I’m in a bit of a blog rut. The same news basically keeps repeating itself: Obama’s abominable healthcare bill, our massive debt, our ailing economy, our lack-of-strategy or will or purpose in Afghanistan, and the general and increasing weakness of the country under Obama. What else is there to say about the latest behemoth healthcare bill. It’s an atrocity, and let’s hope it fails, but I have no particular ability to handicap its likelihood of passage or not.
As for the economy, the situation is bad and Obama is making it worse by running up huge deficits. Friends from extremely normal backgrounds–i.e., they weren’t reading Paladin Press books in college like I was–are talking about stockpiling guns, survival retreats, and general doom and gloom. These are guys that walk lon Wall Street and the Chicago commodities exchange, not habitual survivalist oriented nut jobs like yours truly.
Times have been worse of course. And God has his own mysterious unfolding plan in store for us individually and collectively. But I hate to write about the same things in the same way over and over again. I’m not quitting the blog. It’s still fun and helps me collect and clarify my thoughts. Something interesting and new should be on the horizon before long. But for now I feel great weariness.
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Got a question for you.. Considering this absolute mess of a healthcare bill just presented, don’t you think I might have been right that the European model of health care would be better than whatever “reform” the democrats enact? About the only advantage of this plan that I can think of over socialized health care is that it might be easier to reverse. But I am not sure that is even the case, as the analogy of the toad in the boiling water comes to mind.
In fact, I think the toad is pretty much already cooked. We are going to socialize health care, just with extra helpings of bureaucratic waste and price distortion along the way.
I don’t know enough about the “European model” to have an opinion other than I understand it has shitty quality, controls doctor decisionmaking, depends on a civilized and homognenous populace, and depends on US innovatio nand R&D. But without us, then what would happen.
Without U.S. innovation it will suck more than it already does. Your criticisms are all valid, but our choices are between sucks, and sucks harder. Only a fraction of our higher per capita health expenditures goes into research and development – most of it goes into bureaucracy, waste, malpractice insurance, and cost inflation driven by subsidies.
If I have some time in the near future, I’ll write more, but the basic point is that we are already in the process of socializing the system, and the current “health care reform” is just going to make the process even more painful. I am not arguing that socialized health care is better than a free market health care system, far from it. I am only arguing that what we are about to get is nothing even close to a free market system, and is going to be worse than even a socialized system, so why not skip ahead to a socialized system?
The financial pain that the middle class is going to have to endure during this transition is going to be ridiculous, and it is going to rapidly drive up the thresholds for subsidized care until we hit a socialized system.
@David, why not skip ahead? I am not entirely sure I can understand that argument, in jest or not. Skip ahead to a complete loss of liberty and freedom?
You are not distilling this down far enough, you are buying the “socialism-lite” argument. There is no such thing as socialism-lite. This is not beer or a non-sugar sweetened beverage. This is liberty. You either have it or you don’t.
And to be honest, you’ve already lost it if you are able to, in free mind, make that statement.
In fact, we have already lost freedom and liberty across many sectors of this government. At some point, we must stand up. At least fight for the last vestiges of our liberty.
Once again, they are playing this right to the letter of their play book. And the end game? To turn this country into a Marxist progressive place where “they” get to make all of our decisions and they own the wealth so that “they” can decide who to redistribute it to.
CL
The way we play the Marxists’ game is when we pretend that we still have a free market health care system, and allow them to place the blame for health care woes on capitalism rather than government distortion. After the Democrats’ reform package passes, our health care system will be even less of a free market, and will continue to cost more and more, driving the process of socialization further and faster. The liberty is already gone.
I don’t like socialism, but at least we know what it is. The U.S. is becoming a socialist state in disguise, where we try to provide entitlements just as ambitious as the Europeans do but under the label of capitalism. The American dream has become a right of birth rather than something earned – a right to go to college, a right to own a home, a right to the best medical care, a right to have your retirement savings protected, etc etc. We subsidize, mandate, and distort the market to provide all these goods, and the result is cost inflation, bubbles, malinvestment, cronyism, and waste.
