Sunday Reading

Newsweek articles on the economy, especially the lead one by Daniel Gross--why the Great Recession may technically be over but only because the Obama Recovery Act and other federal measures prevented it from getting far worse. Why the stimulus takes awhile to generate jobs and why recovery on the ground may be slow, but once recovery gets going, is designed to be sustainable for the future:

The Obama administration's strategy rests on what some might call industrial policy or excessive government intervention—or even creeping socialism. I call it "the smart economy." It means eschewing the blunt economic instruments we've always used and focusing resources and rhetoric on strategic sectors: renewable energy/green technology, infrastructure, broadband, and health care. It means making investments to run vital systems more intelligently and efficiently, thus creating a new infrastructure on which the private sector can work its magic.

I don't always endorse the views of Bill Maher but this column on Huffington Post is an almost perfect combination of wit and sense, which is to say, he agrees with my analysis. It begins:

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.

And in tracing the trend since Reagan for privatization etc. ("Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations.") he takes on the ugly destructive spectre of health care for profit. To which I add:La salute non si paga! Health is not for sale!

Along the way, Maher comments on the hypocritical elegies about how Walter Cronkite was the end of an era, which never mention that one major reason for better reporting in the Cronkite era (though it was seldom probing, it was serious): in the Cronkite era the network news division wasn't supposed to make a profit, it was a public service to report serious information that Americans needed to know to intelligently govern themselves. ( "In Uncle Walter's time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies. ")

Cronkite and the news are also the subject of Frank Rich's Sunday column in the New York Times: "Watching many of the empty Cronkite tributes in his own medium over the past week, you had to wonder if his industry was sticking to mawkish clichés just to avoid unflattering comparisons. If he was the most trusted man in America, it wasn’t because he was a nice guy with an authoritative voice and a lived-in face. It wasn’t because he “loved a good story” or that he removed his glasses when a president died. It was because at a time of epic corruption in the most powerful precincts in Washington, Cronkite was not at the salons and not in the tank."

Update: A Paul Krugman column lays out the economic reasons why markets alone can't cure heathcare. His conclusion:

"There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence."

So let me repeat: La salute non si paga: health is not for sale!