There's No Business Like Government
Claudewell S. Thomas, MD, MPH, DLFAPA, is an established psychiatrist who is currently retired ,, He received his medical degree in 1956 at SUNY Downstate College of Medicine and specializes in social psychiatry, public health psychiatry, and forensic psychiatry. Dr. Thomas was board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry... more
Michael Heltzie in the October 26th issue of the Los Angeles Times attacks the premise that government should be run like a business. He gives the current wildfire crisis in California as an example of the folly of entrusting the public welfare definable as health equity and wealth equity (lives, wellness and property) to private enterprise. Despite unconscious effort to leave them out, policing and imprisoning, key aspects of law enforcement, rush to mind. Years of infrastructure neglect while maximizing the bottom line for owners, management and shareholders have left power lines in proximity to dense brush and vegetation. This proximity defining a high wind, broken branch, downed power line, sparking to inferno catastrophe sequence.
The rupture of century old gas and water lines has plagued California as well, resulting in raging residential fires, explosions, local flooding, and air and water pollution. The failure of Tesla's summoning system within its 200 foot range, the diversion of Tesla programmers from voltaic solar electricity supply to the resolution of automotive production line problems, and the rash of unexplained battery fires. In addition to Boeing 737 MX fatalities related to a toggle switch, the increase in the number of black box warnings issued by the FDA, in turn related to the speeding up of approvals of potent drugs most probably too soon after partial success in phase 3 testing (attributed to the wish to save lives but the huge price tags attached to such early and uncontested products is alarming).
On a different front (no pun intended), elements of the U.S. military are being returned to Northeast Syria ostensibly for the reclamation of coveted oil resources. The objective facts seem to be that there is little exportable oil left in a war ravaged region. Syria was never much of an oil exporter and what was left acted as a support for and indeed the lifeblood of the autonomous Kurdish state. The departure of the U.S. military has left the huge swath of territory as the playground of Assad, Putin and Erdogan. The disputed lands are breeding grounds for diseases of contamination, including Cholera, dysentery, pulmonary infection like bronchopneumonia, Tuberculosis, and plague.
It is clear that totalitarian governments, socialist or fascist, have been fomenting arms smuggling, human and drug trafficking, and that death and disease are tracking closely. Having discovered that capitalism is the greatest income producing system, they are pitting state capitalism with its top down controls against entrepreneurial capitalism with relative laxity but that laxity with little concern for citizen well-being and overall concern with profit gives state capitalism the advantage.
