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March 13, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
15:57
1611 True News: Medicare, Poverty, Terrorism - from Freedomain Radio

How much power does Paul Krugman think the government needs to solve the health care crisis?

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing magnificently.
This is a roundup of some of the more recent news stories from a philosophical standpoint.
Also, if you're interested, I'd be happy to start starting a new service or program if you email me at youtube at freedomainradio.com.
I will be happy to, every week or two, gather together the smartest and most brilliant questions and they're all, I must say, pretty smart and brilliant and do my best to answer them using this video medium.
This is from the New York Times, Paul Krugman.
He is an economist and quite a prize-winning economist.
He's got an article called Health Reform Myths that came out March 12, 2010.
And it's interesting to me just how warped an addict's thinking can be.
So, he says, the first of these myths, which has been all over the airwaves lately, is a claim that President Obama...
He's proposing a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, the share of GDP currently spent on health.
He goes on to say, well, if having the government regulate and subsidize health insurance is a takeover, that takeover happened long ago.
Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care.
While private insurance pays for barely more than a third, the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses.
And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated.
So, I mean, this is really fascinating when you think about it.
He's openly saying that the government directly pays for almost half of healthcare plans.
He is directly saying that the government subsidizes and tightly regulates the, quote, private insurance market.
What he doesn't say, which I think is very important as well, is that the government provides a monopoly to the doctors through the coercive enforcement of the AMA. And I know that some doctors have written to me and said, the AMA sucks like a vacuum and we hate it.
I understand that, but the reality is, economically, it enormously drives up the price, which is why doctors in the US get paid about twice what they get paid in Europe, because there's this very tight protection of doctors through this government monopoly, which was not the case in the past, costs in medical care, costs have gone up considerably since the creation of this monopoly.
That doctors have to spend almost a decade in school to say, "Oh, you have an infection.
Here's a prescription, which you could train someone to do in about ...
Oh, actually, I think I did just train you to do it." The government controls the supply of doctors.
It controls the cost of doctors through the monopoly.
It controls the The legal framework that the doctors operate in, the tort law, right?
You can get sued for X, Y, and Z, which adds tens of thousands of dollars per year to doctors overhead.
The government controls how many doctors there are, how much they can charge fundamentally.
It controls the regulatory and legal environment that the doctors operate in.
It spends almost half the money that is spent on healthcare, or I guess one twelfth of GDP. It tightly controls and regulates The insurance market is left in the insurance market.
When it really comes right down to it, the question I always have for status, the question I always have for these people, the blinders that I would die to take off their eyes, is simply this.
How much power does your system need?
How much power does your system need?
You already have the biggest, most expensive, most profligate, most heavily armed, most controlling government that was ever created in the history of the planet.
I mean, when these social programs first went in in the 1960s or further back in the 1930s for Social Security, when these programs went into place, I mean, there were no computers.
There was no deduction from source income.
The GDP of America and other Western countries was a tiny fraction of what it is now, and taxes of that tiny fraction of the current GDP were themselves a tiny fraction of the GDP. So, the amount of money and power that is available to these governments is vastly in excess.
Of anything that could be remotely dreamed in their wildest, unicorn-rid, crack-addict delusions of the people who created these social programs.
There's almost infinitely more money and power available now to solve these problems than when these problems were promised to be solved in the 1930s to the 1960s.
So, if you say, I only need $500,000 for my business plan, and then I'm going to be perfectly fine, and then you end up getting $50 million and blow it all, does anyone really believe that you ever intended to use only $500,000?
Well, of course not, right? So, the question that I would always ask these people is that, If, if, Paul, listen to me, listen to me, if you ever, ever hear this, and I doubt you will, because like most intellectuals, you have a bubble of reality that does not let, of unreality that doesn't let anything through.
But if you ever were to hear this, Paul Krugman, please answer me this, answer me this.
