Posted on 07/17/2011 1:30:04 PM PDT by Kaslin
From the best of intentions to bankruptcy and recriminations
The intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a huge wave of debt swamping all western nations, this is the core of their argument: They want a fair society, and their critics do not; they want to help, and their opponents like to see people suffer; they want a world filled with love and caring, and their opponents want one of callous indifference, in which the helpless must fend for themselves. (“We must reject both extremes, those who say we shouldn’t help the old and the sick and those who say that we should,” quips the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg.) But in fact, everyone thinks that we “should” do this; the problem, in the face of the debt crisis, is finding a way that we can. It is about the “can” part that the left is now in denial: daintily picking its way through canaries six deep on the floor of the coal mine, and conflating a “good” with a “right.”
Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt linked “freedom from want” to “freedom of speech” and “freedom of worship,” the left has been talking of everything that it thinks would be nice to have in terms of an utter and absolute right: a right to a job and a right to an income, a right to retire in comfort in Florida, a right to the most advanced health care without paying much for it, and a right to have your children taken care of while you work all day at your job. The problem is that these are all goods and services, though of varying importance, and goods and rights are not the same things. People tend to concur upon rights (except for the speech rights of those who oppose them), and they do not depend upon others to supply and pay for their rights. With goods, there is always a political argument: about the value of the good, who is to get it and who is to pay. And all this comes down to the question of “fairness,” about which there is no end of disputation and grief.
And on nothing does the rights/goods division loom larger than on the issue of health care. Rights come from nature, and cost no one money, but good health in nature is rare. It is only thanks to human ingenuity over centuries and billions of dollars of effort that we have been able to conquer illnesses not long ago fatal, rebuild bodies broken in war or by accidents, postpone or ameliorate the problems of aging, and bring people back from the dead. The roll call of miracles that surrounds us today—the vaccines and the pills that have vanquished infections, the devices that let amputees run marathons, the organ transplants and the open heart surgeries, the techniques that replace hips, knees, and heart valves, not to mention the treatments that make so many public men cancer survivors, that saved Bob Dole years ago, are saving Dick Cheney, and once kept John Kennedy able to function—all of these are the result of the time, sweat, and strain of doctors and nurses, technicians and scientists, inventors and makers of drugs and devices, administrators of hospitals and large corporations, whose time is expensive, and who need to be paid.
Paid by whom, one may ask? Not by the patient alone, as the cost of a serious illness or accident overwhelms the resources of all but a few. They are paid by the state, or a private insurer, which in turn are funded by citizens, through taxes, or premiums paid.
But when costly new drugs and treatments appear on the scene (and are demanded by patients) they are paid for by hikes in the taxes and premiums, which reduce the money people have to spend elsewhere. This is true for governments, too. They either end up rationing care, cutting back other programs, or simply printing money. The people who insisted that goods had to be treated as rights, (which is to say, as universal and limitless), refused to seek cuts, and went on printing money. Even as the whole western world seemed to run out of money, the Obama administration decided it was high time for a massive expansion of government benefits. Then, in early May 2010, just after the American left passed its huge and hugely unpopular health care reform bill, the republic of Greece hit a wall.
From that day on, the world and the country would be given a series of lessons in the dangers inherent in treating a good as a right. The European Union extended a bailout to Greece in exchange for a series of deep cuts. The country was to reduce its deficit from 13.6 percent of its gross national product to less than 1 percent in 2015, by way of “reduced wage costs in the public sector . . . and lower defense and health care spending.” Other countries in Europe began preemptive measures to deal with their own budget problems. In Britain, David Cameron planned cuts of $130 billion over a five-year period, cutting welfare and causing riots by raising fees in universities. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy raised the retirement age from 60 to 62, and limited pensions. In Spain, Socialist José Luis Zapatero did much the same thing. “An elaborate cocoon of benefits faces disassembly,” the Washington Post reported on May 15, 2010. “We can’t finance our social model any more,” the European Council president said. “Workers have been forced to accept salary freezes, decreased hours, postponed retirements and health care reductions,” Edward Cody wrote in the Post on April 25, 2011. “From blanket health insurance to long vacations and early retirement, the cozy social benefits that have been a way of life [in Europe] appear be luxuries the continent can no longer afford.”
In the United States, the states patterned most on the Old Europe model—those with high taxes, high spending, and strong public unions—suffered the same plight as Europe, while those with free-market models did not. “The eight states with no state income tax grew 18 percent in the past decade,” Michael Barone tells us. “The other states grew just 8 percent.” The 22 states with right-to-work laws grew 15 percent in the past decade, the 28 others grew 6 percent. The 16 states that don’t require collective bargaining with state employees grew 15 percent, the others grew 7 percent. The most rapid growth—21 percent—was in the Rocky Mountain states and Texas, which have low taxes, weak unions, and light regulation.
