Wednesday: Stuff the Left Does that Drives Me Nuts

Busy, busy, busy, guys.  This is just a free form post of stuff the Left does that bugs the shit out of me.  For the record, I consider myself on the left -liberal side of the spectrum.  But my mind is not so wide open that my brains have fallen out.

1.) Blaming corporations for everything.  Yes, corporations are the bad boys of America.  They pushed the envelope too far.  If Margaret Heffernan, the author of Willful Blindness, is to be believed, they are staffed at the top by a bunch of preening assholes who are short term thinking, self serving and not necessarily working for the shareholders.  But it’s hard to do some kinds of work without the support of a corporation.  That’s just a fact.  The miserable, whining lefties can cry all they want about how unfair and mean and BIG and POWERFUL corporations are and how they run everything with obscene, unholy gobs of cash.  That’s like blaming the candy for being sweet.  No one says that politicians have to do their bidding.  If you don’t like what corporations are getting away with, change the fricking rulemakers.  It really is that easy.  And don’t be surprised if politicians are the ones behind the “corporations are the source of all evil in the world”.  It takes the eye off the ball, which is the politician.  So what if corporations can purchase more TV adds than Ron Popiell?  These days, you can watch TV for days without seeing a single political ad if you don’t want to.  When it comes to winning an office, the average Joe has as good a chance as anyone using social media.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is just doing a haka.

2.) Single payer is the holy grail of healthcare reform.  Mebbe.  Mebbe not.  We won’t know until we discuss all of the options.  Wedding ourselves to one answer and repeating it over and over again like it’s some kind of mantra could cloud our judgement.  It’s better to find out what successful national healthcare policies have in common, distill the salient virtues and try to match those virtues as closely as possible.  That might mean single payer or it may mean something else.  Lefties who insist that there is only one way to do this are boxing themselves into a corner and not thinking creatively.

3.) Big Pharma is Satan cubed.  There are big problems in pharma.  Some of these problems pharma did to itself.  No, no, don’t try to wiggle out of it.  Taking the easy route with merger and acquisitions has ruined research.  You can blame researchers all you want but keeping the beatings up until we all become cheaper to employ is not going to work.  In fact, it will backfire.  It will only make us not want to do science anymore, which, if I remember my microeconomics correctly, will cause a scarcity in scientists, making us more expensive to employ.  So, this strategy is doomed, DOOOOOMED, I say, to failure.  If people can go through life making a lower middle class living without having to learn the Hamiltonian equation, they will.  In fact, you can live your entire existence without ever once having to learn Organic Chemistry and your lifestyle might actually improve, if current trends persist.  So, if you want good researchers, you will have to make it worth their while to study the shit that 99.9% of the population in any country in the world won’t touch with a 10 foot pole. But I digress.

The reason why lefties deride pharma at their peril is because if you want good healthcare reform, (see point #2), pharma *should* be a necessary and indispensible part of the package and will help keep costs down.  Yes, sports fans, if you can prevent strokes, heart attacks, asthma attacks, psychotic episodes, epilepsy, diabetes and a whole host of other maladies from clogging up your emergency rooms and taking up valuable hospital beds, pharma is worth every  penny.  An ounce of prevention is worth a couple billion dollars in cure.

Think about that next time you want to bash pharma.  Which would you rather pay for?  Some obese, diabetic, cardio case waiting to happen sucking up thousands of dollars a day with IVs out the wazoo or some monthly prescriptions for ace inhibitors, insulin and cholesterol lowering drugs?  This is not rocket science, oh ye self proclaimed “our side is smarter than their side” lefties.  Whether or not pharma is effective in delivering this message is another problem.  Your stupidity will show.  Give people a choice between going to the hospital with some life threatening crisis and taking some pills everyday and they will choose the pills every time.

5.) Roe v. Wade is the holy grail of womens’ rights and must be protected at all costs.  In fact, the opposite is true.  The longer Roe is out there, the more our rights will be eroded by fundamentalist nutcases who are goaded by neo-feudalist politicians who know a good issue when they see it.  Democrats are also guilty of using Roe as a political football.  It shouldn’t have escaped the left’s attention (but it looks like it probably has) that the Obama campaign amped up the fear factor with respect to Roe in order to terrify women into voting for the Sun King.  Yes, Democrats are just as cynical and self-serving as Republicans when it comes to womens’ rights.  Let’s not sugar coat this.

You can’t build your rights on abortion.  Drop this pointless, losing, distracting battle to protect Roe and go for equality.  Are women equal?  Do they have the same rights as men under the law?  If they do, then you can set your own terms when it comes to abortion, preferably one that rewards responsibility and develops guidelines that the majority of people in this country can live with.

There’s more but I’m out of time.  Ciao for now.