So apparently, the Supreme Court case on Obama’s healthcare reform is rapidly descending into madness.

Let’s start with the objection to mandates. Paul Krugman gives the counterarguments here. To quote:

Is requiring that people pay a tax that finances health coverage OK, while requiring that they purchase insurance is unconstitutional? It’s hard to see why — and it’s not just those of us without legal training who find the distinction strange. Here’s what Charles Fried — who was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general — said in a recent interview with The Washington Post: “I’ve never understood why regulating by making people go buy something is somehow more intrusive than regulating by making them pay taxes and then giving it to them.”

I would only add that while the government can directly compel us to buy things, it generally doesn’t, for a very good reason: It’s irritating. And that irritation–our dislike of being told what to buy, an intrusion that is softened if we simply pay taxes and get the thing instead–is the control on government power here. That is, we’ll only put up with such obvious intrusion in certain special cases.

In fact, one might expect conservatives to argue that every government program should be mandated like this, in order to make the government intrusion clearer and more irritating. And in fact, the idea for mandates came from the neanderthal-right Heritage Foundation. And replacing Social Security with private accounts? The darling idea of conservatives everywhere? Yup, that would involve mandates.

So the argument against mandates comes down, not to any principle it violates, but to the fact that it’s Obama who wants them.

But that’s not the craziest part.

The Supreme Court–or those appointed by presidents named Bush or Reagan–seems to be actually listening, seriously, to another argument. Marty Lederman on Balkinization explains it clearly. To paraphrase:

• Way back when, Congress made Medicaid money available to the states, with conditions on how it be spent (i.e., they had to spend it on something resembling Medicaid, not on hookers and blow).
• States could refuse the terms by refusing the money. This is not federal coercion in any possible sense of the word.
• The current law will, in 2014, provide more money, with new conditions for that money.
• The money is provided all together–states can turn it all down, but not just the new money.
• The states with Republican attorneys general are saying that this is unacceptable coercion–they want (or say they want) to turn down the new money without losing the existing money.

But what if Congress had simply:

1. Cut off Medicaid funding in 2014,
2. Immediately instituted a new program, with more funding, that covered the same bases and more,
3. Allowed states to opt out of the new program if they chose (I say “allowed” just to stress the point–in fact states have a clear and unchallenged right to opt out)
4. Called the new program Medicaid in order to save on letterhead?

That would be exactly the same thing.

Given that steps 2, 3, and 4 are clearly constitutional, the state AGs are arguing that step 1 is unconstitutional coercion.

Which means saying, essentially, that Congress cannot ever stop funding something once the states have gotten used to the money.

This is so far from sane law, common sense, and even conservative ideology that I’m wondering whether the state AGs deliberately made pathetically weak arguments. That would make sense: any state AG who said, “hey, this program means a lot of money for our state and we shouldn’t fight it” would have no career in the Republican party, but that doesn’t mean that, as individuals, they actually want to fuck over their own states. They may have figured that the Supreme Court would reject their arguments. Their careers are intact, their states get that sweet federal money, everyone wins.

But if that was the plan, the joke is on them: many justices are treating their funhouse arguments as grave and sensible.

And why should we be surprised? This is the court that decided, in Bush v Gore, that George W. Bush should be president and fuck you. Of the five justices who gave us that travesty, three are still on the court. The two who left were replaced with worse ones.

The sad thing is, it’s 2012. The health care bill passed two freaking years ago, but the best parts–the parts that actually insure most of the uninsured–still haven’t gone into effect and won’t until 2014. And some will take longer than that. If they had gone into effect–if more people saw the benefits in their own lives–fighting it would be political poison. (The state AGs aren’t fighting the existing program, because the existing money is popular. It’s the program that we haven’t seen that they can fight, for the exact reason that we haven’t seen it.) The right wing has had years of opportunities to kill decent healthcare before it’s born because it has taken such a ridiculous time to *be* born.

I can’t help but quote my own post from 2009:

It’s not that fixing a health insurance plan really takes that long—nine years (2009-2018) was enough time to create a military from scratch, fight World War II, dismantle the military, and rebuild it for the Korean War. Back in the thirties, nine years was enough time to create important programs like the Works Progress Administration, the Public Works Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps, have them do their work, and dismantle them.

On the other hand, the long delay gives the forces against reform time to undermine it, and an entire freaking presidential election campaign to replace pro-reform politicians with ones more amenable to their interests. One doesn’t have to be paranoid to think that maybe this is the point.

I didn’t think of the legal aspect at the time. More fool me.

Our quote of the day comes from William Jennings Bryan:

“They call that man a statesman whose ear is tuned to catch the slightest pulsations of a pocketbook, and denounce as a demagogue any one who dares to listen to the heartbeat of humanity.”