If you have the most powerful government in history, with the most staggering revenues in history, with the capacity to borrow trillions of dollars more than it was ever imagined by the people who set up these programs, with all of this money and power and computerization which allows you to control paperwork in a manner undreamed of by the originators of these systems, since you have so much power and so much money and so much control, Why is there still a problem?
Why is there still a problem?
The amount of government intervention and control over just the medical industry is vastly, vastly, vastly in excess of that which was dreamed of originally.
So why is there still a problem?
If you were supposed to be able to solve the problem with 5% of the money and power that you have now, now that you have 20 times that money and power, Why is there still a problem?
But people can't think that, right?
They can't think, well, we have so much more money in power than we ever dreamed of, but there's still a huge fundamental problem.
They never imagine that It is the power and the control and the coercion at the root of it.
The coercion of monopolizing doctors, the coercion of this hideous tort system, the coercion of taxation, the coercion of counterfeiting through the Fed, the coercion of borrowing and selling off the kidneys, lives, brains and souls of children into the future to foreigners.
They never imagine, or they can't imagine, that it is that power that has created the problem.
Because these addicts always believe one more hit is going to solve the problem.
One more drink is going to make everything better.
One more expansion of power is going to make everything better.
No, that's complete madness.
Because at the same time, You see that just recently, in early March 2010, there was a 21% cut in Medicare benefits, which is causing a lot of doctors to kick Medicare patients off their patient roles because they can't afford,
they physically, mathematically, economically cannot afford to take the couple of bucks to see a Medicare patient when their office expenses with property taxes from the government is extracting from them is so high, when their malpractice insurance is so high, when they have so much debt from this ridiculous amount of schooling that you need to get in order to stitch up somebody's cut.
So, they physically can't afford 25 bucks or whatever it is that is offered by Medicare to see patients.
They can't afford it. It's a money loser.
And this is the genuine tragedy.
People who are interested in a free society, like myself, are always accused, oh, you don't want to help the poor, oh, you don't want to help the sick, and so on.
Well, that's all nonsense.
It's just prejudice.
It's just a kind of bigotry.
Because the facts are completely the opposite.
If you look at when the government was much smaller, from the 1950s to the 1960s, very, very clear, and I'll put the references off to the right, the poverty rate was declining by 1% a year.
Poverty rate was declining by 1% a year among minorities as well.
Poverty was being solved by freedom.
Poverty was being solved by freedom.
And this is during the time of the massive expansion in the warfare state under Eisenhower.
But poverty was being solved.
You understand? Government does not solve problems.
Government prevents the solution of problems.
The reason the welfare state was created was because the problem of poverty was being solved.
And if the problem of poverty is solved, government power diminishes.
You understand, right?
If there are virtually no poor people, you must have a smaller government, because there'll be much less crime, because there will be a demand for private schools, or at least education will become much better.
And that there will be no need for a massive government handouts to the poor, if there are no poor.
So you understand, the government moves in to prevent the solutions to problems.
Because if there are no problems, we don't need a government.
So the government is funded by problems.
And so every time a problem is about to be solved by voluntarism, the government moves in and kills the solution.
And this is exactly what happened.
Poverty was being solved by the free market.
As you would naturally expect if you have any brains about economics.
Poverty was being solved by the free market.
The government said, oh shit, if poverty is solved, we're a hell of a lot smaller.
We lose a lot of power. So, right?
You have to get back to bread and circuses in order to keep the poor dependent on you.
Otherwise, who are you going to bribe for votes?
Who are you going to bribe for votes if you don't have people who need stuff from you?
So... The government is not interested in solving these problems and what is absolutely terrible is that the poor and the elderly and those who genuinely need a lot of medical care and who are poor are running out of options.
See, the government is like a pusher.
Not like a pusher. It is a pusher, in that the government will give you, and by you I mean perhaps even a generation or two, free samples in order to get you addicted to statism, in order to get you addicted to the fruits of violence that the government regularly pumps into the overcharged arteries of the nation.
