Aragula For All!

Heh. You didn’t.

Still…it was a good one…worth your time!

Re medicine, a little anecdotal evidence from Germany: as the hours are brutal (as everywhere in medicine) and as the pay is ridiculous, all young doctors that can do so try to move to Switzerland, where the system is still far more privatized than in Germany. It’s come so far that the Swiss health care system is basically run by Germans.

On the other hand, what do German politicians do to stem the recent cost explosion in the health care system? That’s right: more government interventions, less choice, less competition, higher insurance premiums. Dumb as stumps here, too.

My general response: How can you guarantee something that cannot be guaranteed? The answer is, you can’t. Our Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, were limits placed on government power; they were restrictive. The Modern Perspective, often called ‘The Second Bill Of Rights’, are attempts to guarantee the delivery of services that simply cannot be guaranteed. Even were the government efficient, noble and wise – but the seat of power is rarely or never any of these, and tends constantly to corruption.

Medicine:
> Even in the good times, though, something interesting happened: the quality of the doctors slipped.

This is the law of unintended consequences, and it is a damning law. Also, it cannot be avoided; there is no way around it. If your leaders must be preternaturally wise and good for something to work, it is guaranteed that it will not work.

> Even the forms aren’t the biggest problem, though. The biggest problem (and I have good information on this owing to contacts in my life) is regulations.

Streamlined regulations can certainly help. A lot. However, there are medical services that simply cost a lot of money, as well – even if you think of it as “Quality of Service”. Does every amputee get the most recent and highest quality replacement artificial leg, the one that costs $7.2 million? Any service beyond the basics is going to be rationed one way or another. I don’t think there is any way around that irrefutable fact, no matter how unpleasant it may be.

Barack Obama has said he wants the Phillies to win the World Series, and Tampa Bay to win the World Series. Promise everyone everything. In services, he’s doing the same thing, promising everything to everyone, and so far it’s working. Until we become adult about these hard choices, I don’t know what happens. For me personally, I see gradations of insurance levels separated by cost as the only possible solution to the problem.

Welfare:
> Second, economic freedom has to be balanced with charity and mercy.

This point applies to health and welfare. “Charity and mercy” have no meaning when income is seized and forcibly redistributed. I like to use the phrase “siezed at the point of the government gun”, and while in a way that’s an analogy, but in truth it is real. At its core government is enforced POWER.

I believe in the safety net to catch people on the way down, and support them for a very short time, while they recover from the fall. Especially in the case of welfare, it must *never* be allowed to foster generational dependency. Even FDR warned repeatedly and soberly about this. It’s catastrophic to do so.

Crime:
The biggest fallacy here is that the police exist to protect you. They can’t (except by pure luck of timing). Self-defense is the sole choice of the individual. The police actually exist 1. to enforce the law and 2. to investigate crimes after they have occurred. The first of these provides disincentive to break the law, reducing crime. The second hopefully prevents criminals from repeating crimes by removing from them their freedom. I suppose we could argue about rehabilitation, but I don’t think our social sciences are up to any rigorous approach yet for deliberately fostering rehab; and right now it seems a fortunate dawning within the criminal soul that sometimes turns them away from crime. Something at least worth hoping for. (So let’s *not* brutalize the criminals when they’re in jail, seems like a good idea to me. I’m referring to gang-run jails, random violence and rapes.)

In the end, to me, it’s all about equality of opportunity vs equality of results. We’re all best served by striving endlessly for the first of these. Any attempt to guarantee the second will always end in disaster eventually, in one form or another. Sometimes I think we give lip service to equality of opportunity (ie, “education is the great equalizer of opportunity”, while our schools fail all around us and we don’t care as long as certain classes of people have their prerogatives protected (Democrat-style) or as long as my neighborhood schools are guaranteed better than yours, ensuring that in fact there is no possible equality of opportunity (Republican-style). If we’re going to say that we absolutely believe in equality of opportunity, especially relying on it as our rejection of equality of results, we ought to unfailingly back it up as a matter of critical principle.

I also think some forms of limited regulation and oversight will always be beneficial, and we’d best focus on checks and balances of every sort possible to prevent corruption.