Quoted in Jason Goodwin, Greenback, page 275 of the hardcover edition.

Our quote of the day comes from Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of the New Republic, in 1989.

“The cheer with which Western commentators greeted Mikhail Gorbachev’s tease that the Berlin Wall might come down when the conditions that generate the need for it disappear is another sign of how credulous we have become in receiving blandishments from Moscow.”

It’s available here.

Thank god we had people like Peretz looking out for us.

Consumerist.com reports that Microsoft has patented a system that would let people pay to skip commercials.

That could be the start of a rant about our broken patent system (is this really something that needs a patent? Isn’t it sort of obvious?), but I’m on a different rant today.

Specifically:

• People will pay to avoid advertising. If we wouldn’t, there would be no point in this patent.
• Things we pay to avoid–or would if we could–are, by definition, bad.
• Therefore, advertising is, in and of itself, bad. Not just its effects, which are bad enough, but the simple fact of its existence, which causes us some amount of annoyance that we would pay to avoid.

Now: in many cases advertising is a tradeoff–I want to watch Jersey Shore, so I’ll sit through some ads in order to do it; the irritation of the ads is worth it for that Jersey Shore goodness.

But what about ads that don’t support anything–that just accost us? Like billboards? Or spam phone calls?

Why are they legal? Spam calls to cell phones are in fact not legal, but why are any spam calls allowed?

And check this out:  Sao Paolo, in Brazil, got rid of billboards. Here’s what a business owner there had to say about the effect that had:

“You have to change the whole structure of the business. Today we work instead of investing in advertising, to have something that attracts the customer. Our job is to look for referrals.”

(Quoted in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.)

In other words, restricting advertising means that businesses have to compete the way that textbooks say they should–by actually attracting customers with their products, their services, or their prices.

Okay, that wasn’t even other words–that was many of the same words.

Point being: If we will pay to skip ads in videos and whatnot–and Microsoft is betting that we will–we would no doubt, if we had the option, pay to skip ads on billboards, on our phones, in bar bathrooms, and suchlike.

Thus, getting rid of these things would make us better off. In theory at least, measurably better off (by the amount of the money we would have spent to avoid the ads).

I can’t find any research about how much people would pay to avoid all the crap that the ad industry dumps on us, all day, every day. But certainly it’s more than zero, while the social benefits of all these ads are less than zero.

So why allow them?

This resignation letter by one Greg Smith, formerly of Goldman Sachs, has created a bigger splash than most. Maybe because he published it in the New York Times.

From the letter:

I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

. . .

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail.

No wonder Goldman’s stock price tanked the next day, although it bounced back. Although Smith says he didn’t see anything illegal, he definitely saw, and describes, things that Goldman could be sued for. The fact is, when you have a client–whether you’re a doctor, or an accountant, or an agent–you have a fiduciary duty to advise your client in his or her own best interest. Breaching that duty isn’t a crime in most states, but your client can damn well sue.

The initial chatter about Smith focused on the small question of whether or not he’s right (he is)–whether Goldman’s corporate culture has deteriorated to the point where they put profits above clients (Michael Bloomberg says no. He’s wrong, but he’s right when he says that the financial industry is crucial to New York City), and whether said deterioration is a Goldman problem or endemic to Wall Street (it’s the latter).

But others have pointed out that Goldman “never had moral fiber” (in Robert Reich’s words), that they have “a long history of duping clients.”

So, have Goldman’s (and Wall Street’s) morals deteriorated, or were Goldman (and Wall Street) always a bunch of bastards?

Both are true.

Wall Street has always been filled with amoral bastards who want to make money any way they can. The country saw that in the 1920s, with the orgy of speculation that led to the 1929 crash and the Great Depression.

Even after the crash, it took surprisingly long for people to understand just how bad–as people, and even as financiers–Wall Streeters were. It took years of depression, followed by congressional hearings in which (in the historian William Manchester’s Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s words) the heroes of Wall Street confessed to “one breach after another both of normal ethics and normal intelligence.”

After that, the New Deal set things up so that finance stayed simple and easy to supervise, and so that Wall Street was more or less forced to do what it’s supposed to do: to find real, productive investments for our savings.

Since that was the way to make money, that’s what Wall Streeters did, whether they were bastards or not.

Starting in the 1970s, we deleted our regulations in the name of the free market. The result was exactly what you would expect: a replay of the 1920s.

How long till we get it into our heads, again, that financiers are dangerous idiots who need to be watched every minute?

Before I leave this subject, check this out: It’s Goldman’s CEO’s response to Smith. Go read it. Then ask yourself: Does this read like something from the pen of an effective, dynamic person–someone so alert, so sophisticated, and so brilliant that he deserves millions of dollars a year if he deigns to lend his powers to the service of a company? Or does it sound like the work of a dull, petulant nobody?