Although I’ve been aware of this great divide for decades now, moving to Tennessee has heightened my sense that a large number of my fellow American citizens are oblivious to basic economic concepts. The Knoxville newspaper barely goes a day or two without someone railing about the evils of socialism. A dear friend who ought to know better wants to elect Republicans in order to save her Medicare! It shouldn’t be necessary, but I think I have to say something about what I consider to be elementary economic theory.

Very few people in the United States are socialists. But very few are capitalists either. The vast majority of us fall somewhere along a spectrum. Most of us probably don’t realize how close we are in that spectrum–as evidenced by my pro-Medicare Republican friend.

Socialism, simply put, is an economic theory by which people agree to pool their resources and pay for services for the common good. When Benjamin Franklin first proposed a public library, he was endorsing socialism. The idea was (and is) that we will pool a bit of money to fund the purchase of books which anyone can read–whether or not they could have afforded to buy the books themselves.

Do you believe that we should pay for our military forces out of a general tax collection? That’s socialism! Should taxes fund roads and bridges? Socialism again!

It may be hard for you to believe, but there are places in these United States where a fire company will let your house burn down unless you are in the correct district or have paid some fees. Most of us are blessed by living under a socialist regime wherein the firefighters will save our homes without asking whether we have paid the fee. Perhaps you think that’s foolish and a home owner should be required to produce a receipt before the firefighters start working. Then you would be trending towards the capitalist side of things.

Should people be permitted to starve to death if they can’t afford food or die of an infection if they can’t afford an antibiotic? If you answer “yes” you’re a good capitalist. But if you answer “no” you’re not necessarily a socialist–therein lies a rub.

Until now I’ve been stacking the deck in favor of socialism. But I’m not a socialist. For example, I don’t believe that we should all be taxed so that someone who doesn’t work can live in a luxury dwelling for free. You might be able to convince me to pay for some minimal level of shelter for people who are ill or unable to work through no fault of their own–especially if the help is temporary. I am in favor of public transit, but I don’t believe everyone should be able to ride for free. I don’t want to see anyone go hungry, but people should work (in my opinion) if they want to eat in restaurants. In short, I do believe in the work ethic. People should work hard, work to obtain good educations, and be able to enjoy the product of their hard work. So I’m a capitalist in those regards.

Americans, like many other people around the world, are neither socialists nor capitalists. We do accept a number of socialist norms and most of us do feel that hard work should be encouraged and rewarded. So the only question is that of borders. Where do we set the lines? What level of health and comfort do we want to guarantee to all citizens? When do we tell someone, if you want that advantage you need to work for it?

Let me make this explicit for my Republican friend. Medicare is a form of socialism. What we have said, since the Lyndon Johnson administration, is that everyone should be willing to kick in a percentage of their income (currently about 3%) to a common kitty so that no older American need fear going without health care. We also use forms of socialism to at least partially cover the indigent and children. Most other industrialized countries have said that it is silly to require everyone else to pay for private insurance. If you’re going to have a system which takes care of the young and elderly, why not just provide health care for all?

Capitalists do have a valid point. If we say that we will provide an unlimited amount of medical care to everyone who wants it, we will bankrupt ourselves. No amount of taxation would be sufficient to pay for health providers and insurance companies giving everyone anything they pleased.

The solution must come from some sort of compromise. That’s what our public debate should be about. How much health care can we afford to provide to anyone, and how much should be reserved to those who can pay?

One thing that happens when you collectivize the effort is that you can reduce some costs. If a person who is diagnosed with cancer will be treated regardless of ability to pay, there will be no need to engage the services of an insurance company. Current estimates are that about 25% of the costs of the American system of health care come from insurance companies, so a more socialized system can be at least partially funded by eliminating the need to pay insurance companies for these sorts of issues.

But what about cosmetic surgery, Lasik for eyes, birth control, all sorts of undoubtedly worthwhile things that people might desire? That’s where capitalism comes in! People can either just pay for such things or purchase insurance policies which will pay for such things. The discussion in the public square becomes one in which we define how many services we want to provide via our taxation system, and what we will require people to arrange on their own dime.

