This deserves some research

Anybody have insight information into the following quote from Fearless Comrade's post on healthcare reform?

Why can't part-time workers, small business employees, or entrepreneurs get affordable health insurance? Because the government gives tax breaks to big companies for overpriced plans. Because individual states have absurd minimum coverage mandates. Because the federal government allows states to prohibit interstate health insurance sales (every other kind of insurance can be bought across state lines). The only people who have challenged this are Republicans, but raising the evil specter of freedom and interstate competition sends Democrats into howling fits of rage.

The fact that people have insurance plans that pay for the bulk of costs (as opposed to nearly all other forms of insurance, which cover only catastrophes) and don't pay out of pocket is why insurance companies make the payment decisions. If you want to make the payment decisions yourself, pay for it yourself. But of course, decades of liberal government and government meddling have assured that the last person who will pay for your care is you. And who does he think created Medicare?

The answer to him, of course, is more bureaucracy and more government meddling--that, not freedom, will increase supply and decrease costs, just like it never has in any market segment, ever (so we are lapsing back into the health industry not being ruled by economics). The answer is more price-fixing and more mandates. This is what von Mises predicted in Liberalism: Because government interventions harm the market and cause results opposite to what was intended, interventionism gives way to more socialism. Governments fail upward.

Modern Greek Tragedy

The neat thing about the Wire, according to creator David Simon, is that it's a modern Greek tragedy, where the Olympian gods are replaced by modern institutions and social structures. So the capriciousness and tragedy make sense--they come from the real world circumstances that the characters (who are often based on, or actually played by, real Baltimore politicians, drug kingpins and police officers) are grounded in. So the triumphs and failures feel real, because the last word is not delivered by some triumphing individuals, but rather the systems in which those individuals live, move, and have their being.

Read Simon's interview with Nick Hornby here.

And go watch the Wire for Pete's sake...so I can have someone to talk about it with :)

"Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think."

I Take Back Everything Bad I Said About the Nobel Prize Committee...

The Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Dr. Elinor Ostrom, the first woman and the first non-economist to receive the prize.

Beyond that, she is the author of an incredible book that changed my life: "Crafting Institutions for Self-Governing Irrigation Systems."

That book (along with Hernando De Soto's "El Sendero Otro (The Other Path)" formed the cornerstone of one of my favorite classes in college, Dr. Oakerson's "Community Organization and Development," which rocked, end of discussion. And if you don't believe me, ask Kate Shaffner.