

The Lie Factory: How politics became a business - mceachen
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/24/120924fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=all

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taliesinb
Great read, but it's odd the article didn't mention Edward Bernays, the
originator of public relations (and nephew of Freud). Bernays preferred the
term 'propaganda', but after he discovered Goebbels had used his book
"Crystalizing Public Opinion" to steer German public opinion towards consent
of the holocaust, he stopped using the name.

He also invented advertising as we now know it. Before Bernays it was "Brand X
doesn't wear out", after it was "Brand X: the man's choice". Among his works
are "The Business of Propoganda" and "Engineering of Consent" (hmm... that
sounds familiar).

Bernays is only on my intellectual radar because of this mesmerizing Adam
Curtis documentary: <http://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/>

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jkubicek
That's an amazing article but the corollaries to the current opposition to US
health care reform seems a little too neat. Wikipedia is sparse on the
subject, has anyone seen any other sources of info on Campaigns, Inc?

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mibbitier
The article does seem particularly biased to me. Sort of ironic.

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tatsuke95
It's the New Yorker; of course it's biased. They're openly, historically left-
leaning.

That doesn't preclude it from being a great read.

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witoldc
The bigger the government influence/regulation/power/money the higher the
stakes and more well funded stakeholders trying to influence it.

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bluedanieru
So we should do away with all regulation then? That way there's nothing left
for the powerful to co-opt? (I'm sure that there's nothing left to stop them
either is inconsequential, as the marketplace or something will just magically
save us from that, I mean if you don't like working for 40 years and then
being left for dead you can always get another job. Anyway we can sort out the
details later, uh, after the election.)

This is rubbish. Plenty of nations (i.e. all first world nations) have
implemented national schemes of some sort, and none of them suffer from the
stuff that you read about coming from the right's bullshit machine. Maybe
you're right though, maybe the fact that the US is one of the most corrupt
nations on Earth and that its citizens are remarkably comfortable with this
fact, means they can't do health care. That's got nothing to do with the
concept of nationalized health care and definitely not with regulation in
general, but is rather a consequence of an irresponsible citizenry and their
terrible social organization.

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crusso
_So we should do away with all regulation then?_

Straw man/false dilemma.

Being cognizant of the danger of unnecessary concentrations of power in our
society does not mean that there's no reason to concentrate power.

It means having a healthy understanding of the side-effects of that
concentration of power and gives yet another reason to keep government's focus
on the narrow side.

 _Plenty of nations (i.e. all first world nations) have implemented national
schemes of some sort, and none of them suffer from the stuff that you read
about coming from the right's bullshit machine._

Broad generalizations. Actually, many first world nations have had huge
problems with their national schemes from poor medical services and poor
availability of actual treatment to larger economic issues resulting from
overspending on social programs like health care.

The bottom line for me is that the health care law passed is a huge and
complicated power grab of a mess that did nothing to address the main issues
that needed to be addressed: Reduction of the middlemen and price-hiding
tactics standing between healthcare providers and consumers. The government
had a real opportunity to cut the ties between place-of-work and healthcare.
They had a real opportunity to give consumers the tools and rights they needed
so that they could be informed purchasers of healthcare services.

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makomk
We'd have exactly the same problem even if there was no government to co-opt
at all, though. In particular the Libertarian market-based approach has
_exactly the same problem_. If businesses can convince newspapers to smear
politicians who're inconvenient to them, there's nothing stopping them doing
the same to researchers who've discovered their drug is killing people, or
doctors who've noticed their factory workers are being slowly poisoned, or
anyone else who tries to give consumers the information required to make sound
decisions.

