Whitcomb: Price Politics; Slicks or Slivers? Strange Hospital Attraction; A Village Life
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Price Politics; Slicks or Slivers? Strange Hospital Attraction; A Village Life
“….Voices in conversation, in discussion—two men, adults—serious inflections
(the words themselves just out of reach).
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A rusty screen-door spring, then the door swinging shut.
Footsteps on a porch, the scrape of a wooden chair….’’
-- From “Nostalgia (the Lake at Night)’’, by Lloyd Schwartz (born 1941), American poet and a professor of English emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.
I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
‘’It is futile,’’ I said,
“You can never —”
“’You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.
-- “I saw a man pursuing the horizon,’’ by Stephen Crane (1871-1900), American novelist, poet and short-story writer
“A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.’’
-- P.D. James (1920-2014), English novelist best known for her detective novels
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The giant, clownish sunflowers are putting on a show, some birds are already migrating south and college kids are crowding back on campuses. Lots of ads for Labor Day sales. And the days merge faster and faster into each other.
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The vague adjectives “unconscionable” and “excessive’’ are sometimes used to describe what shouldn’t be permitted.
Something like Canada’s now at least temporarily settled railroad-labor dispute, which could have hit U.S. supply chains hard, could have been be declared an emergency. (It’s surprising how little the U.S. media cover the rest of the world, even Canada, whose economy is so interwoven with ours. These days, reportage is concentrated on the presidential horse race to the near-exclusion of such important news as Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia and China’s sometimes violent efforts to take over the South China Sea.)
Here’s a state-by-state look at anti-gouging laws:
Harris isn’t proposing price controls. Those can swiftly limit supplies, and can eventually raise prices by distorting market forces. The great thing about our fairly lightly regulated market economy is its flexibility in responding to change. If some enterprises lift their prices too high, customers will find other suppliers, perhaps some of them newly created to respond to an economic crisis or to satisfy new consumer desires. Eventually, supply and demand are brought together, except, it seems, in sectors such as housing. (Read below.)
Of course when big companies collude to raise prices and keep them high, that’s price-fixing – a criminal offense, as well it should be.
Harris is appealing to people angry about the inflation of the past few years, now coming down, which many (unfairly) blame entirely on the Biden administration. That inflation can be laid to the pandemic’s snagging of supply chains; Trump and Biden administration stimulus money aimed at reducing the immediate economic pain caused by COVID, and Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, which screwed up the energy sector and some of the food sector, too. And, yes, of course, some companies, as well as individuals, get rapacious during times of crisis. We usually can’t do anything about it. It’s too complicated.
If she’s elected, Harris can certainly use the bully pulpit of the presidency to try to jawbone companies that jack up prices beyond a certain level and she can get the Federal Trade Commission to investigate them. Meanwhile, the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department should always be on the lookout for companies whose huge size gets them extreme pricing power.
In any case, don’t look for anything like the Nixon administration’s wage-price controls, in the ’70s, which ended up making things worse during that decade of “stagflation.’’’
Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t hear much more on the subject if Harris becomes president. It’s election-year rhetoric.
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Part of the inflation anger is about the high cost of housing. Harris pushes for tax breaks to homebuilders and helping first-time home buyers with $25,000 in downpayment money. The latter, at least, is a bad idea because it could push up overall housing costs by creating new demand amidst a housing supply that will remain constricted for years to come.
As many economists and others have noted, the biggest problems are rigid zoning rules, including “snob zoning’’ that mandates big lots, and bans on multi-family housing over wide areas. These severely discourage new construction, thus driving up prices of the existing stock as the population increases. But these rules are the prerogative of localities and the states, not the Feds. State and local politicians often find it difficult to take on the often affluent people (who include campaign donors) who already own homes and oppose any changes in housing regulations that might affect their neighborhoods. They’ve got what they want, and don’t want more people moving near them. That’s understandable.
