In 2005, Jerry Graff called it “essential for keeping au courant with the best current thinking in the areas of literary and cultural theory.” In the same year, Paul Buhle called it “the standard-bearer for dissenting views on American literature and culture” that his students in the American Civilization program at Brown read with “near-religious fervor,” outlasting “nearly all of the journals of its type founded in the 1960s and 70s.” During Williams’ editorship, mr garnered more mentions in the Chronicle of Higher Ed than any other academic journal.

But now the quality trolls at Carnegie Mellon, one of the most aggressively “well-managed” institutions in the country, with every tub truly on its own bottom, threatens the survival of this venerable humanities institution with the ceaseless renewal of the doltish mantra to “do more with less.”

Upon arriving at CMU, Williams’ 2-year deal for support of mr was similar to the arrangements he’d had previously at the University of Missouri and ECU: modest subvention for office space and mailing, and just $9,000 for graduate student labor, plus a single course release and one month of summer pay. Hardly a fortune in a world of $50,000 vehicle allowances and $6 million mansion renovations for university “leadership.” And a real bargain for a school like CMU with an engineering rep and a confessed need to brush up its humanities cred. As Williams notes wryly, the level of support he negotiated from CMU–and believed would continue, or he would have negotiated a longer arrangement–was provided without question by the “much less wealthy and prestigious institutions” where he’d previously worked.

But at the end of his first year there, Williams found himself without prior warning (surprise! managerial “innovation” at work!) pressed to “do more with less.” It was suggested–just as a for-instance–that he could get one graduate student to do the work of two, and thereby shave a princely $4500 off the hefty 9 grand they chipped off of CMU’s mighty fiscal block. He quickly assembled a roster of luminaries (Jameson, Felski, Berube, Menand) to defend the journal, and limped through for another three years, when, in in 2007-08, the demands were renewed, this time more firmly.

This time he was offered the option, instead of shortchanging the graduate student employees, of giving back his month of summer pay–doing the same work as before, but for a 12% cut in pay.

There’s a slim chance that the quality clowns will relent, with the possibility of resistance emerging from Williams’ departmental colleagues and graduate students in the literature and cultural studies program at a meeting tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meanwhile, though, Williams has taken the line that enough is freaking enough. He’ll give up the journal if another editor can be found and–more likely–if not, he’s made plans for a final issue. Inspired by the 1950s “My Credo” issue of Kenyon Review featuring short, passionate essays by, among others, Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye, and Austin Warren, Williams has invited sixteen cultural-studies intellectuals to contribute credos and reflections about the dismal state of the profession for an issue that he feels would fittingly mark his retirement.

You know, there’s a thread over on (union-busting former university president) Trachtenberg’s corner of the Brainstorm group blog on “education gurus.” Twenty Chronicle of Higher Ed readers offered their thoughts. Nobody mentioned Aronowitz. Nobody mentioned Slaughter, Leslie, and Rhoades or Bill Readings. Henry Giroux? Cary Nelson? You gotta be kidding. Nobody mentioned even centrist disappointments like Bok or Kirp.

Quality management? It’s all about taking actual, tangible, meaningful, intellectual quality and turning it into fresh paint for the business school in quest of enhanced revenue.

Responsibility-center management theorist William Massy (download and play his revolting Virtual U training game–it’s scarier than anything I could tell you about it) once opined, in the midst of an essay praising the work of the HMO, that starving the revenue-poor locations in the university made great sense, saying that if you had six gold mines, you’d want to invest most in the one with the greatest assay. But if you have six runners on your team, are you helping the organization by giving nine lungs to the fastest? If you play football, do you win by giving everyone’s meal to the quarterback?

How’d that happen?

Quality management.

Ever since the first Clinton came to office, we’ve had bipartisan agreement that the quality management of everything–the military, municipalities, colleges, philanthropies–was going to magically reduce expenditures and raise revenue by encouraging market orientation and market behaviors. All we needed was better, leaner leadership in ever stronger control of institutional mission.

With quality, we’ve achieved wonderful “efficiencies” by driving down wages and benefits, with the result that many folks who are employed are homeless and/or eligible for food stamps.  And because the food-stamp giving bureaucracy is also quality managed, there isn’t a whole lot of actual feeding the poor going on.  Any more than the quality management of FEMA was about disaster relief, or the quality management of the war in Iraq has been about providing armor to soldiers.

The country’s achieved greater executive control of mission than ever before–and that’s been just dandy, hasn’t it?

