Tax Philosophy in America; a Brief History

The United States has been blessed with an abundance of natural resources unlike most any other nation in the world from the very beginning of our nation. Plentiful rich land for expansion, an abundance of coal, oil, natural gas, and a mostly congenial and mild climate combined to make this a haven for those willing to work hard and have an independent spirit for the better part of three centuries now. Combine this with rich soil, and almost limitless supplies of fresh water and wild game and you begin to get a feel for how uniquely rich this country has been since its inception. It is hard to overstate the fact that much of the rich character of our nation is directly attributable to the vast bounty in natural resources that our part of the continent of North America contained when the first settlers from Western Europe set foot here. We as Americans are fond of bragging about the individualism and entrepreneurial spirit that made us the greatest economic and military power in the world today without giving due credit to the vast richness the land held when we came here.

At the outset of the experiment that the United States government is we were almost overwhelmingly an agricultural nation. What made this country unique from so many of the nations of Western Europe where so many of the original immigrants came from was the heretofore unimaginable amount of land available for the taking. This is the only nation of the western world where for centuries there was more land available than people to work it. This led to low prices on land and high prices on labor; both uniquely and vastly different from what the rest of the western world knew as normal. It was this great abundance of land that financed much of our government expense for most of the first two centuries of our existence as a nation. Money from the public sale of these lands along with moderate tariffs on imports from overseas provided the great majority of revenues that our government needed to survive. While much of Western Europe struggled with high taxes and all manner of attempts to raise enough revenue to cover expenditures Americans were for the most part completely unconcerned with such problems.

Indeed the American Revolution by which we as a country gained our independence from Great Britain was largely fought over Americans refusal to pay taxes to the British government. Great Britain believed that since she had provided the military that fought two wars against foreign powers and Native American allies to these powers, the colonies should share in the high taxes these expenditures had levied on her citizens in Great Britain and other colonies of the crown. American colonial leaders disagreed. It is worth noting here that even at that time the preponderance of this tax burden fell upon the first wealthy class that had sprung up in this nation. These taxes that American colonial leaders found so objectionable were not levied on the average American small farmer they were taxes on the merchant and planter class; the wealthiest Americans.

As Adam Smith in his "Wealth of Nations" notes; it is the division of wealth that is in many ways the root cause of government expense to begin with. If all nations are equal in wealth there is little motive for one nation to attack another. If all citizens within a country are equal in wealth there is little reason for the expensive protections government provides in the form of justice systems, police, and standing armies. It is the division of wealth, furthermore the unequal division of wealth that makes stronger central governments necessary. Central governments from the very beginning of civilization have been necessary to support property rights. John Locke, the enlightened thinker from whom Jefferson borrowed the immortal "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" in the opening of the Declaration of Independence, stated the function of all government more clearly as the protection of "Life, Liberty, and Property". While both Jefferson and Locke agree that all true governments receive their power from the consent of the governed Locke was much more honest about the three basic rights governments have the duty to protect. In other words, justice systems, courts, police, and to a great extent national armies are necessitated by the need to protect property rights. In largely agrarian societies with equal wealth smaller, less expensive governments have always sufficed. An axiom that Smith well recognized is that the larger the division of wealth within a nation, the more complex and expensive the government system that is needed to support it.

Smith spends a great deal of time in his book explaining this theory. It is the basis for his justification for taxing the populace in proportion to their wealth. After all, if they are the reason why a larger more expensive government is necessary, they should be willing to pay for it in proportion to their need. This is an important point and one that we seem to have lost sight of in this country in the recent past. Much of our governmental effort goes into protecting the business interests of our wealthiest citizens. Our nation's foreign policy since the beginning of the 20th century has been overwhelmingly slanted towards protection of the largest business interests in the country. When we were an isolationist nation with little business interests outside of our borders we had little need of a huge military or a large and expensive state department. As corporate giants began to dominate the market place both here and abroad our government grew to protect and support their interests.

When the bulk of this nation was agrarian we had little need of a large central government. For much of the first 120 years of our history as a nation this held true. However, with the growth of corporations, manufacturing interests and international trade interests at the end of the nineteenth century this began to change. This change was manifested in our growing involvement in international affairs on a national basis. We didn’t become intimately involved in international affairs through a national referendum; we became involved because of the growing influence of a wealthy class of Americans whose financial interest necessitated a strong military and diplomatic international presence to support their interests. Anyone who takes the time to read the writings of our founding fathers will find them almost unanimous in their disdain for a strong central government supported by large standing armies. This is because as an agrarian nation, we had no need of such exigencies, but as an economic leader in world financial centers this is no longer the case. I don’t think anyone would sensibly argue we don’t need a standing army today or an international diplomatic corp. Aside from those who believe we should revert to being an agrarian nation, everyone understands this is simply a necessity in today’s world.

It was our nation’s rise as an industrial nation that necessitated the growth of our government. In other words, the growth of wealth in this country led to our becoming a leader in the world and this wealth also has costs associated with it that we pay in the form of a larger, more expensive government. You simply cannot have one without the other. Therefore, since it is the wealthiest among us who profit the most from this system they should pay the largest share of the expense in maintaining it. This has been the basis for a fair system of taxation from the very beginnings of organized governments. To quote from Smith again;

The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state. The expence of government to the individuals of a great nation is like the expence of management to the joint tenants of a great estate, who are all obliged to contribute in proportion to their respective interests in the estate. In the observation or neglect of this maxim consists what is called the equality or inequality of taxation.

The growth of corporate power in this country is another reality that we seem to not understand very well as a voting public. Corporations have gained legal status that allows them to have many of the same rights as individuals without the requisite liability of an individual. Just for example, the Supreme Court recently ruled that corporations have the same right of free speech as individuals so they should not be limited as to how they contribute to campaigns of their favorite candidates. While this may seem plausible on its surface it covers up the fact that as an individual you and I are responsible for all of our actions to the very limits of our financial ability to cover them while corporate leaders are only liable as far as their corporate finances while their individual finances are beyond the ability of a court to reach. This is just one example of how the vast capabilities of large corporation’s wealth don’t match their culpability in our legal system. There are many others that favor corporations which is exactly why their success has been tied so closely with the growth of our nation’s power and the growing division between the wealthiest 1% of Americans and the rest of us. I don’t believe corporations are evil entities but they are favored entities under the legal system of this country which is exactly why they have so much wealth and requisite power in our government today.

It is in their best interests that many of the foreign policy decisions that the rest of us pay for are routinely made. Receiving the great abundance of favor that such decisions afford them, one would think that they would happily pay the heaviest share of the expenses put forth to gain them but that is not what is going on in this country today. Since the Reagan revolution we have seen a steady increase in corporate profits along with a steady decrease of the amount of revenue the government receives from them. It is true that the Corporate Tax Rates in this country are high compared to most other industrialized nations (close to 35%). However, what is also true is that tax loopholes that have progressively been extended throughout the last 30 years have reduced the actual tax liability of corporations to all time lows. In 1978 the percentage of total tax revenue raised in this country off of tax revenue on corporations was 15% as opposed to some 47% in individual income taxes at the same time that corporations took in some 40% of the total profits realized. In 2009 the percentage of revenue gathered from corporations was 6% as opposed to 46% in individual income taxes. In other words, corporations which took in some 70% of the total profits made in this country paid 6% of the taxes collected. Looked at another way if corporations earn 70% of the profits and pay 6% of the revenue they are paying a vastly smaller percentage of the cost of the government that makes their profit margin possible while at the same time capitalizing on the protection government affords them. Taking into account the recent rulings on campaign contributions by corporations it is easy to see how this vast increase in profit margins will allow them to continue to consolidate control over the election process in the near future.

Beyond the unlevel playing field of corporate America is another level of unequal taxation the Reagan revolution ushered in that is just as devastating to the deficit. The highest tax brackets in this country have historically paid some 70-90% in income taxes. Again, this is the group of Americans who profit the most from the business environment that our large government creates through subsidies, government research and development grants, and foreign policy decisions built around protecting the financial interests of this same group of people. This same group of people today typically pays some 15% on their income taxes by the time all the loopholes available to them through tax attorneys and favorable legislation are assessed while the average upper middle class citizen pays close to 30% on their income taxes in direct payroll deductions. This is exactly why the upper 1% of the wealthiest Americans now own 45% of the wealth of this country as opposed to the 18% they owned when Reagan came into office.

