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The Third Option

Submitted by Ken Watts on Wed, 11/11/2009 - 09:18

THE CONTINUUM I PLACED health care on in the previous post was a simple line, stretching from Socialism, on the left, to Capitalism on the right:

ContinuumSocialimsmCapitalism

Using that model, our current health care system shows up about here:

ContinuumMostlyCapitalism

By contrast, the Democratic plan, in either of its configurations, shows up about here:

ContinuumTwoThirdsCapitalism

"Obama care" is not an attempt to seriously socialize health care. It's an attempt to make a capitalist system a little more stable and a little more responsive to the people.

This can be hard to understand in the present climate because our thinking is stuck on the continuum above—but that continuum does not represent the real world.

It's meant to be a kind of map, showing where the power lies.

A completely socialist system would be a system in which the government owned and ran everything.

All decisions about how we live our lives, about the allocations of resources, about work hours, pay, quality of housing, quality of food products, education, etc. would be made by the government.

In the case of health care, it would be like the military system.

The government would run all the hospitals and clinics, the doctors would work for the government, as would the administrators, nurses, technicians, janitors, etc.

A completely capitalist system would be a system in which those decisions were decided by market forces.

The market would decide how resources were allocated.

Private corporations would decide who got health care, and how much and when.

And, of course, in a completely capitalistic system, the government wouldn't interfere at all.

The "market" would take care of all the regulation.

It's pretty clear how "the market" would make these decisions—we only need to look at what's been happening recently to health care.

The market is not a god. It doesn't act of its own volition, and it is not above manipulation.

Insofar as a country is completely capitalist, the market will be manipulated, and controlled, by the most powerful companies and people.

So the power continuum we've been talking about, in terms of real world consequences, really looks like this:

ContinuumMostlyWealth

The big corporations and the super-wealthy will call the shots.

When a sacrifice is necessary, they will not be the ones to make it.

When a profit is possible, they will be the ones who take it.

On the simplistic continuum above, the only solution to that is socialism: more government control.

If we don't want the X to be at the far right end, we have to move it to the left.

If we don't want government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy, we will have to have more and bigger government control.

Being less capitalistic means being more socialist, as long as we stay on the continuum.

But there's another alternative.

There's a third center of power which is not represented in the standard model above:

TriangleGovernmentWealthThePeople

As long as we stay on the standard continuum, the only role the people have is to choose between government and wealth.

But the people are a serious center of power themselves, and should be considered, not only as the choosers, but as one of the choices.

Next time: how the new player
changes the game...