NEW COLUMN: Pandemic, Plague & Protests: Will Chile Join The Shithole Country Club?

Capitalism, Democracy, Economy, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Socialism, Welfare

NEW COLUMN IS “Pandemic, Plague & Protests: Will Chile Join The Shithole Country Club?” Previously on Quarterly Review, WND.COM  and The Unz Review, read it now on American Greatness  

An excerpt:

Before the coronavirus pandemic and the plague of locusts came the protesters.

From the affluent locales—Chile, France, Britain, Hong King, Catalonia—to the impoverished ones—Algeria, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Lebanon and more; the world was on fire (to borrow from Amy Chua’s brilliant book).

The reasons cited for a world-wide conflagration ranged from the evils of free-market capitalism (says the Left) to the “socialist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela” (says the Right), to “economics, demography, a sense of powerlessness…and social media.”

Some experts spoke of a “youth bulge” of over-educated young people chasing too few jobs. In truth, this was more like ill-educated youngsters with useless degrees, who thought it chic to don a balaclava and lob hard objects at the police and the property it was protecting.

Chile is the jewel of Latin America. In 2014, it even surpassed the United States on the Index of Economic Freedom, ranking seventh to America’s 12th. Since 1990, economic growth in Chile has been as steady as the stability of its institutions. Poverty rates had plummeted and social services had been extended to the needy.

On the right, Pat Buchanan has described Chile as “the country with the highest per capita income and least inequality in all of Latin America.”

On the Left—yet still on the side of a competitive market economy—the Economist agrees. Chile “is the second-richest country in Latin America, thanks in part to its healthy public finances and robust private sector.”

In no-man’s land are the protestors on the streets of Santiago and other cities. What the demonstrators want is unclear. To the extent their inchoate signs and signals can be divined, it would appear that the path the well-to-do Chile will be forced to take is that of less capitalism and more socialism; less of the private sector and more of the state.

Indeed, Chile is beset with protesters determined to bring the elected government to its knees. Many parts of Santiago, the capital, have been boarded up or burned down. The country’s “malcontents” want more state-provided stuff; more health care and more free education and pensions.

It increasingly looks like Sebastián Piñera, Chile’s president, may just be forced “to scrap a system” that appears to have served Chile well.

READ THE REST … NEW COLUMN IS “Pandemic, Plague & Protests: Will Chile Join The Shithole Country Club?” Previously on Quarterly Review, WND.COM and The Unz Review, it’s now on American Greatness.  

* Image is via The Economist

Pandemic Preparedness And America’s Mañana Mentality

COVID-19, Debt, Economy, Free Markets, Healthcare, Political Economy, The State

The dynamics of state regulation and ownership aside, there is no ignoring our American mañana mentality. Consume in the present; worry not at all about tomorrow’s supplies.

Doesn’t that epitomize the state of America’s coronavirus pandemic reserves?

Via the LA Times: “A disaster foretold: Shortages of ventilators and other medical supplies have long been warned about.”

The nation needed larger caches of standby medical supplies and hospitals that were better prepared to handle a surge of infected patients.

A decade later, the coronavirus crisis is exposing many of the same gaps. Inadequate supplies of protective masks, ventilators, intensive care beds and other medical resources are forcing mass closures of schools and businesses and restrictions on everyday activities as public officials rush to slow the virus so America’s medical system isn’t overwhelmed.

the Government Accountability Office … the federal government’s leading internal watchdog, has issued a steady stream of reports about poor pandemic planning. …

The GAO, public health experts and others issued a steady drumbeat of warnings that America would sooner or later face a widespread infectious disease outbreak or a major bioterrorism attack and was woefully unprepared. …

… In both 2018 and 2019, U.S. intelligence agencies issued insistent warnings in their annual Worldwide Threat Assessment.

“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,” the 2019 report noted.

AND, “Making the case for investments in material and hospital planning has long been challenging as most people have difficulty envisioning a major disaster, acknowledged Dr. Eric Toner of Johns Hopkins University, an authority on pandemic preparedness.”

Hospitals also are under pressure to keep margins thin and eliminate spending on staff and supplies that aren’t used all the time.

And, in government-regulated hospitals, which are the majority in the US,

The budget crunch represents a particular challenge for so-called safety-net hospitals, institutions that serve many uninsured patients and those covered by Medicaid, and consequently collect less revenue. These same hospitals are now expecting a large surge in coronavirus patients but have limited resources to ramp up staffing and add intensive care beds if needed.