Makes you wonder whether our institutions might not function better with less “quality management” and more democratic impedimenta like senates and unions.

Greater executive control has meant more responsiveness to the needs of the shareholder class–military contracts; lowered wages and benefits; record profits, endowments, and accumulation of fixed capital in buildings and grounds.  Greater executive control hasn’t meant greater control to contradict the shareholder class, just greater freedom to meet their needs. When the shareholders’ needs are met, the executive class has been “free” to reward itself handsomely and to lock itself behind the guns of $10/hr security guards in their gated communities.

But quality management hasn’t been so great for the rest of us. We’ve quality-managed ourselves into world-historical, staggering economic and educational inequality. We’ve quality-managed the judiciary into the largest prison population on the planet. And don’t get me started on the quality management of health care, which, if you don’t read the papers outside of the United States, is an international joke: we are the dolts who cannot deal with social problems without imprisoning our underclass, which is actually good for them because prison is where our underclass receives its education and health care.  But we believe our own propaganda and are amusingly convinced that we’re the global city on the hill.

Amazing how unwilling the rest of the globe has been to follow our quality leadership.

What the Bush mob has taught us is that “quality leadership” only works in undemocratic circumstances–when you’ve rigged the laws against labor, the poor, the intellectuals, the young, and the old, when you have underlings to do difficult things for you, like remember the name of the dictator of Pakistan, when you have all of the “assessment instruments” churning out self-adulatory metrics.

Perhaps it’s time we tried a dose of democracy. Not the “sense of participation” kind, either. The participation kind.

I completed my app. with style and perfection
Now I wonder how long before you make your selection
I hope you don’t mind that I’m being persistent
But, I really want to be your teaching assistant
–”JD,” March 13, 2008, applying for a “HotForWords” position

I left off last week with a note on Youtube phenom HotForWords as an exemplar of what’s produced at the shabby intersection of driving the humanities into the cellar of “teaching for love” and the “market-driven” and “metric-accessible” administrator notions of educational quality.

There were a bunch of interesting reactions. At The Valve (”A Literary Organ”), the responses trended toward the hormonally clever: “By and large I prefer the natural linguistics teachers to the silicone kind,” notes John Emerson.

At Brainstorm, the ever-trenchant Richard Tabor Greene tested the videos on his students (I’m sure violating the guidelines of his institutional review board for human-subjects research in the process):

Now, evaluating this audio track—she chose to explicate word histories and does a simple competent job, if not an extraordinary job. Indeed, if you close your eyes and ignore her bulging breasts, the impression of stupidity from her goes completely away. I tested this on students the other day, giving them the audio and giving a control group the video versions, and asking ratings of 50 randomly combined dimensions. A cropped video version without her breasts upped her non-stupidity score, nearly doubling it.

I should be clear that I didn’t suggest that Marina was “stupid,” nor do I hold that opinion. I think she’s obviously extremely intelligent and ambitious, and I think she has a genuine passion for philology.

In fact, I think Marina herself had the most intelligent response to the post, understanding clearly my intention, which was to feature Michelle Masse’s observation about the reason highly-paid hypocrites administrators are always pimping engaging in organizational myth-making by promoting the racist and sexist quality-improvement notion of “teaching for love” to other people, especially to those sectors of the campus where women work: “What Michelle says makes sense.. that if one does their work for the love of it.. they are easily exploited with low wages and extreme hours! So true!”

Among the respondents, Marina herself best understood that what is questionable (and stupid and wrong, and racist, and sexist, and unjust, and a freaking social crime) is the system that defines the passion for philology as something that should be “done for love,” ie, like other “women’s work,” on a highly discounted basis out of noneconomic rewards by persons who don’t need or want a wage.

With the profoundly socially unjust result that persons who can’t afford to discount their wage can’t do that kind of work. (Wealth gap!)

It also means that pursuing non-market passions can mean implicating the pursuer in markets of specious relevance: ie, doing “history” can mean entering the entertainment market and doing crap about guns and war for the Hitler channel, and following the market for anthropologists means working for the clowns who sponsored a “creation science” museum in Kentucky, or being a philologist means pandering to college boys on Youtube. As Marina defines her own teaching strategy: she is, as she sees it, “’exploiting’ the YouTube crowd by enticing them into clicking on a cute picture of a girl only to be (pleasantly) surprised by finding themselves unexpectedly learning a little etymology for the day!”

