Imagine, if you will, a government that faces an urgent public need. This government decides, after an appropriate amount of pressure, to enact a law, a series of programs, to meet that need. The government has two options: enact the programs directly, in a very efficient manner with minimal overhead, helping the maximum number of people. Alternately, the government can please the free market fundamentalists (and large campaign donors) who pay off many of its representatives, and pay a private company, or cartel of companies, to provide the exact same service, at far higher price.

Only, of course, it’s not the exact same service. Inevitably, the private contractors will gouge, cut corners, and harass their other clients, the citizens. C’est la vie. A profit must be made.

Now imagine that after years of this arrangement, the government is in a desperate crunch for cash, and wants to cut the gravy train to help enact another major program. They decide that, gee, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to bribe a private company to treat its citizens like garbage, providing the exact same service (on paper) that the government could have provided, only at far higher cost. Wouldn’t it make sense, the representatives of that government argue, to do it ourselves?

All well and good, right. Only what’s the new program? Why, it’s to address an urgent public need… by paying a cartel of private companies… to provide a service that (in the rest of the developed world) is normally done by government… only they want to be paid a premium to do it, of course… and they need their profits guaranteed, of course…

Yeesh.

This is seriously what we’re faced with now in the debate over Health Care Reform. One badly designed, government-bestowed oligarchy is to be cut to help pass the law constructing a much larger, meaner, even more evil government-bestowed oligarchy.

I mean, seriously. I hate Sallie Mae as much as the next college student, but they don’t kill 45,000 people a year, like the semi-privatized healthcare system does in America.

When you think about it, the current student loan mess is far more liberal than the Obama plan for health care. Really; the federal government does a lot of direct lending. In effect, they already act as a public option in the student lending market.

Yet it hasn’t been enough; private companies still gouge students and the government simultaneously, and the price of education has slipped further out of the reach of American students. Something had to be done, and that something was to nationalize the process, saving a buttload of money. (Which I wholeheartedly support)

However, I can’t help but wonder why it’s ok to stick a shiv in one group of usurious private sector parasites, while cozying up to a much larger and more vicious group at the same time.

I was reading The Rude Pundit today and he had a link up to a Mother Jones editorial about the rise of right wing extremist groups. The editorial discusses, in a fairly long-winded way, the fact that extremist groups want to operate outside the American system, overturning governments they dislike through violence and force of arms, rather than elections. They tie this into Richard Hofstadter, the Paranoid Style, what have you – you’ve probably heard this song before.

“The paranoid spokesman,” Hofstadter wrote, “is always manning the barricades of civilization…Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse…He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised…Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.”

The interesting part comes when they try to tie the extremist actors in the right wing to first the Republicans in Congress, and then.. well, me. (Us?)

If this were all just so much blowhardery—designed merely to drive ratings and bait liberal bloggers—it would be slightly tawdry but perfectly ordinary political theater for the groundlings. But what may have started as tactical rhetoric has become a philosophy of governing. As MoJo blogger Kevin Drum has put it, the congressional minority’s guiding principle is now “What part of NO! don’t you understand?”

This is the true danger of condoning rhetoric like Oath Keepers’: It’s not just that it might push some from the paranoid fringe to the terrorist fringe. It’s that the political debate becomes corroded to the point where we as a nation no longer have enough common ground to agree to disagree. When one side’s goal is to stonewall and destroy rather than discuss and engage, we get paralysis—it takes two to tango, but only one to stonewall. (And stonewall-and-destroy is by no means a strategy unique to Republicans—yes, kill-the-health-care-bill lefties, that means you.) There are many ways to attack democracy, and one of them is to slowly, cynically undermine the founders’ mandate: to work together toward a more perfect union.

In the original, ‘kill-the-health-care-bill lefties’ links to Jane’s Huffpo piece listing ten reasons to oppose a specific piece of legislation. Which is somehow akin to bringing down a government through unreasoning fanaticism. (They might have noticed that Jane’s call was specific to the Senate health bill, not the House’s version or healthcare reform in general, but that subtle point slipped past their keen editorial radar somehow. Reading comprehension’s not what it used to be)

Aside from convincing me to never purchase another copy of Mother Jones, I don’t find this editor’s note very persuasive, but let’s see if we can follow their logic:

1) Extremist right-wing groups exhibit Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style, characterized by a fanatical, uncompromising stance that views one’s enemies as pure evil and all political conflicts as fights to the death between good and evil.

