Below is a table that represents the way that the US operates its SoMP for various social needs and the involvement of individuals, family, the private sector, charity, local, state and federal government in the SoMP.  It should be noted that while our nation has a relatively strong tilt toward big government control of the SoMPs, there are many nations around the world with an even greater government monopoly of the SoMPs.  The question can (and should) be asked -- "Is a big government dominated SoMP the best way to provide for a stable, productive and vibrant society."

     Like most any marketplace, the SoMP has two essential participants -- the vendors & the consumers.  For the vendor, there are several basic fiscal considerations to operating a 'business' in the SoMP:

• the quality of benefit (product or service) offered,
• who 'gets' the benefit (the target consumer),
• who 'pays' for the benefit (consumers, government, third parties)
• how is the cost of the benefit determined (marketplace, government, third party coercion, etc).  

     This is all fine and good except that the federal government SoMPs play by a different set of rules.  By tapping current and future taxpayers as the mandated funding source, it is not necessary for a federal government SoMP to run a balanced budget.  Good times result in promoting a 'free for all' mentality, with bureaucracies and politics pushing SoMP benefit to expand with little concern for the long term cost or liabilities of that SoMP, so long as the growth is incremental and politically manageable.

     Moving on to consumers, each type of SoMP has its own rules for consumer interaction in a SoMP.  

• What, if any, does the consumer personally pay for that particular SoMPs benefits?  In pensions and health care, individuals pay significant amounts to private sector SoMP vendors through third parties (employers).  There are various policies to promote this sort of activity. However, these policies frequently promote collectives over individual responsibility and participation.  The self employed and self reliant individuals are typically discriminated against in favor of collective SoMPs.  In part, this is due to the political influence of union/collectivist special interests who desire to promote individuals to become part of some collective rather than to personally responsible for their own SoMP benefits.

• Employer based (third party) SoMPs create special problems of their own.  In the case of employer based health care coverage, individuals are excluded from promoting a check and balance against managed care cost cutting.  Health care is 'dumbed down' to a herd mentality.  So long as most of the herd is taken care of, things are just fine and dandy as far as managed care and third party payers are concerned.  Moo if you like managed care.

• How do those of limited means become a consumer and/or get a benefit from a SoMP?  There is a wide variation of rules for each SoMP to deal with this problem.  Some examples are :

  • In the case of Social Security and Medicare, instead of limiting the benefit to the needy, everyone is included in the SoMP.  This policy creates a huge collective of senior citizens defending these benefits, regardless of the cost to current and future taxpayers.  This collective is ripe for use and abuse by politicians looking for power and long careers utilizing the leverage of special interest politics.

  • In the case of health care for those of limited incomes, some states have programs to subsidize individuals to buy their own coverage from a government defined health care program.  If appropriately designed and funded, this can be a decent SoMP if reasonably limited to a modest segment of society.

  • In the case of education and primary schooling, everyone's children is eligible for the education SoMP.  The taxes paid to fund the schooling are generally tax deductible.  The problem is education is skewed towards government SoMPs by tax policies that favor public over private sector education.  Consumers in the private education end up paying for the SoMP twice -- once for public education and once for private schooling.  One can hardly call this system fair.  However, it is again the darling of union special interests.

     As one can see, SoMPs operate differently that the Widget marketplace. The private sector Widget marketplace operates with relative freedom according to marketplace checks and balances.  However, SoMPs are typically a mixed affair between the marketplace, collectives, individuals and the politics of that particular SoMP.  Contrary to the popular socialist/liberal trend towards big government SoMPs, using modern technologies and consumer tools, there are many viable ways to promote and operate a fiscally and morally sound SoMPs without big government monopolization or mandates.  Such SoMPs can provide equal or greater benefits as exampled in Chili's private sector social security/pension system.  To date, there has been relatively poor recognition and/or cohesive articulation of these various options within our political system, the media and to the public.  Furthermore, the policies of each particular SoMP have enormous implications on the behavior of individuals and groups in society, as well as the fiscal and moral solvency of that society.  If collectives are promoted as the source of SoMP benefits, individuals tend to become less self reliant and society as a whole less productive.  Conversely, if individualism and self reliance are promoted for the able bodied, the moral and fiscal well being of a society is promoted -- e plurbus unum.  

SoMP Politics

       As much as some wish to deny it, the defining feature of SoMP dynamics are SoMP politics. While there are clearly many ways to define and operate any SoMP, each political philosophy seems to have its own preferred approach to SoMP policies.

• The liberal Democrat/socialists, with their strong collectivist/union backers, look to SoMPs that are monopolized and/or controlled by a strong centralized government. On the other end of the spectrum are the purist libertarians, who feel that the SoMP should be entirely voluntary and privately operated.  Wandering aimlessly about in the middle somewhere on this philosophical plane of how to define the various SoMPs are the conservative factions of both the major parties.