Make no mistake about it–you’d have to find a very extreme Tea Party member indeed who is not in favor of some socialist positions. So let’s stop throwing the term “socialism” around like it’s some bogey man. We are all socialists and we are all capitalists. It just depends on the issue under discussion.

As will surprise absolutely no one who knows me, one of my favorite things in the world is reading the articles of the linguistics commentator at the Jewish Daily Forward. Recently there was a kerfuffle over the fact that the one Arab member of the Israeli Supreme Court stood mute during the singing of the National anthem, HaTikva. It turns out that standing mute for this has been acceptable behavior for the 20% of the Israeli citizenry that is not Jewish for quite some time.

Philologos, the above mentioned commentator, delved into the history of HaTikva and discovered that most, if not all, of the problems experienced by non-Jews could be eliminated by a few simple edits, the most important of which simply take the song back to the words of the original poem on which it was based.

As is usual with these wonderful columns, he finds a few other things along the way that may be of interest. To read the column, click this link.

As I read of the continuing furor over “ObamaCare” I recently experienced an set of circumstances that illustrate, yet again, why the current system of so-called “private” insurance in the US is completely broken.

Despite carefully preparing for our trip from Ann Arbor to San Diego, I managed to omit two medications from my travel bag. One was a blood pressure medication, the other my daily cholesterol pill. Both are generics and both should be non-controversial and dirt cheap. We’re not talking about narcotics or potentially dangerous medications. Not the sort of thing that anyone would be falsely demanding of a pharmacist. So I had no idea of the difficulties I would encounter as I tried to repair what was admittedly my goof upon my arrival in San Diego.

After settling in our lovely boutique hotel, the Keating, in the Gaslamp District I quickly located a nearby shopping mall and headed for the CVS Pharmacy therein. The Pharmacist was sympathetic but insisted on contacting my home pharmacy to verify that I had a valid prescription for the two medications. As it happened, my blood pressure prescription was current and there was no problem filling it for the duration of my trip. My cholesterol med, on the other hand, was “expired”–I had been renewing it for three months at a time and had just used the last of that round of renewals, so technically I wasn’t entitled to get any more until the physician wrote a new scrip. The Pharmacist noted that I could do without this med for a day and she would contact my doctor the following day.

When I returned to the pharmacy the next evening, the Pharmacist sadly informed me that my doctor had not returned her call, so no cholesterol meds for me. At that moment, it dawned on me that my doctor did have an “after-hours” number, so I tried that and sure enough the answering service had the doctor on the line within a couple of minutes. She called the pharmacist immediately. So I gave the pharmacist an hour or so and then returned to the store. She looked at me and said, “Yes, I did get call to my voicemail but I haven’t had time to listen to it.” So no meds yet. Soon she reported that yes, there was an appropriate authorization but it would take her some time to get it together.

An hour later, I made my fifth trip to CVS in search of my anti-cholesterol medication. The pharmacist wanted my prescription health plan card and I found two different copies in my wallet, both of which were no longer valid. We then recalled that when I retired, my prescription coverage was provided by my wife’s plan because I was too young for the University’s retirement plan to provide subsidized coverage. The reason I didn’t have a current card was that the University had provided an incorrect address for me to the pharmaceutical insurance provider, so they had mailed my card to the wrong address. Despite receiving a corrected address about three months ago, they still hadn’t managed to get me a new card.

But fortunately my wife could provide her information and sure enough that number did include my insurance coverage. But we weren’t home free yet. Yes, I am covered, but no not for these pills because my prior prescription had been provided too recently. In other words, if you recall, I couldn’t use the prescription on record at my pharmacy because it was “expired” but neither could I get a new prescription because it was too soon.

Fortunately the medication was generic and I can afford to pay without insurance. So after a $12 payment, my five pills were procured and I was, at last, on my way back to my room with my anti-cholesterol medication.

In our country, a maze of government red tape, insurance company interference, and stupid regulation resulted in a phenomenal waste of time for all concerned. Forget about my petty needs to control my blood pressure (somewhat countervailed by the handling of these issues) and cholesterol. My home pharmacy, the San Diego pharmacist, my physician, the insurance company’s costs and you will see how a few generic pills probably cost these various entities a total of several hundred dollars.

