Thursday, September 10, 2009

It's True

the NYTimes is further degrading their imprint with Megan's words. Hard as it is to say this, I almost don't blame them. Douthat is so bad Megan would arguably be an upgrade, in the sense that I'd probably rather be forced to drink urine than eat shit.
Her name sticks out like a sore thumb in the list of "analysts of health care politics", a phrase chosen instead of "experts in..." not at all because of the inclusion of Megan.

* Robert Reich, former secretary of labor
* Mark McClellan, Brookings Institution
* Lisa Dubay, professor of public health
* Arnold S. Relman, professor emeritus, Harvard Medical School
* Stuart M. Butler, Heritage Foundation
* Megan McArdle, Asymmetrical Information
* Richard Huber, former chairman of Aetna
* Donald H. Taylor, Jr., Duke University
Well, the guy from the Heritage Foundation seems out of his depths, too, but we get to ignore his boilerplate bullshit in favor of Megan's.
The first thing you notice is that someone actually proofread this before publishing it. It's not impossible to think it was Megan, if you look at this as akin to a graduate school application essay. The first half is chock full of entirely unnecessary restatement in quietly contentious terms of facts everyone who will read it already knew, the part that's weird is it's basically coherent, too.
It's in the second half where she essentially lies out of her ass, and counts on the only people who kept reading being dumb enough to fall for it. Right at the beginning of the section revealed by clicking "Read more" she switches from the President's promise to cut spending if necessary to pay for this program to Medicare, because cutting unnecessary cost (profit taking) from the system is, from her perspective, just like cutting Medicare benefits.
The real get in her splork is the close, where she insults the proles for not being her;
But these sorts of wonky considerations are not the issues on which the success of the speech will ultimately be judged. The real question is whether it persuaded voters. On that score, I have my doubts — it seemed over-wonky and complicated, with Mr. Obama’s signature rhetoric left for the end, when a lot of viewers had probably already tuned out. His supporters were no doubt thrilled, and his detractors annoyed. But the mushy middle he very much needs to win? I suspect a lot of them were watching the season premier of “So You Think You Can Dance.”
Hey NYTimes, she can be an elitist, see, you, like, totally should hire her and junk.
The piece is so insight free it reminds me of her pathetic, Bushlike, repetition of "the US is the world's only remaining superpower" when she and Ezra did some pre-election pieces together for the LA Times. When Megan can't resort to passive aggressive liberal baiting via the intentionally poor reasoning of a concern troll she really gets boring.

Ok, Wow

I hate to navelgaze, but Tbogg has blogrolled us. Damn.
Thank you, Tbogg. I've been a reader since right around when you became "a somewhat popular blogger", and you're an inspiration for all of us here. I wish I were half as funny as you.
It really is gratifying to know that the kind of people I want to be writing for appreciate the effort. To know the likes of Tbogg, DDay, Html Mencken, and Roger Ailes come by and smile is just... wonderful. Our readers are why we do this, and your comments and encouragement truly keep us going.
I started this on a whim, and was honestly shocked to discover a few weeks later that people were reading. Megan makes it easy, in some respects, but still, thank you all.
< / sincerity mode >

Fake Reporter Joins Fake News

John Stossel sez I'm moving to Fox.

Because Lou Dobbs hasn't, yet.

Ahhhh, memories....



And this probably means he'll be giving Megan airtime, eventually. At least no one is watching the Fox Business Channel. I think we've had more viewers on a few occasions.

Crapsticks

she has diarrhea of the keyboard again. These have to be shorter, for the sake of the children.

Drafted:

Sure, we all already paid to keep the banks solvent with our tax dollars, but

The banks need to repay TARP and get out from under the eye of their legislators, and the banking business is only getting more competitive as customers can shop tiny differences in interest rates. Bounced check fees are drying up, because people no longer write many checks.
If we don't cover those costs someone who matters might have to not buy something hideously expensive and unnecessary, she's fine with sacrificing so they don't have to. Especially since she won't really be the one sacrificing.

Edutopia:
For another, more than 50% of [teachers unions'] membership are, definitionally, average or below-average. Merit pay is probably not a good deal for them. Especially if they've spent valuable years of their lives acquiring useless M. Ed. degrees.
There's almost a hint of self-awareness here. She has the useless MBA, the IT program certificate that she learned was useless only after completing, and she's definitely a below average blogger and thinker. Alas, she projects this onto teachers, instead of asking whether she deserves her salary.

