the commie in me

Most of them are luxury apartments for the very rich who have like one in New York, one in Tokyo, one in London, etc so they are rarely here in Chicago and their apartments sit empty while poor folk can't even find room in an SRO and have to sleep in the street.  Brings out the commie in me.

If I do say so myself, and I do.  When I say commie I am not referring to the grim, humorless, decidedly illiberal institute of the communist party.  I have not read Das Kapital, and all this stuff about dialectical materialism, I'm not sure what that means.  I just mean kind of a grass roots, Joe Sixpack kind of thing where this just doesn't seem right, and maybe we should do something about it.  I am going to list three examples,

The first is those luxury apartments.  Like I said they are popping up all over in Chicago, meanwhile there is a shortage of affordable housing.  The contrast I made in my initial comment was with the homeless ,but let's take that up a notch to the folks that Beagles and I grew up with in the great bungalow belt.  Modest people of modest means, nowadays they might be called lower middle class or blue collar, these are the people who can afford what is called affordable housing, of which there is a shortage, so you would think they would be building more of that instead of luxury apartments.

These luxury apartments are huge, they contain easily enough square footage to contain four apartments the size of mine, and you could charge four people a fourth apiece of the rent they are getting from the richy rich.  I am not sure if that would bring it down to the affordable level, but it would certainly be a step in the right direction, so why doesn't anybody do that?  I did a very brief internet search on the subject and the answer that came back resoundingly was market forces, that's why.  Well maybe something should be done to change those market forces.

The second example is medical insurance.  There is talk of socialized medicine, single payer, medicare for all etc. and I don't understand the intricacies of them, but one thing stands out.  The insurance companies are huge, they build tall buildings they fill the airwaves with commercials of grinning bumpkins displaying their cards because now they can have all kinds of healthcare because the insurance companies will give it to them.  But of course the insurance companies do not actually deliver any health care.  All they do is give themselves a big cut of any transaction between you and your provider, some of it comes out of your pocket and some of it comes out of the potential earnings of the provider, none of which goes directly to your healthcare,  Cut out the insurance companies and your healthcare does not suffer at all, and there is all this money left over for you and your provider.

The third is focus groups.  Let's use the example of aspirins.  When you go to the drugstore there is a dizzying array of aspirins in all kinds of packaging,but they are all the same damn thing and anybody who buys anything but the generic is a damn fool.  I've taken part in some focus groups and I don't recall exactly what they were peddling but it was something like aspirin.  They get seven or eight people who get around a hundred bucks each and they bring them into some room in a fancy office building that surely costs a pretty penny and some salaried people conduct it, and in one group it was packaging, which package would make you more likely to buy Anacin than Bayer, and in another it was commercials, which commercial would make you more likely to buy Bayer than Anacin. 

There are damn fools that buy either brand rather than the generic and the extra money they spend for it funds those focus groups which have no real function as far as eliminating your headache.  One of the supposed virtues of capitalism is that you have all these companies competing with each other and the ones that make the best products win out and therefore the consumer gets the best products.  But they are not spending much money on making a better product, they are spending most of their money on advertising which has nothing to do with how good the product is/

And that's the commie in me.