Once you are addicted, the government will begin to withdraw what it provides, because that means that you're more and more dependent upon the government, in the same way that a pusher will give you free crack cocaine, and then will start to charge you more and more once you're already hooked.
So, Medicare was free!
Medicare and Medicaid was free!
Just as Social Security was free, and it was just this last week that the government began to try and hauling in the IOUs that are in the Treasury, because there's no Social Security.
There's no Social Security. It's a huge Ponzi scheme.
It's just a way of extracting money from the young and poor and giving it to the oldest and richest generation in the history of the planet.
There's no Social Security money whatsoever.
It's just a bunch of dusty old IOUs that, because the money that was taxed for Social Security, was spent decades ago.
The government is running out of money for Social Security.
The government is running out of money for Medicare.
And what's happening now, and what's going to be completely gruesome, is the...
What is going to result is that the poor are going to get progressively poorer.
The sick are going to get progressively sicker.
And oh boy, don't you just know it?
Don't you just know it? That in the absence of strenuous efforts from people like yourself and myself, all that's going to happen, all that's going to happen, is that It is the vestiges of freedom and of voluntarism and of peaceful human interaction that is going to get progressively blamed for the coming disasters of violence.
Violence doesn't solve problems.
The government does not solve problems.
The government thrives on problems like flies on shit.
So all it wants to do is produce more and more shit.
So let's stop supporting it and let's start looking for free and voluntary solutions.
The last thing I wanted to mention is that Karl Rove has written a smarmy memoir.
And, you know, boy, talk about mental health.
I think his mother and his grandmother both committed suicide, and he has not processed any of that.
So the murderousness and self-destruction within the family, I think, has been clearly translated into an addiction to war and violence in the man.
But that, by the by, the new lie is going around that there were no attacks under President Bush, and there has been one, I think, the Fort Hood shooting under Obama.
I mean, how can you even look at a statement like that and not just double over laughing and crying?
Of course there have been attacks under Bush.
What do you think is happening to the soldiers in Iraq?
The American soldiers in Iraq are dying by the thousands, are dying by the tens of thousands if you count those who die in accidents and other forms of death and mutilation that occur even outside of combat.
Tens of thousands of Americans have been killed by terrorists, by insurgents, by freedom fighters, whatever you want to call them, the people who are attacking them in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So to say there have been no attacks upon Americans During Bush, he moved all of these soldiers into the combat zone, and they're all getting blown up by these people, and of course those are attacks upon Americans.
Oh, but it's the American soil that counts.
Well, that soldier's nonsense, right?
So, of course, there are far more attacks and deaths upon Americans since 9-11 than on 9-11 because of these two insane, murderous, destructive, bloody wars.
But will you ever see this mentioned in the mainstream media?
Well, of course not, of course not, of course not, because ideas only flourish in the mainstream media.
Like, why does Paul Krugman have, I think it's a Nobel Prize or something like that, why does he have a prize?
Why did Keynes win over Friedman?
Well, why did sort of the statist economists work over, win over, win relative to the free market economists?
Well, Keynes won relative to Friedman because Keynes It was useful to the ruling classes, because he justified increased expansions of power, profligacy, and money printing relative to the free market economists.
If the free market economists win, the government power severely diminishes.
If the statist economists win, then government power vastly increases.
And so, of course, the government is going to fund money towards the statist economist, who is going to have prizes, who is going to increase funding to universities, who is going to bribe all of these people to justify The increases in state power.
If you want to look at the history of ideas, the ideas that win are those that serve the ruling class.
Of course, because intellectuals, for the most part, are just lick-spickle court toadies to the ruling classes.
So anyway, I just wanted to point out these three little things.
I hope that this week finds you absolutely wonderful.
I hope that you are having a great time in life and we will win.
I hope that you understand that the truth consistently and passionately portrayed will always win in the long run.
So, you know, take heart and walk upright and feel proud that you are doing your part to save the world of the future for the future.
Thank you so much for watching.
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