Preview: Obama's Health Care Speech:
Looking ahead to the speech, I think there are four key pillars of any health care plan: guaranteed issue, community rating, an individual mandate, and a subsidy.
Gee, a reform opponent doesn't think the public option is key, that sure was relevant to what Obama was going to say.
Then she says all the Republican lies aren't lies because they make her feel warm inside to believe, and that the Repub failure to privatize Social Security shows something or other that blahdefuckingblah. But remember, polls that agree with her preconceived ideas are the ones that are scientifically valid, and Obama's ability to communicate won't affect those polls because
vague things tend to poll better than specific things. Vague things are a blank slate upon which you can project your wishes. Specific things have actual drawbacks.
Uh-huh.

Running Thoughts on the Obama Speech:

Jebus fuck. Random selections from these "thoughts";
Obama is dropping a lot of statistics about the uninsured, including a note that one in three Americans will be uninsured at some point over the course of two years. I wonder if this isn't counterproductive. When you get to numbers that size, people start gut checking them against their experience, and that of their neighbors. Have one in three of the people you know gone without treatment because they were uninsured? Not so much, particularly if you're not an immigrant, or under the age of thirty.
Because who knows any immigrants or young people?
Reforms will not insure illegal immigrants. Democrats boo: bad move. What about legal immigrants, though? Paying for their health insurance is not going to be much more popular than paying for the illegals.
Dirty brownies dirty brownies!!!!!!!!!
"Consumers do better when there is choice and competition". As a friend tweets, why not school vouchers, then?
..... why are you hitting yourself, nerd, huh, huh?
The complaints about Republicans at the end also didn't sound, to me, like they'll play well. Right now, more voters are on their side than yours. Don't tell them they're gullible dupes, and/or mean-spirited obstructionists.
The Silent Majority has risen again and will send this uppity blackamoor to defeat immediately after he's reelected. Mhm.
To sum up, she saw what she wanted to see.

Health Care Speech: Wrapup:

No, we opponents of reform don't actually have any legitimate arguments, so we're left to try to delay and obstruct as much as possible. The new talking point is "start over", which is not at all a stalling tactic, and Megan is on board with it. She's even decided it polls well, since she knows what polls really mean. N yeaaaaaaaah, Obama probably 'won' the night, but just wait till we get some new lies going.

Waste, Fraud and Abuse:

In retrospect, Megan remains unconvinced, and isn't that what matters?
Plus, now if Obama doesn't pass reform any problems in Medicaid and Medicare will totally be all on him. Heh, indeed.

Why Has Obama Downgraded the Number of Uninsured?:

Concern troll remains concerned.

Forcing a Filibuster:

Not allowing insane people to sit on the Federal bench is just like trying to prevent poor people from getting health care. Also, don't look at the actual number of filibusters used by the Republicans since 2006 versus historical norms, as you might learn something. Also also, the filibuster is only of questionable Constitutionality when Dems use it.

The Joe Wilson Backlash:
One wild-card in all of this is how Congressman Joe Wilson's shout of "Liar!" when Obama said that his plan wouldn't cover illegal immigrants.
English major.
Overall, I can't see how this could help triggering sympathy for Obama. But I don't know if the effect will be big enough to make much difference. I do know that the Republicans had better play very, very nice for the rest of this debate.
..... what?
Also, apparently the Repubs haven't been demonizing brown people enough, an idea which intrigues Megan.

Confessions of a Swing Voter:

Megan is important, so her mom is, too. Sure, Mom voted for Bush in 2000 when he lost the election, but her Swing Voter powwwwwar forced the Supreme Court to intervene and make things right. She can even make a candidate win without voting at all, and Obama didn't even thank her.
And Mom thought it was rude to shout at the President while he was making a speech to a Joint Session of Congress.
Until we get more reliable polls, I would assume that this was the general sentiment among independents.
And Nate Silver wept, or would if he bothered to read her.

Please take a three day weekend, Megan. Please.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

I'm Not Crazy

U R!!! I WIN HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!!!!
or
further adventures in false equivalency.