Among the states with high taxes, strong unions, and heavy public employee pension burdens are those in the Rust Belt around the Great Lakes. As Matt Continetti writes in the Washington Post, “Five of the eight states that border the Great Lakes now have Republican governors working to limit union power,” while one Democrat, New York’s Andrew Cuomo, son of a much revered liberal icon, has been praised by New Jersey’s Chris Christie as his cost-cutting twin. And to everyone’s shock, the Democratic legislature in Massachusetts has voted to rein in unions, too.
“For decades, the Great Lakes states have subscribed to a high-tax, high-spend, closed-shop political model,” explains Continetti. “That hasn’t worked out.” That didn’t work out in Europe (whose welfare states the American left has always looked up to); that didn’t work out in American states such as California and Michigan; that didn’t work out in Detroit, which is becoming a wasteland in spite of massive infusions of government money, and that didn’t work out for General Motors, which turned in time into a retirement plan with a car company attached to it, which priced itself out of the general market while foreign car companies built factories in right-to-work states in the South, employed hundreds of thousands of people, and took its share of the market away. It probably won’t work out in Illinois, either, where the Democratic governor passed a massive tax increase, and the Republican governors of neighboring states invited Illinois businessmen to relocate there.
Was it wrong for the liberals to try to create an entitlement paradise when World War II ended? No, the war’s end seemed a good time to start over; the link between the rights that they fought for and the “right” to a middle-class standard of living seemed rather more plausible then, and they had no way of knowing it might one day prove too expensive. When Roosevelt signed Social Security into law, it was meant to start coverage at age 65 at a time when 58 was the average life span of male Americans. (Roosevelt himself died at 63 ten years later.) When President Johnson signed Medicare, life spans were still well below today’s standards, and most major medical breakthroughs were still in the future. (Johnson also would die in his 60s.) Neither imagined a world in which people routinely lived into their 80s and 90s, with knee replacements and heart transplants and home dialysis machines. Roosevelt opposed public employee unions, whose pension demands and early retirements are now driving some of our states and cities into bankruptcy. It’s easier to think of goods as rights when the costs are low, and they therefore take little from others. It’s when the costs rise—as in medical treatments—that the political trade-offs rise, too.
And of course, their intentions were laudable. But so are those of most people, within the bounds of what they think is realistic, is feasible, and is likely to work out in real life. Two times in recent memory Americans have tried to “fix” health care, and each time the script is the same. They start out, according to pollsters, by trying to think it’s a right. They think it unfair that income can alter the access to treatments. They bleed for poor people whose children are sick. They know they are one diagnosis or car crash away from financial as well as from medical challenges. They want everyone to be covered, no one turned down due to pre-existing conditions, want no limits on payments for medical treatments. Encouraged, Democrats draw up their bills, proudly present them, and wait for the thanks of the rapturous public. Then the fine print is revealed, and people are shocked at the expense and conditions. It’s then that their attitudes change.
What the fine print reveals beyond disputation is that health care is a good, not a right; that goods involve trade-offs, and that the trade-offs are high: higher costs and less choice for those covered already, rationing inflicted by government bureaucrats, interference by bureaucrats in medical doings, doctors threatening to leave the profession, less incentive (and money) to develop new treatments and drugs. They still want what they wanted before, but not at the cost of the harm it will wreak on the system in general. They vote their concerns, and 1994 and 2010 turned out very badly for Democrats. Stunned, Democrats fall back on their noble intentions, and say their opponents are mean.
They aren’t mean, of course, merely weighing their options, and finding that the costs to be paid by all of the people outweigh the gains made by the few. It would be mean indeed if standards declined, hospitals closed, cancer patients had to wait months for surgery, or if life-saving treatments stopped being developed. It would be mean indeed if the burdens of welfare brought down the economy. And nothing would be meaner than if Medicare remained unreformed and ran out of money, or if Social Security also ran out of money, because trimming benefits, raising the age of retirement, or imposing a means test is “mean.”
It was not wrong to have a fling with the welfare state sixty-five years ago, when it was a noble experiment that had not yet been attempted. It is wrong to ignore the evidence that in some ways it is failing, that the model set up has become unsustainable, and that renovations are needed if its critical functions are to survive. Goods are not rights. Pensions and access to health care remain social goods that a decent society will try to provide to its -people. But goods are not rights, and the old model, which claimed that they are, is broken. We need a new one, which provides sustainable ways to convey social goods to those who most need them. Good intentions are fine, but without means they are useless. They are the things with which the road to Gehenna is paved.
