When I was in sales, one of my closing remarks was to remind people that “most things are the same when they work, it’s when they break that you discover the differences.” If you buy any dishwasher, like all the other dishwashers, it will wash dishes However, when a bad dishwasher breaks, it will be difficult to diagnose the problem, parts will be hard to find – or expensive, and your repair tech will shake his head and say “yeah, these things are great until they fail.”
America’s version of capitalism supported ad supplemented here and there with a patchwork of socialism is broken. Capitalism itself proved to be a disastrous system many times leading up to its greatest failure in 1929. Since then the failures have been less tragic but no less numerous only because of the neoliberal belief that government’s role is to fix market failures but not replace them with government solutions. The Affordable Care Act was the last example of this where citizens are expected to purchase heath insurance through private companies and it it only where these private companies fail that the government enters to fix it, but never address the causes for the failures.
The pandemic has broken the American economic machine and in so doing, exposed many faults.
- Tying health insurance to employment is a disaster
- Expecting both parents of a family to work full time outside the home leaves no room for error
- A medical model that pays handsomely for treatment and a pauper’s sum for prevention is madness.
- Our patent system for prescription drugs and medical devices is killing us and slowing us down.
- Insulating doctors from foreign competition serves no ones best interests except our doctors.
I’m sure you can add to this list.
Please do.
Its time to fix this.
Our economic system worked better than all the alternatives from 1945 through about 1980, when the GOP decided to “fix” it. A return to the tax structure of that period will go a long way towards addressing the many failures we see today (many, but not all).
The economic systems that seem to be working today (Germany is at the top of my list) are fundamentally similar to the US system.
I think several millennia of human history shows that it is exceedingly dangerous to discard one system until its proposed alternative is available for inspection.
Your fourth bullet strikes me as an example that illustrates this on a smaller scale. An overwhelming majority of the new drugs introduced each year are introduced first in the US. A significant portion of the high costs we pay for these drugs is the benefit of having first access to them.
None of the nations that fail to provide such patent protections are leaders in science. NONE.
If we discard our patent system, the most likely outcome is to stop the creation of new drugs. Any new drug is ENORMOUSLY expensive. The pipeline from novel drug to safe and clinically-tested medication takes 10-15 years and costs billions of dollars. Most novel drugs fail and return nothing — so many that pharma companies eagerly strive to identify failures early. The patent system and resulting US profits are the primary way that pharma companies recover the enormous costs of drug development.
I enthusiastically agree that it is past time to fix this. I hope you agree that we must ensure that the resulting “cure” is better than the “disease” it claims to address.
75% of all new drugs are discovered through research funded by the US government. That’s why we we lead other nations. It has little to do with patents and capitalism.
I think you both lament, as do I, the grand bargain of the post war/pre-Reagan era. A grand bargain won off the backs of striking workers and the necessity of cold war politics created a lasting consensus. That consensus was basically businesses could make as much money as they wanted, but they had to pay their workers a living wage, had to work with unions, and had to pay high taxes to the government. This capped CEO pay at a far more modest 10-1 ratio with the lowest paid worker and lead to the largest middle class in economic history.
It was undoubtedly a sexist and racist consensus helped by xenophobic immigration laws and justified by anti-communist and mainline civic Christian values that have receded into history. I still think it can be rebuilt. I hope this is what Biden means by build back better. Just as FDR used the Depression and WWII to more equitably rebuild the American economy, so can this present crisis help Biden build it back.
It sounds like you are suggesting that we could have social progress or economic progress, but not both. If so I would disagree.
This seems a bit like hope triumphing over experience. In reality, a very large portion of the political base supporting what is described here as “economic progress” was resistant, to put it mildly, to what has been described here as “social progress,” with the result that the New Deal coalition broke apart in the 60s over “culture war” issues, has not been re-assembled, and probably cannot be re-assembled.
Now, a huge part of your coalition is the wealthy, educated suburbanites– the folks that drive johntmay to distraction– who are all in on most “culture war” issues (though perhaps not on the more radical positions that have been prominent of late), but balk when the tax hike bill comes along. Decades ago, they probably would have been Rockefeller Republicans, but now they are Dems. They were essentially swapped with what has become the, umm, “culturally conservative” working class that is now unswervingly pro-Trump.
I’m not sure how that arrangement, even if it produces broad Dem majorities in Congress and a Biden administration, produces Big Social Programs of the type desired by many posters here. It seems as likely to simply expose, again, that Dems don’t really have a consensus on these issues.
Disclaimer that the present state of the world has the potential to end that dynamic.
That may be the case politically, but what I meant is that there is no inherent reason that we have to choose between postwar prosperity and civil rights. It’s not a zero-sum game.
I think CMD has spot on analysis, and we already saw a little bit of that during the Obama years when there was a reluctance to reform the mortgage interest deduction and backtracked on cancelling the 529 exemptions. Tom Edsall has written many prescient Times columns on this issue.
What I find interesting right now is that they seem to be liberal on BLM and some economic stuff related to Covid. I think Trumps law and order bet on the suburbs will backfire. I do think when busing or section 8 expansion is proposed as a means to integrate the suburbs, those same voters will balk.