  • To their credit liberal Democrats/socialist have developed a clearly recognizable market strategy to promote their big government SoMPs.  It is an easily understood and widely dispersed marketing plan of a fuzzy and warm collectivist society where each and everyone is taken care of by government (taxpayers) or some collective (unions).  

• Libertarians have a solid vision and set of principles to their individualist SoMPs.  However, for all the libertarian logic, their SoMP have many gaps as far as marketability to the needy go.  In our democratic society, contemporary libertarian SoMP marketing plans can't compete for votes with the big government SoMP.  This in not so say the libertarian SoMPs won't work and/or perhap work better that socialized SoMPs, only that their product isn't packaged competitively to the full spectrum of voters.

• For decades, the GOP's conservative mantra has been to move to a smaller government as if something will magically pop up to replace the big government SoMP.  Like the libertarians, the conservatives lack a coherent, recognizable and marketable SoMP that can compete with the socialist SoMP.  This doesn't mean that the GOP and conservatives haven't been trying to define an more individualist SoMP. Rather, the GOP hasn't marketed their efforts with any coherent and recognizable icon.

• Conservative rhetoric aside, the moderate GOP actions on the SoMP have generally been to moderate the growth of the socialist SoMP rather than to devolve it. There have been some exceptions to this recently with MSAs and some pension reform.  However, for every step forward, there seems to be at least one backwards.  

Delving into SoMP Dynamics

     Now that a modest foundation of the principles and players in the Social MarketPlace have been laid out, it is time to dive into the dynamics of how different types of SoMPs operate when applied across a broad population and wage spectrum.  As an aid to minimize rhetoric and focus upon realities in furthering this discussion, a downloadable QuattroPro spreadsheet model for a universal SoMP has been used to model and study the various types of universal SoMPs.  This dynamic economic model was originally designed to study the alternate forms of Universal Health Care with varying degrees of individual and government responsibilities and differing tax policies.  The model outputs a 3 dimensional perspective that relates the quality of a particular SoMP's benefits to the percent of the society who are subsidised to the effect that SoMP has on the average wages.  The model has reasonably complete documentation for wonks who wish to explore it in more detail. Being a spreadsheet, all of the formulas, variables and equations are fully accessible for inspection and/or modification.  It takes no programming to operate the model.  A wide variety of SoMPs can be designed and compared at the poke of a button with the results developing right before your eyes.

The Business Plan of the Social MarketPlace   

     The business plan for a vendor in Social MarketPlace revolves around several basic fiscal constraints. For the sake of argument, the discussion that follows uses various models of universal health care SoMPs from the perspective of average wage earner.  The model used studies a board population spectrum with a wide variety of wages and family sizes. The graph below presents cost of various forms of health care SoMPs as economic conditions change (unemployment changes).  Perhaps the most relevant thing to note  in this first  graph is how the unemployment conditions is quite limited in range. This ignores the reality that unemployment fluctuates into double digits through history and through various communities in the nation.  However, the graph does accomplish the task of showing that ClintonCare and Single Payer socialism are not that expensive, at least within the range studied.  There is also little ability to use this model to study the dynamic of how individuals who get 'free' health care coverage aren't as motivated to seek gainful employment as they might otherwise be.  

    It is also prudent to model the cost that any health care SoMP imposes on average wages as benefits are changed in quality or cost.  Here again, the results show a modest burden on average wages for socialized ClintonCare and Single Payer SoMPs.  As noted in the first graph, this simplistic modeling does not allow for any reasonable means to study the dynamics of how there is a trend to perpetually increase benefits in highly socialized health care system until the system becomes fiscally unstable.

    Furthermore, there is no attempt to study the combined dynamics of both of these perspectives as neither perspective allows for a reasonable dynamic study.  It is left to rhetoric to debate how if unemployment increases that there will be an increased burden on the economy to pay for socialized SoMPs that requires increased taxes or borrowing to keep the system solvent.  It is left to rhetoric about how increased numbers of people subsidized always push for an expansion of benefits.  By limiting the set of initial benefits, and by limiting the economic conditions studied, and by never putting these two perspective together, liberals who wish to promote socialized health care SoMPs, can select a set of benefits and limit subsidies to conditions that make socialized SoMPs seem a somewhat reasonable choice for society to make.  