Without a doubt we as a country have some serious problems as far as our financial situation. We are continually spending more than we take in which is obviously unsustainable. The question is what do we do about it? Do we continue to slash government programs until we can subsist on the lower revenues our present tax codes provide or do we believe that it is both necessary and proper for the government to provide basic services and increase our revenues through higher taxation on corporate profit? The ugly truth we seem to be ignoring is that our government which has steadily grown more and more to be controlled by corporate interests in the financial interests of the wealthiest Americans has at the same time continuously reduced their responsibility for paying the bills. The good news is that we are approaching a point to where these questions will have to be answered. The bad news is that we don’t seem to realize why or how we got into this situation. Corporate interests of the wealthiest Americans continue to gain more control of our government while at the same time increasing their profit margins by cutting the amount of taxes they pay while pointing to the poorest among us as the financial drain on the economy. The choice is ours to make. We can either institute a taxation system based upon the timeless values of equal taxation espoused by Adam Smith above or we can continue our present system of unequal taxation and see the eventual financial collapse of our government as we now know it. What we cannot do is expect to continue on the path we are presently on without facing up to where it is leading us.

Observations Concerning Governments and Taxation

In this country today we have some serious problems with deficits. Anyone who takes the time to look into the situation soon understands that this is a problem that has consistently grown since the Reagan revolution. After the national deficit had basically stabilized since the early 1940’s Reagan’s Administration managed to double the deficit in just eight years. The vast mobilization of armed forces that the United States won WWII with temporarily doubled the deficit but it was quickly paid back down shortly afterwards. Reagan and his policies managed to double the deficit during peacetime with the added legacy that the policies he espoused have directly led to the fact that we still have not managed to get it back under control in the thirty years since.

Governments, unlike personal budgets have regularly and routinely run budget deficits since the beginnings of organized governments in Sumeria some 4000 years ago. The reason for this is very simple. Revenue for governments can come only from taxation and taxation is based upon last year’s expense so there is always a time delay in the reaction of taxation to expenditure. While this is a little alien to the way the most people understand budgeting on a personal level, it is inherent in government expenditure. It is only in recent modern history that methodologies for predicting expenditure have come into common usage for governments and the success rate of these methods is not exactly stellar as governments are frequently faced with situations that require immediate response. We must always remember that any government’s ability to raise revenue is not immediate; it is always lagging behind the need to make expenditures. Modern budgeting methods are predictive modeling attempts at seeing future need and setting money aside accordingly. Barring a discovery of omniscient future sight governmental budgeting will always be at best a very inexact science.

From the very beginnings of organized governments it has been necessary to match revenues (money coming in) with expenditures (money going out). While there is an inherent delay in this process it is still necessary to adjust expenditures and revenues accordingly. While most everyone understands this process from their own efforts to balance their household budgets the public at large in this country today seems unnaturally predisposed to seeing only one side of the budgeting method of our country; expenditures. In a nation as large as ours with as many different obligations as we have it is inevitable that we will disagree on the relative importance of expenditures. Largely these disagreements center on regional interests but they are often further divided based upon our individual status in the economic hierarchy. Farmers in Iowa consider government agricultural subsidies to be of prime importance while government workers in Alabama who work on government facilities are much more likely to favor government investment in military research and development. This discussion can go on ad infinitum without respite, the point being that part of belonging to such a diverse country is an inherent disagreement on priorities. While this diversity is a weakness when it comes to budgeting it is in many other ways the source of our greatest strength as a nation.

Let’s look at some history of governments and taxation to better understand the problem. There is a large push in this country today to do away with big government; to go back towards smaller government and more of a pure capitalist system. Virtually everyone seems to believe this is the path we need to take to recover our economic strength and upgrade our standard of living. Unfortunately for the proponents of this theory, history seems to teach us just the opposite. The advents of organized governments throughout history have directly corresponded with marked advancement in civilization. The Sumerian city states were the first organized governments and marked the beginnings of advancement in cultivation techniques that allowed the growth of populations that had never before been seen on this planet. It is the combined efforts of groups of people and the resultant division of labor that has led to all advancement in living conditions since the beginning of recorded history, not the individualistic efforts of the strongest amongst us. The pooling of labor resources and revenue resources led to large irrigation projects that simply could not have occurred by individual effort. The source of this combined effort, whether in labor or capital was taxation. Each individual by contributing his part in the group effort advanced his own standard of living infinitely quicker than he could have in isolation. This is the root source of all government, the bonding of individual effort for the common good.

Government provides stability. Stability is necessary for advancement. Without government, people are forced to fend for themselves spending large proportions of their time defending their gains from becoming plunder for others. Division of labor collapses and efficiency collapses along with it. Even a cursory glimpse of the history of civilization proves the indivisibility of these two concepts; progress and government. The larger and more effective the government the greater the progress and the higher the standard of living for its citizens; there is an undeniable and direct correlation.

Sumerian civilization with its localized city state governments was closely followed by Greek civilization with its larger city state governments. Each led to rapid advancements in agriculture, science, and business practices that led directly to rapid advancements in standards of living for its citizens. Along with these governments came taxation which also directly corresponded to this advancement. It was the advances in taxation policies which gave the governments the labor and capital they needed to protect and advance this standard of living, allowing it to further advance.

Roman civilization featured even larger governments with further refined systems of taxation that led to stronger central government and more rapid advancement in standards of living for its citizens. With the collapse of Rome and the drift of European civilization towards feudalism and this system's inherent individualism we had the advent of the dark ages which saw standards of living regress and scientific knowledge collapse. It was the inherent inability of governments to centralize power that led directly to these problems and the resultant drop in standards of living all across the western world.

As western national governments began to re-emerge and consolidate power we saw the return of economic advancement and a corresponding steady increase in the standard of living for their citizens. Larger, more centralized governments subsidize economic prosperity by providing security for their citizens and allowing ever greater divisions of labor which in turn lead to higher efficiency. In short, the strength of central governments and their ability to raise revenue for the common good have always directly corresponded to increases in standards of living. Smaller, less centralized governments have always had just the opposite effect throughout the history of the civilized world.

This leads to the United States and our own history of economic growth compared to governmental strength. The United States, even though it possessed the greatest abundance of natural resources of any one nation, was basically a third world power economically and militarily until the consolidation of power in our central government began to take place. Our economic prosperity is directly correlated to the size and strength of our central government and this has held true throughout our nation’s history. For the same reasons that western civilizations advance has always been tied to the strength of government, the explosion of economic power that the United States experienced happened along with the growth of the central government and the resultant revenue increases that came with it.

The United States financed much of the world’s economic recovery after WWII through the ability to raise revenue. The growth of our national educational system, our national road system, our national electrical power system, and virtually every other economic engine that led to our world leadership in both standard of living and economic capacity are all directly related to the strength of our national government and its ability to raise revenue and disburse it for the common good. Individuals didn’t build the road systems, they didn’t build the schools, they didn’t subsidize the space exploration that led to most of the technologies that have so rapidly advanced our standard of living in this country. The central government with its vast ability to raise revenue for the common good did. Individual companies didn’t bring the cost of food down to its lowest relative level the world has ever seen, the central government with its subsidies of crops did.

Americans once understand this concept. No one likes paying taxes but it is a necessity to finance government and government of the people, by the people, is the guarantee that makes the whole system work. The idea that our government, the one we elect and control, is somehow an evil thirsty beast that must be slain so that we can inherit economic prowess is directly in conflict with the truths that our own history conveys. We have been sold a bill of goods by a small wealthy minority in this country who believe they should have the benefits this national system allows them without paying the costs associated with maintaining it.

Adam Smith, in his “Wealth of Nations”, which is widely espoused as the founding tome of capitalist theory addresses the idea of taxation as follows:

The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state. The expence of government to the individuals of a great nation is like the expence of management to the joint tenants of a great estate, who are all obliged to contribute in proportion to their respective interests in the estate. In the observation or neglect of this maxim consists what is called the equality or inequality of taxation.

This is exactly why we as a people voted in a progressive income tax in 1916. The people of this nation well understood the idea that those who prosper greater under the protection of the government are most responsible for paying its costs. The top tax brackets in this country were historically in the 70-90% range previous to Ronald Reagan. Since he was a product of some very wealthy patrons it is only natural that he would attempt to advance their interests but it is literally amazing to me that the general public fails to make the obvious connection between the drastic cuttings of this tax rate with the immediate rise of the deficit. The theory that cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans and Corporations would lead to economic growth has been tried for the last thirty years and we find ourselves in the same kind of depression that this kind of fiscal irresponsibility netted us in 1929. George Bush Senior was right, it is "Voodoo Economics".

If cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans leads to economic prosperity we should be in the biggest economic boom this country has ever seen right now because we have been doing it for 30 years now. What we have actually seen is the distinct degradation of every facet of our national economic infrastructure along with a drastic redistribution of the wealth of this country from the middle class to the wealthiest one percent of Americans. The tax burden has shifted dramatically to the middle class while the wealthiest Americans get relief. We have the highest deficits ever seen along with the lowest tax burdens for those that prosper most under the umbrella of protection our government affords.