“Cash is very limited,” said Charlie Shields, chief executive of Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City. Shields said the finances are under even more stress since the hospital canceled elective procedures and shut down its dental services to prepare for the pandemic, moves that reduce hospital revenue.

In case you imagine the US has a free-market in medicine, here are a few statistics that’ll shock you, via The Economist:

The country has over 6,000 hospitals. Only 1,300 or so are private for-profit institutions; the rest are non-profit or government-run. The lack of an overt profit motive has done little to rein in prices …

In any event, the defining characteristic of the Unites States is debt—public and private, macro and micro. America is a debtor nation. A natural shift must take place in the economy from a credit-fueled, consumption-based economy, to one founded on savings, investment and production.

US Has Over 6,000 hospitals. Only 1,300 Are Private For-Profit Institution

America, Capitalism, COVID-19, Free Markets, Government, Healthcare

If you imagined America has a free market in medicine, read “Diagnosis: opaque: Donald Trump wants hospitals to be more upfront about prices”:

The country has over 6,000 hospitals. Only 1,300 or so are private for-profit institutions; the rest are non-profit or government-run. The lack of an overt profit motive has done little to rein in prices, however. Hospital costs have risen at an annual rate of close to 5%, compared with below 1% for drug prices. … Nor has a charitable mission dampened the ambition of bosses at big hospital chains; seven-figure salaries are not unheard of at those with revenues exceeding $500m a year. They have also been on an acquisition binge. The number of deals has jumped from around 55 a year between 2002 and 2009 to 90 or more these days. Since 2018 non-profit hospitals have been the acquirers in three-quarters of the transactions.

How do government-run or subsidized hospitals engage in the capitalistic act of mergers?  They do so on the backs of taxpayers. Profits are privatized; losses are socialized. This is the stuff of cronyism.

Free market medicine we do not have. Before Coronavirus, Trump was looking to reform the nation’s hospitals.

MORE:

“Diagnosis: opaque: Donald Trump wants hospitals to be more upfront about prices”

* Image courtesy The Economist.

Happy, Homogeneous Hungary

Christian Right, Christianity, EU, Europe, Family, Globalism, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Race, Racism, The West

Happy Hungary: CBS’s flagship program, 60 Minutes, has just assailed Hungary for its closed border, pro-Western, Christian, Hungarian-families-first policies. Hungarians looked as happy as they are homogeneous. Can’t have that!

Hungarians, incidentally, have only 131 Corona cases (6 deaths). This (as this writer, at least,  hypothesizes) is due to a more stable population and fewer pockets of people living, say, with one foot in Wuhan; the other in the West.

And it’s not just that “enlightened” western media object to “Hungary exercising its right to self-determination.” No. The media treat the sight of fruitful, happy whites as they would an aberration, a plague. Freud would have called this western attitude Thanatos: “the personification of death.” This mindset is pathological, for Hungarians look beautiful, happy and whole.

The same government that strenuously tries to boost population, also goes to extraordinary lengths to keep non-Hungarians out. In 2015, hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants, most from the Middle East, passed through Hungary. They were told they were not welcome to stay.

“We must state that we do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed,” Orban said in a speech last year. “We do not want our color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others. We do not want to be a diverse country.” …

 

Prime Minister Orban’s motto:

“‘Procreation, not immigration.’ He did what President Trump promised to do [and didn’t]. In 2015, Orban slammed Hungary’s gates shut, building, essentially, a border wall, a $500 million fence 180 miles long on the southern border with Serbia.”

“This is about preserving, we keep hearing, ‘European values,'” Wertheim said to Toroczkai. “What does that mean?”
“For me, the– the European culture, the– the European values are the classical music. Mozart. Beethoven. Tchaikovsky,” Toroczkai said.

…Secretary of State Katalin Novak … says the plan is entirely consistent with Hungarian values. “We speak about not only preserving Western civilization, we also, to say it openly, that Christian culture we would like to preserve,” Novak said.

“Christian culture?” Wertheim asked.

“Yeah, that’s the way of life in Europe, in Hungary, that we have a Christian way of life,” Novak said.

‘Keep Hungary Hungarian,’ that’s true. We say that.”

MORE of CBS’s drip-drip poison: “Subsidies for minivans: Hungarian government paying citizens to start families, but only the ‘right’ kinds of families. A program in Hungary is offering cash to couples for having kids, but the reasoning for it echoes some of Europe’s darkest chapters. Jon Wertheim reports on the anti-immigrant motivation to “keep Hungary Hungarian.”