up?

For a more informed take on the dollar’s decline than what was offered in my own paranoid blatherings, have a look at this article in the Economist. Since it’s Cutting & Pasting day at Rowhouse Logic, here’s a little from the article:

Many American policymakers talk as though it is better to rely entirely on a falling dollar to solve, somehow, all their problems. Conceivably, it could happen—but such a one-sided remedy would most likely be far more painful than they imagine. America’s challenge is not just to reduce its current-account deficit to a level which foreigners are happy to finance by buying more dollar assets, but also to persuade existing foreign creditors to hang on to their vast stock of dollar assets, estimated at almost $11 trillion. A fall in the dollar sufficient to close the current-account deficit might destroy its safe-haven status. If the dollar falls by another 30%, as some predict, it would amount to the biggest default in history: not a conventional default on debt service, but default by stealth, wiping trillions off the value of foreigners’ dollar assets.

The dollar’s loss of reserve-currency status would lead America’s creditors to start cashing those cheques—and what an awful lot of cheques there are to cash. As that process gathered pace, the dollar could tumble further and further. American bond yields (long-term interest rates) would soar, quite likely causing a deep recession. Americans who favour a weak dollar should be careful what they wish for. Cutting the budget deficit looks cheap at the price.

Via TPM

-Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao on the decline of the U.S. Dollar.

I wouldn’t bet on it Mr. Jiabao

I’ve noticed that whenever I try to discuss my concerns about the declining value of the dollar or the housing bubble, I generally get the same peculiar reaction. It usually comes in the form of a glazed, disturbed look that you might give to some gun nut who is stocking up on canned goods and getting ready to move into his bomb shelter in order to wait out whatever apocalyptic, nightmare scenario is haunting his drug addled mind. That’s usually followed by some sympathetic comment to my wife about what a nice person she is to put up with such an odd fellow.

I hope the owners of those gazes are right and that I am indeed a nut.

Nevertheless, my own personal concern is this; my wife and I have been saving up money to buy a house. We have managed to put away, what is to us, a pretty decent pile of cash. Unfortunately this seems like an awful time to buy real estate. Housing prices have skyrocketed over the last decade and in my estimation, uninformed though it may be, have in many cases exceeded their real value.

Now this isn’t as big a concern in Philadelphia as it is in other major cities, especially on the West Coast, as our housing prices are still relatively low and houses themselves are in short supply. It’s still a concern, especially when you consider that the price of a house or condo in some Center City neighborhoods is often four or five times what it was ten years ago.

The next problem is this; if we decide not to buy until the market has completely settled or the bubble has popped, this really isn’t a good time to be holding onto a big pile of cash. Even with the very best interest rates on a CD or Money Market account, I have concern that those interest rates will not fully cover the decline in the value of the dollar. Additionally, the stock market seems like a less than stellar option right now.

I don’t have any answers, just allot of questions.

Just to clarify, I’m not a gun nut, I don’t have a bomb shelter, I just checked the kitchen cabinet and the only canned goods I have are two cans of Pepper Pot soup and one can of Chicken Noodle soup.

Rubin, discussing the rapidly declining value of the dollar and potential consequences:

“If markets begin to fear long-term fiscal disarray and if foreign providers of the capital inflows upon which we have now become so enormously dependent share this fear and also develop a concern about our currency, then the markets may begin to demand sharply higher interest rates on long-term debt and possibly even create conditions of serious disruptions in our financial markets, with all the problems that that can lead to for our economy,”

It’s the serious disruptions that worry me. Since I’m not an economist, I won’t pretend to do any real analysis of what’s happening. One of the major fears, which appears to be emerging as something of a reality, is that the Chinese government will divest itself of its U.S. holdings, at which point we’ll all be in for an interesting ride.

In a post on the same topic Djhlights asks a great question. I wonder if I can privatize my Social Security funds in Euros?