The book I abandoned two books ago was James Kirchick's The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. Kirchick, a journalist, is a wonderful writer, but for some reason, which I can no longer remember, I started to lose confidence in what he was saying. (He wasn't just reporting. He was constructing an argument.) Kirchick has spent time living in and studying Europe, from a journalist's perspective, and I haven't, so I'm generally inclined to assume he knows what he's talking about. But curiously, as out to sea as I felt with the subject matter, what seemed like a bigger issue, since I wanted as much grounding as I could get, was that Kirchick seemed to approach topics as a liberal, but he was described online (possibly Wikipedia) as a "neo-conservative." If I'm reading his synthesis of something about which he knows a lot, and I know very little, I have to be able to trust him. So I wrote to him to say he was described as a "neo-conservative," and to ask him what a "neo-conservative" is (and how it influences his view of things). He never responded, so since I was increasingly unsure that his reporting was accurate, I stopped reading the book.
The last book I abandoned was Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man. The book is well-constructed, with lots of references, but it relies too heavily on perspectives and assumptions that are dated and, in my opinion, not valid. Even from Darwin's point of view, it seemed glaring to me that there were angles and explanations he never considered. And since I can't discuss this with him (either), I contented myself with a 75 page start, and decided to move on. And I moved on to the topic immediately at hand.
I have three books written by one or both of the same two people. The one on top of the pile is The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. As it turns out, this is the most recent of the three books, and the original argument was made in Merchants of DOUBT. The authors are Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway (The Big Myth and Merchants of DOUBT), and just Naomi Oreskes (Why Trust Science?). So I started with The Big Myth, which I thought was going to be an impossible pain, because the Introduction is long (as is the book), and the font is too small and faint for me to read easily with my glasses. But I got through the Introduction, and the rest of the book/font is much more manageable. It's exceptionally well-written, too.
The reason for the subhead about American business having manipulated public opinion about government and the free market is introduced in the Introduction, and I'm sure it will get a lot more attention in subsequent chapters.
The thesis, to put it as simply as the authors sometimes put it, is that both the public sector and the private sector are necessary, and that if government wasn't necessary (that's the Libertarian view), the private sector would not have created as many problems as it glaringly has. It has been willing to create horrible pollution, because putting toxic substances in the water and in the air is cheaper and easier than processing or avoiding them. The Introduction mentions child labor a few times, which works well for industry, but it doesn't work well for children. It mentions the often poor treatment of employees, when that treatment is left to the discretion, and power, of industry. It mentions the tobacco industry, the product of which is great for the tobacco industry, but very bad for the public. None of this is adequately confronted except by government. "Just say no?" Nice, Nancy, but it doesn't work that happy way in the real world.
Two examples not included in the Introduction spring to mind. Maybe they'll be discussed later. One is seatbelts. Seatbelts were invented by a Briton in the 19th C, and he used them in his glider. They were improved (made retractable) and offered for use in cars in this country in the early 1950s (by a neurologist). But the public weren't keen to use them, and particularly to pay for them (they were a discretionary feature), and the car companies didn't want to raise the price of the cars by including them, either. So, between the public and the car companies, there was resistance. It was left to government to step in and tell everyone essentially to grow up, and use the seatbelts. Without them, the neurologist had messes to clean up, and corpses to bury. It was the private sector, or the "free market," that invented them, but the public sector that required their use. I don't know if there are Libertarians who drive themselves and their families around, and refuse to use seatbelts, because the government requires them, but I hope there aren't. And not because I hope they don't get ticketed.
In my field, doctors are answerable in a variety of ways to the jurisdictions/states. And you can be sure that when this started to happen, the doctors were very unhappy about it. They didn't want the states (government) making rules for how they practice. But the problem was that they hadn't been making, and enforcing, rules for themselves. They didn't police themselves, and they were offended that anyone else policed them. But someone had to protect to public/patients. If the doctors weren't going to do it, then government was.
Another medical-related issue, which I might have discussed before, is the Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG). This was put in place in the 1980s, and it affected hospital treatment of Medicare beneficiaries. Medicare was getting killed paying these bills, and they established a different approach. The doctor had to make an admitting diagnosis, and list any other conditions (comorbidities) the patient had. Based on this information, Medicare decided in advance how much it would pay for the hospitalization. If the treatment was effective and efficient, and the patient was improved enough for discharge early (and didn't get readmitted for the same problem too soon), the hospital kept the money. If they were inefficient, and kept the patient longer, the hospital itself had to pay for the protracted treatment. I was in practice on Miami Beach at the time, and many doctors, and the four fully functioning hospitals, were up in arms. Doctors were making a killing off hospitalizing Medicare beneficiaries who didn't need to be in the hospital, and keeping them there as long as they wanted, charging, of course, for a hospital visit every day. Some doctors retired early, because the gravy train ended. But the private sector -- the market -- was not functioning properly (it was functioning in its own interest), and the government/public sector/Medicare had to step in to limit the excessive use. If you're a Medicare beneficiary, and your doctor tells you you need to be in the hospital, are you going to argue? Who knows best if you need hospital treatment? Today, there is one hospital on Miami Beach. And it's a private hospital. The private sector does what it's supposed to do (still to excess), and the public sector or government has to control misuse. No one else can do it.
And that's where we are. The vast majority of countries in the world have a combination of market functioning and government functioning or oversight. Anyone who thinks government, or the market/private sector, can function monolithically and adaptively is kidding him- or herself.
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