Summary
The Republican Party by adhering to its core orthodoxy that "markets are always better than government regulation, and management must be, by nature, evil and eliminated, is on a path to being as much a minority party as it was in the 1930's, 1940's, 1950's, and 1960's. The truth is that failures of regulation have led to the crisis in health care, home mortgages, trade, the loss of manufacturing jobs, dangerous pollution, global warming, and even the Iraq War.
Analysis
There are a number of articles in this Sunday's New York Times that are relevant to this discussion. The front -page article titled
Varying Paths in a Wide Open GOP Lineup
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/us/politics/23repubs.html?hp is one and the editorial dealing with the issue of Health Care is another. Looking to the business section there's a number of articles that deal with the finacial implications of the sub-prime mortgage mess. And of course the long front page piece on how free market orthodoxy and greed has led to the failure of the market to provide decent nursing home care for an increasingly aging population. Health care is a good example of being out of touch with reality. There is a real health care crisis in America today. It has less to do with out of control spending on care, but rather the inability of free markets to anwer compelling needs of citizens. The fact that somewhere between 45 million and probably 60 million citizens lack proper coverage masks the reality. Elderly are covered, but the middle class -- that potent swing group that analysts often see as "Independents" when they vote -- are increasingly finding themselves priced out of the market. Moreover the aging baby boomers often are prone to being "let go" because of age and find themselves unable to get new coverage since even the best working machine, i.e. the human body, will, over forty years or more, accumulate something wrong. Let me give you a good case in point. When I moved from working for a company to private consulting I remained with the Cobra plan from my work for 18 months. Before the end of that period I tried to get coverage from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Mexico. Unlike the BCBS of Washington who had covered me for 20 years, the BCBS of New Mexico was owned by the for profit BCBS of Indiana.. Initially they offered coverrage, but when my wife put down that she took Synthroid for hypothyroidism (a condition afflicting nearly half of women over the age of40) and easily managed by taking this thyroid replacement that had been used for twenty or thirty years, they decided to deny coverage for any possible illness that could remotely be associated with thyroid disease. Lacking over coverage we accepted. But within a month they requested seeing doctors reports from nearly all of our doctors for the past five years. They then found in these reports vague hints that this condition could, under rare circumstances, lead to heart diseae and a host of other conditions. Nearly anything you have wrong with you can lead you to these conditions. The long and short of this was that they sent back the payments for the past three or four months and stopped covering the family. We were able to secure better and more affordable insurance from other carriers. My wife doesn't have any signs of these other afflications and likely never will. But this is why any Republican market driven plan that leaves the choice of who to insure to insurers a non-starter. The market failed, as it always will, in these cases.
The mortgage crisis in sub-prime debt is another example of Republican lack of management of what has been a scandle ridden industry for years. Failure to regulate the worst abuses because you think the market will take care of it has led to the problems that will bring down the economy leading to a slow down, if not an out right recession. Anyone with half a wit could see that offering teaser loans to individuals without adequate incomes and making repayment options so punative to make it impossible to refinance the loans when these reates expired also believes in the tooth fairy. Letting the market work things out as a solution to this mess is no solution at all. Again the Republican orthodoxy will get in the way of real distress on the part of real people who, at least some, in the past voted for the Republicans because they saw themselves as "conservatives".
There are numerous other examples of failure of markets to do the right thing. So long as greed is the motivator then human beings will more often do what is right for them, but not what is right for society. They pollute if they can get away with it because they don't usually have to live next to the dump that their "free market based, laissez-faire, factories make". They buy companies and fire half the work force cause they think that this makes the world more efficient, ignoring the fact that getting rid of enough jobs might lead to a slow down in demand and ultimately to a failure of markets to perform up to expectations. The article on home nursing care and the fact that private equity has covoluted the ownership to make it impossible for government or individuals to have redress when their elderly parents are mistreated and neglected because these homes are no longer adequately staffed. Again its a failure of markets and greed that mas made this possible. And again the companies doing this are easily identified as cheerleaders for the Republican party.
The election next year will the litmus test for the party. Given that they can't afford to change or are unwilling to change, then I predict that it will be a blood bath akin to that the Party suffered in 1932.
