Why Does Obama Hate Freedom?

Now that the O-Bomba is flexing his muscle, the dreaded SHCA hydra is returning to U.S. politics. Yes, that old many headed serpent, the Socialist Health Care Agenda is back, and by Zeus, it has got teeth.
As any liberal with a bleeding heart can tell you, people often seem to support the idea of institutionalised health care. (Usually it is because they are closet commies - no doubt the blood of those demanding fair access to health is red like Marx.) Some people even go so as to say that health care is morally important. I truly wonder why people hate freedom?
Fortunately, like any good citizen group, the CPR have swiftly stood up to the monstrous threat to choice that is socialised health care.
In a series of advertisements released in the U.S., the Conservatives for Patients' Rights have finally spoken the truth about health care. Following is selected chunks from Chris McGreal's article in today's Guardian:

[The CPR campaign claims that] "a state-run system strips patients of control over their healthcare. "[People] lose control over their own destiny in the health system,"...[This] campaign is being co-ordinated by the same public relations firm that masterminded the "Swift boat" attacks by President Bush's campaign against John Kerry in the 2004 election...CPR says that Obama's plans to control costs, while widening access to care for some 45m people without health insurance, means that the US will introduce rationing of treatment and drug supplies...[describing] Britons as "trapped" by the NHS, with medical decisions made by bureaucrats, not doctors.

Yes. The U.K. health care system is obviously a nightmare. Waiting lists can be long. Choice relating to doctors is limited. In contrast, the current U.S. system truly supports freedom: I can get the best health care in world if I truly want it. Choice is more important than being alive to make choices. I sure as fudge don't want some pesky socialist bureaucrat telling someone who oversees an institution to tell a medical Dr what to tell me. I would rather die from freedom than live in a world where I get healthcare without choices. As the founder of the CPR Richard Scott points out "What you see is when the government gets involved, you run out of money and health care gets rationed." I assume it follows that those who don't have money to begin with deserve their poor health. In fact those who don't have the money to pay for health ought to follow Scott's entrepreneurial model.
We ought avoid those pesky ideas like 'health' or 'wellness' in the world of healthcare. Healthcare needs only Scott's four pillars: "choice, competition, accountability and personal responsibility." Anything else must simply be a socialist conspiracy.

As the US economy shits itself, we look on in confusion...

I am not an economist. I know nothing of economic theory, and have a five year-old's grasp of economic practice. Yet even a five year-old can see that there is something hideously wrong with the US/World economic system. Some of the big thingies* in the US have encountered troubles - Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie May. Now the US federal reserve has bailed out the insurance company American Insurance Group with a loan of US $86 Billion.

It seems that the so called 'sub-prime' crisis is tearing apart the fabric that holds together modern economic theory. Fascinating to watch, unless of course, your house is being repossessed, your job cancelled, or your food is too expensive to buy for eating. No-one, it seems, knows how long this recession will last, what the long term effects may be, or if there even is a recession at all. (In The Doubter's Companion John Raulston Saul argues that the world economies have been in a depression since 1973 (pp 95-99). Coincidentally, the same year that Black Sabbath released Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. But I don't think you can blame them entirely). I am sure that there are a stack of tricksy economic sleight of hand tricks to pull, and like rabbits out of a hat, we will all emerge unscathed and better for the experience.
One idea, that is so simple that it must surely be wrong is put by former US senator in a NY Times article today: “We’ve been consuming more than we’ve been producing. We’ve been spending more than we’ve been earning...It’s been a big holiday.”

Governments in the developed world have followed the mantra of privatisation to the letter, and privatised debt, shifting debt from a public responsibility onto the backs of 'working families'. Now, the US government is throwing money hand over fist to prevent full scale collapse of the US and world economy. For years, free market advocates have been voiciferously opposed to the state interfering in economic matters. Should we now demand that the state remove its hand and let the world economy collapse, or will the invisible hand come to the aid of struggling economists to explain why the system is not working?

As should now be entirely clear, I don't really know what I am talking about, and have no idea of what I want to say. But when US $86 Billion is thrown at something, I wonder what in hell is going on, and could that money be spent elsewhere?


* Again as the use of the technical term 'thingies' shows, I am not an economist. I don't know who these Freddie Mac or Fannie May people are, why they had a fight and are now not talking. And I don't know who let the Stearn Bear into the US stock exchange, causing a Bear-ish market. I think there is some gun related freedoms going on here: as some of you know I fully believe the Second Amendment and the right to arm bears, but maybe not in a crowded stock exchange. But more on that some other time.

Poor pubs and clubs :~(

I read today with some annoyance the bitching of pubs and clubs about how smoking bans put in place last year have meant that they've lost millions of dollars from gambling revenue.