Department of Lunatic Fringes:

Anything I don't agree with is a conspiracy theory, no matter how well documented, which means the left is so just as bad as the right wing extremists who in no way make up the base of my readership or the right in general. Sure, I excuse my own bad behavior with "9/11 9/11!", but only I get to use a trauma to our national psyche to explain mistakes. Also, I'm still implicitly agreeing with the idea that the election of a black man as President was a comparable mental trauma.
The point is Michael Moore is fat.
And yes, the comments to this are as bad as you'd expect. Suspicion of Diebold is kooky, but death panels are real and questioning Obama's birth is just a natural question. He's black, haven't you noticed that? Geez.

Playing With Fire:

Why are Jon Henke and I firing into our own ranks on the birther nonsense? Wouldn't it be better to take on Democrats?
Well, two answers to this. First, the WND folks are not, in any sense of the word, my people. I supported Obama, remember?
And she still does, in no way, shape, or form, should her entirely principled opposition to poor people being permitted medicine be misconstrued as her joining in the efforts to make health care reform Obama's Waterloo.
And Megan? Who do you think Dan Riehl and Red State are? You link to them, they are your people. And they are WND, there's no actual difference. And sure, wow, birthers are bad, but you dance around deathers with enough words for them to find support in your work, quite intentionally, as you know your most dedicated commenters believe it, and you keep saying the armed gun nuts, who happen to frequently be birthers, by their own fucking words, are just silly but good, normal people who are worried about them SEIU thugs. Unions bad!
And once again, the impact of the psychic trauma of 9/11 on truthers is apparently equivalent to the impact of a black President on birthers, same shit different day. Only Megan was allowed to be at all affected by 9/11, not, say, those of us who lived across the street from her on the UWS at the time. (Weird but true fact. On 9/11, she and I were neighbors.*)

There Oughta Be A Law:

Megan's iPhone or Kindle got stolen, and she is maaaaaaaaad. When things affect her, they're important. When it's a lack of basic health care for all that she totally experienced too for a few years after college when all she had was her parents' wealth to rely on in an emergency, well, that's not worth hurting the profit margin to deal with. She managed, that's all that matters. And now she has a health plan that gives her free psychoactive drugs to drown the bad thoughts with, so everybody (who matters, to her) wins!

When Good Polls Go Bad:

My gut understanding of people is more statistically valid than professional polls, especially when the two clash. Do you really think people care about stuff? People who aren't supers like me and everyone I associate with here in Eliteland are too dumb to think about more than one or two things at a time.
The American public feels very strongly about every single issue you ask them about. Forgive me if I think that most Americans are not wearing themselves to a frazzle over all of the following: healthcare, immigration, the economy, unemployment, the budget deficit, taxes, terrorism, the environment, energy, gas prices, our relations with other countries, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I get exhausted just typing it.
I don't even care about most of these things, why should anyone else?

Bonus stupid hypocrisy:
The relative numbers matter--people clearly do care about health care and the budget deficit more than Afghanistan. But the absolute numbers are nearly worthless.
Things that confirm my beliefs are accurate, things that don't are not. I am smart. So very smart. I am a self proclaimed expert in the field of expertise, and I have a few former D students and engineers who agree, I win (again)!

Mental Illness Break:
Maybe it's because I'm not a sports fan, but I want to hop up and down on his editors desk, waving a game of Clue and shouting "What on earth were you thinking?"
.... Jail the Jena 6? Waiting for an iPhone was like being a refugee? How many examples do you want, Megan? You've provided roughly one a week, at minimum.

No, I'm not doing any nutpicking of that truthers=birthers post. I know there's a goldmine there, but I'm not feeling strong enough for it today.


*- or maybe not, I don't know when she moved across the street from my old place on West 95th. It might even have been after I moved downtown the following year, I'm not going to try to find out. I think that's all the unnecessary detail I can add here.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Concern Troll is Concerned

I know, someone at S,N! has used that title, but let's face it, they probably didn't come up with it either.

All Health Care Politics is Local:

The latest press packet I'm working off of finally told me how much health insurance costs in NY State, I iz an expert! (Which, as Downpuppy mentions to Megan, here, and at Susan's, means she's confusing union group plans with individual private coverage and is off in her numbers by roughly a factor of 4, making her conclusions completely mistaken.)
Anyway, just because Baucus's plan is arguably unworkable by design, as it sure doesn't seem like he wants reform, doesn't mean I can't use those design flaws as an argument against reform in general.
Also, hahah, unions, you suck, haha, nyah nyah nyah.