2) Republicans in Congress have translated this into a political strategy, using obstructionism to try and bring down the government rather than allow any of their evil enemy’s policies to take effect.

3) Progressives who oppose a specific piece of legislation are just the same as Republicans in Congress, because they don’t agree with President Obama on absolutely everything ever. Oh, and they’re subversives undermining the country, attacking democracy and betraying the Founders.

Hmm. What was that definition of the Paranoid Style again?

Because it sounds a lot like the editors at Mother Jones.

Most likely you’ve all seen a Bond movie (or three), but for those who are new to the concept, let me outline Bond Supervillain Syndrome:

Dashing, womanizing, and ultimately cold-blooded killer James Bond has been captured by a villain while on assignment by Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The stakes are very high; often the villain has by this point assembled a doomsday device or at least stolen a nuclear weapon; sometimes they have brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.

At this point, a rational human being in the villain’s position would take a remarkably simple course of action: kill Mr. Bond. Quickly, efficiently. Get it over with and move on to World Domination, or at least a comfortable retirement on some warm tropical isle. Instead these old-school villains invariably set up some elaborate death trap or other and leave Mr. Bond to escape, now knowing the full details of their scheme and positioned correctly to defeat it. Hilarity ensues.

Why bring this up? Well, after a long year of secret backroom deals, ridiculously heavy lobbying, and writing the damn bill themselves, the Health Insurance Industry had victory in sight thanks to the legislative abortion known as ‘Health Care Reform’ in the Senate. All they had to do was shoot Mr. Bond in the back of the head, dump his body somewhere, and keep quiet for a couple of months.

Instead, what did they do?

Anthem Blue Cross is telling many of its approximately 800,000 customers who buy individual coverage — people not covered by group rates — that its prices will go up March 1 and may be adjusted “more frequently” than its typical yearly increases.

The insurer declined to say how high it is increasing rates. But brokers who sell these policies say they are fielding numerous calls from customers incensed over premium increases of 30% to 39%, saying they come on the heels of similar jumps last year.

That’s right; instead of keeping their heads down and getting the Senate bill passed, ensuring them government mandated profits in the billions and forcing millions of Americans into their clutches for fear of the IRS… they decided to set up a winch over the piranha tank.

Tom Simmons, the president of a consulting and design firm with four employees in Oakland, said he had recently read about the Anthem rate hikes when he received a letter from his insurance company, Blue Shield of California, telling him that his monthly family health premium would increase from $908 per month to $1,596 per month, an increase of almost 76 percent.

…

The recent news that WellPoint’s Anthem Blue Cross health insurance company in California wanted to increase premiums for individual policyholders as much as 39 percent is further evidence the current health system is not sustainable. And a survey by the Center for American Progress Action Fund found that California isn’t the only state where WellPoint is hiking individual premium rates by double-digit percentages. In fact, double-digit hikes have been implemented or are pending in at least 11 other states among the 14 where WellPoint’s Blue Cross Blue Shield companies are active: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

This sort of melodramatic price-gouging is hardly new, as a report yesterday indicated. Insurance industry greed has driven the unsustainable growth in health insurance costs for many years now. However, the difference between villainy and cartoonish supervillainy comes when you take that extra step to rub salt in the wounds of someone you’ve already beaten.

And that’s what I think boosters of the Exchange model (sans public option) fail to understand. Supporters of the Senate plan believe that it will curb the rise in costs, that having information available to the end consumer, along with some limited protection from the most egregious consumer abuses, will be sufficient to bring the insurance companies under control.

The flaw in this thinking is obvious, given the insurance industry’s diagnosis of BSS: they can’t be controlled by anyone. They’re completely unhinged. No matter how many mechanisms you put in place to encourage them to put away their death traps, power down the laser beams and behave in a slightly more modest, though no less ruthless manner, they will return to abusing the consumer, again and again. They can’t stop; it’s a compulsion. Eventually they’ll destroy themselves.

The only question is whether we’ll be trapped with them in the secret volcano base when the time comes.