Mock PSA Propaganda PSA
I won’t grant it the benefit of linking to it, but I must comment that the mock “PSA” recently produced by moveon.org, featuring a gaggle of hollywood drones, is one of the most superficial, outrageously fallacious, and economically ignorant displays of human stupidity that I’ve seen in some time - a message which accurately reflects the de facto ideological debris surfacing from the bowels of American pop culture.
It’s chock-full of mostly shopworn rhetoric, but there are a few exceptionally erroneous humdingers - the most stunning of which is this sarcastic mind-bender:
“…what’s so American about competition?”
He’s partially correct, there is nothing American about what he refers to as “competition”, i.e., nationalizing an industry, but referring to such as competition is an (intentionally) obscene misuse of the word.
His incredibly distorted implication is that competition is American, and the healthcare market is lacking competition (which it is only to the extent that government intervention has facilitated). His sarcastic portrayal of a stereotypically “greedy” insurance exec (a supposed free-market advocate) dismissing the need for increased competition is intended to A) condemn businessmen as exploitative predators, B) highlight the supposedly un-American essence of the “free-market” as represented by the greedy exec, and C) suggest that anyone who doesn’t advocate “reform” is un-American.
These conniving insinuations are united by condescending sarcasm in order to justify the need of (even more) Government intervention. Let’s unpack this irrational nonsense.
Competition is a vital economic aspect that can exist only to the extent that a market is free of coercion. Government intervention, i.e, reduction of freedom, can only decrease competition. There is no way to legislate competition. Competition is a dynamic which reflects a sum of individual choices. Those choices present an unyielding potential for the loss or gain of market share, if the market is free, i.e., void of unnatural barriers to entry for new competition. If an insurance company had rates that were unnecessarily high, or coverage that customers deemed inadequate, then another firm could seize the opportunity to earn the business of any customers who unsatisfied with their insurance coverage. The only way that a company can escape acknowledging that constant threat of competition is through some barrier to market entry. The only entity that can legally pose such a barrier is Government - the only entity which can regulate and tax businesses by force.
The greedy insurance executive portrayed has no control over competition short of leveraging government force in some manner. So, if there is any lack of legitimate competition, it can only be as a result of government acting beyond its proper scope - protecting individual rights.
In fact, the market is not free, and that is the exact cause for its dysfunctional state today.
The second, more ridiculous fallacy presented is the implication that further government intervention can remedy the claimed lack of competition. This absurd contradiction suggests using illogical means to achieve fallacious ends. There is no conceivable scenario where socializing a market could possibly incite more competition than completely de-regulating the same market. Competition is driven by the sum of consumer choices. Socializing, by definition, spends consumers money apart from their discretion. Socializing a market is the antithetical destroyer of competition - just as we see in the stagnant debacle known as our “public” schools - which can hardly be described as a competitive market. How could there be any substantive competition when “customers” (as the IRS likes to refer to taxpayers) are forced to pay into the government system. In order for would-be competitors to even exist, much less compete, they’d have to stay afloat considering both a forced, artificial decrease in demand since the “customer” has already been persuaded at gunpoint to choose another vendor, as well as the main “competitor” they’re up against (government) is effectively immune to market influence, i.e., can operate at a loss, since his customers are guaranteed and his funding is the unlimited virtual piggy-bank known as the treasury. How can one compete with an entity which holds the power to legally force customers to unconditionally pay for services and can arbitrarily charge as little or as much as they want?
Forcing consumers to pay for services from a “producer” immune to customer satisfaction - this is what Turk, as a perfect caricature of pragmatic, collectivist ignorance, means by competition.
Free-market competition is American - the enslavement and looting of an entire nation is not.