Political Theory:

Oh, fuck.

Obama's poll numbers have been improving steadily over the last week. Theory: people like Democrats much better when they are not talking about health care. Corollary: the liberal commentators saying that no, really, health care is in a good position to pass are indulging in wishful thinking. (To be sure, it is possible to level exactly the same accusation at me).
So a rise in Obama's numbers now means Megan is winning. Ok. And Megan, I know you're a terrible writer, but you do realize you just said you agree with those liberal commentators, right?
And folks, this train wreck of a post just gets worse. This won't be shorter.
The Townhall ruckuses were not the end of the Republican opposition on health care. They were the beginning. There is an observed regularity in politics so consistent that I am tempted to dub it Megan's First Law of Politics: intentions are more popular than concrete proposals. As long as there was no one Obama Plan on the table, people could project their fondest dreams onto the president. Once there are plans on the table, Republicans will be able to attack specific propositions that are specifically attached to the president [sic].
So sending armed bullies to shout down anyone who dares not agree with them was only the beginning? Does this mean we are going to see a full scale fascist uprising from the conservative movement? Is she drunk? Once Obama's team gets specific then conservatives can start attacking them, because the deathers claiming he has specific plans to kill your grandma/retarded children/Republicans/vets/your pets/white people/all the pretty girls are just voicing generalized opposition. What the fuck is she talking about?
And Megan? "Megan's law" is already claimed as a name for something, you're from the tristate region, you know that.
For example, polling last year found that a majority of Democratic primary voters were opposed to a mandate to buy health care. Mandates were popular among two groups: people with post-graduate education, and people who made more than $100K. Polls this year are a little more positive--but people aren't paying attention to the details of the debate right now. I'm betting that support for mandates drops once people aren't hearing about them for the first time from a pollster.
She is drunk. Mandates are not universal coverage, which is why Dem primary voters didn't like them so much. Now that the same group is faced with the seeming impossibility of universal coverage, and maybe even the public option, they're coming around to at least moving the ball forward a little with mandates, alas. But Megan knows Dems better than us Dems do, and knows we'll change our minds once we understand an idea that Clinton was pushing a decade and a half ago.
When someone asks you, "Should people have to buy health insurance?", if you haven't really thought about the question, your answer is likely to be different--and more positive--than it will be after you've been musing on the oppo ads for a while.
Once they've been told mandates means they have to be raped by a black person once a month they'll change their minds, so there. Blatantly lying works, so Megan is in favor of it. After all, if they're left to understand this is about money for the already rich versus health care for the poor and middle class then they might support doing something.
Moreover, this mandate will come with a specific price tag on the subsidies, not a fuzzy "should people have to buy health insurance" question. Republicans will be able to find plenty of people who are going to be forced to buy insurance that they can't really afford under the new plan, or taxed heavily for their failure to comply. Even worse, these people will be easier to identify with than the uninsured: at or above the nation's median household income, possibly living in a high-cost area. The lower Democrats cut the subsidies to make the price tag politically powerful, the more dramatic the sob stories will be.
They'll hire (white telegenic female) actors who will read scripts about how they make $2 an hour and Obama wants to charge them $50k a day to be verbally berated by unemployed crack addict welfare queens as a mental health initiative. Megan and her allies will lie, lie, lie and be fucking proud of it, so long as they're defending their masters' profit margins.
This is not the only problem area. The budget deficit is big enough--and projected to stay big enough--that people are starting to care about it again. All of the plans on the table at this point stay deficit neutral only because the program doesn't kick in for four years; after that window, the costs explode. Most of the plans are similar enough to what prevails in Massachussetts [sic] that Republicans can reasonably point to the runaway costs there.
She can't even spell the state's name right, she has to be an expert. And there's the standard conservative argument against the government doing anything; we fucked up, so you can't do anything. Bush's deficits were noble and necessary to enable the killing of brown people, Obama's might save a brown person's life. NO.
Once there is a specific plan to make any cuts at all to Medicare, seniors will go ballistic.
. . . and so on, ad infinitum. Health care reform has not survived the worst Republicans can throw at it. It's survived--barely--the opening volley.
What an asshole. She's proud to be a lying bully who wants to fuck over the public welfare in favor of helping the already wealthy, and is ready to enable an even worse assault on reason in service to her masters. She and Peter's pals at Freedom Works know they'd lose an honest debate, so they're going to do everything they can not to have one. She doesn't care about the human lives involved, she just wants to WIN. She won't even see material gain in the form of a raise, she'll just feel a cheap self-righteous thrill, and isn't that what's really important?

