mardi 21 mai 2019


COMMUNIST NEWS

To rebuild socialism:  a colossal but needed challenge

By Daniel Paquet and Archives

MONTRÉAL – Firstly, here is the bourgeois viewpoint on capitalism : 
Capitalism Will Save Us -- If Only We Let It
Steve Forbes
Forbes Staff
Policy“With all thy getting, get understanding."
This story appears in the May 31, 2019 issue of Forbes. Subscribe
HARDLY A DAY goes by without some eminence from business or finance proclaiming with furrowed brow and seeming sorrow that capitalism is in crisis and must be overhauled if it is to survive and not be replaced with some variant of socialism. Inequality, climate change, obscene levels of corporate profits, stagnant wages, soaring healthcare costs, crushing levels of student debt, rampant Wall Street greed, high-tech monsters and much more are all laid at the feet of an allegedly heartless, unresponsive capitalistic system.
It ain't so. Contrary to all this highbrow hand-wringing, the problem is bad government policies and, worse, a fundamental misunderstanding of free markets. It's time for a reality check regarding this much-maligned system.
Capitalism is the target of more and more protests.
Capitalism is the target of more and more protests.
 SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES
Capitalism, free enterprise, free markets--whatever you label our system--is moral because one succeeds by meeting the needs and wants of other people. An entrepreneur tries to discern needs people don't know they have until a product or service is introduced to the market. Think Steve Jobs and the iPhone and iPad. Businesspeople try to persuade you to buy what they offer. Unless the government gets involved, there is no coercion. Countless people are trying to come up with ways to make everyone's lives better. If they succeed, they might (gasp!) get rich, but we are all better off.
Ever more sophisticated supply chains rise up, which work precisely because no tsar or central planner is in charge.
Government mistakes--not inherent flaws in free markets--are at the root of every economic crisis in modern times. The Great Depression was triggered by the draconian Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which imposed higher taxes on thousands of import items, triggering a global trade war that devastated economies. This felony was compounded when countries--Germany, Britain and the U.S. were the worst offenders--substantially raised taxes in the teeth of a sharp downturn.
The terrible inflation of the 1970s was the result of the Federal Reserve and other central banks repeatedly printing too much money. The crisis of 2008–09 sprang from the U.S. deliberately weakening the dollar, which set off a flight to hard assets such as housing.
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High taxes are growth-killers. Taxes are a burden. Countries that keep the burden light do better than those that don't. After it recovered from WWII, Europe had growth rates comparable to or even better than those of the U.S. But in the 1970s the weight of taxation became heavier and heavier with the imposition of VATs and higher effective income tax rates. Result: microscopic paces of expansion.
Every time the U.S. has enacted big tax cuts, its economy has blossomed. The economy's post-Obama pickup came from the 2017 tax reduction and deregulation.
Excessive regulations hurt. Regulatory expert Philip Howard cites a typical example: An upstate New York apple orchard is subject to 5,000 rules from 17 different programs. Regulations cost the U.S. some $2 trillion a year. On average, a manufacturer pays $2,000 to $4,000 in annual taxes per worker; its regulatory burden is $20,000 to $35,000. Is it any wonder that manufacturing has suffered until recently?
Don't blame student debt on free enterprise. Government is the villain. With the best intentions Washington created programs to help people pay for college, primarily Pell Grants and student loans. Studies from the New York Fed and others confirm that the more money colleges collected via these schemes, the more students were charged.
High-priced healthcare is not a failure of capitalism. Free markets are the solution here, not more government control. Ours is a third-party healthcare system: government (primarily Medicare and Medicaid), insurance companies and large employers, not consumers. Hospitals' revenues depend on how well they negotiate with third parties, not on how well they please their patients. What a drug company charges for a medicine is far smaller than what you see reflected on a hospital bill. A big chunk of the price charged goes to pay pharmaceutical benefit managers. Discovering in advance what a procedure might cost is a Herculean effort.
In normal markets, if you make an advance in productivity, competitors will likely follow suit quickly. Not so in healthcare or higher ed.
The Surgery Center of Oklahoma posts all of its prices online. It has topflight surgeons; its overhead is low, by industry standards; and the cost of an operation is a fraction of that charged at traditional hospitals and clinics because patients pay the entire amount in advance. (Prices are higher if a patient wants the center to file their insurance claim.) Yet it has few imitators. Why? Because there is no consumer market. Since third parties foot most of the bill, most patients have no incentive to compare quality and prices, and would be hard put to do so even if they wanted to.
