Insurmountable Barriers to Structural Reform
by ilene - August 4th, 2009 11:04 am
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Insurmountable Barriers to Structural Reform
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith at Of Two Minds
The current discussion on "reforming" healthcare illustrates the impossibility of true structural reform in a system controlled by deeply entrenched State and private-sector Elites .
The charade of "reforming" sick-care is an excellent example of how "reform" is subverted by entrenched Elites that I call fiefdoms. "Reforms" as currently proposed are merely policy tweaks which do not address any of the numerous structural flaws in the U.S. sick-care system. This is not by happenstance; the obstacles to structural reform are insurmountable.
In a perfect world, both the non-Elite citizenry and those grasping the reins of power would conclude that serious structural reform would serve their long-term interests better than structural collapse. Yet there are ontological (and therefore insurmountable) barriers to any such reform, obstacles which can perhaps best be understood as forces of nature similar to gravity: to expect any concentration of political and financial power to relinquish its power rather than defend it is akin to expecting gravity to cease its pull on mass.
Elites, by definition, hold concentrations of power at immensely higher densities than the broad non-elite populace. I term this structural imbalance in power density asymmetric stakes in the game, in which the game is the concentration and distribution of national income and wealth, both via State-collected taxes and private capital.
To better understand the concept of power density, in which power is financial and political, let’s compare a rural, agricultural economy such as the U.S. circa 1783 and a post-industrial urbanized economy such as the U.S. in 2009.
Setting aside the issue of slavery in 1783 America--from one point of view, a forced concentration of labor to serve the plantation model of production--we note the diffusion of power in the non-slave states. Voters--the ultimate source of political compliance and thus power--and private and public financial assets were diffused except for a few (by today’s standards modest) urban centers: Philadelphia, Boston and New York. What Marx called "the means of production"--the capital, plant, tools and knowledge required to produce goods and services and thus wealth--were spread over the rural and urban populations alike.
Another way of describing this diffusion of power is to calculate the rate of concentration via the rate of inequality. Thus…
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