Federal Health Care Costs, Spiritual and Material

Freedom always remains the highest social value; without it, all others are destroyed. Still, when attempting to persuade others, it's often helpful to state the costs - dollar and regulative - of current and proposed Federal insanity. Michelle Malkin outlines some here.

The administrative costs and spillover spending effects will be astronomical. Look at existing federal programs. In 1966, the Office of Management and Budget put the total taxpayer costs for Medicare at $64 million. In 2011, Medicare costs are expected to balloon to nearly $500 billion. Medicaid cost $770 million in 1966. By 2011, that program will cost taxpayers an estimated $264 billion. The Virginia-based Council for Affordable Health Insurance estimated that the administrative expenses of both programs last decade were 66% higher than those of private sector health insurance companies.

And we ain’t seen nothing yet. House Republicans on the Joint Economic Committee sifted through their opponents’ 1,018-page health care bill and released a dizzying flow chart detailing the Byzantine bureaucracy Obamacare would create. Washington would become the home of at least 31 new federal programs, agencies, and commissions to oversee the government-run health insurance regime.

Because 32 “czars” isn’t enough, the Democrat plan would add another overlord to the Obama administration. The new “Health Choices Commissioner” would helm the new “Health Choices Administration” (Section 141 of the bill) – separate from the already existing Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (formerly the Health Care Financing Administration), the Veterans Health Administration, and the Indian Health Service.

Because the government has done such a boffo job managing the near-bankrupt Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds, the Democrats have proposed creating a “Public Health Investment Fund” and a “Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund.” The latter would create a “transparent and functional marketplace for individuals and small employers to comparison shop among private and public insurers.”...

And, shades of Anthem...! (the Ayn Rand novel):

To coordinate all the new bureaucrats, Obamacare would create a new “Health Care Program Integrity Coordinating Council” to “to coordinate strategic planning among federal agencies involved in health care integrity and oversight.”

Physicist Richard Feynmann Explains How Trains Move

No, not by being driven by the engine. Here, the title refers to how they manage to stay on the tracks. The answer will probably surprise you. (I studied physics for several years and it did me!)

Ten Oldest Still-Inhabited Cities

The author acknowledges (in the comments) missing one or two, particularly Cadiz. But this is a stunning list. Still, I can never get over the somewhat pessimistic feeling that in 10,000 years humans should have made a lot more progress. Nonetheless, these cities - and the history provided by the post - are amazing.

[Hat tip: Jonah Goldberg, NRO.]

Out of the Mouths of 'Babes'

I always thought Victoria Jackson, once of Saturday Night Live, was pretty cute. I knew the bimbo act was just that (Judy Holliday taught me that lesson early on), but I never knew she was wise. Here's some evidence from her Big Hollywood article:

Sonia and I started talking about the 48 pages of “Hate Speech” I received on The Huffington Post after my last Big Hollywood article. Sonia said, “When people can’t defend their position on an issue, they attack you personally.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I would love someone to talk me into being a liberal. But they can’t give me one good reason. Take socialized medicine for instance, the ‘Health Care Reform’ that the President is trying to shove through the Senate as quickly as possible. They can’t give me one good reason I should want it. I mean, they say it will be cheaper, but that’s not true, because our taxes will go up to pay for it.”

Sonia told me that when she lived in Communist Russia, her friend had appendicitis and was sent to the hospital. She told Sonia that cockroaches crawled over her chest at night. Sonia then went on to explain that with socialized medicine, desperate patients resort to an “underground” system. Deals are made “under the table.” Deals involving your life! She compared it to the police force there.

She said that when you are pulled over for speeding, the police expect you to slip them a folded up bill under your driver’s license. Sonia said, “Did you hear the story about the professor and the classroom? It explains communism so well. The professor told the class that after every test, all the students’ grades would be averaged and all would receive the same grade. So, after the first test, the A students who studied all night and the F students who partied all night, all received a C. As the semester went on, the A students quit studying, and all received an F.”

With no competition, humans reach the lowest common denominator. If capitalism dies, and there is no competition for patients let’s say, doctors will all study and work as little and as poorly as possible…as will hospital maintenance workers. Thus, the cockroaches.

Oh, the insouciance of that last line. Not just cute and wise, but a good writer, too.

Mark Steyn Tells It Like It Is, Viro-Wise

Mr. Steyn gives the sincere viros, all of whom are borderline psychotics, what for.

"I don't think a lot of electricity is a good thing," said Gar Smith of San Francisco's Earth Island Institute a few years back. "I have seen villages in Africa that had vibrant culture and great communities that were disrupted and destroyed by the introduction of electricity," he continued, regretting that African peasants "who used to spend their days and evenings in the streets playing music on their own instruments and sewing clothing for their neighbors on foot-pedal-powered sewing machines" are now slumped in front of "Desperate Housewives" reruns all day long.

One assumes Gar Smith is sincere in his fetishization of bucolic African poverty, with its vibrantly rampant disease and charmingly unspoilt life expectancy in the mid-forties. But when an hereditary prince starts attacking capitalism and pining for the days when a benign sovereign knew what was best for the masses he gives the real game away.

Capitalism is liberating: You're born a peasant but you don't have to die one. You can work hard and get a nice place in the suburbs. If you were a 19th century Russian peasant, and you got to Ellis Island, you'd be living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, but your kids would get an education and move uptown, and your grandkids would be doctors and accountants in Westchester County. And your great-grandchild would be a Harvard-educated environmental activist demanding an end to all this electricity and indoor toilets.

...

