Predatory Rhetoric

by digby

In his WSJ column today Thomas Franks discusses something I’ve been mulling over myself the last few weeks: when did the conservatives decide that business and industry are delicate flowers that can’t possibly be forced to compete with anyone? It thought it was all “let the best man win?”

During a debate last week over two Democratic proposals for a health-care bill featuring a “public option”—a government-run alternative to private health insurance—the senator announced he opposed the idea because, as he put it, “Government is not a fair competitor. . . . It’s a predator.” The word “predator” seems to have become something of a Republican talking point. Mr. Grassley’s colleague from South Dakota, John Thune, went on the record in July to warn that, when government goes into business, it “becomes not a competitor but a predator.” Have these two august men of the right secretly become fans of Mr. Galbraith, one of our leading liberal economists? If so, they need to go back over “The Predator State” a second time. Although they have snapped up Mr. Galbraith’s catchy title, they have misunderstood his message. What makes government predatory, Mr. Grassley seems to believe, is its public-mindedness. Were government to offer health insurance to everybody without the industry’s many devices for excluding risky individuals, some seem to fear, it might be able to offer consumers a price too fair for the profit-minded sector to match. This is a curious reversal for a movement that ordinarily celebrates Darwinian struggle and the destruction of the weak by the strong. Just think of the conservative caricatures that must be inverted for this argument to work: All those soft liberal bureaucrats? Ferocious man-eaters. The welfare state? Law of the jungle. And the actuarial-minded hardliners of the insurance biz, the ones who deny your claim or cancel your policy? A gentle but endangered species that needs our nurturing, sort of like panda bears.

He goes on to point out that Galbraith’s book is (naturally) being completely misrepresented by these Republicans as it’s theme is actually the takeover of the government by corporate interests, but never mind.

You have to give these Republicans credit for constantly finding ways to misdirect the public from a natural anger at the big corporate interests that have been benefiting at their expense, to the government which is trying to mitigate the disaster these interests have made of the US economy. They are nothing short of geniuses when it comes to twisting the other sides’ effective rhetoric to their own uses. But I honestly didn’t think they’d be able to find a way to use their patented victimology to protect businesses like insurance in this economic horror show. To make the unregulated sharks of finance and insurance the prey of the laid back “do your own thing” laissez faire government of the past couple of decades is chutzpah t0 the nth degree. I fully expect to hear dittoheads calling up Limbaugh and whining about how the government is hurting the average Joe by forcing insurance companies to insure them.

.