The Fool or the Fool Who Follows Her?

Megan pulls off a joke (I'll generously call it intentional) that actually makes me smile by titling her most recent post "Department of Education." A rare feat indeed, though not as rare as the commentors. (If only)

The post itself is short and stupid, but the real fun is in seeing Megan's fans go wild. When "aMouseforallseasons" is the voice of sanity in your comment thread, you know you're preaching to the choir. The Arkham Choir.

Update:
This is awesome. Alsadius informs us of the various faults of some of our most recent presidents:

Yes, Obama has been a pretty awful President so far. But let's compare him to some of the others elected in the last 50 years:

- Kennedy: Drug-addled fool
- Johnson: Unmitigated asshole
- Nixon: Flagrant criminal
- Carter: Bigger socialist than Obama, with none of the backbone
- GW Bush: Abysmal public speaker
Funnily enough, cross out the "drug" and Reagan had the same faults as Kennedy!

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Nutpicking

hai guyz, did you know we're only doing what Alinsky told us to?

Earnest Iconoclast (Replying to: ethan salto) September 4, 2009 9:59 AM

I am amazed at how much some people hate you, Megan. It's bizarre. It's like some people on the Left look for people to hate and then seek to destroy them. This whole page is full of vicious attacks that pose as logical argument. They may have a point buried in there, but it's so mixed in with vitriol and condescension that it's hard to find.

movertyperguy (Replying to: Earnest Iconoclast) September 4, 2009 11:34 AM

"It's like some people on the Left look for people to hate and then seek to destroy them."
It's not "like" that. It is in fact their stated strategy.
Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals #12: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)"
They want to hurt Megan. They're cutting off her support network of other liberals. They're isolating her. Excommunicating her. They want to get her fired from the Atlantic to hurt her financially.
It's the Barack Obama playbook ... written down in easy rule form. Nothing surprising about what they're doing. They've announced ahead of time how they'll govern.
If you disagree with them, they'll hurt you.
Preemptive victimization, fun. I don't think David Bradley is listening to our criticisms. I'd expect he couldn't care less.
Also, apparently we have influence over the likes of Ezra and Matty Y, because we all listen carefully to people who idly mock us without really knowing us and our work.
Not that these two are talking specifically, or only, about us here, of course. And movertyperguy is so over the top at times I'm wondering if he's a subtle parody.
Anyway, remember rule #17; have a beer. It's Labor Day, thanks unions.

Shortened Concern Troll

oh noes, if she sees this she might offended by me calling her a concern troll. I'm not nice, I've already lost the debate.

What's the Price of an Acceptable Health Care Bill?:

Ezra, Peter and Megan, Mickey Kaus. Now there's an all star lineup.
Anyway, Megan wants us crazy libs who think people should have access to health care as a basic right to know that, unlike the system we have now, it would cost money to do this. Who knew?

Asymmetrical information:

Only highly informed people like Megan, who doesn't even know how much health insurance costs, have valid opinions about the health care debate.

Is Pfizer Too Big to Fail?:

Attempting to regulate Pfizer and limit their profit motive will only make them more powerful, because. And yes, this is all Megan has to say about a clear demonstration of how full of shit she is whenever she speaks of big pharma. Corruption, false advertising, unnecessary research, it just shows we should leave them alone lest we force them to do something really bad.

Labor's Love Lost:

Yay, the lies we've been spreading about unions have worked! We, or rather the actual rich people I'm paid a pittance to shill for win! I'm proud of the lies I have rebroadcast, and while I'm offended by the idea of calling extremists who bring LOADED FIREARMS to peaceful public meetings crazy extremists, it's all good to lie about "union thugs" who dare to show up and disagree with those noble gun nuts. The ends justify my means, not yours.

BaucusCare:

Blue dog reform obstructionist Max Baucus has proposed a plan which is in no way designed to fail. What are you gonna do now, reform advocates? Nyah nyah nyah!