Government finance is always an adjustment between revenue and expenditure. We cannot solve the problems we have by attacking only one of the two basic levers that control our system. The only way we will regain our economic strength is to return to the proper balance between what is earned under the protection of the government and what is owed in its support and that means raising the tax rate on those who prosper most.

Is Our Health Care System Broken?

Is the Health Care system in this country broken? This is the basic question we need to ask ourselves as Americans. I think there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it is; that we are paying for a Cadillac and receiving a Yugo with warranty issues. I often hear it said that we have the greatest health care system in the world but I seldom hear that particular sentiment out of anyone who is not a right wing Republican, a doctor, an insurance spokesman, or a drug company executive. This issue really isn’t that different from any other; it is all a matter of perspective.

Let’s look at that argument of those who like the system as it is. First off, if you are a doctor in this country you make almost twice as much as a doctor in the rest of the world on average. This number climbs to four times as much for specialists but on the average it comes out around twice as much. There are probably numerous reasons for this but the ones most often presented as justifications are the costs of doing business as a doctor. Education to become a doctor is extremely expensive and time consuming. There is little doubt about this but I would also point out that it is the AMA who controls the medical education field. The AMA controls how many doctors get into the field and how long it takes to get a medical degree. The AMA, as a union for doctors, well understands that the best protection for high fees is a moderate supply of doctors and almost all studies agree that we have a shortage of doctors in this country so I would suggest that they are doing a very good job of controlling the supply of doctors which can be directly correlated to the pay of doctors by the simplest rules of supply and demand. The AMA also regulates who can practice medicine in this country which is why we don’t have nurse practitioners, holistic doctors, and other types of medical practitioners treating many patients in this country. In alliance with the AMA, private insurance providers refuse to provide payment to non AMA approved practitioners even though they are much more cost effective for most common ailments.

The next argument that the AMA puts forward as a reason for high costs is tort policy in this country. It is without doubt that high malpractice insurance adds cost to the practice of medicine. However, experiments in tort reform policies in Texas and several other states have shown that such reforms actually only lower medical costs some 1-2%. While this is not something to be ignored it hardly goes towards explaining why health care costs in this country are higher than in any other industrialized nation in the world but I will get back to tort reform a little later. As a percentage of GDP we are fast approaching 20% for health care costs in this country while no other industrialized nation in the world has more than 12% of their GDP associated with health care costs. It is also worth remembering that our GDP is larger than any other country in the world.

Let’s look at some numbers to see if we can decide how our health care system fares when compared with the rest of the industrialized world. The US GDP is estimated to be 14.1 Trillion dollars. If you are anything like me you have a hard time visualizing this type of number but I decided to do some comparisons with other countries to try and make sense of this number. If you add up the GDP totals of Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, Spain, Belgium and Australia you get a number just a little less than the 14.1 Trillion dollars of the US GDP. Therefore, the combined total of these countries’s GDP is roughly equal to the US GDP. If you add up the averages of these western countries percentage of GDP spent on health care and average it out it comes out to a roughly 9%. Currently in this country the best estimates put our percentage of GDP spent on health care at 17.3% (and projected to grow at an astonishing 6.78% per year in the near future).

To decide what this means in actual dollars per person I looked at the population totals. The population total in the US is presently some 307,212,123 people. If you take 17.3% of our 14 trillion dollar GDP and divide that by the number of people in the US you get $7883.00 per person as the average cost per person in this country. If you take the total population of the eight countries I listed above (352,179,713) and do the same calculation based upon 9% of their GDP the total comes out to $3552.00 per person. In other words we pay on average 221% higher health care costs per person in this country than do the people in these eight nations which I would argue are probably the closest to this country in culture and standard of living.

This is exactly why so many of the supporters of the present system are so adamant about saying we have the best system in the world. It better be; as it is more than twice as expensive as any other system that is directly comparable. Let’s look at some comparison studies to see if this theory holds water. In terms of general health and measurable statistical information I am afraid that the numbers don’t support this theory at all. According to the CIA World Factbook the US ranks 41st in the world in infant mortality rate which is hardly something to brag about. There is controversy over how these figures are gathered in that many countries vary according to how they specify when an infant is alive but the US also ranks 41st in the world in infant low birth weight which I think anyone can see is directly correlated to infant health. We rank 46th in the world in life expectancy and it is worth noting that there is a rapidly growing disparity in this country between life expectancy for the wealthy upper classes and life expectancy for the financially lower classes. Those who can afford our best health care simply live longer.

There are other basis for doing relative comparison studies on health care efficiency that are based upon years of life lost under the age of seventy in cases amenable to being saved by health care. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development publishes studies based upon these cases under the heading of “years of potential life lost”. This is where we should shine as a nation if our health care system, which is heavily slanted towards cure instead of prevention, is actually efficient. Unfortunately, the US ranks third from the last for women in the study just behind Mexico and Hungary. For men, we rank fifth from last for men just ahead of Slovakia and Poland. Being in a class with Mexico, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland is not necessarily something I think we need to be bragging about; especially when we pay more per person than anyone in the world to get there.

The fact of the matter is that the US leads the world in specialized care for many types of technologically complex treatment systems. This is one area of health care where our system shines and this is exactly the area that is so often highlighted by proponents of the system. If you have plenty of money and inexhaustible insurance coverage this is the place to come for such treatments and people from all over the world come here for that reason. However, if you don’t have insurance and a lot of money besides this is not something you will likely be afforded access to in this country. After all, the medical industry has to make a profit in this country too; that is how capitalism works.

As I have covered in several posts already the private insurance industry in this country well understood the pitfalls of providing health care insurance from the beginning and they have avoided them admirably. By tying insurance to employment from the beginnings of the rise of private health insurance in this country they effectively assured themselves that they could control profit margins by providing insurance for the healthiest people (those that are gainfully employed) while removing those from their rolls who are the worst risks (the elderly and those who get too sick to work). While this is good business for private health insurance companies it is a problem for those who actually need medical care and one that continues to add exponentially to actual health care costs. As is often the case, the goals of meeting profit margins and providing needed services are frequently in direct opposition.

For example, a very high percentage of personal bankruptcies in this country are directly attributable to health care costs. Estimates range from 50-80% as far as percentage of people filing bankruptcy because of medical bills depending on which agency you get your information from. The story that is repeated over and over again is the same. Person A, who has health care insurance through their work, is unlucky enough to get cancer or some other debilitating medical condition. This person soon loses their ability to work and with it their health care insurance (some 80% of medical related bankruptcies come from people who originally HAD health care insurance through their work but later lost it). Being unexpectedly unemployed bring many financial hardships to working class people and very few of them can afford the higher rates they are forced to pay to keep insurance after being removed from a group plan where they work. Therefore, they are soon without insurance and the bills instantaneously get higher without insurance. If any of you have been to a hospital recently you know that the bill you get is usually two to three times higher than what the hospital eventually accepts from the insurance company as payment. However, if you don’t have insurance you also don’t have the power to barter with the hospital to get this same reduction. The truth is that the hospital recognizes that people cannot afford to pay the high costs associated with a long treatment and they fully expect to take a loss on the costs so they are not willing to barter. They would much rather take a loss and write it off on their taxes while collecting what they can through government sponsored Medicaid. It is just good business sense for them and they too are part of the capitalist system wherein profit is the final motive. The end result is bankruptcy for the individual who is unlucky enough to need the care. Even worse, if this person is lucky enough to survive the disease, the treatment, and the bankruptcy they are now faced with the certainty of not being able to attain private health insurance for this condition for the rest of their lives. This leads to the surprising conclusion (and one that most working class people aren’t aware of until it is too late) that having private health care insurance through your work is a lot like playing Russian roulette; everything is fine until you hit on the chamber with the bullet in it.

Let’s talk about the uninsured for just a moment. Some 15% of the population in this country is currently uninsured. While a good percentage of these people are younger workers who are not working in industries that offer employer health care programs the fact remains that all of these people are at risk of accident or catastrophic disease that would quite literally bankrupt them if it were to occur. Russian roulette is equally deadly whether you are aware you are playing it or not. If an uninsured person does need routine medical care, no matter how innocuous, the large majority of them show up at emergency rooms where health care costs are the most expensive because most emergency rooms are required to provide the care they need. Because there is often no other choice these people get the most expensive care possible; often for problems that could easily be taken care of much more efficiently at a clinic by a nurse practitioner were lobbyist from the AMA not actively making sure this is not legal. Between the government’s reluctance to help set up such alternative programs and the AMA’s insistence on protecting their memberships ability to make exorbitant amounts of money we have another situation wherein the worst solution is the only possible one for people without insurance.

