A New Era for the Center-Left

We must tell them that a new dawn is breaking.

Part one is here.

It is always darkest before the dawn because the sun has yet to rise and the night is so very cold. This is true in politics where the forces of reaction play on the fears and terrors of losing the past. It is true that the past is slipping away from us because we can no longer ignore the costs that it imposes. We can only look to President Buchanan and President Hoover as the nadir before dawn’s early light.

This has often been true and twice in the lifetime of the United States a particular conjunction of forces has combined to force us into changing the way we get energy from nature. The first is in the run-up to the Civil War when we went from wood, water, and wind to coal and the beginnings of oil. The second was in the 1930s when that same coal-driven economy was blindsided by the benefits of oil. This is the third time and we must cast aside the fossil fuel economy towards one which uses the wind and solar in a more productive way by converting the light and motion into electricity by photovoltaics and more efficient turbines. That is it has moved full circle to where the wind, sun, and water are more efficient again.

In the corridors of academia, we need to show that an economy must be run like a battery - so there is very little lost in its dealings, especially with energy. In the hallways of power, we must select the best way to make the case to the American public. But we also have to formulate what is important.

When elected a party must have 3 courses of action:

1. The immediate problems that they were elected in the normal course of politics. This is because any political moment will respond better to conservative or liberal policies and we must assume that there will be times that will favor be center-left and there will be times that will not be as favorable. There are many on the conservative flank of the Democratic Party who feel that all that we need to do is wait for the failures and move into power by simply giving enough people enough of a tax break to muddle into the White House.

2. The changes to government will be favorable to us in the future. This is something that the old Democratic Party was particularly bad at doing while the Republican Party was particularly good at doing. The current set of Donks must realize that this pattern is one core reason for their defeat. Because the Phants realize it quite clearly.

3. A change in the nature of government that will prevent certain actions from being pursued again even by a Republican party. This is because if the United States is seen as being able to take certain actions then the United States is not an appropriate power to trust. Taking back the Panama Canal is a simple example: if this is at any time a worthwhile project for the United States to pursue, then no government in Panama will trust that it will not happen eventually. Certain things must be off the table whether we are in our war not. This dives deeply into the structure of not government but debate and discourse.

Now let us look at each of these three buckets and remember that we are introducing a new Democratic party and a new center-left movement. This means that we need to think of things in a broad way rather than a narrow subsection. It means that from Bernie Sanders to Mark Kelly there must be a wide agreement on the essentials of this program. Some problems will be solvable, but other problems cannot be. This is true, particularly of the vital areas of healthcare, immigration, foreign relations, and labor issues. As John Kenneth Galbraith once remarked: “Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” This is because the solvable will be solved rather quickly, whereas the day-to-day grind of fresh meat will be on the unsolvable problems.

The problems in the first bucket are inflation, home prices, and healthcare. We will take health care first because it is the most easily solvable problem.

Fortunately, there is a wide gap between certain areas of government and their execution. We must now realize that universal healthcare must be done, even if many of the people who will use this healthcare will not give the Democratic party the credit. This is of the same ilk as “I don’t want the government interfering with my Social Security.” Certain voters will not connect the government to the Social Security check that they receive each month but they will not stand for government actions that threaten their lifeline. It may not be fair but it is also the truth. It is there children who we must reach.

Why we need to do this is relatively simple: the way we are doing things is contrary to economic theory and practice and it shows in the results that we get. The reason for this is that the way we do things in the United States is suboptimal on the larger scale of the nation. First, let us look at the practical result:

This chart means that the United States spends more, in fact considerably more, than any other nation and gets the same result as China. Let me repeat this: we spend 10 time times as much as China to get the same result. And if that is not enough the only country which has a degradation in recent years is the UK because they are privatizing some aspects of their healthcare. Capitalism does not work for most healthcare problems because it does not have the problems that private capital can handle.

Fortunately, economic theory agrees. Let us look as to why. There are two areas of capitalism where the amount of profit extracted by the producers exceeds the benefit of the consumers. In this graph above that is the shortfall of lifespan of the United States versus other countries who are able to spend less and get more. All of the developed countries guarantee healthcare by one means or another through the government. This is because the advantage of capitalization is the ability to pick the winners and the losers. However, from the government’s perspective and the nation’s perspective, everybody must be covered. This defeats the advantage of private capital: it wants to pick the winners and not ensure the losers. But in this case, the losers die. But further, if there is no advantage to private capital the private capital still must make a profit. Which means that it charges more for less utility to the consumers. In other words, the advantage of private capital is to degrade the nation’s health, which does not work.

This is a graph between how much for weapons and how much for consumable goods a given economy may purchase. This is of course a simplified version and, in fact, at the ends of the curve, it reduces because of the inefficiencies of production whereas in the middle section, gains are made because of the total utility of mass production.

What is not immediately obvious is that the production of weapons means that they have to be controlled or one gets excessive casualties. What is further not immediately seen by the graph is that the nature of consumable goods has a diminishing return. people get shot by madmen and fat because they don’t get as much pleasure from the last unit of consumer goods consumed as from the first unit of consumable goods consumed. Unfortunately, this is also an insoluble problem that will raise its head up constantly in governance.

However, once taken into account that the weapons are almost entirely devoted to the government and the consumer goods must be regulated so as to produce no happiness for the consumers, one sees that while private capital might like to be involved its place will almost always, though not always, be detrimental to the consumers. Simply put they want the government to not be involved precisely in the areas in which government should be involved. But private capital wants to take advantage of the consumer to degrade be consumer’s choice because that is what is most profitable for the private capital.

This is why the actions of Luigi Mangione were held by the average person while being horrified, even by then the most liberal outlets: the readers of the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Atlantic are private capital or related to private capital and their writers cater to that audience: their readers rooted for Brian Thompson. Whereas the private citizen felt for the individual on the street who could not get health insurance.

Since we are interested in not having a Wild West shooting gallery sort of justice, it is in our best interest to quash this debate: because neither Mangione nor Thompson was in the right. Thompson was taking money to kill consumers of his product. Mangione was taking the law into his own hands for private revenge. This is exactly the kind of situation where the government should be involved: don’t let executives kill people don’t let little people shoot at other private people who they have some disagreement with. It is a both/and not an either/or.

This means that to quash this debate we need to remove the majority of private capitalization of healthcare. That does not mean that there will be no role for private healthcare because there are examples of healthcare that are not necessary but optional: a private room is not necessary but is nice to have. These nice-to-have options are exactly what private capital provides.

But there is a larger picture: private capital will go elsewhere. This will mean that options that are not available presently will be financed with the private capital now freed up from health insurance. This will cause some difficulties in the capitalization because the members of that class have learned all of the ways to benefit from health insurance, and therefore as a left-of-center movement and a Democratic party, we should make those options available at the same time as we per bid most private capital from the health insurance business. Because it is the people involved not just the finances.

Fortunately, there is another aspect of immediate problems to solve that requires private capital: the electrical grid and the electrification of the economy. This requires government help but is primarily a private market.

The third part will talk about how the must change our economy from a fossil fuel economy to an electrified economy.