#carson daily

[fatimazainab]

Anne Carson, from Autobiography of Red

[bunbunbl0gs]

l&C🌟🎶🎼🗡️🎹🎸🎬

masterlist

purple hearts masterlist

[milkibana]

[dailyanarchistposts]

Author: Kevin Carson Topics: health care, left-libertarianism

Mutualist, at the livejournal blog of the same name, writes on “Building Consensus with Egalitarian Liberals in Healthcare Reform.”

His argument is that libertarians and egalitarian liberals are likely to disagree on demand-side issues like single-payer insurance vs. medical savings accounts, because they’re so closely tied up with differences in purchasing power. But liberals are more likely to be sympathetic to proposals to open up the supply of healthcare to competition. Breaking the power of the license cartels and the patent system, and eliminating barriers to a fully functioning market (i.e., permitting price competition through advertising) would drastically reduce the price of healthcare and greatly empower the consumer.

And, I’d add, if we did that, discussion of demand-side reforms might be a lot more politically feasible.

Liberal welfare-statism is a pretty natural--if misguided--reaction to a society in which the state, through privilege, creates great disparities in income. Privilege creates massive distortions, made cumulative through the process of feedback, that must be dealt with somehow. One way of dealing with the consequences is through a Rube Goldberg device like redistributive welfare policy, another layer of policy to counteract the first layer, to prevent underconsumption from becoming too destabilizing and the underclass from becoming too radicalized. The other way is to eliminate the privilege itself--a lot simpler.

But make no mistake. If the privilege remains, statist “corrective” action will be the inevitable result. That’s why I don’t get too bent out of shape about the statism of the minimum wage or overtime laws--in my list of statist evils, the guys who are breaking legs rank considerably higher than the ones handing out government crutches. All too many libertarians could care less about the statism that causes the problems of income disparity, but go ballistic over the statism intended to alleviate it. It’s another example of the general rule that statism that helps the rich is kinda sorta bad, maybe, I guess, but statism that helps the poor is flaming red ruin on wheels.

Libertarians need to stop admiring the emperor’s clothes and pretending that disparities in income reflect the triumph of industrious ants over lazy grasshoppers. Liberals might be a lot easier to talk to then. That Galt’s Gulch bullshit can be kind of hard to listen to sometimes.

I’ve argued elsewhere myself, by the way, that we need to go beyond cooperative solutions to healthcare finance, and get into cooperatively organizing delivery of service, as well.

[hellish-cruelty]

Ada Limón on Grief

[gretsonoftheday]

today carson and greta are having to really hold themselves back from storming amazon prime

[haljeexyee]

Day ??: god I’m so obsessed with the walking dead and this pic of Jeffery Dean Morgan with the Rick print out reminded me of Goddard cuz his obsession with wanting to take down Scythe Lucifer 🫶

Characters: Overblade Goddard, Rowan Damisch — Arc of a Scythe by Neal Shusterman

[elfietheespeon]

October daily art challenge, Day #26: Carson "Chuckster" Kemper

[familiarquotation]

I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us?

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

[stephantom]

Thinking about TRL in 1998-2001 and how part of what fueled that show was that you literally couldn’t stream music videos you wanted on demand back then. That just didn’t exist. You voted for your favorite music video that you thought had a decent chance at being in the top 10 just to SEE it again.

[pebblezone]

succumbing to the illness. becoming a hater. anyway look at this building they’re fucking destroying

[milkibana]

sorry

[dailyanarchistposts]

Author: Kevin Carson Topic: health care

Alternet has an interview with Dr. Richard Deyo, who co-authored Hope or Hype: The Obsession with Medical Advances and the High Cost of False Promises. Some excellent bits of analysis, although (like a typical goo-goo) he gets the big picture wrong.

The problem with me-too drugs is a big one. Me-too drugs are chemically very similar to other drugs already available, yet they are typically marketed as if they were important new breakthroughs, and typically with very high prices. We found in many cases that new, expensive me-too drugs are not necessarily better than older generic and less expensive drugs. Because new and heavily marketed drugs seem like they must be better, manufacturers can command higher prices. That is an important driver of drug costs.

The central factor in this process is the state’s patent policies, which drastically inflate the profitability of the newer “me, too” drugs against much cheaper competitors that do very nearly the same thing. Indeed, the patent process has a huge distorting effect on R&D, since it results in so many resources being channelled into tweaking existing drugs just enough so that they can be re-patented as “new.” Then the drug reps hit every hospital and clinic in America, drop off some free samples and pamphlets, and (most M.D.s relying on drug industry handouts for their information on the new drugs that have come out since they left med school) the “me, too” drug becomes the new standard form of treatment.

The state having created the “honey pot” with its patent system, it is quite predictable that the state-enforced drug cartels and the white-coat Mafia (medical licensing boards with their mainly pharma-influenced “standards of practice”) should drive the industry toward a model focused on these high-cost drugs, and crowd out low-cost alternatives.

Any doc who (say) recommends Co-Enzyme Q-10 as a first recourse against congestive heart failure, or attempts some other low-cost departure from the drug-‘em-and-cut-‘em model, had better remember the state licensing board has its eye on him. Even stipulating that patents themselves are legitimate (which they are not), this latter practice has the effect of outlawing one of the most important defenses against monopoly: what Schumpeter called “product-substitution.”

The fact that the authors’ proposed response to this state capitalist sewer is even more state intervention (finessing the FDA approval process, more regulation of advertising, more procedural oversight of research), rather than eliminating the forms of state intervention that create the honey-pot in the first place, is mind-boggling. It’s like looking at one of those Rube Goldberg inventions.

Speaking of inventions.... One of the best regular features on MST3K was the weekly “Inventions” segment. My favorite was a treadmill with motorized wheels on the bottom, just in case you felt like moving around outside while you were walking. But with big government liberals making proposals like these, it’s hard for the farceurs on the Satellite of Love to compete.

[fanofcarson]

[gretsonoftheday]

today carson is sending flowers to greta’s office to surprise her at work

[sga-owns-my-soul]

i think about this way way way too often but it’s absolute bullshit to me that everyone gave rodney so much shit for doranda bc he almost got him and john killed and he destroyed an uninhabited solar system, but carson almost got john killed (which also led to elizabeth almost being killed and two marines being killed) with his retrovirus, and then kept working on it and created michael, and then kept going despite teyla and ronon saying it was a bad idea, and that’s fine????? like so so so many people died because of becketts retrovirus and they’re like “whoops well we need to beat the wraith so it’s fine” but rodney is given shit for the entire series???? like yeah rodney was a dick in trinity but rodney is always a dick that’s like his main personality trait so it’s nothing new AND he apologized which we see like what twice in the series????? yeah anyways rodney deserves to be forgiven for doranda and im gonna forever be salty that they expect absolute perfection from rodney at all times and he’s the only one held accountable if he doesn’t achieve it