Posted by
Philip Mella on Friday, July 24, 2009 3:42:02 PM
One of the unfortunate byproducts of the recent excesses and abuses in the financial and housing markets is that the profit motive is once again being demonized. Enter Bill Maher, whose HuffingtonPost.com piece clarifies, for any of us still uncertain, that the left would like to excise the profit gene from our body politic.
It may cause heartburn as you peruse his contorted logic, but we trust this over-the-counter antidote will cure it. Once you look past the cliches--"The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us."--you'll find the same tiresome argument that some things (read health care) ought to be quarantined from profit (read competition). Somewhere between the iconoclastic 60s and the booming 90s the hard left lost its intellectual footing, and along with it its credibility. Their 401Ks and IRAs may be chock full of companies whose success on Wall Street they pray will one day help them make payments on their hydrogen cars, but in the meantime they'll spend sleepless nights excoriating the presumed evil in profits.
You might not be aware of it, but, as Maher observed, contemporary news anchors believe that the news coverage in Walter Conkrite's day was much better. If you recall the monochromatic news copy that was delivered to your door or into your living room in flickering black and white images, it was meticulously filtered through a prism that had a remarkable fidelity to one particular political party.
Maher laments how thoroughly the profit motive has consumed today's media conglomerates, naively casting his mainstream pals in a negative light. It's curious that we never heard complaints from these mavens of anti-competition until Fox News muscled its way onto the scene, reminding them it's a Darwinian world. As the quip goes, Roger Ailes, Fox's chairman, found a niche market--half the American people.
That takes us to health care, and Maher has the temerity to assert that "The problem with President Obama's health care plan isn't socialism, it's capitalism." I guess that's his way of saying how displeased he is that most Americans still believe competition is healthy and that they're horrified that the same system that provides such exemplary care to veterans may be imposed on the rest of us.
We all know why the left vilifies competition and it offspring, profit: It presupposes, and guarantees that there will winners and losers, which in the liberals' minds is hostile to the common good. You see, we're all winners according to them, and that goes for everyone, from the auto makers and their extortionist union workers to every kid on the playground.
So, they're comfortable looking to their great masters in DC for price controls for drugs (which will strangle research and development for life-saving medications), lower reimbursement for physicians and hospitals, and a system that will surely result in inhibited access times for physician visits, testing, and interventions from surgery to cardiac catheterizations.
All because they abhor the idea that someone might make a buck, and someone else might lose one.