Obama vs. Romney & my dream for Capitalism in Talk Radio

Conservatives like Rand imagined money as a great equalizer. They did not imagine money as part of a totalitarian power structure that arbitrarily controls the lives of everyone below them, like the weather, selecting peasants to be trickled upon.

Although we have many differences, what Rand and I do have in common is that our vision of the free market economy does not include advertisements like: “ask your Medical Authority about Fuckitall,” because it is illegal to decide to buy it yourself with your own money you earned at your real job without getting permission from someone.

I would imagine that Rand would approve of my dream: Imagine a reality where without needing a prescription a homeless man can buy a bottle of anti-psychotics from the grocery store for less than the price of beer.

If money is can be an equalizer, we should trade drugs without the current oppressive state of drug regulations. The sale of prescription drugs in the US are an unequalizer.

Americans are supposed to have freedom to buy and sell as they pleased, in fact, Americans fought a war with Britain over the regulation of tea.

Rand believed in the power of real money, but the Republican Party and even the ironically named modern Tea Party are privileged people who confuse their personal power with the power of real money.

If the Republican party and friends actually believed in the power of money, they would not support substance control, which destroys the legitimate capitalist exchange of drugs.

Obama also enforces drug control. Neither Romney or Obama want to see me get anti-psychotics as easily as beer, which I think is tragic and I take very seriously. But if you think there is no difference between them, you are wrong, because Obama understands that it is indefensible to assume absolute control of drugs without also socializing them.

I want to talk about deregulating our economy. I don’t want the prescription drugs I rely on to be controlled by arbitrary parties. I hear doctors being criticized as though they are using a magic eight ball to decide who deserves Adderall, yet during a year of tremendous Adderall shortages due to heavy government regulations no one talks about the real human cost of market regulations.

From the Republican party, I only hear about the harm of limiting the freedom big business which might effect me indirectly in some abstract manner. Republicans are all about freedom for enterprise. When it comes to personal freedom, Republicans are suddenly distracted by nefarious, society-destroying individuals like homosexuals.

I can’t cast a meaningful vote for drug deregulation, but while we are still committed to drastically regulating the medical industry, I can vote for Obama to support every effort to include the entire population in legitimate drug trade, even crazy people without jobs. It is a risk to make health decisions without the oversight of doctors, but it is a risk to deny options to the under-privileged who struggle to make doctors appointments. We should strive to include those people because even they could pay for some drugs if we didn’t ask so much more of them. Prescriptions require investment, time and effort to negotiate and maintain. I think that we should seriously prioritize providing incentives to consumers who make an effort to get prescriptions for drugs instead of investing in black markets that devastate our domestic and international security.

Drugs and healthcare are only the most clear examples of the difference between Romney and Obama. Romney is not an agent of compromise. He appeals to middle class types who do vote against what is in their best interest and have whimsical ideas about the market. He appeals to people who are praying for rain while a current of trickle down bullshit washes the American middle class wealth out of America in the forms of outsourcing, off-shore tax havens, and foreign countries who stock our black markets.

Republicans are hypocrites. While American companies would rather give jobs to Chinese people than other Americans, they take Obama’s “you didn’t build roads” out of context, then paint a picture where everyone is dependent on what the wealthy “job creators” have built. What happened to the great American Entrepreneur? Entrepreneurs who create their own jobs are more worried about health care than wage slaves working for the “job creators” who negotiate big deals with health insurance companies.

Insurance companies are a part of a privately controlled redistribution of wealth, where unhealthy people might need more medical treatment than they can pay for, and healthy people might pay for treatment they never need.

We are a democratic country because we believe that public assets of massive organization and expense are best organized by elected representatives working within a transparent democratic process. Although public elections are upheld as our first defense against government corruption, we take a hypocritical attitude toward the private power structures that have an absolute monopoly over legitimate sale of controlled substances and unfairly redistribute the monkey of insurance holders.

But Obama has shown compassion for how market inflexibility effects real people whose lives and standards of living are at stake. We should not be having a debate about Obama’s capacity for positive change, but Obama has potential that even his supporters have ignored. Change did not only come in the form of healthcare. Change from the Obama administration came in many forms, such as my heating bill, which is less $200 a year because I heat my home with green technology. I bought a wood pellet stove while Obama was offering tax incentives designed to upgrade the middle class to a sustainable lifestyle, but the hope for this program has been shut down due to lack of participation.

I am not re-posting propaganda or internet memes because we can’t afford not to change. I am trying to write about something new that isn’t being discussed. We cannot go back in time and hide in the economic bubble of yesteryear. The security Americans felt before the bubble broke will never come back again, in fact, we will probably feel less secure. If our economy improves it is because we will be forced to adapt to market conditions as they actually are instead of being sheltered by lies and bad credit.

This is the lie of the free market: Consumers are afraid of change, and while wood pellet stoves do not compete against traditional furnaces our market is still fucked. We can’t afford not to change. Obamacare hasn’t made my drugs freely available, but he has changed the treatments I can afford, and that is a compromise I support fully. If you are feeling hopeless, it is probably because you do not have a pellet stove this winter. Knowing that I have taken advantage of those programs and changed my life might make you feel more hopeful about voting for Obama, even if you have not changed your life yet.

Last updated September 12, 2021