Ayn Rand and President Trump

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I don’t know whether this is generally known, but Trump, who inherited a lot of his money, is a fan of the writer Ayn Rand, the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and chief publicist of “objectivism” and libertarianism. He is surrounding himself with other admirers of the notion that there are makers and takers, and that the takers are parasites who get in the way of morally superior innovators.  Worse than that, the latter actually have to pay tax to support the takers (horrors!).   Rand’s attitude was that government is evil and deliberately puts obstacles in the way of those accumulating wealth.  “Man exists for his own sake. The pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, not of the happiness of anyone else.  He shouldn’t make sacrifices for others”.
Trump, as is well known now, believes that “winning” is all and that the means justify the ends.  The ends are wealth and power. Women are simply adornments; the poor are “losers”.  ” Be a killer”, Fred Trump (father) reputedly told his son,”then you are a king”.
Among the disciples of this moral-free, inhuman and distasteful philosophy that treats people as commodities are Bannon, of course, Rex Tillerson, new Secretary of State, and Mike Pompeo, head of the CIA.  There are others as well in the threatening new government.  Andrew Pudzer, Secretary of Labor (who opposes the minimum wage and wants to automate fast food) was another admirer, now, blessedly, turned down by Congress.
Not only is libertarianism and objectivism anathema to normal decent people, but Ayn Rand claimed to have taken the bit about happiness being man’s highest moral purpose straight from the writings from Epicurus.  She might well have, but she took it totally out of context. Epicurus would never have recognised this as a humane, thoughtful, approach to human relationships; on the contrary, his approach was that friendship and getting on well with people created happiness – unless you are autistic (which I agree you can’t help) you get no joy out of using and exploiting people and treating them like money machines.  “Objectivism” and libertarianism have nothing to do with Epicureanism and never did.  It’s all part of the “fake news” ethos of the alt-right.

Let us all thank messy eaters

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Researchers at the Arizona State University Institute of Human Origins have found that our species’ first ancestors began to climb down from trees to retrieve snacks they had dropped. Anatomical evidence from the 6-million-year-old fossilized remains of Sahelanthropus peinaó—which was unearthed earlier this year in South Africa and is now believed to be the last common ancestor shared by chimpanzees and modern humans—suggests that the animal frequently descended from the jungle canopy to retrieve food that fell from its hands owing to inattention, overeager eating, or a loosening grasp as it dozed off after a meal.

According to the researchers, everything humans have accomplished as a species—from “colonizing every corner of the planet, to building the Colosseum, to walking on the surface of the moon”—can be traced back to that first human forebear “sweating and breathing heavily as it struggled down a tree trunk” to recover a snack .

At some point in the Miocene epoch, one of the hominids realized that if it wished to continue snacking, it would have to come down from the tree, wander out onto the savanna, pick the morsel up, and put it back in its mouth. This was the impetus for several other key adaptations, including the increased brain size and cognitive capabilities that are the hallmarks of Homo sapiens. They began gradually developing the ability to form abstract thoughts—including planning, problem-solving, projecting into the future, and evaluating alternative options—as they grasped the notion that if they did not retrieve the food they would go hungry. Moreover, complex human emotions, from regret to longing to a desire for remediation, are also said to have begun emerging as humans began to reflect on the meals they dropped.

Speech arose from the grumbling about having to climb down the tree. The hominids’ final shift to becoming an exclusively ground-dwelling species is said to have occurred roughly 5 million years ago when, having finished the snacks they had retrieved, they looked at the trees, realized what a hassle it would be to climb all the way back up there, and opted instead to take a nap on the ground.

Does all this really matter? Not really, but it takes your mind for a moment off the world political situation!  That’s what Epicurus would have advised us to do – if possible.