Tort reform is another solution that is often tossed about as something that will cure the problems we currently have with health care costs. The theory is that by protecting doctors from high lawsuit settlements we can thereby bring down the costs of malpractice insurance which will be reflected in lower overall costs for the consumer. Even though there have been several instances in the last few years where such plans have been tried out, the results are not encouraging as costs have simply not come down appreciably from such efforts. If we had a nationalized health care system where everyone was guaranteed health care coverage this whole argument would disappear because the whole system of high settlements is based upon the recognition that health care costs are so high. This isn’t a chicken or egg argument, it is more like a cow and calf argument in that it is quite evident which one came first in this situation; the high health care costs. If you pursue a lawsuit against a doctor for malpractice the vast majority of the settlement set aside it is to cover the costs of future medical expenses. If you had nationalized health care insurance that will cover these costs already; there is little reason to collect a high settlement outside of pain and suffering incurred due to the doctor’s negligence. Without the high settlement possibilities the very volume of such lawsuits will steadily diminish as lawyers are capitalists too.

There is yet another aspect to this marriage of employment and private health insurance that we as consumers are now being forced to deal with. In an economic downturn such as we just experienced in this country unemployment is one of the first symptoms. With unemployment comes loss of employment based insurance for the workers who lose their job; involuntary Russian roulette for both the worker and his immediate family. Therefore, the Medicaid costs in the states where they live grow as well as these people are still going to inevitably have the normal every day health care needs even if they are lucky enough to avoid catastrophic disease or accident. The states are forced to come up with money to make up this difference at the same time they are suffering loss of revenue associated with the recession; both from payroll taxes and from dwindling sales tax revenues. The net result is higher deficits for the state at the same time they need more revenue; in effect a double blow to the economy. We are currently seeing this played out all across the country as states struggle to balance their budgets with rising costs and dropping revenue. The Kaiser Family Foundation released a study in 2008 that suggested a 1% increase in unemployment equates to roughly 1 million extra people without health care insurance in this country which winds up costing some 3.4 billion dollars in extra health care costs. This is a direct result of the fact that our current system of private health care insurance is largely weighted towards employment benefit packages and simply would not occur with a nationalized health care system.

Aside from same tired old mass hysteria argument that the right always trots out about the country being overrun by socialists who want to turn us into a communist state, the main fear surrounding a nationalized health care system is that it would be too expensive for us to afford. Unfortunately, as we have seen and continue to see on a yearly basis, health care costs are the real issue and we have to be able to control these costs to deal with health care issues. The average administrative cost of private health care servicea in this country is about 12% of total costs. Add to that a 3-6% profit margin for the company and we now have an additional 15% levied on top of our health care costs with the present system that is quite unavoidable. I would start out by saying that adding 15% to the costs right off the bat by having private health insurance belongs in the tally of problems rather in the tally of solutions. In any case, as a worker who has employment provided insurance my costs have steadily risen over the last ten years as costs have increased. The national average for such coverage has risen 78% since 2001 while employee compensation has risen just 19% during the same time period. Plainly, rising health care costs are the source of the problem and we have to make strides toward solving this problem. However, I now pay some $350 a month in payroll deductions for my health care insurance with the promise that it will only grow more in the future while the problem itself continues to spin out of control due to all the reasons I have listed above. A lot of these issues would be solved by integrating a national health care system and if we took what we are all paying into private health insurance plans that add to the problem and put that money into taxes that would help alleviate the problem I think it would be a step in the right direction.

The unvarnished truth about our system’s private health insurance is that the only way it is profitable to sell and administer is if there are enough healthy people paying premiums to offset the costs of those who need care. Insurance executives recognized this fact from the very beginning which is why they were so anxious to tie insurance to employment in the beginning. In our system the private health care insurance companies get to reap the benefits of insuring the healthiest Americans while skipping out completely on paying for health care for the unhealthiest. When people in this country retire or are unemployed the government picks up the tab for their health care which is exactly why Medicare and Medicaid programs are so expensive; they are forced to deal with the unprofitable refuse that private health insurers have tossed overboard after they have milked them for all the money they can get. If we had a comprehensive health care system like the rest of the civilized world we would be able to offset the high health care costs for the elderly with the premiums in the form of taxes paid in by the healthiest citizens; the young working class people. Is this a socialist idea? Of course it is but so are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. These programs were put in effect originally because we were faced with the choice in this country of providing steadily rising health care costs for retiring citizens with little or no savings or letting them die. Capitalism had no solution for the problem so we adapted a socialist idea to solve the problem.

Over the course of the last 30 years we have proven that the combination of rising health care costs and an aging population have contributed to another situation that Capitalism has no solution for so maybe it is time we started to admit that what we need is another socialist solution. I shouldn’t say Capitalism doesn’t have a solution as the unseen hand of the free market always has a solution. The only problem is that this solution is the same as all others in the free market. If you can’t afford health care do without. To paraphrase our esteemed Speaker in the House of Representatives when told that the Republican spending cuts proposed recently would cost 800,000 jobs in an economy already in recession, “So be it.”

Conventional Wisdom

I have read several books lately by John Kenneth Galbraith; while they are older, they are very informative. In “The Affluent Society” I think he was still formulating some of his later ideas but he has a whole chapter on conventional wisdom. When you break it down to its simplest explanation conventional wisdom is simply what most people find acceptable. This doesn’t seem completely negative until you start to consider what that really means in that it is simply the net average of the most common shortcut to understanding.


Conventional wisdom therefore can be a very functionally useless but dogmatic and dangerous thing when applied to politics, economics, or any other social based and therefore intricately complicated process. Because these processes inherently contain so many different variables they are constantly changing; often rapidly. In other words, since these fields are affected by an almost limitless array of variables, the rate of change in the basic laws of social systems is likely to be exponential. Therefore, a constantly evolving understanding is necessary to deal effectively with these changes. This requires a great deal of effort and concentrated study just to keep abreast of changing conditions so that one can even begin to know how to deal effectively with basic social concerns. Conventional wisdom, by its very nature, is fundamentally incapable of effectively dealing with changing circumstance yet it is the core principle of most of our modern political parties.


In other words, politicians cannot get elected unless they understand how to play upon most people’s perception of conventional wisdom. It is an absolute necessity for success at the polls in our modern system. The logical inverse to this is the ability to gain political power by controlling media so that you can shape conventional wisdom; now you have something that is infinitely powerful even though it is also functionally unable to deal with changing circumstance. The very tool that tends to strengthen a candidates ability to get elected weakens his ability to effectively govern. The upshot is that politicians cannot ever really go against conventional wisdom without alienating their own voter base. Unfortunately, this rules out the ability to innovate and deal with issues in a proactive way. Instead, politicians must wait for conventional wisdom to convincingly fail in order to prove the necessity for innovation. Conventional wisdom is the natural enemy of innovation of any kind. Therefore, both in the field of economics and politics what we have are groups of people steadfastly devoted to anachronistic systems that are outdated but cannot be discarded until they completely collapse. At that point, innovation must come about to solve the issue and we start the whole cycle all over with this innovation now becoming the new Conventional wisdom to be protected against further innovation until it also fails because it is not allowed to innovate for changing circumstance; ignoring the truth that circumstance is always changing.


Most of our social beliefs and economic theories have historically been controlled by this cyclical process of conservative resistance to change followed by failure. We are always far behind in reacting to change because we are so enamored with conventional wisdom and the mental laziness that nurtures it. Imagine if we took this model and applied it to scientific studies (although it could be argued that this is exactly what creationist theory is all about). We would still be riding horses and struggling to grow enough food to eat every day. For some reason we have accepted that our understanding of science is constantly evolving and that every theory is just that…. a theory that only remains to be proven wrong before we adapt a new one. Yet in the social sciences of economics and politics we treasure conventional wisdom and will often violently oppose innovation that threatens it. I would venture to say that most wars can actually be traced to this kind of collision between circumstance and conventional wisdom that becomes both outdated and fanatically defended.



This is exactly the reason why American politics is so enamored of opinion polls. Successful politicians are not leading they are following. Any successful politician on the American political scene today is much more interested in finding out what the majority of the voting public believes than actually searching out solutions to problems that come from ever changing circumstance. This tendency is not limited to one political party or another. It is also not limited to conservatives vs. liberals as both are equally careful to avoid contradicting the perceived conventional wisdom of the voter base that put them into office. The key to power is holding office, not in effectively governing once elected. Unfortunately, this pandering to conventional wisdom of any kind is the exact opposite of the innovation that is needed to solve the issues arising from the circumstantial complexity of the social and economic spectrum.


