Having More Choices Is Not Always A Good Thing

 Conservatives love to say that having more choices is always a good thing. That's not always true, especially if some of those choices are designed to bilk consumers of their hard-earned money. Consider this article from Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman:

Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, is clearly what my father would have called a piece of work.

Early in the pandemic he made headlines by saying that older Americans should be willing to risk death so that younger people could “get back to work.” More recently, he suggested that Texans who found themselves with $17,000 electricity bills after the February freeze had only themselves to blame, because they didn’t “read the fine print.”

Funny, isn’t it, how politicians who denounce liberal elitists sneer when ordinary Americans get into trouble?

But something else struck me about Patrick’s take on supersize power bills: How did we become a country where families can face ruin unless they carefully study something as mundane, as normally routine, as their electricity contract?

And electricity isn’t a unique example.

As The Times’s Margot Sanger-Katz has documented, many people end up with heavy financial burdens because they chose the wrong health insurance plan — yet even experts have a very hard time figuring out which plan is best. Using an out-of-network health care provider can also lead to huge medical bills.

Wait, there’s more. One cause of the 2008 financial crisis was the proliferation of novel financial arrangements, like interest-only loans, that looked like good deals but exposed borrowers to huge risks.

What these stories have in common is that they’re snapshots of a country in which many of us are actually offered too many choices, in ways that can do a lot of harm.

It’s true that both Economics 101 and conservative ideology say that more choice is always a good thing. Milton Friedman’s famous and influential 1980 TV series extolling the wonders of capitalism was titled “Free to Choose.”

The spread of this ideology has turned America into a land where many aspects of life that used to be just part of the background now require potentially fateful decisions. You don’t get a company pension, you have to decide how to invest your 401(k). When you turn 65, you don’t just get put on Medicare, you also decide which of many Medicare Advantage plans to sign up for. You don’t just get power and phone service, you also have to choose from a wide variety of options.

Some, maybe even most, of this expansion of choice was good. I don’t miss the days when all home phones were owned by AT&T and customers weren’t allowed to substitute their own handsets.

But the argument that more choice is always good rests on the assumption that people have more or less unlimited capacity to do due diligence on every aspect of their lives — and the real world isn’t like that. People have children to raise, jobs to do, lives to live and limited ability to process information.

And in the real world, too much choice can be a big problem.

The lesson of subprime mortgages, health insurance and now Texas electricity is that sometimes people offered too much choice will make bigger mistakes than they imagined possible. But that’s not all. Too much choice creates space for predators who exploit our all-too-human limitations.

Before the subprime mortgage crisis, Edward Gramlich, a Federal Reserve official who warned in vain about the potential for disaster, asked, “Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers?” The question, he suggested, “answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped into taking these products.”

Similarly, there’s clearly a lot of profiteering in medical billing, with the victims disproportionately those least able to understand what’s happening.

Beyond all that, I’d suggest that an excess of choice is taking a psychological toll on many Americans, even when they don’t end up experiencing disaster.

There’s a growing body of research suggesting that the costs of poverty go beyond the trouble low-income families have in affording necessities. The poor also face a heavy “cognitive burden” — the constant need to make difficult choices that the affluent don’t confront, like whether to buy food or pay the rent. Because people have limited “bandwidth” for processing complex issues, the financial burdens placed on the poor all too often degrade their ability to make good decisions on other issues, sometimes leading to self-destructive life choices.

What I’m suggesting is that a society that turns what should be routine concerns into make-or-break decisions — a society in which you can ruin your life by choosing the wrong electric company or health insurer — imposes poverty-like cognitive burdens even on the middle class.

And it’s all unnecessary. We’re a rich country — and citizens of other rich countries don’t worry about being bankrupted by medical expenses. It wouldn’t take much to protect Americans against being scammed by mortgage lenders or losing their life savings to fluctuations in the wholesale price of electricity.

So the next time some politician tries to sell a new policy — typically deregulation — by claiming that it will increase choice, be skeptical. Having more options isn’t automatically good, and in America we probably have more choices than we should.

The Ten Top Veep Prospects For Clinton To Choose From

Donald Trump has made his choice for vice-president -- Mike Pence, and it's a choice that hasn't excited the American public. Will Hillary Clinton do better when she make her choice for second spot on the Democratic ticket?

Here are the top 10 prospects that are most mentioned as viable choices. I like them all, even though my choice would be Elizabeth Warren or Xavier Becerra. What do you think? Who would you want Clinton to choose?

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts

Representative Xavier Becerra of California

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack

Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia

Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro.

Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado.

Retired U.S. Navy Admiral James Stavridis.

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Tyranny Is Still Tyranny - Whether From The Right Or Left

(This cartoon is by Ben Garrison at bengarrison.com.)

The United States is supposed to be a free country -- a country where each citizen has the same rights and privileges, and can make their own choices about how they wish to live their lives. Unfortunately, there are many in this country who seem to have a different definition of freedom. For them, freedom means having the right to force their fellow citizens to live as they want them to live -- and these people populate both the right and left political wings.

On the right, these people would like to force other Americans to accept their religion through force of law (and would even force their religion on children through the public school system).They would keep women as second-class citizens, and deny them the right to control their own bodies. And they would deny equal rights to minorities, immigrants, and homosexuals -- because they believe equal rights are only for those who look like and agree with them. They would also fine or jail others for using marijuana -- the safest drug known to man. But forcing another to accept your beliefs or denying them rights is not freedom -- it is tyranny.