This piece illustrates what’s wrong with establishment conservatives. The woman knows little history, has no real philosophical base, and gives every indication of lacking much in the way of moral courage. A waste of elctrons...
Excellent article that lays out the truth in succinct and logical common sense. How could anyone read this and NOT understand -— unless they simply ARE intrenched ideologues and don’t WANT to!!!
Curiously, no one, right or left, thinks that the right to freedom of the press creates a need for the government to tax the citizenry to pay for everyone to have a blog or a printer and ink and paper, or the right to keep and bear arms entails the need for a government program to buy firearms and ammunition for all and sundry paid for by increased taxes.
I would argue that we indeed have a right to food, shelter and medical care, but, like the right to publish a newspaper, these rights do not create an obligation for others to pay for our exercise of those rights. Often government market interventions, in fact, infringe those rights either directly or by raising the cost of exercising them.
When some leftist asserts that people have a right to any of those things, ask about the rights enumerated in the Constitution and what he or she proposes to do to makes sure everyone has the financial means to exercise those rights. If they won’t buy us all guns and ammo and a printing press, ink and paper, they have no business financing non-enumerated rights. (Of course I don’t seriously advocate such programs: they just serve as a reductio ad absurdum of the left’s concept of “rights”.)
Although I agree that the Democrat party at its power core is using government goodies to amass and hold power, I think the rank and file Dems that agree with and vote for this stuff see the world in rose colored glasses as this author explains -— they “care”!!! Those of us who see the pitfalls of the whole entitlement culture and choose the path of personal responsibility are not being “mean” as the left likes to claim. We care about our fellow citizens, too -— we just have a different perspective and perhaps a better grasp on reality than the touchy, feely liberals. That is why we have to TEACH the TRUTH of Conservative Principles at every opportunity, because they require more overall thought than the liberal alternative of “free stuff for everyone”.
Nonsense. Socialism was tried by the Pilgrims in 1620. It was a monumental failure then and it has been a monumental failure wherever tried. The only question is how long it takes to run out of other people's money.
The Welfare state is HIV positive. Fling with at your own risk.
Bump for reference.
and they don’t even have to be Americans
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu6ok5ykyuQ&feature=share
I thought this was a great piece.
But when costly new drugs and treatments appear on the scene (and are demanded by patients) they are paid for by hikes in the taxes and premiums, which reduce the money people have to spend elsewhere.
Ding. Ding. Ding. We have a winner. This accounts for the massive increase in Medicare and Medicaid which, along with growth in other entitlements, is bankrupting both our federal and local governments. It is also wreaking havoc on all who hope to have affordable insurance. Any way we look at it, we have to get control of health care costs. Karl Denninger addresses this, as well as our current problem of the debt ceiling here.
Yep. When people want the “new” drugs or treatments, they are going to be told, nope, you get aspirin and penicillin. A heart or liver transplant? Nope. Granny to be kept alive by dialysis? Sorry. When they protest, I’ll just tell them they got EXACTLY what they voted for. “Free” healthcare for all.
If I hear one more A-hole tell me the people at the top need to share with the bottom feeders I may punch them. How much more do others have to give these people before they start standing on their own two feet?!
They are already getting most everything for FREE. Just because they don’t take care of it or don’t spend the money wisely isn’t anyones fault but their own. Just like most of the decisions they have made in their lives what makes anyone think that they will ever make good decisions?
There was an article in our local paper this last week that Excellus-BlueCross was raising premiums for many of their plans for 2012 by 9-12%. This is simply unsustainable. I was blessed to get a 2% raise this year. My wife and I have been reducing our coverage for years to be prudent. We are all going to have to make some tough choices.
Chris Wallace had puke John Podesta on Fox News Sunday today he has really gone off the edge with having that jerk on...
******
CHENEY: It is driving the country off of a cliff. It is completely irresponsible.
PODESTA: I think that is so fundamentally wrong on the facts. President Obama has proposed taking the domestic government down to the size that it was in the Eisenhower administration. That is in his budget. We have taxes now lower than they have ever been since 1950, and have —
WALLACE: A lot of that has to do with the fact that we’re in a recession.
PODESTA: We’re in a recession, but the Bush tax cuts have contributed substantially to that, particularly for the high end. What are the Republicans proposing? Go even further than that. Now we’re in a hostage-taking situation on the debt limit that will be catastrophic if we actually do go over that August 2 deadline. I actually think this is the craziest hostage-taking that we’ve seen since Al Pacino and John Cazale were in “Dog Day Afternoon.”