Beginning with FDR, wily statists justified the massive expansion of federal power under ever more elastic definitions of the Constitution's commerce clause. For Obama-era control freaks, the environment and health care are the commerce clause supersized. They establish the pretext for the regulation of everything: If the government is obligated to cure you of illness, it has an interest in preventing you getting ill in the first place — by regulating what you eat, how you live, the choices you make from the moment you get up in the morning.

Likewise, if everything you do impacts "the environment," then the environment is an all-purpose umbrella for regulating everything you do. It's the most convenient and romantic justification for what the title of Paul Rahe's new book rightly identifies as "Soft Despotism."

Ya gotta love the modern Luddites and their political pals, no?

Why the GOP Sucks, And What to Do About It

I'm not one to embrace conspiracy theories. They invariably ignore relevant facts or fail to explain the very thing they were designed for. That is, in fact, the defining difference between a conspiracy theory and a view that makes clear something heretofore hidden.

But I also know that it is never sufficient just to state a broad principle and call it a day, not if your goal is to understand particular events at a place and time. You can't calculate the path of a tennis ball tossed on the moon just by citing Newton's 2nd Law. You have to grind through the details.

What am I talking about here, with all this abstract verbiage? In this case, why the GOP is such a lousy organization, why its members so often disappoint.

Steve Lonegan explains in detail, using the example of the GOP establishment in New Jersey. Circling back to principles, though, the discussion could be usefully applied just about anywhere in the country, and especially to the Federal Government.

To understand how we got here, we need to look at who controls the levers of power within the GOP establishment in New Jersey. For the most part, it's not the elected officials. In New Jersey, most elected officials are part-timers. You must look behind the Republican "leader" - to the permanent bureaucracy who runs our legislative caucuses.

The players in this bureaucracy slide through a revolving door that takes them from legislative staffer, to lobbyist, to holder of government contracts or appointments, and then back in time to secure a fat taxpayer-funded pension. These are the hollow men who are there when a freshmen legislator arrives in Trenton - and remain twenty years after he's gone.

Only our party - the Republican Party - can bring change to Trenton. The Democrats cannot bring the fiscal responsibility New Jersey needs. They are captive of their own base vote - of public employee unions and those dependent on government. They dare not risk their contract with these constituencies.

Republicans have a base vote who wants fiscal change. It is the hollow men who reject it, and they do so for the simple reason that it is in their financial interests to maintain the status quo. At the back of every seemingly inexplicable betrayal by a GOP "leader" sits a close personal advisor with his own personal reasons. And in a state GOP without principles - that fails to adopt its own party platform - this kind of venal corruption is rampant. [emphasis added]

Now for the what to do about it part.

It's not enough to replace the corrupt men with good ones. That would help, but it's like replacing a deceased Pope. One goes, you get another one pretty much like him. No, you have to change the system, and that's a very hard thing to do.

Specifically what about the system? That's much too broad a question to answer here, but we can make a start.

Individuals respond to incentives. Those that don't have their moral principles too firmly stuck to them, which is just about anyone interested in working in politics in the first place, will find it hard to resist certain 'selfish' advantages. The usual suspects are easy to name here: ill-gotten gains, power, the feeling of being in the crowd that controls, the near-insane 'value' of "wanting to make a difference" by coercing others, and so forth. Nothing out of the ordinary where politics is concerned.

So, the key is to change the incentives. Remove the power of politicians to offer the various 'bribes' that are attractive to those behind the scenes (and the bribes to the general public they use and manipulate to retain the power they devolve to those shadow figures) and you'll have solved the problem.

How to do that is, of course, a whole 'nother discussion. Here again, we can only make the barest of beginnings.

Make all earmarks illegal. Get the Feds out of the construction business, and the health care business, and the environmental protection business, and the education business, etc. etc. Don't, for example, let the politicians act as if it's appropriate for them to decide which form of energy is "best for the country." Ditto health care, and all the rest.

Stop approaching the Federal Government as if it was a hotel owner and the citizens mere guests being offered various spa services for which they are required to pay. (Never mind about all the services some are required to subsidize for others...) In short, roll back the Leviathan to those responsibilities listed in the Constitution (and fix the Commerce Clause by amendment).

A tall order, to be sure. It will require a revolution, whether only intellectual or physical also it's too early to tell. If the former can be pushed hard enough the next 20 years the latter won't be necessary in 40. But, as Adams wrote to Jefferson:

What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 - 1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. * Letter to Thomas Jefferson (1815-08-24)

Long live the Second Revolution.


[Hat Tip: the superb Veronique de Rugy at NRO.]

What Will the Future Bring?

Robert Samuelson has a fine article on Real Clear Politics outlining some projected economic effects of existing policies:

The easiest way to measure the size of government is to compare the federal budget to the overall economy, or gross domestic product (GDP). The CBO's estimates are daunting.

For the past half-century, federal spending has averaged about 20 percent of GDP, federal taxes about 18 percent of GDP, and the budget deficit 2 percent of GDP. The CBO's projection for 2020 -- which assumes the economy has returned to "full employment" -- puts spending at 26 percent of GDP, taxes at a bit less than 19 percent of GDP, and a deficit above 7 percent of GDP. Future spending and deficit figures continue to grow.

What this means is that balancing the budget in 2020 would require a tax increase of almost 50 percent from the last half-century's average.

Scary stuff. The future is always open to change before it occurs, of course, but not unless course corrections are made. The current navigators are surely steering toward the shoals, though, while proclaiming that everything is working as intended. Well, in a way not intended by the author of that assertion, that might well be true.