Club revenue from pokies fell from $295 million in March 2007 to $230 million in March 2008. Total turnover - the amount of money put through the machines - fell from $3.6 billion in March last year to $2.9 billion this March.

[...]

"There is growing evidence that the continuing drop in revenue is not related just to the indoor bans. With petrol prices up substantially this year and several more interest rate increases announced, households are clearly reducing how much they gamble." Some clubs would not survive, [chief executive of Clubs NSW, David Costello] said.

Poor pubs and clubs! Now some of them will have to close, because they can't get their hands on the easy no-need-to-actually-do-anything-but-buy-a-machine money from .... wait, what?! Come on guys, this is freaking fantastic news! Smoking bans, helping gamblers kick their (gambling) habit!

Of course on the second page they mention in one small paragraph that the CEO of AHA, Sally Fielke, said "some venues had reported a rise in food sales since the smoking ban". See, now, this is what I'm Tolkien about.

Put up or shut up, pubs and clubs of NSW/ACT, and find a way to decently earn your income, through, you know, actually providing services rather than leeching off the gambling and nicotine addicts.

Problems with the private sector...

A topic that seems to be increasingly relevant in the last few days of posting (here, and here) is the invasiveness of corporate practice on other areas of life. So with that in mind, I thought I'd throw some news from Nature out there, in the form of this article.

So this article gives us a quite disturbing set of events whereby

"a company conducting a clinical trial, having its employees design the trial, analyse the data, write the paper, and then towards the very end recruit academic authors to put their name on the paper to give it that seal of supposed authenticity "

Two words for this: not cool. Peer-review for a number of years has come under attack for encouraging, among other things, nepotism and sexism. The literature is vast, and a study (albeit, a potentially rewarding and important study) in itself, which I don't feel confident trying to portray to you in a single blog post. What is important to note, is that in the Journal of the American medical Association (JAMA), where the study mentioned in Nature is soon to appear, this phenomena of 'ghost authorship' has been mentioned for at least 10 years.

What is the problem here? Well, apart from the fact that, as Nature mentions, this particular cache of studies are actually so doctored as to be plain ol' fraudulent in their content, it's also a subversion of the current system of scholarship practiced over the world. If the peer-review system wasn't on shaky footing before, it's certainly been shown to be in even more strife. The tobacco industry has been employing researchers for decades to attempt to show that smoking isn't as bad as everyone thinks (nice, guys), but this is a new level of subversion, the actual hiring of external researchers as front-men for internal research.

Priority is one of the big prizes in scholarly research. It always has been, as we aren't generally the type to earn the big bucks. But lo and behold, the private sector has found a way to tap into this prize, by effectively giving away research to motivate their own ends. It seems like a win-win situation: the company gets their research, and a researcher gets to be a first name. This is not so much an issue in philosophy, but in the natural and life sciences there is a huge emphasis on being a first name. I mean, computational science/high-end physics papers can have tens, occasionally hundreds of names on a paper. No one wants to be obscured behind the impenetrable wall of `et. al.' And hence the problem - the prize of research, priority, has been subverted.

How does one counter this? It's not easy, and will most likely require a restructuring of peer-review (a shout out to my friends who are big on `designing in ethics'). The first, if somewhat cumbersome method I can think of to alleviate this problem is to require a defense of a paper funded by industry, but I don't think we have enough peer-reviewers for this. The second would be a change in emphasis on the importance of priority in research in the current academic climate, but that's even harder to accomplish.

the method of discovery mentioned in Nature may show some promise, but requires a diversification of talents in the academic community. I'm talking about encouraging and promoting the meta-study: a study of studies. Hell, this might even allow us to get our highly critical social theorist brethren into the fray. To examine a wide range of studies on a topic allows us to see trends in data that may not appear otherwise.

I'll quote a personal example to illustrate: my honours thesis in nuclear physics revolved around the debunking of a number of popular ideas in a particular field of plasma physics. The problem was that people had initially misunderstood a set of phenomena, and had published based on this misunderstanding, which was never picked up. It, over the span of 30-odd years, became canon within this field, until one day my then-supervisor was alerted by a PhD student that the description of the system was false. As in, the data that people continued to collect, to describe other phenomena, was all based on an interpretation of a system which was false. The data had been replicated time and time again as a side product of other projects, and still no one noticed. It followed that an analysis of the literature pointed to how and where the misunderstanding occurred.

That was a benign example, certainly far removed in intention from the current situation, but I hope I get my point across- by looking at what has come before, we can see patterns that each individual study can't display. In my example, it was a misunderstanding of theory, in Ross' example written up in nature, it was the subversion of a practice within the scholarly methods of reporting. Both of these are important, but it takes a particular type of research to see where things are going wrong. Academic maintenance, so to speak.

I can't see that corporations are going to stop trying this. It's up to the academy to make it that much harder for private sector interests to subvert our practices in an effort to push products.