Author: Stephen Pickering

In 1989 after the Berlin Wall came down, Boris Yeltsin, then Russia’s President, immediately handed over his countries largest industries to a handful of oligarchs. We all know what happened after that. One part of the Russian economy blossomed and was a raging bull market in the late 90s. Anybody who owned a Russian or Eastern European ETF, remembers those days fondly as their portfolios boomed, and there was the definite sense of a World changing paradigm shift underway. Simultaneously, in America the great internet, communications revolution was exploding, unleashing an unprecedented wave of legitimate wealth, creativity, and freedom to the people. No wonder, as the year 2000 approached, there was a palpable feeling in the air that the new millenium was about to usher in, not an Armageddon of religious prophesy, but a dawning of an age of Aquarius where a sense of wealth and freedom would manifest, a true Golden Age like no other. There was indeed “exuberance,” but it was not as Mr. Greenspan said, “irrational.”

The most important point to remember why this isn’t working is that crony capitalism is not free market capitalism. It’s national socialism. It’s like what Warren Buffet said, ‘The next best thing to a monopoly is a duopoly.’ He was referring, at the time, to the national socialist organizations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We know what those two organizations were and what they did: Created the national housing crisis while stuffing the pockets of power with unearned millions.

What knocked the wheels off this apple cart bringing the “forbidden” fruit from the Garden of Eden? It was not the desire of the people, the “unwashed masses” to be rich and free or the greed of entrepreneurs, as the Establishment and its mouthpiece the corporate “mass” media would have us believe. On the one hand in Russia, the abuse of the Oligarchs, which is not a free market system (analagous to our Financial, Energy, Insurance, and Telecommunications industries in America), created a wave of crime and instability that was too powerful a force for the freed “cottage” industry system, a true free market, freed by eliminations of regulation and a 13% flat tax, to bare. The Russian Oligarch abuses and criminality is well documented, and what it did was open the door for an authoritarian style regime, led by Vladimir Putin, to fill the vacuum. In America a watered down, but no less effective, version of this took place with its epicenter being the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which caused the internet crash of 2000. On the surface it seemed as if the act was designed to protect the little guys and restrict the Oligarchs of Telecom. But this was a “false flag” destruction, creating a false vacuum of national socialism, or Oligarchy. The bill was designed, not to help small telecoms, but to put a knife in the side of free market creativity by retarding the natural flow of capital into this industry. The result is what we have today, an Oligarchical system in the Telecommunications industry, controlled by a few small players. These are false monopolies, false vacuums if you will, created and protected by Governmental regulation. This is national socialism which has nothing to do with free market capitalism.

The same system holds sway in America’s Health, Energy, and Financial industry. Who writes the policies for these industries? The Oligarchs and their paid for representatives in the Government. Witness Dick Cheney and friends writing energy policy in the early part of this decade. But this same playbook has happened in Insurance, Financial (need I remind you of what came to fruition last year there?) and Telecommunications.

The Health Insurance industry is an Oligarchichal, Government Regulated, Protected system that gives us higher prices and lower quality at we the people’s expense, for the benefit unearned gains of a few powerful elite class of Oligarchs.

But the solution to this national socialism is not “socialism socialism”, whereby the quality degrades even further, and the prices do not go down but are simply transferred from bloated premiums to bloated taxes, and the power and money is pocketed in an unearned fashion by the same people, simply wearing different hats. What’s even worse about this scenario is that, since the majority of tax money is pocketed by governmental Oligarchs and their various pals and interests, the debt will crack the U.S. Government, like it did the Soviet Union, and which Medicare itself threatens to do all by itself in the next two decades.

The solution to the Healthcare problem is simple. It’s almost too simple for people to accept. “De-regulation” has an ugly connotation. People have the subconscious sense that regulation is always beneficial to the people. And indeed a lot of it is. Real justice as regulation, the rule of law as applied to justice is a benefit, indeed a necessity to the public. But regulation in the name of protecting a false vacuum, a false monopoly, Oligarchical system such as what exists in the Health Insurance Industry today, works against the people and works against prosperity and creativity.

All that needs to happen to bring down prices and increase quality in Healthcare is to outlaw governmental lobbying, to outlaw the Health Insurance Oligarchs from writing Healthcare Insurance regulation and policy. The effect of this so far has been eliminating free market forces from bringing efficiency to the industry. The Healthcare Reform Act could be written on one sheet of paper. One of the most important revisions would be to allow all citizens to buy health insurance in a free open market from anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world for that matter. In other words, regulate against fraud and misconduct but don’t regulate against free choice (for the benefit of a few large corporations to ride an unearned money train). If such an Act were passed a flood of capital would come flowing into this market and a rich ecosystem of diverse, energized, competition would blossom, fulfilling every niche in American society with a cornucopia of products and choices. Not only would needs be met, but opportunities would also manifest. Innovation, like it always does, would spur quality and efficient prices to the consumer and wealth and abundance to a whole new generation of entrepreneurs who would simultaneously create great paying, fulfilling jobs to the society itself.

The premise of free market capitalism is this: Whenever wealth is created in an open, free market, in an ethical, non criminal, non false vacuum way (meaning propped up by Government protection disguised as “regulation”), the benefit to society as a whole and the individual is inversely proportional to the wealth that is generated for the capital, businesses, and individuals invested.