While there is a growing effort to control conventional wisdom by propaganda in this country there seems to be no effort to understand the real problem behind our inability to deal with changing circumstance; our fundamental reliance on conventional wisdom and its inherent inability to deal with change. It is the crippling deformity that paralyzes our government from the very top downward. We seem much more interested in finding men who have the wisdom to spout our own beliefs back at us than finding men who want to solve problems. What we need is the understanding that, like scientific knowledge, political expertise must first accept the premise that every theory is only as good as its most recent proven effectiveness for dealing with problems. We seem to value politicians who are principled beyond those who are willing to innovate. To be seen as someone who “flip-flops” on the issues is to be seen as politically weak or possibly even corrupt and is usually the death knell of an election effort. Innovation in almost all fields is well understood to be both desirable and necessary to increase efficiency but innovation in political or economic fields is looked upon as weakness or worse yet, fundamentally foolish.


The term Conservative in its most basic sense implies an effort to preserve. This preservation can extend to many different areas or beliefs but is most often a basic resistance to change and supports the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports in society. While most conservatives would probably agree that a certain amount of change in society is inevitable, it is their basic belief that the amount of change should be minimal so as to provide stability. Unfortunately, this puts them in the insupportable position of resisting change in a modern world where technological advancement has literally exploded in the last 30 years. The fields of modern communications, economics, manufacturing, and energy are vastly different than they were just a short time ago. Advances in these fields have impacted every strata of modern society and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The conventional wisdom of the conservative agenda is quite literally unable to deal with how these changes have impacted society effectively. To be fair conventional wisdom in any form is incapable of dealing with innovation but a political movement that insists in basing its core beliefs on conventional wisdom to the exclusion of innovation is especially prone to this tendency. Abraham Lincoln was fond of explaining to his detractors that he “dealt with circumstances as he found them” rather than trying to control them to meet his preconceived beliefs. It is that spirit of understanding that we need to promulgate in politics and economics today. The spirit of modern conservatism can be captured in two observations.


1) Those who have power are the most anxious to maintain the status quo.
2) Fear of the unknown is directly proportional to how comfortable you are right now.



It is my own basic antithesis to the idea that conventional wisdom is an effective means of governance that leads me to say that I am not a Conservative. It is this same understanding that deeply confounds me when so many people who are obviously at the bottom of the social strata proudly proclaim that they are.

Ownership of the Media

As discussed in my last post, there were originally two main supports for avoiding propaganda on the publicly owned airwaves in this country. The first was the Fairness Doctrine which was the guiding principle behind the FCC’s efforts to make sure that custodians of the public airwaves focused on presenting the news instead of pushing an agenda. In other words, it is the basic difference between the efforts to inform vs. the efforts to convince. By the ultimate but limited usage of the FCC’s ability to control who had a license to use the airwaves the FCC attempted to make sure that no one political viewpoint could completely dominate the system. Propaganda, to be effective, must control the spread of information so that opposing viewpoints are not heard or considered and complete editorial control over what is broadcast is the first step in successful propaganda. With the Reagan administration's demolition of the Fairness Doctrine that I discussed in my last post, the door was open to removing the second support.

The second support for maintaining the integrity of the publicly owned airwaves consisted of a steady effort by the FCC to control the ownership of media as a means of assuring the spread of accurate information. The idea of a free press in this country is as old as the nation itself. The protection of this idea has taken many different forms but by and large it still springs from the basic concept perhaps best expressed by Thomas Jefferson, "The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." It is the idea of a press as free as possible from vested interests of ownership that has shaped our national policies concerning the media since the early 1920's.

With the rise of corporate interests in this country it became obvious that this idea needed protection from the inevitable control that would come from unrestricted ownership of the media by the wealthy as both the Supreme Court and Congress have on numerous occasions ruled and legislated that the American public owns the airwaves. It is the duty of the FCC to see that the public interests are served by those who obtain license to utilize the airwaves. If a corporation or even a wealthy individual owns the radio or television station through which a local community gets its news it is all too common for viewpoints opposing the vested interest of that ownership to be censored or even altogether silenced by editorial authority. While this is an inevitable result of our modern business tendency for corporate entities to be vested in diverse industries it can also be a dangerous temptation for propaganda as opposed to information as corporate entities seek to convince rather than inform public opinion.

As an example let us assume that a news organization is simply that; a news organization who's sole interest is the reporting of events. In this scenario it can be argued that such an organization is in fact a purely market based entity in that its ratings are its prime motivation as ratings are directly proportional to advertising premiums which pay the bills. However, the reality of modern corporate America is that media outlets are almost without exception actually individually just one arm of what is usually a multi-faceted corporate conglomerate; usually a very small arm in terms of fiscal returns. Under these conditions is it reasonable to expect that the news media outlet will report accurately on issues that adversely affect the much larger profit share of its corporate ownership? Naturally, if other media outlets are reporting on this same issue even though it negatively affects any one corporate entity it must be forced to at least address the issue, it cannot ignore it completely nor can it arbitrarily report facts and figures without a basis in fact without facing the possibility of being exposed as propaganda rather than news. It is this diversity; the widespread ownership by groups with diverse viewpoints and vested interests that best guarantees the spread of accurate information. It can be reasonably argued that the more diverse the ownership of our media outlets are; the more accurate will be the information they broadcast. Of course the inverse axiom is that the more narrow the ownership of the media becomes the more inaccurate the broadcasts will be and the more likely they will devolve into propaganda as opposed to news.

Unfortunately, this logic has steadily fallen prey to corporate grasp in this country for the last thirty years along with the Fairness Doctrine. On February 8, 1996 the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. This act was the first major legislated change in the industry since the Communications Act of 1934. It was widely touted by its supporters as an act to encourage the free market in the industry and to increase competition which would inevitably drive prices down and improve the quality of communications services. While the main focus of the act was telecommunications such as the telephone industry and cable television it also directly effected FCC rules defining media ownership. Previous to this act the FCC limited the ownership of media outlets in order to assure diversity of ownership and protect the integrity of individual ownership. These regulations limited the ownership of radio stations to forty for any one group and further limited this ownership based upon markets. In other words, no one entity could own numerous stations in one market and therefore monopolize the industry and thereby the spread of information. Television station ownership was similarly limited as were newspapers. All of these types of media outlets were well recognized to be the cogs in the machinery necessary to combat propaganda.

It is interesting to look at the results of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and its immediate effects on the industry. While one of the act's basic intents was to foster competition and fight the consolidation of the ownership of media outlets that had been underway since the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine by Reagan in the early 1980's it has had the opposite result. In 1983 the number of major media outlets in the United States was 50. This number is now reduced to 6. Private ownership of radio stations by individuals has shrunk to numbers lower than have been known since the early days of radio stations even though the gross number of radio stations is growing astronomically. Over 4000 individually owned radio stations were bought out in the first 4 years after the passage of the act by corporate entities. Huge corporate entities with thousands of stations now own the vast majority of radio stations in the United States today. Local news is increasingly not even existent on most of these stations and those that do still retain some news capability increasingly find their content editorially doctored so that the resultant report is almost unrecognizable from its original form.

As the ownership of our media outlets shrinks the pressure to remove remaining constraints to ownership has increased proportionally. In 2003 the FCC under pressures from large media concerns intent upon increasing their monopoly, further loosened the rules concerning media ownership. Unlike previous FCC rulings these changes were not made available to the public for a time period before their release so as to afford the public time to comment. The new rulings did several things to allow for more consolidation of the industry by corporate entities. Market shares for ownership of all media in a given market was raised from 35% to 45% (this had previously been raised in a similar ruling in 1985 from 25%). Restrictions on newspaper and TV station ownership in the same market were removed. Requirements for periodic license review for renewal by the FCC were dropped. In effect, licenses are no longer reviewed for "public interest" considerations at all. Not only is the Fairness Doctrine not considered in these reviews the reviews themselves are no longer conducted under this guideline so a broadcast license is in effect perpetual and subject only to monetary fees with the public interest no longer a consideration at all. We have basically come full circle with this ruling ignoring 80 years of careful protection of the public interest as the basis for all such decisions and instead bowed subserviently to the corporate interest.

Fortunately, there is still a faint heartbeat in the ideas surrounding the belief that the public airwaves are still the property of the American people. In a case brought before the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit the majority ruled 2-1 against the FCC and ordered it to reconfigure how it justified raising ownership limits. Since the Supreme Court later turned down an appeal on this case (Prometheus Radio Project v FCC) this ruling still stands. It is worth noting that the dissenting opinion on this case was turned in by one Antonin Scalia who was also instrumental in striking down the Fairness Doctrine as I pointed out in my last post. Since Mr. Scalia is now on the Supreme Court we will undoubtedly hear from him again on this subject at some point. It is also worth noting that this ruling strictly applies only to the provisions surrounding the market percentage ruling and does not apply to the much more important issue of FCC review of licenses. In 2007 the FCC made another ruling removing restrictions on newspaper and TV ownership in the same market as there was some concern that the court ruling might have invalidated this section as well.