Just about any place else in the industrialized world, this situation would have been handled quickly and with little cost to anyone. The pharmacist has reasonable discretion, most people have government controlled plans that allow quick information to be located based on something akin to a social security number, and the absence of regulation results in dramatically lower costs. This is a microcosm of what is wrong in our country, why health care costs so much. It won’t end until we wake up and realize that our crazy-quilt system of providing coverage is costing us dearly–sapping vital resource we could be using to for so many other projects and depriving many people of adequate care.

Today, October 6, 2010 there are two stories circulating about capital punishment. The first regards the horrific case of the family of Dr. William Petit Jr. Dr. Petit lost his wife and three daughters who were killed by two monsters masquerading as human beings. The prosecution has just proved its case against the first of the two defendants and will soon be moving to a penalty phase which will request the death penalty.

The second story concerns the case of Cameron Todd Willingham who was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of his three daughters. According to Texas, Mr. Willingham deliberately set fire to his house causing the deaths of his children. The state Fire Marshall was responsible for the finding of arson. When Mr. Willingham came to trial, the state funded public defender hired a local fire expert who agreed with the State, so Mr. Willingham was unable to present a contrary expert opinion. The case came to the attention of Craig Beyler, the chairman of the International Association of Fire Safety Science who studied the facts and concluded that the arson finding was contrary to the evidence and that the state’s investigation failed to follow common, national standards of investigation. Several other fire experts not connected with the state have studied the evidence and concluded that the fire was accidental. It’s too late for Mr. Willingham who was killed by the State of Texas in 2004.

In another case coincidentally reported this same day, federal Judge Jack T. Camp has been accused of hiring the services of a stripper he is alleged to have frequented to obtain cocaine. Judge Camp, a Reagan appointee, has a reputation for handing out harsh sentences for drug offenses, among other things.

Many in our national media are using the case of Dr. Petit’s family as a clarion call for the death penalty. But the other two cases amply demonstrate why we should be slow to accept that advice. The question is not, in my mind, whether the perpetrators of those heinous acts deserve death. There is not a shred of doubt in my mind that they do. I will shed no tears for either of these men should they suffer execution. But I still oppose capital punishment for a very simple reason, one that I would have thought conservatives would understand.

As the other cases I cited from today’s news amply demonstrate, we simply can’t trust the government with the ultimate penalty. There is too much corruption, too much financial advantage to the prosecution, and too much plain incompetence in the judicial systems for us to trust the government to properly enforce a death penalty.

What baffles me is that a reluctance to trust the government is the most central plank to American Conservative ideology. Conservatives don’t trust the government with our tax dollars. They reject gun laws because they insist that the government should have little or nothing to do with regulating their right to “keep and bear arms.” They rail against regulation of almost any sort. But somehow, they do trust the government to choose the right defendants to kill. I don’t get it.

There is a “Jewish angle” to this issue. It has often been observed that Jews are more likely to oppose the death penalty than other ethnic groups. Although this is changing in America as the community matures, gains wealth, and more people move towards opinions generally held by the more affluent, the percentage of Jews opposed to capital punishment remains higher than the general population. One reason occasionally cited for this is that Judaism has opposed capital punishment for most of the last two thousand years. I believe that the reason is the reason which is behind that traditional opposition to capital punishment–the certainty that Jews have had over the centuries that if the State has the power to kill people, innocent Jews will be not infrequent targets of state sanctioned brutality.

It is certainly less likely in our time that the American state will target Jews this way, but it wasn’t that long ago that Jews were lynched in America–the case of Leo Frank probably the most infamous. And while there haven’t been mass, state countenanced slaughters of Jews in America, Jews have experienced exactly this from states and governments which were considered to be “modern” and “democratic.” Jews have learned from bitter experience that populations and governments can turn on them in short order. So opposition to capital punishment among Jews is not just a matter of trending liberal, it is to some extent an exercise in self preservation.