I read with interest this article, in The New York Review Daily, about the funeral industry. For years I played on a softball team that was sponsored by a funeral parlor. Once, over beers after a game, we went around the table and it turned out that at least half of the ball-playing funeral directors had lost a parent or sibling before they were teenagers. People like to believe they're steering their own ship but they aren't. Impossible to escape the shade cast by early traumas.
Of course these guys I played ball with had been to college and majored in mortuary science. Do you know what class they all had to take, a prerequisite for the rest of the curriculum? Freshman decomposition. Embalming room humor (a cousin of gallows humor).
Another joke among the funeral directors concerned how their business was "recession-proof," a humorous admission that it isn’t subject to the normal economic analysis. Its only customers are in no condition to ask a lot of questions or shop around—indeed, if there is to be a viewing and a burial, there's hardly time for that. Grieving people, even if thrifty by inclination or necessity, tend to part easily with their money. It's simpler just to pay and get through it. There is also an element of shame, or pride. The second most expensive casket is a strong seller. Probably explains why the top of the line one resembles a room at the Ritz.
The workings of the exalted free market just don't apply to everything. Health care is another—for example, the services provided by the professionals and the medicines they prescribe. Generally, when the price rises, demand drops, but not for funerals, bypass surgery, or insulin. The downward pressure on price exerted by "the invisible hand" is replaced by human decency alone—in other words, there is none. But for whatever reason there is in our country such a strong presumption in favor of The Market that things have to get completely out of hand before "socialists" notice that it's not working. Grandma buys macaroni instead of medicine and dies at 66. Well, at least she doesn't have to pay for the funeral. She can't afford to live and her kids can't afford a funeral, but, by all means, keep the gubbermint out of it!
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