Marina also grasps that under academic capitalism doing good (like women’s studies programs or the teaching of writing) implicates the do-gooder in exploitative schemes of academic employment, such as the perma-temping of academic labor. In order for Marina to serve her 50,000 Youtube “students” and to continue racking up the great metrics she’s had so far, she clearly needs teaching assistance.

Marina’s application for teaching assistants is both a marketing ploy and in fact a challenging questionnaire–some of them more difficult than the questions usually posed to most students applying to many disciplines of graduate study.

There are 17 questions on the application, requiring the applicant to provide an etymology of their own surname, to distinguish between phobia and philia, and to demonstrate command of–or willingness to research–terms like sesquipedalian and palindrome. (To view the questionnaire yourself, you have to click “yes,” you’re a subscriber, but you don’t actually have to be oone.)

The principle of encouraging others to work for the pleasure of hanging out with Marina and/or the love of linguistics is essentially identical to the principle employed by universities in getting teaching assistants and contingent faculty to work for wages and benefits worse than those offered by Wal-mart.

What this suggests is that Marina may or may not be qualified to do advanced linguistics, but she certainly has all the knowledge necessary to be a university president or a trustee.

“Dude, her metrics are awesome!” Teaching for love, indeed.

Youtube phenom “Hotforwords” raises the ante on the “teaching for love” canard. In the process, she schools us on how teaching really can realize the administration’s dream in the form of the ultimate “quality” process.

The 27-year-old Russian philologist is a former Ph.D. aspirant and high school literature teacher with nearly 30 million views of her videos explaining various linguistic puzzles, such as–in the featured clip–how “dope” can mean both stupid and excellent.

One might ask the same about the term “quality,” which for administrators means, well, this.

Seriously, there’s no disputing her metrics. It’s teaching as “vaudeville,” as the New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan points out, but her curriculum is customer-defined and market-oriented. She is a self-funding responsibility center. She gets great student evaluations. Her teaching methods are susceptible to straightforward assessment instruments. There isn’t a “quality” complaint to make about her.

Oh yeah, and it’s totally exploitative, which makes a nice fit with all the outsourcing and permatemping.

Marina’s teaching for love (of fame) is not entirely divorced from the phenomenon that Michelle Masse analyzes as the feminization of the humanities–the reduction of whole fields of faculty work to second-class status by way of the gender economy: part of the cheapening and degradation of the work is the tacit recognition of it as women’s work, as a service, compensated by something other than wages. In connection with her forthcoming SUNY collection Ten Million Served with Katie Hogan, she observes how the call to “service” is one of the most compelling vectors of exploitation in academic life.

Masse points out that “secretary” and “nurse” used to name well-remunerated, well-respected positions for men. Kinda like “professor of language.” Now that it’s women’s work, it’s best done as a kind of lightly-paid volunteerism–for love, or, as in Marina’s, case, something closely allied to it.

I’m not generally a big fan of “charter schools,” which more often than not are sleazy operations that combine experimenting on other people’s children with transparent attempts to break schoolteacher unions.

But one NYC charter school really breaks the mold by offering the same argument for developing teacher talent that administrators make for themselves: you pay for it. A starting salary for teachers of $125,000 a year, to be exact.

Yeah, baby.

But here’s the great part: he’s paying his principal less than the teachers. A lot less–just $90,000 to start. Oh, double yeah, baby.

I effing love this guy.

Reaction from the administration? Predictable. Robert Logan, president of the city principals’ union, called the scheme “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” continuing, according to the New York Times, “If you cheapen the role of the school leader, you’re going to have anarchy and chaos.”

Hey, we could some of that kind of anarchy and chaos right here in higher ed.

Keep in mind that the kid–aged 31–is himself the first principal, so he’s chosen to pay himself less than the faculty. I bet he’s going to get results a lot better than a boatload of half-million-a-year university presidents who can’t graduate 50% of their students in six years.

Read the NY Times article yourself.

Enjoy. Then organize.

What if we followed this kid’s lead and jammed up those administrators the way they’ve jammed us up all these years: make ‘em contingent, make ‘em compete for janitors’ wages, and tell ‘em to ask Medicare for their chemo?

All right, I guess we couldn’t find it in ourselves to be that cruel. That’s why they get paid the big bucks–not to be smarter, or “better leaders,” but to be ethically blunt, serviceable, and willing –willing to live large and build new gyms and business facilities while the faculty starves.

Oh, Great Spirit, hear my prayer. Just give me one university president willing to follow this kid’s salary scale for her faculty and herself. Please. That would be an experiment worth watching.