But I'm sure that to reform proponents, I just sound like one of the nattering nabobs of negativism.
Nixon? What? You sound willfully incoherent, Megan. The more confusion you can spread, the more you think you matter to the people paying you to be this horrible.

Phew, I'm done. I should have just taken the weekend off, probably.

*sigh*

I'm violating my Brooklyn resident status by not being at a bbq right now, but *whispers* I think PBR tastes like piss. Don't hurt me.

Embracing Rationing:

Chris Bertram takes the hard stand that I think advocates of any sort of comprehensive single-payer plan, which Chris Bertram definitely is, are going to have to take: that some lives aren't worth saving.
Quote which says absolutely nothing of the sort, instead saying a reappraisal of treatment and research goals would be beneficial although easily misrepresented as rationing. Bertram's concluding lines:
So it turns out that the McMegans of this world are right about one thing: in a just society (not that they'd call it that) there would be less spent on expensive medical/drug research and development than a country like the US spends now. But that's a good thing : against a background of fairness and equality, rational and fully informed people would look at the opportunity cost of such activity and say "no thanks!"
I don't think this really follows. First of all, with the exception of cancer drugs, there aren't many drugs that are developed for people in the last few months of life. In other contexts, people complain about this: instead of developing a cure for cancer, we've got another goddamn antidepressant.
Note, she "doesn't think it follows", meaning she has no actual argument, in no small part because she didn't even read what she quoted, hence ignoring the examples Bertam provided.
Instead she talks about medical equipment which, as she points out, is used by all sorts of people recovering from extreme injuries, which is totally relevant, no, really.
And then there's this crap;
Then there's the time inconsistency problem. How much are we really willing to argue that it's wrong to stop a would-be suicide, wrong to dissuade people from smoking, wrong to refuse to pay for your 19 year old daughter to pursue her dreams of a rock career rather than a degree in accounting? But unless we are, we have to ask how thoroughly we should attend to the desire of the young self to ignore the needs of the old self. Dworkin thinks we should ask people what they would buy for themselves from behind a sort of personal veil of ignorance. But why is the perspective of someone at the beginning of their life the right one? Why not ask people what they would want at the end of their life? There's a problem of specificity, but surely you could develop some kind of average set of services, which would probably be very different from what you would pick in youth.
... what? My grandmother had Alzheimer's, Megan. There's no quality of life to to maintain at the end of that progression, and, notably, Bertram was not discussing withholding treatment but rather not spending millions on developing expensive but for all intents and purposes ineffectual treatments. R&D outlay is already being fucking rationed in favor of profit taking via dividends, but that doesn't count because Megan won't acknowledge it. But not seeing the value in researching new drugs with identical effects to older drugs on which the patent has expired in order to maintain profits means we want to kill Grandma. Especially when the drugs in question have minimal effect to begin with.
And then there's this;
Of course, for me, the core problems are more basic: I don't think that there is "a" regime of social justice to which all right-thinking people subscribe, which me [sic] reluctant to empower technocrats to enforce this mythical consensus.
Because having insurance adjusters decide what is a medically necessary treatment based on their desire to maintain profit margins is working fucking fantastically, at least in Megan's mind where it's still the 70s and they still act like humans.
There's another intuition that at least libertarians have, which is that it is not as bad to have undesirable things result from an impersonal process than from an active decision. It is bad if someone's house burns down and they couldn't afford insurance. It's worse if someone's house burns down, and they were in the class of people deemed unworthy by a bureaucrat of having their house rebuilt.
....... ummmmmmmmm, Megan? How fucking stupid are you?
I think almost all progressives have the opposite intuition. They think it's better to try to produce an optimal result, even if that results in individual injustices (which it will--government rules are very broad brush, and will always involve error at the margins). I'm not sure how to bridge that intuitive gap.
THE FREE MARKET IS PERFECT I CAN'T HEAR YOU LAALALAAALALALALALALAAAAAAAAAAA.
Apparently only governments have bureaucracies, just like only they can ration. If it were otherwise Megan would be horribly, horribly wrong, horribly misinformed, and not a very good person. And she thinks she's nice, so it just can't be.
I know I didn't snark this post very well, but sometimes her stupidity is too offensive to be creative with.