Good Monday afternoon and best post-Thanksgiving wishes. I’m back but off to a slow start. Luckily, my friend Pasquino is still using the paper to kindle his fire. After reading an op-ed in today’s Strib about phony diplomas, Pasquino, who must not have enjoyed his turkey, burst into flames over the idea that the invisible hand of the free market will solve everything:
Betty McCollum’s scary story about phony diploma mills doesn’t take into account the wonderful corrective mechanisms of a free market. If you have a major organ incorrectly removed by a surgeon whose diploma is phony the solution is simple: don’t hire him again. If you or a loved one is killed or maimed by anyone who advertises medical skills they don’t possess, just withhold your business from them in future. Is that so hard? Untrained phony-diploma surgeons don’t get much repeat business because their patients die; that’s called the miracle of the marketplace.
It is the same for a million of life’s little problems. Everything is solved easily and efficiently by an unregulated free market economy. If a bridge falls down when you are on it, remember never to cross that bridge again. If you go to a credit counselor for help sorting out your credit woes and they strip your home equity leaving you homeless, don’t bring that credit counselor any more of your business.
But don’t expect the government to protect you. You are, after all, an adult.
But what if you are a child and you suck on a Chinese-manufactured toy and become permanently brain damaged by the lead in it? What if you are the parent of such a child? What kind of a parent are you exactly? Why is it the government’s job to keep toys out of your children’s mouths? Is it the importer’s fault your children suck on toys? Are you expecting a busy company to send employees to your house to teach your children how to play safely?
No, it’s your responsibility, along with avoiding bridges that are falling down and checking on your surgeon’s diploma while you are waiting for emergency surgery, and slowly and carefully reading all fifty pages of the fine print on any financial document you are signing. Don’t you know how to read? Don’t you have a law degree? If you’d like one I know where you can buy one.
And if you are one of the many thousands who can’t afford to send your children to college because your health insurance policy stated on page 42 that it didn’t actually cover your particular disease, or your pension plan had very small print allowing your employer to keep your money, or your mortgage documents stipulated a ginormous balloon payment on page 541, appendix zed, you might be interested in simply buying them one of these diplomas off the rack. They aren’t cheap, but they are cheaper than college, and no actual learning is required. They take Visa and Mastercharge.
Pasquino is the nom de plume of Minneapolitan Eric Hanson.
Holy cats, I don’t remember the last time I saw a straw man that large. Are you seriously suggesting that the outright fraud that this man committed is a serious critique of market failure? Every system is vulnerable to con men. Even government regulated ones.
Pasquino, you mention some bridge that fell down. Can you tell me the name of the private company that paid for and maintained it? I know it must have been private, because a government agency could never have let something like that slip through it’s notice, right?
You might remember Bush standing beside an ob-gyn in Ohio bemoaning the fact this doctor “could longer demonstrate his love” for his patients because evil tort lawyers had driven him out of business. It turned out that the doc had previously demonstrated his love for one patient by telling her to go away because her symptoms were imaginary (fortunately, she went to another doctor who discovered that her symptoms were real and serious) and for another by leaving operating room junk in her.
Start with the fact that corporations, institutions and professions harm people either as customers, employees or, in the case for example of pollution, as innocent bystanders. The question is how do we prevent or repair that harm?
1. There’s the market place, which works in some cases; if I get a bad meal in a restaurant, I’m unlikely to go back, but that doesn’t work when the subject is surgery; nor would I have much luck boycotting the corporation that owns the ship that hit the bridge in San Francisco.
2. Self regulation, used largely by the professions, but the medical profession’s unwillingness to chuck out the bad guys and the absence of a nationwide registry that keeps a quack who is booted out of one state from hanging out his shingle in another don’t inspire confidence. Outfits like the BBB are about as toothless as they get.
3. Government regulation.
4. Litigation; when all else fails sue. Litigation also has the advantage of providing some relief for the victims.
Conservatives appear to favor 1 & 2, which are usually ineffective, and foam at the mouth over 3 & 4 which actually do work.