As Time magazine television critic James Poniewozik puts it, “All The Wire’s characters face the same forces in a bottom-line, low-margin society, whether they work for a city department, a corporation or a drug cartel. A pusher, a homicide cop, a teacher, a union steward: they’re all, in the world of The Wire, middlemen getting squeezed for every drop of value by the systems they work for.”

What the show grasps is that private corporate and public institutional managers both employ “quality” in an Orwellian register in which a “quality process” is one of continuously increasing workload and continuously eroding salary and benefits, with a single, doltish mantra employed everywhere—in police departments, in social services, and school systems, just as on college campuses: the perpetual command to “Do More With Less.”

As Poniewozik observes, what this actually means “is doing less with less and cutting corners to make it look like more.” Hence the need for assessment instruments that everyone inside an organization understands to be trivial and easily spun to nearly any purpose by agile institutional actors.

The instruments are supposed to be easily defeated. As upper management continuously urges lower management, who in turn urge the workforce: “be creative” with the numbers. Being creative with the numbers allows managers to survive in their own culture of claiming ever-larger improvements in productivity while papering over the enormous human cost.

The human cost isn’t just the immiseration of the workforce. It’s also the failure of these intrusively and anti-socially managed institutions, “highly productive” on paper, to actually deliver the policing, health care, and education they exist to provide.

In the show, this means that all city departments are under continuous pressure to fudge their statistics to make it look as if this dishonest managerial policy is actually working. The Baltimore Sun fires its experienced reporters and slashes funds to do investigative reporting in favor of fire-chasing and puffery, fleshing out the staff with cheaper, younger, workers, some of whom lack the contacts, experience—and moral compass—to do the job. “Squeezing every drop of value” from every worker means disposing of the most experienced before having to pay their health care premiums or their retirement benefits, and asking young workers to work at a discount because they believe in the mission of the institution.

At the police department, funds to actually investigate homicide and gang crime have been steadily restricted to the point where only “high profile” murders receive resources; most victims receive perfunctory attention, and individual investigators are barred from investing time and resources in long-term efforts to bring down criminal organizations.

In order to shake funds from the system, one homicide investigator gets the idea of faking the evidence in the murder of some homeless men to appear as if they are serial killings.

This plan plays on the interlocking nature of the quality-management values driving public institutions and the privately-owned media with a public-service mission, together with the responsibility-center resource allocation of the mayor’s office: if the newspaper can drum up a market and capture the attention of the mayor, then—and only then–resources will flow toward the investigation.

When he ups the ante by subsequently faking a sexual component to the murders (plain serial killing is not enough), and when a young reporter, under similar pressures at the Baltimore Sun, also fakes journalistic evidence, a very modest stream of resources is finally aimed toward the new institutional mission of the police department, getting the nonexistent serial killer.

A significant fraction of those resources are wasted maintaining the illusion that reporters and police officers are following managerial direction and chasing down the fake murderer.

The small amount left over is secretly diverted to actual policing—a small cadre of dedicated officers use the funds and control over their time recaptured from management to order test results, do surveillance, acquire computers, and actually make a series of arrests.

There’s plenty to say about this in relation to campus administration—the way that managerial control of institutional mission has shifted toward vocational training over education, as Stanley Aronowitz has long observed, and toward direct corporate influence over research and curriculum, as Jennifer Washburn has made abundantly clear.

My own take on this is that the faculty are in a culture-struggle with administration, and they are losing. This isn’t a theory that I have: as I explain in the introduction and Chapter 3 of How The University Works, it’s management’s own account of its program, to prosecute war on faculty and student culture by shaping institutional culture to its own purposes. Quality management is above all an engine for the promotion of a relentless administrative solidarity against traditional faculty values and traditional faculty institutions.

“Quality” processes are the Stalinist iteration of late capitalism, through which the class of functionaries exist in a separate world of servants and second homes while urging everyone else to accept scarcity for love of the mission. It’s no longer just teaching for love—it’s policing and soldiering and urban planning for love, game design for love, word processing for love.

Quality management takes advantage of the fact that most people don’t behave as the self-interested clots modelled by neoliberal economics. Most people are animated by profoundly pro-social impulses. To a limited but real extent, depending on individual factors, janitors do their work for love of clean floors. And it is the overt, cannibalistic intention of quality management to see that—to the absolute limit of the possible—they do that work for love alone.

