Tom Naughton

My Hollywood buddy Paul is relentless.  Here’s another round in our on-going email debate:

 

Round Seven – Paul

Tom –

Regarding that smallpox vaccine, I think all government contracts should be open to competitive bids.  What’s more, it surprises me Republicans haven’t jumped on this.  And if the shelf life of this vaccine is only 36 months, it strikes me as ridiculous.

But does that mean the government should never fund vaccines? No, I wouldn’t conclude that.  If indeed a real epidemic threatens, only the Federal Government has the funding to manufacture nationally sufficient stockpiles.

I mean, it’s not like we can depend on private sources to create a vaccine for 300 million people.  Nor can we expect lower-income people to pay $35 per dose to vaccinate themselves at their local Walgreens.  Only the Federal Government can implement a national effort free of charge to everyone.  With schools and local governments encouraging participation.  Which will, in fact, be necessary when the next pandemic strikes.

And pandemics aren’t the time for testing Libertarian principles.  Milton Friedman would back me here.

With regards to Medicare, let’s roll back to the summer of ’09.  At that point the Tea Party was rearing its stupid face.  Or the faces of older, angry Whites opposing health reform.  With signs that actually read “Hands Off My Medicare”.

Stupid as they are, those seniors certainly know that Medicare is essential to their survival.  A point, apparently lost on you.

No one has the cash these days to fund their own retirements.  And no one would ever inherit anything from their parents if Medicare didn’t exist.  Our parents would all go bankrupt by age 80, at the latest.

Don’t you get that, Tom? Or has your family been so lucky you really have no clue?

And if we privatize Medicare, as Paul Ryan recommends, characters like Ron Perlman will be vying for the contracts, or charging into the markets.  Politically-connected guys who get exclusive bids.  The privatization of Medicare would be their mother lode!

Therefore I prefer good old civil servants.  Administrators with no allegiance to any corporation.  And safe from getting fired when new Presidents take office.  Or when Congress suddenly shifts.

Finally Tom, I must note, the word ‘Libertarian’ forces me to use the spelling option almost every time.  This should be a red flag to anyone in your movement.  Here in Hollywood we know: hard to spell titles never sell.

Paul

 

Round Seven – Tom

Greetings, Paul –

Regarding that smallpox vaccine, I think all government contracts should be open to competitive bids.  What’s more, it surprises me Republicans haven’t jumped on this.  And if the shelf life of this vaccine is only 36 months, it strikes me as ridiculous.

It’s nice that you believe in responsible purchases by government, but surely you know that wasn’t my point.  I said in an earlier email that if the government takes over the healthcare system, decisions will be based on political connections, not what’s good for us.  This article I linked is a perfect example of what happens when self-interested government officials are empowered to spend huge sums of money on healthcare — is that too Pollyanna of me?

But does that mean the government should never fund vaccines? No, I wouldn’t conclude that.  If indeed a real epidemic threatens, only the Federal Government has the funding to manufacture nationally sufficient stockpiles.

Excuse me…  have to chuckle a bit…  did you just try to tell me that if there’s ever a drug that EVERYONE needs, the greedy pharmaceutical companies won’t be capable of manufacturing it?!! An instant market of hundreds of millions of people, and the pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t be satisfied with earning a couple of bucks per dose? That’s laughable.  We have enough Tylenol for everyone, don’t we? When the cold and flu season comes around, I don’t hear about a shortage of DayQuil.

I mean, it ‘s not like we can depend on private sources to create a vaccine for 300 million people.

You do depend on private sources to create vaccines.  The government doesn’t manufacture them; it buys them.

We have fewer domestic manufacturers of vaccines now because the Clinton administration imposed “voluntary” price controls but refused to place any limits on liability.  Since all vaccines produce negative reactions in at least a small fraction of the population, most domestic drug-makers quit making vaccines rather than put themselves in a situation where they’d be forced to accept small profits while facing unlimited liability.  That’s why we had a shortage of flu vaccine a few years ago, when our government was scrambling to find enough foreign-produced vaccine.  As I said in an earlier email, if you want a product readily available, you’d better hope to hell someone’s making a profit.

Nor can we expect lower-income people to pay $35 per dose to vaccinate themselves at their local Walgreens.  Only the Federal Government can implement a national effort free of charge to everyone.  With schools and local governments encouraging participation.  Which will, in fact, be necessary when the next pandemic strikes.

I disagree that people can’t find a way to spend $35 to save their own lives, but again, that’s not the point.  Our government just wasted nearly a half-billion dollars on a drug that apparently isn’t even necessary, just to say thanks to a big contributor.  That’s what happens when you’re empowered to spend other people’s money.

When you say “free of charge to everyone,” are you suggesting the government doesn’t have to tax citizens to pay for the drugs, or do you mean “free of charge to people who don’t pay taxes and feel entitled to live off the earnings of others”?

And pandemics aren’t the time for testing Libertarian principles.  Milton Friedman would back me here.

I agree.  Libertarian principles should be tested long before a pandemic strikes.  Because when the pandemic does strike, we’ll learn the hard way how incompetent our government is, as the residents of New Orleans discovered after Hurricane Katrina.

With regards to Medicare, let’s roll back to the summer of ’09.  At that point the Tea Party was rearing its stupid face.  Or the faces of older, angry Whites opposing health reform.  With signs that actually read “Hands Off My Medicare”.

I didn’t see those, if they existed, those people don’t represent the majority of the Tea Party members.

Stupid as they are, those seniors certainly know that Medicare is essential to their survival.  A point, apparently lost on you.

That explains why no one lived to a ripe old age before Medicare came along.

No one has the cash these days to fund their own retirements.

That would be news to the millions of Americans with 401Ks.

And no one would ever inherit anything from their parents if Medicare didn’t exist.

That explains why no one ever inherited anything from their parents before Medicare came along.

Our parents would all go bankrupt by age 80, at the latest.

I see you still believe Medicare somehow magically causes the cost of treatment to vanish.  Same apparently goes for government-funded retirements, only in reverse – the money just appears, like magic.

I covered this in a previous email, but I’ll go ahead and re-state the blindingly obvious: Medicare simply transfers the cost of treatment to the taxpayers.  So if the cost of medical treatments will bankrupt all of our parents by age 80 without Medicare, then the taxes required to fund those same medical treatments through Medicare will likewise bankrupt our parents, along with everyone else.  Transferring a cost doesn’t reduce it.

If no one can afford to save for retirement, then the government can’t possibly fund everyone’s retirement either, because people who can’t afford to save for retirement likewise can’t afford the taxes required to fund everyone else’s retirement.  (Of course, saving for retirement would be a hell of a lot easier if our average wage-earner’s total tax burden hadn’t gone up 20% since the 1950s.)

You seem to believe government has the power to repeal the laws of mathematics.  It doesn’t.  And here’s what the mathematics say: Most of the Medicare costs seniors rack up are incurred in the last two years of their lives — in other words, they result from ridiculously expensive treatments for people who are going to die soon anyway.  So there is an alternative to going bankrupt: we accept that life is a fatal condition, as an old person without Medicare probably would.  If I were 80 years old, had a half-million dollars saved, and some doctor wanted me to plough through my savings to live a couple more years, I’d tell him to piss off.  I’d rather check out and leave the half-million to my kids.  (If I were 55, that would be different — I’d still have a lot of life and earning power ahead of me.)  But when it’s “free” medical care courtesy of the taxpayers, of course I’ll spend whatever it takes to live two more years.  Again, that’s what happens when self-interested people get to spend someone else’s money.

Here’s what else the mathematics say: when you incur a bit more debt each year, the debt grows exponentially and eventually the interest on the debt exceeds your income, unless your income somehow grows exponentially.  Many consumers have learned this the hard way, and nations aren’t immune from the math.  The United States is officially 14 trillion dollars in debt, which is outrageous, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Depending on whose figures you use, Medicare alone has somewhere between $50 trillion and $80 trillion in unfunded forward liability.  If we use the lower figure, that’s more than $300,000 for every working adult.  We will never pay that bill.  It isn’t possible.  At some point in the next 10 or 15 years (if we’re lucky), the interest on the debt will exceed tax revenues, no matter how high we raise taxes.  When that day comes, all these government goodies will stop.  Not just Medicare — everything.  It’s a mathematical certainty, not a right-wing theory.

So when I hear leftists whining for more government handouts, I hear children who, upon learning that their parents are in hock up to their ears, have been funding the entire household on credit-card cash advances and have tapped the last credit card, immediately demand a raise in their allowance and help with the college tuition.  They just know, by gosh, that somehow, some way, Mom and Dad can continue the spending and even increase it.

There is no free wealth.  We cannot continue spending wealth that wasn’t produced.  We’ve bled the country dry and have already taken out credit cards in our kids’ names and run those up to the limits.  You can cry a river over all the old people who can’t afford to rack up hundreds of thousand of dollars in medical treatments during their last year or two on earth, but that doesn’t change the mathematical fact that the government can’t possibly afford those costs either – and attempting to do so will only hasten the day when the government either defaults on its debts, hyperinflates the currency, or implements an austerity program that will make Greece’s austerity program look like a picnic.  Any of the above will likely cause an economic crash that exceeds the levels of the Great Depression.

Don’t you get that, Tom?

I get the math.  You don’t.  You still believe the government can create wealth and goodies out of nothing, like Santa Claus.

Or has your family been so lucky you really have no clue?

Yes, my dad did quite well financially — all because of luck.  First, there were the family connections.  His grandfather was a coal miner who emigrated to the U.S.  alone at age 13.  His father was an alcoholic railroad worker who raised my dad and his brother in a small house on the blue-collar side of town.  They shared a bedroom with one bed until my uncle left for college.  This is, of course, the kind of family that feeds directly into the old-boy network.

Dad was lucky enough to develop a childhood stuttering problem that left him insecure and painfully shy, and later lucky enough to begin working at age 15 and continue working as he put himself through college — with a few bucks here and there from his mother, who had saved money by stealing from the old man’s wallet whenever he passed out drunk.  One of Dad’s lucky jobs was hauling railroad ties on his back.  My mom remembers him being so covered in creosote, he looked like a black guy.

After he left college and became a salesman for IBM and later NCR — always afraid he’d start stuttering during a sales call — Dad was lucky enough to save like a madman.  Vacations consisted of driving to visit relatives or friends.  Weekend entertainment was playing cards with friends.  Thanks to this luck, he bought his own business at age 36, thus risking everything he’d saved, with a wife and three kids to support.

After several years of having the good fortune to work his ass off building the business, he started doing quite well — but continued saving like a madman.  He never bought an expensive car, never joined the nearby country club despite his love for golf.  Thanks to this bit of luck, he survived the early ’80s recession by paying himself a dollar a year for three years, funding the business from his savings while refusing to lay off anyone on his staff.  Despite this luck, he at one point went through a period of deep depression because he believed he’d soon have to close down his business .. thanks in part to the geniuses in the Illinois legislature raising payroll taxes in the middle of a recession, costing him an extra $40,000 in a year during which he was already losing money and running the business with his savings.  He studied for a real estate license just in case.

As he neared 60 years of age, confident his business wouldn’t sink in some future recession, he finally started treating himself and my mom to more of the good things in life…  vacations overseas, expensive golf clubs, a nicer house, etc.  He had a pretty good decade, then succumbed to Alzheimer’s.

So yes, Paul, by the leftist definition, he was a really lucky guy.  A “winner of life’s lottery,” I believe is the preferred term among leftist politicians.

My mom is now paying $5,000 per month to keep him in a nice nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients.  If she ends up in a similar home someday, if all the money my lucky dad earned throughout his lifetime is gone by the time they’re both gone, that’s fine with me.  I would never dream of asking other people to pay for their care so I can inherit his money.

And if we privatize Medicare, as Paul Ryan recommends, characters like Ron Perlman will be vying for the contracts, or charging into the markets.  Politically-connected guys who get exclusive bids.  The privatization of Medicare would be their mother lode!

Well, let’s see how that would work.  I’m the CEO of a private — and therefore profit-motivated — business.  Along comes Ron Perlman, offering to sell me a drug nobody is sure anyone needs, for the low, low price of $433 million.  How do you think that would play out? What would be the self-interested decision?

Therefore I prefer good old civil servants.  Administrators with no allegiance to any corporation.

Riiiiight.  Give a man a job in government, and he immediately ceases acting from his own self-interest and starts caring only about what’s good for society.  That’s why in the states that are going broke, you see all those selfless civil servants offering to give up part of the their ridiculously generous pensions so the pension liability doesn’t bankrupt the state.

Did you miss that part in the article where the government employees stepped in and made sure good ol’ Ron Perlman got his $433 million for a drug we don’t need? Are you still under the delusion that government employees who get to spend other people’s money don’t operate in their own interest?

But it’s libertarians who have a Pollyanna problem…

And safe from getting fired when new Presidents take office.  Or when Congress suddenly shifts.

That’s actually one of the biggest problems with civil servants.  It’s nearly impossible fire the ones who are stupid or incompetent unless they show up at work firing a gun or tell a female co-worker she looks hot in that dress.

Finally Tom, I must note, the word ‘Libertarian’ forces me to use the spelling option almost every time.  This should be a red flag to anyone in your movement.  Here in Hollywood we know: hard to spell titles never sell.

No, that’s not the biggest problem libertarians have.  A fellow comedian, of all people, explained the problem to me: “Libertarians are the most intelligent, well-informed, rational people I’ve met,” he said.  (He didn’t say “wonkish,” but that could be what he meant.)

“And that’s your problem.  I find your arguments very convincing and very logical.  But most voters aren’t logical.  They’re emotional.  And until you can learn to play hardball against the team that tells the voters that shrinking the size of the government is going to kill babies and old people, you’re going to lose.”

He was right.  So the government will continue to grow and take on debt, and someday in our lifetimes it’ll go totally bust.  Then everyone will lose.

Tom

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 7th, 2011 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Random Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.