The most disturbing part of this whole situation is the loss of the recognition of how important the idea of a free press is to this nation's survival. There are several ways to attack a free press and limit its ability to inform the public. The first and most obvious way is to simply legislate it out of existence by having the state take over the media directly. This is a highly effective means and both has been and still is utilized with great success in different areas of the world to control political expression. There is little danger of this type of takeover in this country presently. However, it is beyond question that we are now faced with a different type of attack on our institution of a free press. If corporate entities are allowed to use their superior financial and political support to simply buy up media outlets they can control the information that Americans use to decide who to vote for at the polls. Since they no longer are under any restrictions such as the Fairness Doctrine or license review based upon "public interest" they basically have carte blanche control of the levers of public dissemination of information once they attain ownership. As an example of whether this in fact underway I would ask you to consider if you remember any of the major news outlets in this country reporting on the recent FCC rulings above.

The Fairness Doctrine

American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic. And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare to differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people.

— Rep. Luther Johnson (D.-Texas), in the debate that preceded the Radio Act of 1927

The radio act of 1927 mandated the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) forerunner, the Federal Radio Commission, to grant broadcasting licenses in a manner as to ensure that these licensees served the “public convenience, interest or necessity”. What Representative Johnson understood was the power of propaganda to stifle democracy and the necessity of a well informed general public to nurture it. What most Americans fail to remember is that the American Public owns the airwaves and the protection of these airwaves so that they can be utilized to advance the public good is the mandate of regulatory bodies such as the FCC. The free and unbiased sharing of information is probably a utopian ideal but the effort to promulgate this ideal is the best protection the American public has against the proven effectiveness of organized propaganda.

The FCC is an independent agency of the US government that was created by congress in 1934 to replace the Federal Radio Commission which had previously been charged with oversight of the publicly owned airwaves here in the US. The basic operating principle for the FCC was contained within its charter to regulate radio use “as the public convenience, interest, or necessity requires.” The mandate was necessarily broad to encompass an industry that was growing in both size and importance as radio became the biggest megaphone with which to speak to the American public and there were widespread concerns over the possibility of propaganda being used to advance political positions as was currently underway in much of Europe at the time. From the very beginning, the ideas surrounding the powers of the FCC was aimed at protecting the American public’s right to information and avoidance of any private entities ability to monopolize the airwaves which were publicly owned. It was well recognized that such a monopoly would enable censorship by omission. In other words, if an entity owned all the radio stations it could virtually eliminate the spread of information inimical to its interests whether they be political, financial, or both. One can easily see that that this fear was well grounded in reality as this was largely the methodology that Hitler used to take over Germany just a few years after the formation of the FCC.

Through much of this century the FCC struggled with finding the proper balance between freedom of speech and the idea that government regulation could lead to censorship. It was in this spirit that the FCC came up with a policy formulation first known as the Fairness Doctrine. This doctrine called for broadcasters to show “due regard for the opinion of others.” In 1949 the FCC adopted this doctrine as a formal rule. In 1959 Congress amended the Communications Act of 1934 to formalize this doctrine into law, rewriting Chapter 315 (a) in this act to read as follows: “A broadcast licensee shall afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance.”

The basic premise behind the Fairness Doctrine was built on the fact that the American public owned the airwaves themselves and the FCC, as a regulatory agency of the American public, was in charge of regulating who had licenses to broadcast over these airwaves. In other words, the FCC saw itself as a trustee of a public resource and insisted that licensees who used these airwaves accept public interest obligation in exchange for their usage of the airwaves. The Fairness Doctrine itself, as one of these obligations, was simply meant to insure that a variety of views be presented; not just the views of the ownership of the license to broadcast. The Fairness Doctrine had two main provisions. The first provision stated that a licensee must devote at least a part of their broadcast time to matters of controversial public interest. The second provision stated that the licensee must also air contrasting views concerning those matters but it gave licensees wide leeway as to how that was to be done.

The Fairness Doctrine was one of the two main prongs of an effort to ensure the public’s interests were served. The second prong of this effort were limitations over how many such licenses in a given market area any one entity might hold. By controlling licenses according to these two mandates the FCC was charged with making sure the public’s interest in having the accurate information necessary to be an informed voting populace was served. I will get back to this second prong in my next post.

In actual operation the FCC’s enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine was a decidedly laissez faire approach. Contrary to what Rush Limbaugh or any one of numerous right wing ideologues regularly preaches when the Fairness Doctrine comes up it was not government censorship in any way at all. In practical terms citizen groups or private organizations would petition licensees for fair representation if they detected what they perceived to be an unfair amount of emphasis placed upon one side on an issue. The broadcast entity would then attempt to redress these grievances by apportioning time for these opposing viewpoints to be heard. There was no 50/50 rule proscribing that each licensee or broadcaster had to have equal amounts of liberal and conservative slanted views. There were no FCC censors monitoring the airwaves threatening to remove a station’s license for unequal reporting. If a private organization or citizen’s group was not satisfied with the response of their complaint or if the station itself disagreed with the complaint either was free to petition the FCC to look into the matter. The FCC retained the right of renewing broadcast licenses and licensees accordingly made every effort to placate the presenters of such enquiries. “Reasonable opportunity for presentation of opposing points of view” was the relevant phrase used in arbitrating such issues.

In such instances, the FCC considered prime time vs. less popular time on the air as well as total time allotted to each viewpoint but the main emphasis was on omission of opportunity. In other words under the Fairness Doctrine a station could spend as much as five times more time and effort presenting any viewpoint over another without violating the principle according to the FCC but it could not completely omit on viewpoint in favor of another. In actual practice over the 26 years the Fairness Doctrine was in place there is only one instance of a licensee having the licenses not renewed for violating the Fairness Doctrine for the simple reason that it was a decidedly lax guideline based upon the principle that stations could not practice totalitarian propaganda techniques. It was never intended to guarantee fair and balanced reporting, only as a buffer against unvarnished propaganda on issues that impact the public interest.

Inevitably, such a formalized guideline will run into legal challenges and this is exactly what happened with the Fairness Doctrine after Congress made it law in 1959. In 1969 Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC made it to the Supreme Court. In this case in a unanimous decision the Supreme Court decided in favor of the FCC and against the idea that the Fairness Doctrine was antithetical to First Amendment free speech rights. It is worth looking at this opinion to understand the issue in a little more detail.

In the first Supreme Court Justice Byron White writing the unanimous opinion of the court addressed the issue of public obligation by broadcasters. In response to the idea that broadcasters were protected under the First Amendment so that they could broadcast whatever they wanted White pointed out that since the airwaves are a limited media owned by the public, it is the public’s right to information that is important:

This is not to say that the First Amendment is irrelevant to public broadcasting. On the contrary, it has a major role to play as the Congress itself recognized in 326, which forbids FCC interference with "the right [395 U.S. 367, 390] of free speech by means of radio communication." Because of the scarcity of radio frequencies, the Government is permitted to put restraints on licensees in favor of others whose views should be expressed on this unique medium. But the people as a whole retain their interest in free speech by radio and their collective right to have the medium function consistently with the ends and purposes of the First Amendment. It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount. See FCC v. Sanders Bros. Radio Station, 309 U.S. 470, 475 (1940); FCC v. Allentown Broadcasting Corp., 349 U.S. 358, 361 -362 (1955); 2 Z. Chafee, Government and Mass Communications 546 (1947). It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited market-place of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market, whether it be by the Government itself or a private licensee. Associated Press v. United States, 326 U.S. 1, 20 (1945); New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964); Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919) (Holmes, J., dissenting). "[S]peech concerning public affairs is more than self-expression; it is the essence of self-government." Garrison v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 64, 74 -75 (1964). See Brennan, The Supreme Court and the Meiklejohn Interpretation of the First Amendment, 79 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (1965). It is the right of the public to receive suitable access to social, political, esthetic, moral, and other ideas and experiences which is crucial here. That right may not constitutionally be abridged either by Congress or by the FCC.

White later goes on to further explains the courts views on the subject with the following:

It does not violate the First Amendment to treat licensees given the privilege of using scarce radio frequencies as proxies for the entire community, obligated to give suitable time and attention to matters of great public concern. To condition the granting or renewal of licenses on a willingness to present representative community views on controversial issues is consistent with the ends and purposes of those constitutional provisions forbidding the abridgment of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Congress need not stand idly by and permit those with licenses to ignore the problems which beset the people or to exclude from the airways anything but their own views of fundamental questions. The statute, long administrative practice, and cases are to this effect.

