Left, Right, Center

For Ronald Reagan, most questions were simple, and there was a clear answer.  Likely, he was significantly in the grip of dementia even during his first term, and for many demented patients there is often a wonderful clarity; the world and it's contradictions becomes simple, and clear. For Mr. Reagan, the answer to all problems of poverty and lives lived and wasted struggling with economic deprivation was simple: The free market solves all problems. Should we bring the resources of the government to bear on the problem of health care? Let the market bring its ruthless efficiency to the health care system and provide the best, most innovative solutions to the lack of health care for the poor, the unaffordability of basic care for the struggling middle class, but do not allow the government to dictate solutions in health care because the scariest ten words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."  That was a very catchy line.  It implied Mr. Reagan had confidence in his audience to see the joke.  It became the anthem for the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh and the far right. It had clarity.

The problem was, it was the essence of facile. It seemed so simple, it had to be wrong. And it was.

Free markets, the profit motive work are potent forces, but where in America is there a really free market?  Certainly not in health care. 

What Mr. Reagan's supporters mean by "free market" is allowing rich and powerful corporations who got to be rich and powerful with government help, like the railroads, the oil companies, the drug companies, to be allowed, by protection of law, to crush all real threats to their supremacy, once they had achieved a position of advantage.

On the other hand, Karl Marx's idea of government as the ultimate planner and force of justice has no clear model of success. The collapse of the Soviet Union was predicted by that brilliant examination of its practical weaknesses in Orwell's Animal Farm. Communists, socialists never successfully answered Orwell's argument.  

In fact, socialized medicine in England, Germany and France has worked much better than the American patchwork quilt of medical care. Obamacare, has, for all we know, improved healthcare for large numbers of people, but there is little in the free, competitive media to document this. 

There are certain public endeavors which simply are not amenable to the profit motive. Health care is certainly the most obvious example, but national defense, space exploration, water management, power distribution and infrastructure, like bridges, roads and air traffic control are areas where the profit motive may simply be antithetical to the business at hand: The public good in these instances is simply not served by the drive toward profit.

The problem is, nobody has yet come up with a catchy little line for the failure of the profit motive. 

The closest thing is Upton Sinclair's line, "It is difficult to make a man understand something, if his salary depends on his not understanding it."