     What is typically lacking from those promoting the big government SoMPs is the dynamic perspective of what happens when a SoMP is put into operation?  If discourse is limited (as noted above) to rhetoric of the dynamics of changing economics and political pressures, no clear conclusion is likely to be reached, which suits liberalism statists just fine. However, one may move beyond rhetoric to reasonable fact based discussion and conclusion if one combines the two dimensional perspectives presented above into a single three dimensional model to that studies a SoMP through the full spectrum of economic conditions.  A 3D SoMP for universal health care for working age people and their families is presented below.  The faint of heart should not ask what happens if one includes Medicare into this SoMP.  Please note, every point on the SoMP plane provides for universal health care.  Additionally, any health care SoMP that one wishes to define is represented by a particular point on this plane. Our current health care systems SoMP point is located somewhere near the bottom of the first square at the top of the SoMP plane. Perhaps the most relevant aspect of the SoMP plane is its increasingly negative 'slope' toward lower average wages when the SoMP progresses from individualist SoMPs to collectivist SoMPs.  This occurs when economic conditions worsen and/or more people are subsidized, and/or as the benefits are expanded.  It should also be noted that this dynamic macro modeling is nonjudgemental about how the cost of the SoMP benefit finds it way to the wages of the average worker.  It can be via direct taxation of some sort, and/or lower wages due to employer mandates, and/or perhaps a hidden premium tax that causes employers to pay more in premiums than wages.  It should also be noted, it is a rare occurrence for benefits (or taxes) to be cut, even as economic conditions improve.

    The negative slope of the SoMP plane is representative of the natural direction a SoMP on the SoMP plane will take in a 'frictionless' democratic society.  In other words, a SoMP will tend to slide down the SoMP plane until there is a sufficient friction created by opposing political forces to momentarily stabilize the SoMP at that point.  It should also be noted that this is a temporary balance at best.   Barring a successful marketing to the public of a better individualist SoMP, when (not if) there is an economic downturn and/or when demographics change (such as the impending boomer retirement) and/or as a result of 'successful' liberal campaigning, this counterpoise will be broken and the SoMP will slide further down the slope towards collectivism and lower average wages.  

    Several conclusions become readily apparent after studying several thousand variations of Universal SoMPs :

• The degree of negativity in any SoMP's slope is generally related to the presence (or lack) of policies that promote personal responsibility and self reliance.

• The stability of a SoMP is directly related to polices that promote individuals to accumulate adequate reserves to become self reliant.  At the same time it is necessary to tap this stream of resources by one means or another to fund subsidies for those of limited means.    

• The fiscal dynamics of  highly socialized SoMPs show a strong (relatively irreversible) trend towards higher deficits, lower wages, and higher taxes. For example, socialized single payer health care is the most fiscally unstable SoMP.

• The fiscal dynamics of  responsibly designed individualized SoMPs show a strong and stable trend towards higher wages, good benefits and low taxes. For example, MSAs can be the basis of a stable Health Care SoMP.

Historical Individualist/Needy SoMPs

     Historically, SoMPs were largely private matters. Those who could afford to pay for their benefits from their own resources did. Those of limited resources shopped in various private charity SoMPs for assistance.  A typical route of support was to look to their family, extended family, church, charity, community, state, or central (federal) government for help and support.  Our contemporary SoMPs have in most respects turned the historical individualist oriented SoMP upside down with the big loser being the family and future generations who pay for the costs of the deficits typically run by big government SoMPs.  Today, the first thing many think about when one is in need is "which government office do I start shopping at?"  From there, one works down through the system with ones family and personal initiative being the last resort. This is not to say that there are not some advantage to having a coherent system of social benefits for needy individuals and families.  What has been overlooked in the rush to create universal big government SoMPs is the option of developing and promoting various individualist SoMPs that contain provisions promoting benefits for the needy.

   Under the current scheme, there is little cause to dump on your family with your personal problems.  Who wants to face the inevitable familial peer pressure to get your act together?  This embarrassment can be sidestepped when there is a 'free' government SoMP to provide for your needs.  As one might expect, big government SoMPs have turned the morals of our society upside down.  Not only do many individuals in various states of need first look to government for assistance in times of need, but many collectives and big government special interests help market and promote the antifamily big government SoMP.

    Fortunately, all is not lost. Opinions and debate continues on how to design the most effective and judicious SoMP. The fiscal failure and future liabilities of many big government SoMPs are triggering people to look at alternative SoMPs.  Some ponder whether it is politically possible to upright the ship of civilization without turning government upside down, given that so many people are addicted to the opiate of liberal SoMPs.  Is it possible for our society to cross the ocean of fiscal and moral debts to become a more personally responsible society? Must our society accept the fate of living in a highly politicized and unstable world that perpetually teeters on the brink of fiscal and moral bankruptcy?  

     In many respects, the solutions and answers to these questions will only come when society in general faces up to the fact that there are numerous ways for a civilized nation to promote SoMPs.  Individuals and groups in society can get their social needs through the wide variety of SoMPs.  Not all SoMPs need to rely upon government as provider, not all solutions need rely upon solely on the individual and self reliance.  One thing is clear, if one endeavors to be true to the premise of preserving liberty to ourselves and our posterity, there needs to be a balance between government and individual responsibility in defining and operating the Social MarketPlace.  

    Or at least this seems right to me.