I suppose that’s one reading of the statement, but I didn’t read it that way. Perhaps the OP can clarify their meaning?
If fixing big, nasty problems were easy and painless, we’d have done it decades ago. That may be where the ACA stumbled most: so many times, dems promised that functionally, nothing would change, even though the law was obviously going to have far-reaching and sometimes negative impacts on individuals. As a result, detractors were able to pin basically every failing of the health insurance system on the ACA, regardless of whether it was actually the cause.
I’m sure plenty of people weren’t happy about having Social Security and Medicare taxes taken out of their paychecks when those programs were first implemented, but I think their proponents did a much better job of selling their importance and utility than dems did with the ACA. It might be because dems seem to be structurally incapable of actually standing up for what they believe in anymore, or simply because they were spending all of their time trying to combat the firehose of bullshit that the republicans where spewing about it, or both. Either way, the result is that as a package, the ACA is not especially popular, even though people widely support every individual thing it does.
Ultimately though, this isn’t a problem that can be solved without everyone incurring some sort of cost. Whether it’s the ACA’s reliance on private insurers or some sort of Medicare For All program, people are going to have to pay into it somehow, or the whole thing will continue to fall apart. Given how hard it is these days to get some people to understand the importance of communally paying for things like roads and fire departments, I’m not sure any solution would have been well-received by those who were formerly able to game the system by not paying into it.
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My once amazing healthcare coverage through my employer got a million times worse after the ACA passed since it would have been considered a Cadillac plan. I blame the healthcare industry more than anything though.
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Did anyone understand what Speaker ryan mean by giving Tax Credits to get health insurance even if you owe taxes ??? Its sounds like the gov is paying the health insurance which doesn’t make sense
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Okay, insult him if you must, but be careful what names you give to Trump. We have a frequent visitor with a very similar name.
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There is what a system’s advocates say it will do, and then there is what it does. I don’t think Marx advocated having despots with no relevant experience or knowledge dictate agricultural policy resulting in the starvation of millions, but it would be a fair criticism of communism to point out that seems to happen. I think in practice neo-liberal philosophy has been to pretend that the free market will fix everything and then justify a few people looting the system by blaming everyone else for not being in a position to loot it. That stuff about the state policing the system doesn’t end up happening because it’s a system where money is power and money is allowed to massively accumulate in the hands of a few people, giving them preferred status.
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it’s a public friendly face of free-market capitalism. it’s not anything new, just what the Thacher’s. Regan’s, and Clinton’s of the 80’s rebranded it.
You are correct.
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It’s not my field(though neoliberals might have entered my coursework through the back door)-- but I seem to recall that a neoliberal argument against governmental control of the economy was based on the idea that the market was an example of spontaneous order-- entirely too complex to be modeled on a computer system-- and yet those complexities, those intricacies that needed to be damped down to make the central planning model work– were so very useful to the functioning of a working economy.
The political problem is how to use markets to transition from large sprawling states where everything is run inefficiently to societies where no one has the monopolistic power to enforce their bad decisions onto others. And most neoliberal politicians decide to start with the dispossessed and making sure that they can’t use their political power, however grounded in democratic legitimacy, against the upper classes.
And then you have tea party idiots who believe that the best way to dismantle governments legitimate claim to those social resources is to demonstrate its political idiocy from within-- let’s make government incompetent so that no one trusts them.
Ugh. Some interesting ideas, harnessed to a political impetus to destroy. I suppose that’s a good definition of conservatism (a la Corey Robin).
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This is the best statement of the problem I have ever seen.
I think the basic idea behind neo-liberalism is flawed (which, here, is a word that means dumb-as-fuck). It’s true that if Friedman’s stated vision were implemented, it would look a lot better than the reality that was imposed in it’s place, but even then it was dumb. I mean, look at the few things that they think need to be fixed. It’s like they looked around at people and said, “Left to their own devices, people tend to cooperate. Wow! We better put a stop to that!”
The basic philosophy that the best organization is the one that arises organically ought to be pretty Zen, not one that sells itself to the public via anger and fear.
Neo-liberalism is kind of a self-defeating idea. What they didn’t get is that a lot of the central planning that they objected to was itself a spontaneous order that arose from those intricacies. We live in a society with taxes and public education and infrastructure spending and free health care (for non-Americans) because all of those things arose from the chaos of human interaction. And neo-liberalism arose from that too.
Neo-liberalism is a cult of market-workship used to distract from kleptocracy.
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