Moment of Truth

I usually post my essays, like the one below, at the link above. Click on it and you can read past essays, plus a lovely almanac of sorts. I thank Yosephus for allowing me to display my essays here. You can also hear them at http://www.thisishell.net - the website of the radio show on which I read them.

jd



2-19-05 DIRT CHEAP

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the Whiskey Rebellion with a dash of bitters.

Hey, this is great, this new law to hinder consumers from recovering damages inflicted by corporate and professional negligence. And why punish the negligent with punitive fines? They never learn their lesson, anyway.

Once all this brilliant tort reform legislation is in place, your doctor bills are going to go down, right? Because the insurance companies are going to charge doctors less for malpractice insurance, right? Insurance companies are going to charge less for all corporate and professional liability insurance, so all prices will drop. Right?

Boy, I can't wait. Once it's easier to get away with ripping off and injuring consumers, everything's gonna be dirt cheap. We'll all be able to have more leisure time to spend with our families, spreading our family values all over our family members, because we won't have to work as hard to support ourselves. We can go on a trip to the Grand Canyon!

Wages won't go up, though. Why not? I don't know. In all of this talk about letting us keep our money, I don't hear anything about getting higher wages. All I hear about is easing the burden on corporations, which is supposed to make prices lower, so we buy more. I don't get it, though. Higher wages would make us buy more, too, right? Why don't politicians promise higher wages? Why isn't there a part of the brilliant tort reform plan that works it so that wages go up?

I remember one time wages almost went up. Large corporations were making record profits. Productivity was at an all-time high. Prices were relatively stable. But then Allan Greenspan did something to make sure wages didn't go up. Apparently, if the worker is given a share of the profits earned by his increased output, that causes inflation. And that's why we have to stimulate the economy by taking the pressure off big corporations. Because the only way to reward workers is with low prices, not high wages. High wages bad, low prices good.

So, that's great. Because not only are wages not increasing to reflect productivity growth and corporate profit rises, but benefits are being cut. But that's okay, because now that we have tort reform, everyone will be able to cash in on the dirt cheap insurance! Because, remember, insurance prices are going to drop! Plummet! It's just like getting a raise, only bass ackwards.

Productivity continues to rise, by the way. But workers are not entitled to share in the gains from that rise. Because the rise is probably due to innovations initiated by management.

To be honest, I'm not even sure workers deserve to get paid ANYTHING. They didn’t start the businesses, they didn't invent the products or the way to produce them. They didn't invent the machines or protocols that cause productivity to rise. A long time ago, unions fought for decent wages, and that's the last time wages had any kind of pressure to rise. And that was plenty, I suppose.

Here's what I figured out: It's not what you do, invent, or own, as much as it is what you can secure the legal right to profit from. Unions wanted to institutionalize the worker's legal right to profit from the revenue taken in by the company he or she worked for. So, for a while, the idea that the worker had a right to pieces of the company profit was in vogue in certain circles. But clearly, today, it's not part of the discussion.

But that's okay. Because we have tort reform. So, all of you who can't afford to buy a house, cheer up! Soon, construction companies will be paying so little in insurance, that houses will be dirt cheap. Health care will be dirt cheap.

Oh, and if you want to open a small business, now's the time! Because, with insurance prices dropping, as they're sure to do, because what insurance company wouldn't lower its prices with all this great tort reform, new small businesses are going to blossom like Kaposi's sarcoma lesions on a crystal meth addict. You'll definitely see mom and pop coffee shops supplanting all those Starbuck's stores. And Home Depot will give way again to the local hardware store. And of course Walmarts will no longer be able to undersell small retail shops, because insurance prices are going to drop like a sack of potatoes.

So it's good that consumers will have a harder time making legal claims to reimbursement for injuries. Because, even if their lives are ruined, prices are going to be so low, even with your children dead because of faulty seatbelts or your life shortened because of carcinogens some vinyl manufacturer dumped in your water, it's gonna be like heaven.

The people most often injured by corporate negligence live in the red states, anyway. And since most of them can't afford health care, even though it will be dirt cheap pretty soon, they'll never be in a position for a doctor to do something negligent or malpractical to them in the first place.

There's only one thing going against this trend: Congress wants to raise indecency fines. This will cause indecency insurance rates to go up. In turn, cable and newspapers will have to charge more. Even networks will have to charge more to their advertisers. Which might offset the price plummet. Things may not be dirt cheap. But decency laws are so vague, they can be applied selectively to whomever the FCC wants to persecute. And in the red states, they don't want news and information, anyway. If the Lord had wanted them to be informed, he would have given them the brains not to vote Republican.

Oh, there's one more thing working against dirt cheap prices: the weak dollar. The dollar is very weak, weak as a meth addict with Kaposi's sarcoma. Who weakened the dollar? I don't know. Could be that our economic leadership has its head up its ass? Naw. Must be the liberals.

This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!