The MAGA/Federalist Society party won’t help. Its program if Trump is re-elected, as described in its Project 2025 includes:
“{A} conservative Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.” (That’s in part because the MAGA voters skews old.) So just how does the MAGA mob propose to expand supply? MAGA has made a big deal about respecting states’ rights – a traditional conservative pose -- but MAGA is not a “conservative’’ movement.
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These numbers are crunched by highly educated career civil servants who don’t answer to politicians. That could all change next year if Project 2025 results in many thousands of civil servants being fired and replaced by political appointees who will be called upon to concoct data to make Trump always look good. That’s what dictators do.
Back when I was a financial editor, the relentlessness of data revisions was an ongoing joke in the newsroom.
As an article by Christian Roselund in ecoRI News discussed, debris on beaches from the broken wind-turbine blade from the Vineyard Wind operation, south of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, during the height of the summer vacation season has naturally angered some folks, especially those who oppose wind power in general.
But compare that with the effects of oil spills, and it’s insignificant. Oil spills off the New England coast – and there have been some big ones! – do long-term damage to ocean eco-systems (including from the chemical dispersants used to break up the spills) and foul shorelines, even in front of billionaires’ mansions. And there are plenty more opportunities for big spills in our waters. After all, oil for heating and power is still shipped into our ports, particularly in the winter.
Debris from wind-turbine blades can be picked up. Oil in the water is quite another challenge. Meanwhile, remember that burning fossil fuel acidifies the ocean by putting excess carbon dioxide into it.
Wind-turbine blades are made from a variety of materials that don’t measurably pollute the water. These include fiberglass, carbon fiber, balsa wood, epoxy and polyester.
Offshore wind is meant to help reduce our dependence on oil and natural gas and becomes ever more important as we continue to electrify our economy for vehicles, data centers (increasingly needed to feed voracious artificial-intelligence operations) and electric heating through heat pumps, etc. All this while praying for a breakthrough from, we hope, such future saviors as nuclear fusion, one of whose research centers is Massachusetts.
Still, I can understand why some people don’t want to look at windmills in the ocean.
Lifespan, Rhode Island’s behemoth hospital chain, plans to take over St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River and Morton Hospital in Taunton. These are two of the hospitals run by the outstandingly corrupt and incompetent for-profit Steward Health Care. Lifespan is “not-for-profit” in that it doesn’t pay taxes, though its senior execs make a pile. Hospitals, given their life-and-death roles, should all be “not-for-profit.’’
But why would Lifespan want these two hospitals? Are there economies of scale that could be sought? And would St. Anne’s and Morton be used as bases from which to send well-insured customers from southeastern Massachusetts to Rhode Island Hospital and the Miriam Hospital for the more complex and lucrative procedures? Or is this a case of C-Suite executives simply wanting to preside over ever-bigger enterprises out of ego and the desire for even bigger paychecks? Or maybe they hope that running a bigger show will result in bigger golden parachutes if Lifespan itself is bought, perhaps by a Boston behemoth such as Mass General Brigham or Connecticut’s Yale New Haven Health System? The latter has been moving into southern Rhode Island, which has many affluent and well-insured residents, including summer people.
Small-Town Energy and Devotion
Those old Yankees had a lot of energy and civic-mindedness, seasoned with self-interest. You see this again and again.
In researching some history of Falmouth, Mass., on the southwest corner of Cape Cod, I came across the narrative of a several times great-grandfather of mine called Knowles Butler, who lived from 1793 to 1860. During that time, he owned all or part of several local businesses, including salt works, which were once a big deal on the Cape, and a grocery store that apparently was virtually a local monopoly (with a boat to bring some supplies from New York City). He also helped start the town’s first bank, helped raise funds to build the local high school, served as a selectman, and was a Whig member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he was apparently an abolitionist.
He remained intensely loyal to his town. I’m sure that that was in part because he was related to so many people in it!
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