It is easy for those of us on the left to see that kind of tyranny. By there is also a form of tyranny that exists on the left side of the political spectrum. There are those who want to outlaw cigarettes, carbonated sodas, fried foods and fast foods, and firearms. And they would join many on the right in outlawing pornography. But denying citizens the right to choose is not freedom -- it is tyranny.

Oddly enough, those on the right and the left use the same argument to try and impose their views on others. Both sides will tell you it is for your own good, and the good of all citizens. That may or may not be true, but it doesn't matter because it has no place in a free and democratic society (even if it is the will of the majority).

We need to make up our minds in this country -- do we want to live in a free and open society, or a society where we are forced to do things because others think it is for our own good? Freedom means people have the right to make their own choices and live their lives as they please, even if those choices are bad and their lifestyle is one that hurts them. That is the very essence of a free society -- to be able to make our own choices, even bad choices. Denying any citizen the right to make a choice (good or bad) is a denial of freedom. It is tyranny.

I am not a moderate, but a proud leftist. But that doesn't mean I will accept tyranny from the left anymore than I would accept it from the right. I believe in democracy, and in a free and open society. Don't you? Isn't it time we stood up to tyranny from both sides of the political spectrum?

Is McCain Senile Or Just A Big Liar ?

It has to be one or the other. Either John McCain is the world's biggest liar, or he has finally slipped from the real world and finally embraced his senility. Note this ridiculous statement he made on ABC's "This Week" program. He was talking about Willard Mitt Romney's selection of a running mate for the presidential campaign and said the "primary, absolute, most important aspect is if something happened to him, would that person be well qualified to take that place?"

He then went on to say, "I happen to believe that was the. . .primary factor on my decision in 2008." How could he say such an ignorant thing? Didn't he pick Sarah Palin -- a woman who couldn't even finish one term as governor of one of the least-populated states, a woman who couldn't name a single newspaper or magazine that she reads, a woman who thought that Africa was a country instead of a continent, a woman who thought Paul Revere "warned the British" on his midnight ride?

I don't think there is a single thinking person in the United States that thinks Sarah Palin was (or even is now) qualified to be president. Even McCain's own aides admit this now, and were horrified that they could have been responsible for putting her a heartbeat from the presidency.

I find it hard to believe McCain could keep a straight face while telling that big a lie. That's why I'm thinking it must be senility. I was going to suggest it may be time for him to retire, But I'm afraid that Arizona would just replace him with a teabagger -- and a person with no brain is just as bad as one with a dysfunctional brain.

Has Liberalism "Jumped The Shark" ?

The 1950's was a low point for liberalism in the United States. Due to organizations like the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and the John Birch Society, and individuals like Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, liberals were driven underground or out of the country. Being a liberal meant losing the right to work or even being imprisoned. By the end of the 50's, Liberalism was nearly dead in America.

But in the mid-sixties, it experienced a re-birth. It began at the University of California at Berkley, when Mario Savio (pictured above) and his cohorts started what they called the "Free Speech Movement". It was originally intended just to give students at that university the right speak freely about their political views. It accomplished that, but became much more, as it spread across the country -- first in the colleges and then in society at large.

Fueled by the "baby boomers" born right after World War II, this new liberalism was different than pre-war liberalism. It was no longer socialist-based, although it pushed many of the same causes like economic justice and civil rights, but was a more general freedom-based movement.
It preached equality and the right of the individual to believe what they wanted and to act like they wanted and live like they wanted, as long as they didn't step on the rights of others to do the same.

No longer was the individual expected to be an automaton -- a replica of their parents who said and did what they were told. The individual had rights which must be respected by authority and the highest value was freedom. Frankly, it was exciting to be a part of this movement in the sixties and seventies.

But some time in the 80's and 90's, liberalism began to go "off the track". I don't quite know how it happened, but "free speech" gave way to "political correctness". While mouthing a belief in free speech, many liberals will be quick to condemn and sometimes even try to outlaw certain forms of speech. They seem to have forgotten that when you outlaw offensive speech, you have outlawed freedom (and the very thing that gave birth to modern liberalism).

Just as bad is the "Nanny State". Just like the right-wing would like to force their religion on all Americans "for their own good", many liberals would like to pass "Nanny State" laws for the good of all Americans. They want to force Americans to stop smoking with exorbitant tobacco taxes, or tell them where they can and can't smoke. They want to pass laws punishing Americans for drinking sodas high in sugar. They want to pass laws to outlaw certain cooking oils in resturants. They would like to force all Americans to recycle their trash.

Maybe all these things are good and would probably improve a person's life and maybe even prolong it, but I have to wonder what ever happened to freedom -- the idea that an American has the right to make his/her own choices? In a truly free country, doesn't a citizen have the right to make a poor choice?

These days, those of us on the left understand that the right-wing can result in tyranny, but many seem to have forgotton that just like you can have a right-wing tyranny, you can also have a left-wing tyranny. And it's my opinion that both are equally bad.

If you believe something is good and citizens should do it to make their life better or longer or healthier, then by all means do what you can to educate people about it. But when you pass a law forcing that behavior, you have gone too far.

In a free country, each citizen has the right to make their own choices, even if those in power believe those choices to be bad ones. Liberalism used to mean freedom, but for many these days it means something else. That's why I no longer call myself a liberal. I am a leftist, a radical, a socialist or a progressive, but I believe liberalism has strayed from its meaning and prefer not to be labeled as such.

That's what I think. What do you think -- especially those of you on the left? Am I wrong? Should government have the right to force people into making better decisions?