Really, do you think we are more free because we pay much more for slightly better health care than the Europeans do? Do you think we are more free because we shovel $40,000 a year per student into universities where students are coddled with luxuries they haven’t earned, “diversity” staffs take up whole buildings, and professors drive Mercedes? Are we more free because we are saddled with negative equity on homes we overpaid for as a result of government driven distortions of the housing market?
It is all driven by government actions. I would rather just be taxed for these things, so at least it’s not all hidden with smoke and mirrors and dressed up as capitalism. We could at least say.. “gosh, if you are going to have to tax me for that new luxury dining hall on State U’s campus, I don’t think we should build it”. Instead we say, “Susie’s gotta go to a good college, so I guess we’ll just have to pay whatever the university tells us to pay. Luckily the government is going to subsidize and guarantee her student loans.” Hidden behind a false veil of capitalism, we aren’t even able to make the connections and actually debate how our society spends its money. At least in democratic socialism the link between spending and income is clear enough that the average citizen can understand the trade offs.
Freedom? It’s already gone.
Chris–
Why don’t you write occasionally on trends in the legal profession and in the law?
–What sorts of things are being litigated now that didn’t used to be?
–Which areas of the law are working well, and which are not?
–What have you observed about the differences between the Texas and Florida legal systems?
–Are there any reforms that conservatives should be promoting that no one pays attention to?
I actually think the legal system and legal profession is less messed up than one would expect. It works reasonably well for resolving commercial and personal disputes. There are no major differences of Texas and Florida that I’ve observed, other than Florida is awash with foreclosures.
The biggest area that needs work is the tort system and the medical malpractice regime. Beginning with Tobacco litigation, the basic principle that one who takes a risk that is known should not be rewarded when it pans out badly has been destroyed. Previously, concepts like “coming to the nuisance” and “assumption of risk” prevented liability in these cases. This went out the window in the short-term gain that was the states’ tobacco litigation. Medical malpractice suffers from a lack of coherent gatekeeping for cases that are, in effect, bad outcomes that are knowable and predictable and consistent with non-negligent provision of care.
I also find that criminal law is a mess. It’s easy to add mandatory minimums for drugs, but hard to distinguish suffering addicts from genuine menaces. Further, violent criminals too often are let out early to make way for drug offenders with mandatory minimums. In both states, I’d favor a simplified sentencing regime that basically divided people into reformable first time offenders (probation to one year), serious offenders (5-15), and people that need to be off the streets indefinitely (30-life).
Our legal system to its credit really is neutral. It is statutory reforms by legislatures that do most of the damage and add the greatest confusion. Judges largely enforce the law as written or received by the common law, which is what we should want them to do. In Burkean fashion, the long line of cases in any given area of the common law is reformed over time and rendered more clear over time.
The biggest areas that are problematic are
a) the legacy of substantive due process from the 1960s, which continues to infringe on the rights of localities to self-government;
b) sundry petty infringements on property rights and freedom in the form of local zoning laws, often written in corrupt fashion by developers;
c) sentencing reform designed to protect society from violent criminals;
d) gatekeepers for scientifcally complicated cases such as medical malpractice. I favor this more than caps on damages and the like. I think juries generally do that well, and only high profile outliers make the news. But too many weak cases make it into the courts and cost doctors and insurers millions;
e) as documented by Juan Mann of deportaliens.com, some reform to the EOIR immigration review system, which clogs up courts indefinitely with nuisance appeals based on fictitious claims of asylum;
f) related to sentencing reform, a swifter application for the death penalty and a greater investment in a good trial defense and less on spurious appeals; and
g) greater sanctions for perjury, which has become widespread as oaths no longer contain implicit a fear of hell and damnation by believers.
Thanks for writing and I hope all is well with you and your family.
“I’m in a bit of a blog rut. The same news basically keeps repeating itself . . .”
In a sense, there’s little to say. Things are “progressing” along lines laid down years, decades, or (depending on your point of view) centuries ago. They’ll keep going along these lines until they can’t.
The populace isn’t going to rouse itself and correct the errors of our ways, because that would entail a massive analysis and rejection of prevailing modes of thought and behavior so entrenched in our culture as to be, in a sense, the defining elements of our culture.
As the saying goes, something that can’t go on forever, won’t. This nonsense won’t go on forever, but only because it can’t.