White later discusses the position of the licensee that the widespread availability of broadcasting spectrum invalidates the need for regulatory oversight by the FCC with the following:

Even where there are gaps in spectrum utilization, the fact remains that existing broadcasters have often attained their present position because of their initial government selection in competition with others before new technological advances opened new opportunities for further uses. Long experience in broadcasting, confirmed habits of listeners and viewers, network affiliation, and other advantages in program procurement give existing broadcasters a substantial advantage over new entrants, even where new entry is technologically possible. These advantages are the fruit of a preferred position conferred by the Government. Some present possibility for new entry by competing stations is not enough, in itself, to render unconstitutional the Government's effort to assure that a broadcaster's programming ranges widely enough to serve the public interest.

With Congressional formalization as law and Supreme Court guidance that the Fairness Doctrine was not only Constitutional but necessary to protect the First Amendment rights of the public it is hard to see how this doctrine was struck down. As a public necessity and one of the basic supports for the democratic ideal of an informed populace it strains the imagination how such a guideline could come to be seen as censorship only 20 years later but that is exactly what happened.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president. Coming into office with an army of anti-regulation free market exponents it was not surprising that Reagan’s appointee as the new head of the FCC, Mark Fowler, was not an exponent of government regulation of the airwaves. In a move repeated in many other branches of government regulatory agencies the fox was indeed put in charge of the henhouse. Fowler had been a broadcast industry attorney who had spent much of his career fighting against the decisions of the FCC and suddenly he was now in charge of the agency. Fowler sneered at the notion that broadcasters bore social responsibilities to ensure democratic discourse. Even though such ideas were supported by numerous Supreme Court decisions and current Congressional laws Fowler suggested they were nonsense. “The perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants,” Fowler said. In Fowler’s view television was “just another appliance—it’s a toaster with pictures,” he stated, “we’ve got to look beyond the conventional wisdom that we must somehow regulate this box.” Contrast this view with 60 years worth of careful stewardship of the public airwaves as one of the basic tenets of a democratic society and you can easily see the difference between a businessman and a public servant.


With Fowler’s appointment as the head of the FCC the Fairness Doctrine was a dead letter issue. The FCC no longer enforced compliance or responded to requests to arbitrate complaints. As much as Fowler would have liked to remove the Doctrine statements from the FCC charter this was a little stickier situation since Congress had formally legislated it into the statute and the Supreme Court had ruled that it was not only Constitutional but necessary for the protection of the First Amendment principles. It was up to two Reagan appointees to the DC Circuit court of Appeals to do away with the statute which they promptly did in 1986 with a nice bit of legal sidestepping that never addressed the issue formally. Judge Robert Bork and Judge Antonin Scalia ruled in a 2-1 decision that Congress had not actually made the doctrine into law in 1959. Judge Bork wrote:

“We do not believe that language adopted in 1959 made the Fairness Doctrine a binding statutory obligation,” because, he said, the doctrine was imposed “under,” not “by” the Communications Act of 1934.

According to Bork and Scalia’s twisted interpretation the FCC was not required to enforce the Doctrine but it could if it wanted to. Somehow in their opinion the wording of “under” vs. “by” made it possible for the FCC to decide if it wanted to enforce the Doctrine or not even though previous Supreme Court decisions had ruled otherwise. In early 1987 former Reagan presidential aide and newly appointed FCC commissioner Dennis R. Patrick used this opinion to justify formally revoking the Fairness Doctrine from FCC guidelines. In less than 7 years the Reagan Administration dismantled 60 years worth of carefully crafted decisions by the best legal minds in America to equate broadcasting with toasters.

Less than a year later former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson framed the effort to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, “It is a struggle for nothing less than the possession of the First Amendment; who gets to have and express opinions in America.” Even though a law to reinstate the Doctrine passed both houses of Congress that year it was promptly vetoed by Reagan. Another attempt to resurrect the Doctrine ran out of steam in 1991 when Bush senior promised a veto if it got to his desk. Control of the national media by those who have the means to buy broadcast licenses is a valuable commodity it seems. After all, how else will the Republican Party manage to continually convince the very people they are fleecing to vote for them if broadcasters are forced to air viewpoints that point this out.

Propaganda or news?

There seems to be quite a discussion in the news since the shootings in Tucson concerning the tone of our political debates in this country. I won’t bother to go into the tone of the rhetoric because I think it misses the real problem that we are facing. In my view, the real problem we are facing is the steady deterioration of the quality of our news sources in this country. News is no longer a fair and measured attempt to discuss the issues. It has devolved into pure and simple propaganda. No longer are media outlets tasked with reporting the issues with a representation of all the views, they are now simply hired guns attempting to control the issues by controlling which information is released to the public. All of this changed in 1987 when Ronald Reagan issued an executive order that directed the FCC to no longer enforce the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine basically charged the FCC with overseeing the content of news that was broadcast over the public owned airwaves to make sure that it was fair and balanced; that both sides of issues were covered. While this is an imprecise and imperfect science the FCC controlled the content previous to 1987 by periodically reviewing content to decide which entities had a license to use the airwaves. I will go into all of this in more detail in my next post but the basic point to remember is that from the 1940’s until 1987 there was a controlling body charged with protecting the American public from propaganda. This probably explains why we had a much more educated voter base previous to 1987 but without question it was not an effort to censor but rather an effort to make sure that all sides of an issue were covered equally.

The best definition of propaganda that I have found is that it is a form of communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda, in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. This includes the omission of information that might tend to undermine a political position and it is the editorial tendency to control content based upon the furthering of a position as opposed to having an open discussion about the issue that defines propaganda as opposed to reporting the news. It is basically the difference in the effort to inform versus the effort to convince; they are not the same thing. This history of propaganda stretches back centuries and it has seen many diverse uses ranging from religious persuasion to political control with varying degrees of effectiveness.

One of the earliest examples of its use in this country was the Creel Commission or as it was known at its creation the “Committee for Public Information” (CPI). The CPI was formed by Woodrow Wilson under executive order on April 13, 1917. The committee was formed with the sole intent of fostering American support for involvement in World War I. Creel, a journalist, had urged Wilson of the necessity of such a commission in order to fight what he termed German propaganda. Creel believed that the CPI should concentrate on the true original meaning of propaganda which he defined as “propagation of faith.” It was the CPI the originally coined the phrase “Making the World Safe for Democracy.” Creel was joined on the committee by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the Navy. One of the most important contributors to this effort was a writer named Walter Lippmann. Lippmann was an intellectual who held common beliefs for the upper crust of American society at the time. In large part he believed that the American public was simply too uneducated and uninformed to make correct policy decisions even if indirectly by plebiscite. Lippmann believed that it was up to the "governing class" to correctly formulate and guide the "bewildered herd" of the American public. He wholeheartedly dedicated much of his life to carrying out this responsibility and the CPI was only the first of his organized efforts at influencing public opinion by any means necessary. It was Lippmann's own term of describing this effort as "manufacturing consent" that was later to be used to label such organized efforts of propaganda aimed at forming public opinion. Lippmann's ideas concerning the absence of necessity for truth in news were all built around the basic premise that it was up to the "governing class" to correctly lead the general public in the right direction; right being simply the direction that the well informed deemed most appropriate. The CPI itself was successful in that it managed to change the preponderance of public opinion away from an attitude of isolationism and empathy for the German cause and towards US involvement in WWI.

While it is undeniable that all the major powers in WWI put forth considerable efforts at their own propaganda, each with any eye towards influencing public opinion in favor of the respective governments involved, many observers believe that the US and Britain were much more effective in their methodology; both at home and abroad. It was their ability to totally mobilize the American public in support of the war that was at least in part responsible for the Allied victory. This message was not lost on the Germans who lost the war. As a matter of fact, many Germans believed that it was their inability to mobilize and gain the undivided support of the German people that led directly to their defeat. Regardless if this is a historically accurate view, it was widely believed in Germany at the time. One of the most fervent believers in this explanation was a young corporal who would later perfect the use of propaganda to further his ideology with such success that he gained total control of the German government. His name was Adolph Hitler and he explained these views more fully in a book he wrote called "Mein Kampf":

"Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. (...) All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. (...) The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. (...) The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood."

As to the methods to be employed, he explains:

"Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favorable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favorable to its own side. (...) The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. (...) Every change that is made in the subject of a propagandist message must always emphasize the same conclusion. The leading slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula."

Hitler was able to use this methodology very effectively in his rise to power and later in his ability to control Germany and her armies to a degree that no one would have thought possible previously. The effective use of propaganda which united Germany while at the same time placing blame for her post WWI collapse on the international banking community and Jews was the cornerstone of his strength. While he certainly modified propaganda techniques specifically to garner all political and military power in Germany to himself, it is the methodology of propaganda and how it corresponds to what is going on today that I am writing about in this post.

After WWI there was a great deal of study carried out on propaganda techniques. This study included those used by the Allies as well as the Axis powers that faced them. Both the US and her allies used propaganda techniques to support the war effort with great effectiveness. It was generally accepted that such techniques are necessary in times of war or national emergency but the idea that they were to be used in national news media as opposed to fair and balance reporting is relatively new in this country.