Take electronic records. Every dry cleaner and gas station has had them for 20 years. But not healthcare providers: There was no competitive advantage. Then Washington decided to mandate them but did so destructively, in a manner worthy of the defunct Soviet Union.
Purdue University president Mitch Daniels has frozen tuitions since he took office in 2013. He has enacted numerous efficiencies, so that to attend this prestigious institution a student today pays less than a student did six years ago. By the way, Daniels has boosted the number of Purdue's tenured professors.
But just as with the case of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma and other hospitals, there's no stampede of colleges and universities urgently following Purdue's example.
Free markets reduce poverty. Real incomes per person have risen over 50-fold since we achieved independence. Before the Industrial Revolution, which capitalism made possible, individual incomes in the world grew imperceptibly. Today, despite all the economic policy mistakes, poverty is plummeting. Over the past 20 years, 1 billion people have escaped abject poverty.
Free markets always turn scarcity into abundance, today's luxuries into tomorrow's common products. Among countless examples is the handheld phone. The first cellphone of the early 1980s--which could only make calls--was as large as a shoe box, weighed as much as a brick, had barely an hour of battery life and cost $3,995. Today there are billions of cellphones, and most have the capability that a supercomputer had a couple of decades ago.
The same happy phenomenon of getting more for less would happen in healthcare if certain free-market reforms were enacted, such as nationwide shopping for medical insurance and removing restrictions on medical savings accounts.
Inequality? Wages, until recently, had stagnated since the financial crisis of 2008, and they hadn't been improving much in the decade before then. Once again, the problem was faulty government actions.
Investment is the sine qua non for progress, and more investment takes place when money has a stable value. Until the 1970s the dollar had been fixed to gold, and the U.S. economy had grown as no other nation's ever had before. But since then our average growth has declined 25% or more. And guess what: Income growth hasn't been as robust as when we were on the gold standard, either.
Another factor: relentlessly rising medical costs. Employer-provided insurance counts as part of an employee's compensation. Even though compensation has risen, the cash part has lagged. Not helping, either, has been the surge in federal payroll taxes, labeled "FICA" on your paycheck stub. With a regime of low taxes, a trustworthy dollar and a patient-oriented healthcare system, cash wages would rise very nicely.
Profits are essential. They are moral. Without them, the economy stagnates and regresses. The economist Joseph Schumpeter famously coined the phrase "creative destruction." Vibrant economies need enormous amounts of new capital to move forward. Change constantly destroys old capital--look at what the internet did to the value of legacy newspaper and magazine publishers--which must be replaced. Capital is needed to finance startups (most fail) and expansions as well as the productivity improvements of existing businesses. Capital comes from profits and savings. In that sense profit is a cost of doing business.
More and more young people want to work for outfits that are not "just" business. This is one of the great virtues of capitalism: The system seamlessly adjusts to people's wants and expectations. Wise companies quickly pick up and respond to these changes. Forbes has written frequently about these companies and the individuals pioneering their efforts.
Some people in business do bad, amoral or unethical things. Yes, they do, but that's not something unique to capitalism. People were guilty of bad behavior long before Adam Smith penned his capitalist classic, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in 1776. Moreover, in an open, free-market and democratic system, the bad ones are usually flushed out, unlike in authoritarian or socialist regimes.
Socialism never works. It always leads to blood, tyranny and tears, as can be seen today in Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea and in the recent past in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and communist Cambodia (where, in less than four years, the regime slaughtered more than one fourth of the population).
What about the "socialism" of Scandinavia and Europe? They are not socialist in the sense that the government owns and runs the economy. Many of these countries have elaborate welfare programs, restrictive labor laws and overtaxation. But all this is beginning to change.
What self-styled American socialists overlook is that countries like Sweden have been scaling back government. Sweden has been cutting taxes. It has no inheritance tax, and it allows school choice, which is anathema to Bernie Sanders and his ilk. As for the rest of the EU, the average rate of economic growth since the crisis of 2008 has been minuscule, less than half that of the U.S.
More to the point, capitalism creates the wealth that makes welfare states possible. That's why more and more Europeans are looking at pro-capitalist reforms, such as low taxes, to gin up their economies.
Steve Forbes
Forbes Staff
Steve Forbes is Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media.