Only management, in the quality scheme, isn’t done for love. One can see why. Management in the quality scheme is done for hate–for hate of democracy, equality, and the public, in service of a totalitarian culture of subservience to “leadership.”

In the quality scheme, management is paid more to do something most of us can’t do. Most of us can’t live in mansions while our neighbors can’t afford chemo; most of us really believe that accumulation has reasonable limits.

Only a very unusual person can do what the sleaziest small contractor does–pick up day labor, pay them less than the minimum wage to rebuild a suburban kitchen, collect fifty grand, and then dump the workers back on the street corner.

The task of academic quality management is to find those rare people and make them deans, provosts, and presidents.

I’m sorry Mr. Bousquet is so unhappy in the academy… Surely so articulate a man could do many things. I disliked being a lawyer so I found an alternative career.

For the record, I’m _very_ happy in the academy. Like the hundreds of thousands of academic unionists and many others, I’m willing to stay and fight to make this a place where administrations don’t reside in mansions on half-million dollar salaries when an impoverished faculty are standing in line for free cheese.

I don’t think going ad hominem was wise for Stephen, who will recognize in that last sentence a reference to his own housing and salary while he was fighting the unionization of adjunct faculty at GWU, ending in the judgement by a Bush-packed NLRB that his administration had broken the law in its creative efforts to justify its refusal to bargain with the legally-elected representative of the faculty, SEIU.

In part III of my reply, unless Stephen has something substantial to say about the actual issues of actual faculty, I’ll say more about contingency at GWU. In Part IV, I’ll explain the concept of “feminization” of sectors of the workforce, and how it affects gender equity. Either in that part or a follow-up, I’ll discuss the tired old canard that “the market” is the reason male-dominated disciplines have fat salaries. (In a nutshell: markets are socially constructed–corporations are the first to complain when they feel a “market” needs “adjusting.”)

In the meanwhile, do take a look at part 2 of my interview with Cary Nelson, The Academic Working Poor.

The academy needs better, more imaginative ways for working with professors who are no longer happy warriors and who are not performing up to potential in the classroom or in research. We must look for creative ways to allow them to reinvent their career opportunities, to transition into new jobs.

He went on to complain that tenured faculty average $80,000 a year.

I couldn’t resist asking him to relate the 2 posts, and specifically requested that he talk about the movement toward massive insecurity for faculty:

Stephen, I haven’t followed all of your commentary here, but the relationship between your last two posts really begs a question.

On the one hand, you insist on the importance of “safety nets” for administrators. On the other, you want more power to put the remaining small fraction of tenured faculty out to pasture because they earn $80,000 a year. (Woo-hoo! Shocking largesse for folks with a decade of postgraduate preparation. Nurses quite commonly earn more than that. So do a lot of bartenders. Oh, and so do all those tenured administrators.)

What sort of “safety nets” do you have in mind for the majority contingent faculty?

Trachtenberg was gracious enough to reply and he wisely dropped the unpleasant assertion that tenure stream faculty are overpaid while averaging $80,000 a year–a figure that includes boatloads of women faculty in English earning $50,000 while junior men in business earn $150,000.

Ultimately his remarks didn’t actually contain a response, arguing that the two posts “are apples and oranges and not linked the way you imply.”

I think most faculty would disagree: the desperate situation of the majority contingent faculty and the generous feedbag strapped onto the administrative snout are indeed related. That’s a core tenet of most contemporary budgeting schemes: reward the administrator who succeeds in “doing more with less.”

Quite inaccurately, Trachtenberg goes on to suggest that the feedbag has been on everyone’s snout:

Institutions of higher education have traditionally been humane places for all constituencies — faculty, students and staff. Over the past 50 years, schools have expanded benefits for all parties.

WTF? “Expanded benefits for all parties”? Over the past 50 years, schools have massively curtailed benefits for faculty and staff through massive outsourcing and permatemping. And they’ve massively expanded the hours worked by undergraduates. 80% of undergrads now work an average 30 hours a week.

Faculty are on freaking food stamps, Stephen. So are graduate students and undergraduates, and the staff who’ve been outsourced to Marriott and other vendors. Administrators haven’t expanded the benefits of the majority academic workforce–they’ve torn up the academic social contract, poured gasoline on the remnants, and are warming their toes by the fire.

I have more to say in direct response, and in the form of part 2 of my interview with Cary Nelson, The Academic Working Poor.

As we move closer to the likelihood of an Obama presidency, isn’t it time to start moving the candidate toward questioning his own lousy health-care plan?