In case anyone doubts that such techniques have gained usage in the national new media in this country since Reagan's executive order of 1987 perhaps it would be useful to look at some of the recognized techniques of propaganda that came out of studies done after WWI and see if we can spot any of these tendencies in modern news media coverage. I will list some of them and give some specific examples of how they are utilized today. Propaganda in and of itself isn't necessarily that big of a problem as long as it is understood to be propaganda. It is the confusion of propaganda techniques with fair and balanced reporting that lends itself to public manipulation and it seems that we have an overwhelming abundance of this purposeful deceit implicit in some, if not most of our national media outlets today. Biased reporting is one thing, organized systematic propaganda disguised as reporting the news is a much more dangerous and sinister proposition.

In 1937 a group of American social scientists, historians, educators, and journalist formed the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA). The purpose of the IPA was to spark rational thinking and provide a guide to help the public have will informed discussions on current issues; to teach people how to think rather than what to think. This group's main focus was to discern and point out the differences between information and propaganda. The founders of the IPA believed that organized propaganda was a dire threat to democracy since one of the basic foundations of any democracy is an informed and educated populace. Propaganda by its very nature is a tool of disinformation specifically designed to prevent the spread of accurate information. Although the IPA eventually folded in the face of the necessity of propaganda to support the war effort one of its first goals was to list the main propaganda techniques in vogue at the time. I don't believe this is a complete list as the proponents of propaganda have increasingly improved their techniques in the years since but we will start with the list published by the IPA:

1. Name-calling
2. Glittering generalities
3. Transfer
4. Testimonial
5. Plain folks
6. Card stacking
7. Bandwagon

Name calling is pretty self explanatory but the specific use of name calling to denigrate people isn't the focus of this tool in propaganda. For this usage name calling is more specific in that it entails the usage of derogatory terms to attack the personality of political or social opponents. By attacking the person one avoids having to even discuss the issue which is one of the basic tenets of propaganda techniques. After all, the last thing that is desired is to have a fair and open discussion of the issues as this removes the possibility of being able to present the truth only as it pertains to one side of the issue. You will find lots of this rhetoric today on Fox News or talk radio. Socialists, Communists, Liberals, Leftists, and Statists are just some of the key words used but you will usually hear at least one of these titles applied with religious frequency to anyone who happens to disagree with the right wing conservative agenda that Fox news was formed to propagate. Again, propaganda itself is not an insidious thing but when it is passed off as fair and balanced reporting of the news it is both damaging to the spread of information and antithetical to the formation of an informed populace.

Glittering generalities is the practice of forming discussions around vague inherent generalities that everyone agrees with. By basing discussions and making the assumption that one side of the argument is based upon such an inherent generality the idea is to identify opposing arguments with views that oppose these generalities. A few examples one might hear daily expounded on Fox news or any number of talk radio hosts are freedom, patriotism, courage, strength, and democracy. By identifying themselves and in effect their arguments with such terms in advance propagandists intentionally strive to equate anyone who disagrees with opposite terms such as dictators, cowards, freeloaders, and socialists. While the technique is slightly different from name calling the goal is the same; to remove the possibility that opposing views will be openly discussed. One way to completely avoid such discussions is to effectively identify opposing views with positions that are inherently undesirable in advance. Not only does the usage of this tool tend to invalidate discussion, it can be done without explicitly resorting to name calling if framed properly in advance.

Transfer involves using symbolism to take the attributes of positive imagery and apply them to individuals involved in policy debates. To be honest, this is a technique the politicians have been utilizing for so long that it is normal behavior in political circles. This is exactly why politicians of all sorts love to be photographed in front of flags, monuments, and patriotic backdrops. The more emotional the response to any symbol the better this technique works and the more you will see it done. A few examples are Sean Hannity's usage of the Martina McBride "Let Freedom Ring" song numerous times each day. Who can hear the part of that song that is utilized without feeling a little lump in their throat? A good rule of thumb for judging the likelihood that a program is propagandist in nature is the amount of symbolism apparent in its introduction. This methodology is chapter and verse of Hitler’s description of using basic feelings and consistent repetition to control opinion.

Testimonial usually involves a written or spoken statement extolling the virtue of a position or product. While this technique is most easily identified in the advertising arena with the usage of spokespersons for products it is also extensively used in political debate. One of the more common modern usages of this technique is the propensity for conservative commentators to quote the “founding fathers” of this country out of context. Any real student of history understands that the “founding fathers” was a diverse group with many different agendas and it is not hard to find quotes supporting any ideology by selectively seeking out those that agree with one view while ignoring those that disagree. This is a tool especially favored by Sean Hannity and Ron Levine. Again, it is technique utilized to prevent open discussion by identifying respected historical figures views with those expounded by the host. Interestingly, as an aside one can get a feel for how artful talk show hosts are at propaganda by listening to their advertisements for products that serve as sponsors on their show. These hosts don't just advertise for the products of their sponsors they frequently give ridiculously energetic and fervent personal testimonials not only for the quality of these products but for the absolute necessity of purchasing them. Their wholesale acceptance of the techniques of propaganda in their social and political commentary leads directly to testimonial advertising on steroids when they start hawking products.

Plain folks propaganda is simply identification. The practitioner of this technique attempts to inherently identify himself with a specific social group, most often as an “ordinary Joe”. This identification is attempted so that the speaker can form a bond with his target that will allow them to believe he understands their concerns instinctively. It is a method of using emotional appeal to blunt intellectual discussion. Two of the most artful practitioners of this methodology are Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Each constantly prefaces their views by contrasting their opponents as “elitists”, “intellectuals”, or “silver spooned Liberals” who they surmise are not identifiable social companions to most of their listeners. This form of propaganda might best be represented by the meteoric rise on Fox News during the 2008 presidential election of “Joe the Plumber.” Sarah Palin is another politician who makes full use of this form of propaganda and not surprisingly Fox news hired her recently as well as a political consultant.

Card Stacking is the technique of emphasizing one viewpoint while simultaneously ridiculing the other. It is a well recognized and universally used technique in political campaigns but it has recently spilled over into national media outlets and is being passed off as news. The propagandists who practice this technique have sharpened it considerably in recent years by setting up panels for supposedly open discussions where both the agenda and the end result are carefully choreographed to make sure that the audience reaches the right conclusion. Fox news is especially adept at this technique and regularly features opposing viewpoints from the most vapid and uninformed commentators they can find. Bill O’reilly and Sean Hannity are also avid practitioners of this technique and you will regularly hear such counterpoint discussions on their shows.

Bandwagon techniques consist of convincing the audience that the great preponderance of the general public agrees with the views expressed by the commentator or political candidate. It is an emotional appeal to our basic herd instinct and usually goes along the lines of “everyone else can’t be wrong.” In other words, if the audience can be convinced that the majority of informed people hold one viewpoint it eliminates the need for them to go gather information from other sources because the great majority of people have already done that and made their decision accordingly. It is simply another tool to avoid an open discussion where opposing viewpoints can be put forth which is the root basis for the usage of all propaganda. This is exactly why Fox News concentrates so heavily on conservative victories while ignoring any instance whereby conservative agenda is refuted by the voting population. Just listen to any of the intros to talk radio’s conservative shows and you will get a perfect example of this type of propaganda; from Sean Hannity’s “Stop Obama express” to Ron Levine’s leadership reports from a hidden bunker.

I don’t believe that conservative media is the only type of media practicing propaganda in today’s world. What I do believe that ALL propaganda is injurious to the spread of information and the disguising of propaganda as fair and balanced news reporting is an effective tool being used to advance agendas in this country that informed discussions would arrest. It has gone well beyond the control of networks, which although lucrative, are small gears in a much bigger machine.

As in any agenda there are reasons for why it is being so effectively advanced and the larger picture in this case is the control of national politics and thereby control of the national government. The truth of the matter is that corporate entities controlled by the upper 1% of the wealthiest Americans are managing to gain control of the government to a degree that has never happened in this country before. Every economic study points out that since Reagan the wealthiest Americans have steadily gained control of the national wealth while the rest of the American public has actually lost buying power as their standard of living decreases and the middle class of this country absorb the nation’s debt. It is no accident that this has happened. What is a little amazing is that they have managed to do much of it with the voting consent of the very people they are squeezing out of existence, the American middle class. Propaganda, as Hitler well understood, is an invaluable tool where someone is intent upon spreading an agenda opposed to the general well being of the populace. This is especially true in a society where the voting populace controls who runs the government. Think about this the next time you hear someone on Fox rail against the very idea of the “Fairness Doctrine” as an attempt by the government to censor free speech. Who is going to be hurt by a fair and equal representation of issues over the nation’s airwaves?