Rhetoric

Obama Rubs Our Faces In It

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“We proved that this government, a government of the people and by the people, still works for the people.”

That’s what Obama said after House Democrats passed his health scheme. It’s a revealing remark. The Democratic leadership ignored broad public opposition to pass this extremely consequential bill on a bare majority by a combination of dishonest rhetoric, bribery, scummy parliamentary maneuvers and sheer willfulness. Then the President had the nerve to abuse Lincoln’s great words to tell us — most of whom opposed the bill, as he well knows — that he and his colleagues did it at our direction (“of the people and by the people”) and for our benefit. I interpret his words, a characteristic inversion of the truth, as a direct insult to his political opponents, who on this issue are now the majority of the country. He knows that we know he is lying and he doesn’t care, because he thinks he can get away with it. And he appears to enjoy it. This is not someone who can be trusted with power.

Get Out Your Godwin’s Law-O-Meter

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I originally posted this at zenpundit.com but then I remembered that at Chicago Boyz there are likely many readers and bloggers who are fans of Jonah Goldberg and might enjoy reading him squaring off against leftist academic critics:

HNN is running a symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s recent book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning:

While I know a great deal about the historical period in question, I have not read Goldberg’s book, so I am not going to comment on his core proposition except to say that IMHO, I tend to find arguments that the intellectual roots of Fascism and Nazism are located exclusively on one side of the political spectrum are flatly and demonstrably wrong. Goldberg’s polemical thesis though, yields a hysterical reaction because he is jubilantly shredding the hoary (and false) assertion of the academic Left, going back to the pre-Popular Front Communist Party line of the 1930s, that Fascism is a form of radicalized conservatism and a secret pawn of big-business capitalism.

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America: You Need a Policy Chimp

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America needs a Policy Chimp. To qualifychimp-9090 as a Policy Chimp, an individual:

  1. Should be perceived as completely nuts.
  2. Should lack self-awareness or a sense of irony.
  3. Should randomly spout threats.
  4. Should be given to verbal flamboyance of the most extreme kind.
  5. Should lack a sense of humor.
  6. Should have a Chuck Schumer-like attraction to cameras.
  7. Should be able to easily scare foreigners and local intelligentsia.
  8. Should have a direct thought-to-mouth interface for maximum performance.

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“The People 48%, The Reactionaries 52%”

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I don’t remember the exact words but this was the essence of a headline in a Chilean leftist newspaper after an Allende referendum was defeated by the voters (as reported, IIRC, by Robert Moss in Chile’s Marxist Experiment).

The aroma of similar attitudes wafts from an AP report that has the headline, “Honduras vote to sideline president, enshrine coup”. Hey, nobody’s calling anybody reactionary here, but if you talk about a “coup” it’s usually an indication that you’re unsympathetic to the people who did it. Never mind that the president was kicked out by his own legislature and courts, following their country’s written constitution, after he flagrantly broke the law. Like global-warming hysterics, and lawyers for obviously guilty defendants, Zelaya’s supporters don’t have the facts on their side and so keep repeating unsupported assertions that are meant to shift the frame of debate in the direction of their narrative.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian government, sensing weakness, is trying to push Obama around. This is the same Brazilian government that just received the great democrat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a widely publicized state visit. But Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, a democracy and a steadfast US ally, is a threat to world peace.

The Public-Health Fallacy

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The discussion at this otherwise-good Instapundit post is typical.

The discussion is misframed. The question isn’t whether a specific medical procedure is a good idea. The question is who gets to make the decisions.

This is a comment that I left on a recent Neo-Neocon post:

It’s the public-health fallacy, the confusion (perhaps willful, on the part of socialized-medicine proponents) between population outcomes and individual outcomes. Do you know how expensive that mammogram would be if every woman had one? The implication is that individuals should make decisions based on averages, the greatest good for the greatest number.
 
The better question is, who gets to decide. The more free the system, the more that individuals can weigh their own costs and benefits and make their own decisions. The more centralized the system, the more that one size must fit all — someone else makes your decisions for you according to his criteria rather than yours.
 
In a free system you can have fewer mammograms and save money or you can have more mammograms and reduce your risk. Choice. In a government system, someone like Kathleen Sebelius will make your decision for you, and probably not with your individual welfare as her main consideration.

Even in utilitarian terms — the greatest good for the greatest number — governmental monopolies only maximize economic welfare if the alternative system is unavoidably burdened with free-rider issues. This is why national defense is probably best handled as a governmental monopoly: on an individual basis people benefit as much if they don’t pay their share for the system as if they do. But medicine is not so burdened, because despite economic externalities under the current system (if I don’t pay for my treatment its cost will be shifted to paying customers) there is no reason why the market for insurance and medical services can’t work like any other market, since medical customers have strong individual incentive to get the best treatment and (in a well-designed pricing system) value for their money. The problems of the current medical system are mostly artifacts of third-party payment and over-regulation, and would diminish if we changed the system to put control over spending decisions back into the hands of patients. The current Democratic proposal is a move in the opposite direction.