Have you ever pondered how is it you can be confident your car insurance or your fire insurance or your health insurance will be there if you need it? The answer is simple: government regulation and a network of oversight agencies which audit insurance companies for compliance. If a company is not in compliance, it cannot sell insurance. In the event a particular company goes belly up, there is a super fund maintained by all member insurance companies to pay claims for that defunct firm. Thus secured loans are much cheaper, risk is managed, and consumers benefit along with everyone else.

But Teaparty Republicans and conservative libertarians have a better idea: magic! The magical free market will eliminate those companies that can’t pay claims because they won’t have customers. True, if an insurance company went around saying, “By the way, we plan on going bankrupt in 2008,” the free market approach would work great. The reality is quite the opposite, companies will smoothly assure customers and reporters everything is fine — right up until the day the company’s stock opens at zero.

Perhaps the Teaparty truly believes the average US consumer is capable of performing their own research on insurance companies and predicting the safe ones? Good fucking luck with that! Broker-dealers and rating agencies pay analysts big bucks to follow specific companies and issue recommendations for various stocks and bonds based on those findings. Even with decades of experience, the benefit of required disclosure for publicly traded companies, and advanced degrees from the best universities in the world, insurance analysts failed to predict which financial services companies would survive the mortgage meltdown of 2008 — in fact analysts as a group failed to predict when or if the meltdown would even happen. The idea that a young art teacher or a retired policeman would do better by orders of magnitude is utterly ludicrous.

Our entire capitalist system rests on a foundation of regulations and agencies empowered to enforce them. Without it there wouldn’t even be an insurance industry. The same applies to virtually every other modern industry whether it’s banking or farming or underwater basket weaving. The irony here is conservative billionaires are trying to destroy the system makes them billionaires by funding conservative groups and keeping them ignorant, the most recent incarnation being the Teaparty. That the conservative grass-roots is blissfully unaware of the part they play in smashing that wrecking ball into the nation is evidence of how powerful and dangerous a well managed campaign of ignorance can be.