His plan is simply unlikely to do much for faculty serving contingently, such as Nancy Welch’s colleague at the University of Vermont, who

has taught in the English department since 2000. Most often, he’s been given three courses each semester. But UVM calls him ‘part-time,’ which means that he isn’t eligible for UVM’s health insurance plan.

As a result, he pays $356 each month for an individual insurance plan, with a deductible of up to $18,750 a year. He also has cancer and has just gone through a second round of chemotherapy, for which each infusion carried a bill of $8,200. At this point, he’s teaching literally to save his life–to pay these medical bills.

While Welch doesn’t hold UVM administrators responsible for rising health care costs, she holds them responsible for raising their own wages and spending on facilities while “consistently, increasingly and, I believe, deliberately underemploying the faculty.”

The best overall conversation on the subject was held on ADJ-L, the very important discussion list on which major contingent organizers such as Jon Curtiss, Joe Berry, Craig Smith, Keith Hoeller, Elizabeth Hoffman–and AAUP past president Jane Buck–all weigh in regularly.

One ADJ-L correspondent, Steve Street, himself a faculty member serving contingently and a cancer survivor, who understandably calls this “his issue,” pointed to the timely Paul Krugman column that strongly favors Clinton’s plan which is, he notes,

more explicit about affordability, promising to limit insurance costs as a percentage of family income. And it also seems to include more funds for subsidies.

But the big difference is mandates: the Clinton plan requires that everyone have insurance; the Obama plan doesn’t.

Mr. Obama claims that people will buy insurance if it becomes affordable. Unfortunately, the evidence says otherwise.

After all, we already have programs that make health insurance free or very cheap to many low-income Americans, without requiring that they sign up. And many of those eligible fail, for whatever reason, to enroll.

I have to say that I find Krugman’s observations regarding the absence of mandates in Obama’s plan convincing. On the other hand, a Daily Kos correspondent observed accurately, that “Congress, not the President” will importantly shape the plan that either candidate brings to the table. While in theory this means that single-payer or universality could be scripted into an Obama proposal after election, I guess I’m a bit skeptical. That said, I’m none too enthused about the “consumer price consciousness” built into the multi-tiered care made in the Clinton proposals. Um, yeah, I’ll choose the “kill me quick” plan for a 10% discount, please.

My favorite moment in the ADJ-L conversation was sparked by the evidently well-meaning forwarding to the list of the “free market cure” videos by frequent Fox guest commentator Stuart Browning, who describes himself as offering “health care commentary from a pro-capitalism perspective.”

In response, long-term Michigan AFT organizer Jon Curtiss wrote:

This bit of free-market propaganda by Stuart Browning does not change my
mind about the need for a single-payer health care system in the USA.

Does this little film even make an argument? Not really. “One guy in
Canada might have died if he hadn’t come to the USA for an MRI”? (Or
maybe it’s “A well-off white guy who could afford to pay $30,000 for
surgery didn’t get treatment the moment he demanded it.” That’s a scary
one!)

But let’s break it down. Even if the anecdote were presented openly and
honestly, does it really tell us anything about the Canadian system?
Does it tell us anything about the US system? (See
http://tinyurl.com/22ftz9 on the details of the story.)

A charitable summary of the logic of the film would be this: “People may
suffer or even die when health care is rationed or subject to government
policy. We do not want people to suffer or die. Therefore, rationed
health care is bad and government should not play a role in health care.”

I’ve heard worse arguments, I guess, and I certainly don’t want people
to suffer or die. But let’s take the next step. How do we do it in the
USA? We don’t “ration,” technically, because there’s no *thought* put
into it, but the fact is that heath care in the USA *is* rationed; it’s
RATIONED BY THE MARKET. You have the money, you get the treatment; you
don’t have the money, you’re out of luck. The bottom line is that in the
USA, about 18,000 people die a year because they don’t have health
insurance (http://www.iom.edu/?id=17846).

So which is a better system? The free-market *feels* better because no
one takes responsibility. In Canada, and all other industrialized
countries, though, the Government, yes, takes responsibility for the
health of citizens, and formulates a rational policy for how to ration
health care resources. That means you it’s easy to point a finger: “This
man suffered and almost died because of *your* policy!”

But ethically, it’s the right thing to do, of course — the same way
that we use our government to formulate all *kinds* of rules and
regulations that protect us from all kinds of things. In the end, you
don’t have to agree with that philosophy, you just have to want to
*reduce* suffering and death to the greatest extent possible given the
resources we have.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread.