The anxiety society

The last quarter century saw the triumph of right-wing ideas, and as a result, our society overall is less wealthy, less healthy and less happy. This is not an accident.

Welcome to the anxiety society.

The ideas pioneered by such as Milton Friedman satisfy one desire and one desire only: ideological purity. If you believe that any collective endeavor is per se a bad thing, without regard to simple metrics like efficiency and desirable outcomes, you'll embrace a perversity like, say, our current health system. America needs to move away from the demands of right-wing ideology to find solutions that actually work - that produce better outcomes for all of us, that don't have as their primary design the happiness of some hacky overpaid ideologues at the American Enterprise Institute.

There are many reasons why the country is ready for a paradigm shift in a new direction. One is the stunning inability of the right-wing system to provide anything approaching security. In our system, one sick child has the potential to put you in the poorhouse - can someone explain to me how that is desirable? Does anyone seriously believe that this is the best we can do?

The underlying model is one of social Darwinism, which the right very certainly believes in, all the blather about "intelligent design" notwithstanding. The lack of security and the resulting anxiety are not incidental flaws - they are foundational and systemic to the model. The idea is to eliminate all vestiges of communitarian action that might provide a floor beneath which you cannot fall. Meanwhile, in the long march to right-wing utopia, in government, they're forced to deal with actual policy problems. This is the underlying thread that ties together Katrina and all the other failures of the right: they don't want the system to work, cannot allow it to work, lest that disprove their theses.

Exhibit "A" on the long list of failed policies should be the new Medicare drug benefit. First, it's obscenely expensive, estimated at twice the cost the administration originally quoted to Congress (said estimate, since they knew better, also has to count as yet another Bush lie, but I digress). Second, it's absurd; the "donut hole" in this benefit - the benefit does not cover costs above $3,000 and below $7,250 - provides an incentive to either not get enough medicine, or too much, to stay outside the hole. Since patients, doctors and the drug companies all have a clear incentive to go higher, that is exactly what they will do, with the full budgetary nightmare this implies. Third, the enabling legislation - true to business-friendly form - does not allow Medicare to bargain with the drug companies for lower prices, such as are affforded to bulk buyers in the private sector. Is that the best use of our tax dollars? Fourth, the benefit, again true to form, mandates that seniors sign up with a private plan - of which there are so many, offering so many options that can't be easily compared, that coverage is presently at under 10% of the eligible population. Fifth, what this plan calls "choice", should be called risk - to which ordinary people are averse, except that in the brave new world of the Chicago school, we're supposed to embrace it, like it or not. Awful policy, wasteful and inefficient at once? Why, yes. Social engineering? But of course. An accident? Absolutely not.

The ideas of choice and compettion have made this country great. But we did not sign up for a war of all against all. The question is how much longer we'll put up with being lab rats in Milton Friedman's laboratory.