28 February 2010
 
Green for Danger

(Heckle, sans Jeckle, surveys an uncertain future)
 
I have a pal who is an attorney and lives in Oz.
 
There are enough contradictions inherent in both profession and location that I marvel at how life can be lived so far away form the Imperial City. He tends to be a liberal and I tend to be a progressive on some issues and a revanchist on others. We often have useful rambling discussions about what constitutes The Real Deal and What The Hell is Going On.
 
I am pretty confident that no one knows, not Mr. Bernanke or any of the rest of them. Another well-regarded associate was musing about how to recognize the initial signs of inflation, and then act decisively, “turning cash into durable goods, which will gain value.  New cars, all the backlog of house maintenance and upgrades.  Etc, etc.”
 
He is a man of great practicality and I agree with him implicitly- that was one of the reasons I bought the farm, even though it seemed a little like whistling past the graveyard. The trick, as my pal notes, is that an inflationary period is a very bad time to retire and go onto a fixed income.
 
This week Ben Bernanke sternly assured Congress he didn't intend to monetize the debt- which is to say that he wasn’t going to print money in a fashion that would mimic what happened in Weimar Germany or Mugubwe’s Zimbabwe.
 
We have talked about the foreign purchasers of American debt getting skittish. At that point, all that's left is printing money  to service accumulated debt.  Avoiding inflation under these circumstances would seem to be impossible.
 
So, on the one hand we are looking at some very rocky road up ahead.
 
Then my attorney chimed in about the other hand, and what could very well be on the shorter term and indigestible menu.
 
He was watching a Netflix on-demand movie from another desperate time- 1946. It was a British film in classic B&W called “Green for Danger.”
 
In the movie, the Brits are enduring the last paroxysm of Hiter’s war, with the Vengeance rockets arriving at the end of Gravities Rainbow at more than mach speed. Which is to say, the explosion arrived before the sound of the engine.
 
That was Werner Von Braun’s contributions, but that wasn’t the only V-weapon that was thrown against the weary old country. The first of the series was the pilot-less pulse-jet rocket-powered Buzz Bomb, which were launched in the general direction of Britain and left to crash willy-nilly into the countryside. Whooop- Whoop-Whoop they would come with the pulsing of the jet. Then silence and a big boom a few moments later.
 
I am sitting with the affectionate feral cat on a perfectly nice bit of land the bank lets me call mine, and worried about the future. My pal was watching a bit of history that reminds one exactly how bad things can be.
 
Pinewood Studios had a great run with stars like Alistar Sim. In Green for Danger, a postman is wounded by a buzz-bomb and mysteriously dies from unknown causes during a relatively minor surgical procedure. This is just the start of he black comedy as Nurse Bates proclaims to a room full of hospital employees at a dance that the postman was murdered and further more that she knows where the clues are.
 
It is a black comedy, and sort of a long way around the rosebush to get to health-care, but that is exactly what my friend did. The Brits got to their version of national health care through the seven years of attacks on the home-land.
 
There was a de facto rationing of care, along with the de jure rationing of just about everything else. Those who could afford private health care could avail themselves of it- if they chose to.
 
 It just didn’t make much sense, since the rest of the system was fully occupied with the recovery.  
 
That got my pal thinking. He thinks the Congressional majority may pass some bill, but it will be useless to lower healthcare costs, and will likely increase them. The most it could try to do is expand coverage to a greater portion of the population. Even if the Republicans swept back to majorities in Congress, there is not a chance in hell they could overcome Mr. Obama’s veto power, so whatever is done in the next few weeks is what is going to stick.
 
He is thinking about the implications of that, just as I am thinking about the sovereign debt. He thinks the HMOs will be overwhelmed with new, non-paying customers. Those already covered with private insurance will scream bloody murder now having to wait months for appointments due to the newly covered. And private healthcare premiums and taxes for the newly insured will go up.
 
In short, he predicts that the system will break the system with more and more people on private insurance will be unable to afford it, and we will get to a point—like the British at war—where the government will have to physically distribute healthcare like the old Public Health Service did.
 
In short, he thinks the Democratic solution that is likely to be imposed will only contribute to the wildly increasing prices of HMO insurance and put us into a wartime system where the government will have to ration and physically distribute healthcare, like Britain in WW II.
 
He doesn’t blame Mr. Obama and the Democrats. Like I said, he may tend to be a Liberal but he is also a realist. The wild increase in cost of HMO insurance in Oz is driving us that way in any case. It is only a matter of accelerating what is already in progress.
 
I went out on the back deck and looked down at the barn, just like Heckle the cat was doing. What will be, will be, I suppose.
 
It might not be very pleasant, but at least the Germans are not dropping anything on Culpeper County at the moment, and durable goods are still easy to get. It was with more than a little astonishment that I looked down toward the barn to discover Heckle looking at her mirror image- Jeckle was not dead after all.

Both cats have survived the savage winter, and with that, there may be hope after all.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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