Warning: don’t fall in love with a foreigner

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The Tories pride themselves on being “family-friendly”, says Giles Fraser. Yet their belief in nurturing this precious institution doesn’t extend to “those of us who fall in love with foreigners”. Under a policy introduced in 2012 – and upheld last week by the Supreme Court – Britons applying to bring a non-EU partner or spouse to live with them in the UK must earn at least £18,600 a year. So no problems for the Queen and Prince Philip, and an effective bar to “scam marriages set up for money, or lonely men conned into acquiring mail-order brides from Belarus over the internet”. But what about the rest of us? Nearly 40% of Britain’s working pop­ulation, and a majority of its young people, earn less than that; in which case you and your partner either have to live apart or “shove off and set up family life elsewhere”. When my foreign-born wife and I went to a registry office to set a date for our marriage, we were interrogated as if we were “smuggling heroin though passport control”. The UK is now “the least-welcoming country to mixed-nationality couples in the Western world”.  (Giles Fraser, The Guardian).

Returning from France a year or two ago, my wife, who is American, had a very unpleasant conversation at UK passport control in Paris with a very aggressive official.  She was reluctantly allowed into England, but even though she is legally  allowed  to be there for up to six months in a year.  The effect of this sort of treatment  is discouraging for those who, not contemplating immigration, are simply visiting for more than a week or two (we were staying 4 months). At one point we talked about her staying in England for several years as my spouse, in order to apply for  British citizenship.  For various reasons we never did it, but now the time has passed – it is just too difficult, queueing at the Croydon office being just a small part of the problem.  Britain, once uniquely open-minded and well-informed about the people and politics of foreign countries, is perceived to be suspicious and sometimes even hostile to foreigners, taking its cue from the right-wing Tories, “cabin’d,  cribbed, confined, bound in by saucy doubts and fears”.

Trumpcare health: Between a rock and a hard place

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Some while ago Trump attacked the high cost of deductibles associated with Obamacare and said  they are “practically useless”.  What he didn’t say is that the man he has chosen to replace Obamacare from the scene, Tom Price, is all in favour of high deductible health plans, with patients paying for routine health problems from individual health savings accounts.  The theory is that this stops abuse of the system.  It would, in theory, lower premiums, but it isn’t possible to lower both  premiums and deductibles at the same time.  Trump at one point promised a more comprehensive health service, but this is impossible if everyone isn’t paying into the system, which is a feature of the ne Republican health bill.
Obamacare  requires health insurance policies to cover  a huge range of services, from maternity, preventive screening to birth control and drug addiction.  Trump seems to think you can lower prices,  have better care, more choices and no mandates  and, simultaneously, lower premiums.  As it is, because Obama knew he couldn’t get a general tax raise through Congress, he and the Democrats had to pay for the new range of Obamacare services (never previously enjoyed by poorer people),  by reducing reimbursements from Medicare, increasing the tax on pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers and employers with gold-plated insurance policies .  They extended the Medicare payroll tax to the self-employed and investment income earned by wealthy investors, and made young, healthy people buy comprehensive insurance.
Was this huge expansion of healthcare somewhat draconian?  In a sense it was, and it hasn’t worked well financially for many people, faced with ever-rising premiums.  Now the (divided) Republicans have an opportunity to get rid of this enforced communitaire law and re-introduce “liberty”, deregulation and “community choice”. But they have the problem that they can’t relieve the young people and the rich investors who are helping pay for universal coverage  without reducing the services offered to the sick and the poor, the sort of people in the countryside who voted for Trump.  They will call the spade a fork and blame the Democrats, but the fact is there is no easy way to replace Obamacare without the sick getting sicker, and people dying .
The current bill, experts said, falls far short of the goals Trump laid out: Affordable coverage for everyone; lower deductibles and health care costs; better care; and zero cuts to Medicaid. Instead, the bill is almost certain to reduce overall coverage, result in deductibles increasing, and will phase out Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.  Call this a betrayal of what Trump promised.
The rational answer is a single payer system, similar to that in the UK, France and other countries (wonderful if adequately funded). But no, absolutely no, said the opponents – that is “socialised medicine”.  Healthcare has advanced technologically so far and is so expensive in comparison with the post- war situation, that the ” free market” is simply incompetent to cope with the scale, the complexity and the number of poor, sick people in a civilised way.  The Epicurean answer is single payer, and tax people accordingly to pay for it.  Health is the most precious thing we have (speaking as someone who only yesterday learned that the local hospital , having cured me of cancer once before has just despatched a second bout, this time before it developed really seriously).