WALLACE: Very good reference. That is our second movie reference.
PODESTA: Well, we like movies around here. Right, Chris?
But I think that they have got to come to grips with the fact that it would be catastrophic, as Ronald Reagan had said in 1983, as S&P and Moody’s had said, as Ben Bernanke has said. If we don’t raise the debt limit by August 2 and those 44 percent in cuts take place, it will do nothing but drive the economy in to a second recession.
Now, that may be the cynical attitude of the House Republican leadership. Maybe that’s what they want, which is to damage Obama by damaging the economy. But I think that the American people see what the framework is right now.
CHENEY: But I was quoting what the president said in his press conference. This president has added more to the debt than all previous presidents combined.
(CROSSTALK)
CHENEY: All you’ve got to do is find - all you’ve got to, all you’ve —
CHENEY: Let me finish.
(CROSSTALK)
WALLACE: Let her finish. Juan, Juan, stop it.
Go ahead.
CHENEY: This man’s stimulus program did nothing to help that, we’re at 9.2 percent unemployment. You could easily find $1.4 trillion in savings if you would repeal Obamacare. Not complicated. This president refuses to put Obama care on the table.
PODESTA: Every, every, independent analysis.
CHENEY: There is no way that you can claim that he has been a responsible fiscal steward of this economy
PODESTA: Says 60 percent of that run up goes to Bush tax cuts-
(CROSSTALK)
WALLACE: Wait, wait, Liz.
PODESTA: Medicare part D and the two wars.
CHENEY: Bush tax cuts, which you guys keep talking about.
PODESTA: The Recovery Act contributes 15 percent to that.
CHENEY: You guys keep talking the Bush tax cuts for super rich.
WALLACE: Here’s the question. Wait, wait. Wait. OK. Everybody calm?
Let’s — what is going to happen? I mean, all you are doing is repeating the arguments we heard and heard and heard. Every one of your agrees that we cannot get past August 2nd without raising the debt ceiling. I think you all agree. Yes?
WILLIAMS: Correct.
PODESTA: Yes.
CHENEY: Yes.
WALLACE: So, what is going to happen?
KRISTOL: The Republicans will pass the Cut, Cap and Balance, on Tuesday. They will then and pass prioritizing of federal expenditures if there are a few days or a couple of weeks where the debt ceiling goes past August 2, so Social Security, Medicare, Defense are taken care of.
They will also pass, I believe, next week, a short-term increase, for maybe a month. $100 billion-
WALLACE: Which the president says he’ll veto.
KRISTOL: Well, let him explain that to the American public. They are going to say a $100 billion increase in the debt ceiling, $100 billion in domestic spending cuts, which the president himself has endorses it. He’s going to veto it? Why? Because it doesn’t accord with his vision of what should happen? So, I think Republicans are in pretty good shape.
WALLACE: John, what’s the end game?
PODESTA: I think it is — I don’t like it, but it’s probably some version of McConnell, which is cut the deficit now by $1.3, $1.4 trillion. Get this passed, get the debt limit past the election, and then fight it out next year in the election. President Obama will frame it and the Republicans can answer.
WALLACE: You have about 30 seconds. What is going to happen?
CHENEY: The president will lose the election of 2012. The American people are —
(CROSSTALK)
Well put. Canadians get “cheaper” drugs, because the Americans are subsidizing them. If they paid fair market prices for them, the Canadian government would either go broke, or more likely ration who gets them, or stop providing them altogether. Other countries wonderful socialized systems DON’T pay for things like heart transplants, or dialysis for patients they deem “unworthy” due to age, or other criteria. Just like how we have the world’s fattest poor people, we also don’t put limits on what our poor receive in health care. You can be penniless, or illegal, but walk into a hospital and you’ll get the finest care in the world. Walk out without paying a dime, because “someone else” will be paying for it. That’s why I get enraged when I see a bumper sticker that says “Free healthcare for all, NOW!” That “free” care is paid for by YOU.
*bump*
Part of the problem is all the cost shifting and issues with 3rd party payers. A friend just switched to our plan where one has no premiums but a very large deductible and diverts what one used to pay in premiums to a health savings account that to pay the deductibles. My friend cancelled a couple of doctor visits in time and was billed anyway. Had she not been on this plan, she never would have seen the bills and had an opportunity to question them.
Another friend with a mother in a nursing home (on Medicare) said the people really inflate the bills. When an administrator just processes transactions, it is just simpler to pay them. When it is your money, you look more closely. When it is OPM (other people's money), not so much...
This was an excellent article. I saw it via a link at Powerline. Thanks for posting it here.
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