And now the point of view of a Canadian trade-unionist about  health-care :
Defence of public health care has begun in a B.C. courtroom
By Pauline Worsfold Opinion
Tues., May 21, 2019
There is a trial going on against public health care in Canada, the outcome of which could very well affect access to health care for every single one of us. We don’t hear about it every day because the trial process has been long and tedious. It began in 2016.
But for participants and observers alike, the monotonous court proceedings in Cambie Surgeries Corporation v. British Columbia (Medical Services Commission) are now getting interesting. As the defence of public health care gets underway, we are getting to the heart of the matter.
The question before B.C. Supreme Court Justice John Steeves is fundamental: Are we going to have a health care system that treats everyone the same and in which access to care is based on need? Or, are we going to move to an American style, two-tier health care system where there is one system for the wealthy and another one for everyone else?
This case against public health care was brought by a group led by Brian Day, CEO of Cambie Surgeries Corporation. Day wants the ability to charge higher fees than the public system allows and to charge the public system and private insurance at the same time. If he is successful, for-profit health care delivery could be introduced into our public system.
Day is claiming he wants to improve wait times for surgical treatment. His Charter challenge is advancing an individual right to overcome unreasonable wait times by seeking for-profit care. However, Day’s team has not provided any proof that for-profit health care will alleviate wait times. Only anecdotal evidence has been offered. Most importantly, Day’s case has not demonstrated that the prohibitions on private insurance and extra billing are the source of any wait time problems.
On the other hand, those defending public health care can prove that the introduction of for-profit care creates lots of problems. Last week Prof. Marie-Claude Premont, a health care policy expert from the École nationale d'administration publique, brought instructive evidence from Quebec, where a Supreme Court decision from 2005 required the province to lift its ban on private insurance under Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.
According to Premont, the subsequent changes have created chaos where patients are jumping the queue by hopping between public and private care. Private clinics are being subsidized by the public system while at the same time charging patients extra fees. As these changes take hold, the number of doctors leaving the public system for private clinics is rising dramatically, draining resources from the public system.
This all creates a health care system skewed by market forces. Flying in the face of the Canada Health Act’s guarantees of universality and accessibility, people with resources have an advantage and because of financial incentives, services are provided more readily where the profit is best.
It seems clear to many courtroom observers that Day’s legal team is trying to stay away from arguing over the Canada Health Act. And for good reason. It’s pretty hard to object to principles that ensure the sick get taken care of regardless of income.
Rather, it looks as though Day is attempting to demonstrate that the public health care system will not be negatively affected with the introduction of for-profit care. In fact, he has tried to demonstrate that it is a natural evolution. Day’s arguments were dealt a serious blow last week.
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There are many ways to improve health care in Canada without compromising its fundamental principles. Innovations in case management, which are now being implemented in B.C., are a direct response to long wait times. And of course, appropriate funding is key to protecting and enhancing our public health care system.
A universal, public pharmacare plan would also go a long way to improving the system by reducing costs and increasing accessibility. These are the real issues that need to be debated.
In the meantime, we cherish a health care system that is blind to wealth and status. A system where resources are distributed by need and not by the marketplace. Should all of that be tossed aside because of unsubstantiated claims made by people who stand to make the most money?
Before we prescribe the treatment, let’s make sure we get the diagnosis right.
Pauline Worsfold, RN, is the chair of the Canadian Health Coalition.

Grover Furr’s latest talks on Youtube.    
From: Grover Furr <furrg_nj@fastmail.fm>
Subject: Podcast (audio only) interview of me concerning my book _Stalin: Waiting for ... the Truth_
Date: May 18, 2019 at 6:22:23 PM CDT
To: Grover Furr <furrg@mail.montclair.edu>

Dear friends:
The folks who run this pro-communist podcast invited me to be interviewed on the subject on my research on the Stalin era in the USSR.
Here is the link to that audio-only interview:
I hope you find it interesting. Criticisms welcome!
Sincerely,
Grover Furr

Communist News:  www.dpaquet1871.blogspot.com

L’Humanité in English:  www.humaniteinenglish.com
On-line Marxist encyclopedia CocoWikipédia:  www.cocowikipedia.org



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