Free marketeers

On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" today, the host Joe Scarborough was discussing the airline industry with business reporter Erin Burnett.

Burnett said something like "I'm against regulation and in favor of the free market, but something has to be done about the failing airline industry. Perhaps it's time to nationalize it." Joe seemed to agree.

What was the reason these two stauch Republican free market advocates think the airlines should be nationlized or at least regulation be reinstated? They both fly a lot and they are concerned about cancelled flights, smelly airplanes and poor treatment.

We're hearing the same kind of thing about the housing industry now that everyone is losing equity in their homes and we are in a recession because greedy companies violated the ethics that are supposed to be automatic in a free market, part of Adam Smith's "invisible hand." And we heard something similar during the Enron debacle which cost California and innocent Californians billions of dollars.

Republicans love the free market, except when it fails, or inconveniences them. They love deregulation until it hurts them. They believe in the invisible hand, until that invisible hand sticks itself into their pocketbook and withdraws cash.

When will they learn that deregulation and the free market have some dangerous downsides and that unrestrained greed inevitably wreaks havoc on economies?

They will never learn. Even those who are today calling for regulation will change their mind when the economy gets back on track with a Democratic president and congress.

This is why Democrats cannot ever allow Republicans to foist their free market, deregulation voodoo on the country again.

That is one of many reasons why John McCain must be defeated.

The greed market and the growth deception

Over at Outraged Citizen, I have presented a laywoman's perspective on the current housing crisis as only the latest example of how the "free market" over the past sixty years has been a predatory market, how it is destroying the middle class, and how the measurement of "growth" in the economy is a decptive indicator of the health of our economy as well as our democracy. Today's free market lures Americans into buying things they cannnot afford on credit, and then penalizes them when they cannot pay:

If the "free market" has become nothing more than a market to make the rich richer, while using and abusing the poor and working classes in deceptive financial proposals they don't understand and shouldn't be expected to understand, tempting and luring them into wanting the things the upper class and upper middle class can afford, convincing them they "deserve" these things, and offering them creative ways to possess them, only to penalize them later because they could never afford them in the first place, then it is a market controlled by powerful, unconscionable forces that threaten us all. It is a market that is neither "free" nor "fair." It is a predatory market, a market that could eventually crush the middle class.

The wonderful "free market"

Following up on my article on the health care crisis, here is an interesting article from the L.A. Times on the incentives offered to insurance company analysts for cancelling policies.

Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies, documents disclosed Thursday showed.

The revelation that the health plan had cancellation goals and bonuses comes amid a storm of controversy over the industry-wide but long-hidden practice of rescinding coverage after expensive medical treatments have been authorized.

These cancellations have been the recent focus of intense scrutiny by lawmakers, state regulators and consumer advocates. Although these "rescissions" are only a small portion of the companies' overall business, they typically leave sick patients with crushing medical bills and no way to obtain needed treatment.