Mistakes of the past...

Republicans have offered up a health care plan to replace Obamacare (see here and here). It also cuts addition treatment which Michael Botticelli, former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, says will eventually be more costly than treating addicts.

Just a reminder of the consequences of Ronald Reagan's decision to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill had a very high cultural and financial cost. Rates of homelessness and the number of mentally ill criminal in prison increased massively. The cost of crime to the victims alone likely exceeded the 'savings' of deinstitutionalization. The cost of prison and criminal recidivism further adds to the bill.

The economics of healthcare is more than the initial outlay to treat immediate ills. There are long term consequences to personal and social wellbeing. Because people live in communities, their actions can have repercussions throughout the larger community.

Entitled to not pay taxes

Comment at Truthout post critiquing the America Health Care Act:

The Republican 'health care plan' is a rich people entitlement plan to not pay taxes that support social wellbeing. Ironic: rich people are actually for entitlement plans (Republican 'health care plan') even when they constantly bash non-entitlement 'entitlement' socialized pension (social security) and socialized health care (Medicare/Medicaid/VA) plans.

Note: How about TrumpSCare for 'Trump Sub-optimum care'?

Science of gun policy

Comment at Truthout article about teachers fighting for gun control in schools:

The NRA is a good example of [gun] policy by ideology as opposed to policy based on science. Science is a system of knowledge that accurately predicts the future under defined conditions (example, researchers accurately predict vaccinations can prevent most cases of target infectious disease). NRA is all about profiting from guns so they don't want accurate scientific predictions of the effect of gun proximity to violence. As a result, they are a major player in banning epidemiological research on gun violence. This allows the NRA to use ideological '2nd Amendment' arguments to advance 'gun right'. The opposition doesn't have the resources to conduct scientific studies so they are forced to use anecdotal evidence to make their case to policy makers; even when their arguments are more intuitively sound, the stridency of the gun rights lobby is overwhelming. 

The resistance needs to fight individual issue battles under the umbrella of increasing overall universal rights. Policy should be based on science, not ideology.

Money & economy

Comment drawn from Richard Wolff video at Truthout:

For workers who 'exchange/sell' their labor to employers for wages, money is stored labor. With money, people exchange their stored labor for objects containing stored labor or services (direct labor). Value of land must then reflect how much labor must be invested to return profit. 

Prof. Wolff said something with even more prolonged implications than his comments about money - workers work to support themselves (and their families). This means the purpose of economies - production, consumption and exchange of capital - is to support the wellbeing of people. The wellbeing of people is not restricted to the current generation, so this includes the long term sustained wellbeing of people. This means profits are not necessary to economies and even more interesting, industrial sectors which do not support human wellbeing are anti-economic; think arms and military industrial complex.

Update: mistake in the original "...profits are necessary to economies..." It has been corrected above.

This article at Buzzflash clearly demonstrates the short economic consequence of our current global economic trajectory I predicted - ever increasing concentration of wealth in the upper income tier by their constant extraction from the producing tiers. When workers are starved to the point they are not productive, the system will degrade into a very low productivity economy. I called it economic desertification. It's preventable. But the best solution is not to replace one set of elites (or apex predator) with another. It's much better to evolve a system with many small enterprises with complex interrelationships in an information transparent society, a modified anarchy because it 'evolves' with the community and is not pre-structure like a charter based society.

More than consumer information

Comment at Truthout post proposing graphic warning labels:

Yes, fully informing consumers is the only way to democratize markets. Without complete information, it is not possible to consume your values; instead, you are forced to consume the values of those controlling information. Consuming values in both literal sense of eating and figurative sense of supporting human/animal/environmental rights. 

But why stop with direct consumer information? Information is used to control and manipulate the behavior of everyone. DJT incites fear by calling immigrants criminals and terrorists in order to gain support for his 'Mexican-paid' wall and Muslim ban. Department of Defense uses national security fears to avoid and get away with not conducting legally mandated audits to (a) force politicians to increase their funding and (b) terrify voters into paying their bills. DuPont hid the health impacts of PFOA so consumers would continue to buy/use teflon. Pharma uses patent protection to obscenely profit from life saving drugs. All sorts of technology companies repress competition by buying and quashing innovative inventions and patents... 

Information transparency would initiate the most transformative and revolutionary political and cultural reform. It won't come from the top. The only possibility is a grassroots revolution.

Triumph or Tragedy

NPR posted a story on it website yesterday announcing the First Clouded Leopard Cub Born Using Cryopreserved Semen. I am often of two minds with such announcements. As a supporter and advocate of science and information, I cheer at the advancement of knowledge and understanding. IMO, the best justification for scientific inquiry is curiosity interesting; answer an interesting question. In instances when extraordinary efforts are needed to preserve a species, I detest the need to ask the question, often because human destruction of habitat is the root of population decline. When I read the post yesterday, I was angry. Economic greed drives habitat loss and decimates wildlife. Now appeals to the compassion of workers funds this type of research and 'preserves' these lost species in zoos as living exhibits. It's morally wrong.