Health Care...or Smoke and Mirrors in the Halls of Congress...

I haven't had a lot of time to write or even think about social issues much in recent weeks, so I apologize for the lengthy hiatus. New country, new job, new home, new car...lots of things needed sorting out. Someone brought to my attention their concerns over the current health care debate and I thought I would add my two cents.

It may sound wonderful to imagine a world where everyone has cheap affordable healthcare, but what does that mean, who pays for it, and can such a concept as insurance ever be universal? I think the left and the right both grossly oversimplify all the issues involved and selectively fail to see the viewpoint of one side or the other. It is not a question of class struggle. It is not a question of haves versus have-nots. To adopt such a delineation is to instantly put the debate in a socialist camp from the get-go. The question is, as always, individual liberty. Do you have a right to order a doctor around? Do you have the medical knowledge necessary to second-guess their decisions? Do you have the financial knowledge necessary to adjust a fiduciary table of risk and returns? If you do not, then you cannot be expected to be able to select a representative who could responsibly make such decisions either. And if they cannot make such decisions, then should anyone have the right to supersede the conscience of educated and trained professionals at the point of a gun?

When it comes to government involvement in anything, it must always come down to the governments entitlement to use force to enforce law. By expanding legislation, we expand the government's charter to use force against us. Unless there is a damn good reason for that, I will be opposed to any enlargement of federal authority. We have to assume that our professionals will be professional. If they misrepresent their services, lie, make false promotions, etc. they are already violating the law and no further legislation is necessary. New legislation is necessary to define the terms of homesteading new frontiers of human knowledge and territory and the disputes that inevitably come from them. It is not to regulate and direct our lives. I am 100% inflexible on this concept: Individual human rights are absolute and inviolate. But people do not have the right to someone else's labor, their effort, or their livelihood (even and especially including doctors, bankers, and teachers). If Obama truly wished to make healthcare affordable, then he should consider unwinding the Gordian knot that our government has steadily added to practically everything over the last hundred some odd years, rather then instigating irrational waves of panic to help slide through unwarranted and unnecessary controls on free movement and action (e.g. Pig Flu pandemic scare).

Altruism is what is killing us. I believe this now more than ever. If you could but accept that as a possibility, I think you would be amazed at how much of the human narrative comes into a clear and understandable focus. Also how much easier it is to make moral judgments, when those morals are derived from clearly defined concepts which are derived from perceptions and are adjudicated by the facts of human existence and not on arbitrary exhortations of "humanity" as a concept undefined. I listen to Obama speak and I realize that he classifies businessmen as outside the scope of "we" when he refers to "us" as Americans and "them" as the bankers on wall street. But does he accept responsibility for the fact that business could not collude with government if government was not involved in business? Just as government cannot collude with religion, when religion is properly and strictly separated from government. Just as the end to religious war was precipitated by the separation of church and state, so will the class wars be ended by the separation of government and economics. Politics, is the province of reaching a consensus on how to deal with the classical crimes, the classical criminals, to defending the rights of its citizens from enemies foreign and domestic, and for determining the terms by which new properties, both intellectual and real, will be negotiated between vying parties. Nothing else requires an official mandate. The rest, as they say, is up to us, to the professionals, the educated men and women who decide where to invest their resources. The risk is also ours. As is the responsibility. These are absolutes, unchanging through time. No civilized society can be sustained without them. As much as we may want somebody, anybody to promise us sweet things and remove the burden of that responsibility, all attempts to do so throughout history have ended in disaster. If it will, is no longer a question. The question is, if we will let it happen again.

That is a choice we all must make, but rest assured I hold no illusions about my ability to sway you to my way of thinking. I see things in black and white, because that is how clearly the consequences of a course of actions springs to mind. It is an issue of life and death. I have seen what happens to medicine in highly regulated countries. There are horror stories that you could not conceive of happening here. (Such as women dying in childbirth because the ambulance had to keep driving in circles for hours because no hospital could accept them. Why? Because the mish-mash of regulation on obstetrics had so strangled the industry that most doctor's felt it was safer to go into other specializations and the country found itself with a shortage of nursery units. Funny, huh? That's Japan, where they're supposedly worried about a decreasing population). But there is always a first time for everything I guess. Seen the waiting lines in Canada? THAT's where we'll be going and in short order.

I apologize in advance if I haven't dealt properly with all the possible arguments. But fundamentally, my problem is at the root of the assumption--i.e. that government should have anything to do with the choice in this matter. Thereafter is merely quibbling over details of implementation.

Who Will Care for your Children?

In case you didn't catch my earlier post on the subject:

http://anamericananti-theistabroad.blogspot.com/2008/07/not-enough-teachers-not-enough-nurses.html


But here again we have another symptom of the ongoing problem:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25692127/

See the problems when lumbering bureaucratic institutions make arbitrary decisions without any awareness of what is needed to actually realize the demands they place on the system?

Let me put it another way. What good does it do to demand that all students have access to a nurse when the number of nurses, how much they are paid, etc. is decided by a public board which has to vote on any related executive decision from tax allocation to job allocation?

What good does it do to demand teachers in a system which makes it impossible to satisfy its own demands?

The only solution is to privatize education, expose the schools to market forces and force the bureaucrats to produce results. Allow parents 100% freedom in where they send their children and remove education from the tax burden so that they can afford to send them. The alternative is to simply place more demands on the nurses (which we already know are in short supply). Should they do even more work for less pay?

If you set those terms, where are you going to find people wiling to work at the schools? Or do you really want the lowest bidder responsible for your child's health?

The choice is yours.

Child Abuse in Schools & Homes (plus I believe in Latin License Plates)

Today there's several news stories I'd like to comment on.

1) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25284886/

All I have to say is GOOD RIDDANCE. I am so glad that this guy was ejected from the school. They ought to arrest him for physical assault and child abuse. What can I say? God and science definitely do NOT mix.

2) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25281287/

The jury may be out on whether religious indoctrination as such constitutes child abuse. After all, all children are immersed in their parents' ideologies from birth. The challenge to every individual is to grow out of those beliefs that one later finds to be false and to take the responsibility to re-engineer one's own psyche.

That having been said, what kind of parent sits and watches their child die of a curable disease right before their very eyes? What kind of human being could do such a thing? Could you imagine watching your baby girl sick with fever, with a scared and pleading look in her eyes? Could you look into those eyes everyday and NOT do everything in your power to save her? What kind of monster could be so cruel, so uncaring? Freedom of religion? Do the children have freedom of religion who are told that they must die by the will of god? Did they have a choice about the faith of their families? And must they pay the price for the arbitrary assertions of others?

If a child isn't protected by the same human rights as all of us, then where do we draw the line? Do parents have the right to murder their child, if their religion demands they do? Do they have the right to punish the child to extemes so that the child dies of exposure? Do they have the right to take sexual advantage of their children because their religion says so? Of course not. The reason is that children ARE entitled to the same human rights as we all are.

But as children they are also dependent on care and guidance. The kind of parenting exemplified by zealots who sit and watch their children die, when they CAN do something about it, is an act of gross negligence. It is an abdication of the responsibility of being a parent. It is little short of murder. And should be punished as such.

3) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25270095/

I believe...that the answer to this problem is not to vote for Christian zealots. Period.

4) http://www.newsweek.com/id/142217

Who cares? Is God Roman? I suppose he can't understand properly unless they pray in Latin. Maybe the scientologists should start holding their ceremonies in ancient greek. At least then it may be harder to get new converts. Woohoo, Atheism!