Monthly Archives: October 2009

A Free-Market Case for the Public Option [12 Oct 2009, Atlantic] 1

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On 12 October 2009, Max Fisher wrote in The Atlantic A Free-Market Case for the Public Option.

A public option would, crazy as it might sound, make health insurance a free market. If there exists a government-run plan, which by all accounts would be basic and geared towards affordability, consumers will have the ability to opt out of the private insurance market. Private providers would finally have real incentives to provide a better product and innovate by building an insurance plan stronger than public insurance.

The Killing of America’s Free-Market Economy

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Follow this link to the article on Minyanville.com by John Mauldin.

There is a lot in the article to argue about, but it is great food for thought.  Too much of it may actually be correct.

I hadn’t seen Richard’s post Iceland after a year of financial crisis (Fin’l Times, 9 Oct 2009) until I decided to make this post.  I now see that my post is actually complementary to his.

Wall Street vs. Reform?

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Be warned, this video may make your head explode.

This is the video of Bill Moyers Journal of Friday, October 10, 2009.

A Moment of Truth with Bill Moyers, Marcy Kaptur, and Simon Johnson


Follow this link to the PBS page from which this video was excerpted. This page has more information about the guests and has links to reference materials.

Follow this link to the article on Huffington Post.

Is US strategy in Afghanistan working?

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Follow this link to the article in The Christian Science Monitor.

The Huffington post in pointing to this article falsely headlined it as McChrystal Criticism Mounts Within Obama Administration.

It has occurred to me that McChrystal is not going around the chain of command by speaking directly to the people and to congress.  He may very well be following the orders of the chain of command to do just what he is doing.

McChrystal may be making the case for the policy that Obama wants to follow, but which does not have much public support yet.  By the time McChrystal is finished, the public may be begging Obama to please do what Obama has wanted to do all along.

Also, there is no single military strategy that fits all situations.  COIN should be the strategy of choice for situations like the end game in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Even in these two wars, the initial part of the game was to overcome fairly conventional forces.  A somewhat conventional US military strategy succeeded during the first phase.  The problem was that for many years there was no switch over to the strategy needed for the second phase.

Any faction in our military that thinks we should focus on one strategy to the neglect of all others is being far too doctrinaire for the real world.  Same for the public and the politicians.

In the article the analysis by Col. Gian Gentile, head of the military history program at the US Military Academy at West Point that Israel had been trying a counterinsurgency operation in the Palestinian territories is just insane.

He thinks the same thing happened to the Israelis in their disastrous war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006: their skills at “combined arms” – blending infantry, tanks, and artillery – had eroded because they had spent so much time carrying out counterinsurgency operations in the Palestinian territories.

I have written comment 1, comment2, and comment 3 on Huffington Post.