I asked Noam Chomsky what his thoughts on the current excitement in libertarianism were, and in particular, I asked him what he thought about the idea that libertarians were simply "petite capitalists." He said why not call them "grande capitalists" because apparently "they regard unaccountable private tyranny as fine and dandy."

Note: Chomsky is a self-identified libertarian-socialist, which is completely different than the Ron Paul and Glenn Beck brand of libertarianism that's in vogue.

Who says there's nothing good in the Senate healthcare bill?

Atul Gawande in the New Yorker:

Among the most important, and least noticed, provisions in the reform legislation is one in the House bill to expand our ability to collect national health statistics. The poverty of our health-care information is an embarrassment. At the end of each month, we have county-by-county data on unemployment, and we have prompt and detailed data on the price of goods and commodities; we can use these indicators to guide our economic policies. But try to look up information on your community's medical costs and utilization--or simply try to find out how many people died from heart attacks or pneumonia or surgical complications--and you will discover that the most recent data are at least three years old, if they exist at all, and aren't broken down to a county level that communities can learn from. It's like driving a car with a speedometer that tells you only how fast all cars were driving, on average, three years ago. We have better information about crops and cows than we do about patients. If health-care reform is to succeed, the final legislation must do something about this.

As much as I love how libertarians are able to find common ground between conservatives and liberals on social issues, such as gay marriage, it comes along with hard-right capitalist ideology.

I believe in the power of labels, and I want to introduce a new term: petite capitalists.

These are people who don't own any capital themselves, but admire those who do, and support policies that primarily benefit capitalists.

Atul Gawande in the New Yorker:

The bill tests, for instance, a number of ways that federal insurers could pay for care. Medicare and Medicaid currently pay clinicians the same amount regardless of results. But there is a pilot program to increase payments for doctors who deliver high-quality care at lower cost, while reducing payments for those who deliver low-quality care at higher cost. There's a program that would pay bonuses to hospitals that improve patient results after heart failure, pneumonia, and surgery. There's a program that would impose financial penalties on institutions with high rates of infections transmitted by health-care workers. Still another would test a system of penalties and rewards scaled to the quality of home health and rehabilitation care.

Atul Gawande in the New Yorker:

Medicine involves hundreds of thousands of local entities across the country--hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, home-health agencies, drug and device suppliers. They provide complex services for the thousands of diseases, conditions, and injuries that afflict us. They want to provide good care, but they also measure their success by the amount of revenue they take in, and, as each pursues its individual interests, the net result has been disastrous. Our fee-for-service system, doling out separate payments for everything and everyone involved in a patient's care, has all the wrong incentives: it rewards doing more over doing right, it increases paperwork and the duplication of efforts, and it discourages clinicians from working together for the best possible results.

Libertarianism seems to be in vogue. More and more wing-nut talking heads are claiming to be libertarian as a way to avoid the well-deserved sting of being labeled a Republican hack.

I was just sent this survey showing that there's a growing percentage of philosophers who subscribe to libertarianism now. Which is unfortunate. Fat Cat Republicans must be laughing themselves silly all the way to the bank, knowing that they finally found a way to dupe intellectuals into accepting economic positions that enable them to make the next big raping of the economy.

I believe people are mincing words talking about how there is no "right to health care."

There is no right to public education, and yet we preserve and enforce the right. In fact, we find it irresponsible and illegal for a parent to not make their children go to school.

If Ron Paul went out talking about how there is no right to public education instead of no right to health care, many more people would think he's a lunatic.

We choose what we have a right to.

From Tim O'Reilly:

Driving home from work, listening to NPR's story about health care costs, I couldn't help but be struck by a couple of numbers. The Obama health plan will cost a trillion dollars we're told. A TRILLION sounds big enough to end the debate, doesn't it?

Then I hear, almost as a footnote, that that trillion is over ten years. That's still a big number to be sure. A hundred billion dollars a year. But then later in the story, I hear that US total health care costs are $2.2 trillion a year. Suddenly, that $100 billion a year doesn't sound so big. That's only a 4.5% increase.

Interesting article in Newsweek