Healthcare and the Limits of Reason

I'm sure that in the groves of academe they are shaking their heads over the outpouring of opposition to the president's health plans.

After all, it's pretty clear that we can't go on as we are. Someone is going to have to formulate a rational national policy on end-of-life care and regulate the offerings of insurance companies. Better leave it to the experts in medical ethics.

I had an epiphany on all this a few years ago when I read Sam Harris's The End of Faith. After roundly critiquing religious faith for a few chapters he began to develop his own ideas. It was strong on meditation and "rational ethics."

Well. There is a problem with that, Sam old chap. By the time you have got to a rational ethics you have already made the serious decisions. Let's illustrate the point with abortion.

Some people think that the laws on abortion should turn on the question of the beginning of life. And life, the activists say, begins at conception.

Other people, including the Supreme Court at one time, believe that the question turns on viability. At what point can the fetus live outside the womb? Obviously, this allows for early-term abortions, since a fetus in the first few months of pregnancy cannot survive outside the womb.

Still other people argue that a woman has a right to control her own body. On this view, it is clear that abortion is permitted up to, and perhaps including, live natural birth.

Some advanced thinkers are proposing a return to infanticide; someone will have the power to determine if a born-alive infant shall continue to live.

Then you could say that, as in the days of the patriarchy, the father has absolute power over the lives of the people in his household.

Now, it seems to me that you can build a rational ethics out of any of these approaches to the question of taking young life. What matters is your defining value about when it is permissible to take human life.

And that, of course, follows the traditional view of logic and reasoning. You start with certain premisses, and you then argue, using the rules of logic and reason, to prove certain conclusions.

So the experts in the liberal academy are missing the point. They are taking their view of human life as an incontestable premiss. But, of course, it is precisely their assumption that is in question.

The work of Zeke Emanuel, for instance, assumes that we should take a utilitarian view of human life. We should focus health care resources on productive people in the middle of life and less at the beginning of life and the end of life.

But that conflicts with the natural instinct of women, which is to care for the people they love, especially babies, and even including their ageing mothers.

The question is: who is right? The rational experts or the loving women?

I'm inclined to go with the women. Obviously, the obsessive care of loved ones is one of the great forces in the story of life--particularly mammalian life.

Rational speculations have their place. But I think that we need to be careful how far we extend it. There is a limit to the utility of reason.

CIA Probe: Another Obama Blunder

You can understand why the Obama administration has decided to launch a probe into the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorist detainees by the CIA. The left is restless.

So why not sicc a special prosecutor on the CIA (and maybe former Vice-President Dick Cheney) and throw some red meat to the angry lefties while the dirty work of compromise proceeds on the president's health reform?

Well, there are several reasons why not.

1. Remember Last Time. Back in the 1970s Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) had a grand old time with Senate hearings on the CIA and the FBI. His Church Committee flayed the CIA and the FBI and reduced the effectiveness of the national intelligence establishment. But Frank Church was defeated in the 1978 elections.
2. Are You Sure, Mr. President. No doubt a special prosecutor will satisfy the angry left for a while. But suppose there's a terrorist incident between now and the 2012 election. That could be a game changer. The reason that the Bush administration went for enhanced interrogation was because they decided that their policy should be "Never Again." I don't think I would want to be the president facing the American people after another high-profile terrorist incident on the US homeland involving thousands of casualties. Not after a special prosecutor has tamed the CIA into complete immobility.
   
3. The CIA Isn't Defenseless. Back in the 1970s when the left last had a go at the CIA there wasn't anyone to defend it. Former President Nixon had left office in disgrace, and President Ford wasn't going to spend political capital on the Nixon era. But clearly Dick Cheney ain't gonna go quietly into the good night. In fact he is doing a bang-up job of sucking up all the oxygen in the room. He was on TV last Sunday. And on Saturday the Washington Post quietly admitted that the CIA was right to go for enhanced interrogation, to the fury of lefties like Glenn Greenwald. Let's face it. Dick Cheney is loaded for bear, and he can make things very difficult for the Obama administration.

So go ahead Mr. President. Go ahead with another major political blunder. As they say. Don't stand in the way when your opponent is destroying himself.

Obama Has Done Us a Favor on Health Care

Perhaps the biggest boost that Ted Kennedy could have given to President Obama was to give the president a week's pause.

Maybe that pause will have given him a chance to refashion his failing health-care plan. Conservative pundits high and low have been busy counting him out over the past couple of weeks. We've counted presidents out before. It doesn't work that way.

The fact is that President Obama has huge majorities in the Congress. If he'd just trim his sails a bit he ought to be able to pass a lot of very Democrat-friendly health legislation. The fact that he chose to go for the long ball has turned out to be a godsend to conservatives and Republicans, for it means that he is wasting some of the opportunity he had back in January.

But the Obama administration is doing conservatives a great favor. It is coming out from behind the screen and telling us exactly what liberals stand for. For the last twenty years, liberals have been pretending they are New Democrat centrists. They had to, because otherwise they couldn't get elected to the White House and to control of Congress.

But once Candidate Obama got elected to the presidency on a platform of transparency and tax cuts, and Nancy Pelosi got to be Speaker on the strength of conservative Democratic candidates winning in Republican-leaning districts, they threw off their disguise.

But that puts the real Democratic agenda in play. It means that conservatives like Betsy McCaughey can start writing about the real health care agenda of the Democrats.

The Democratic health agenda is really quite simple, as Rahm Emanuel's brother Zeke has laid out. Doctors are going to have to balance the personal needs of their patients with the overall needs of society.

Dr. Emanuel believes doctors should serve two masters, the patient and society, and that medical students should be trained "to provide socially sustainable, cost-effective care."

If you are an elite Democrat, this seems quite uncontroversial. Of course we are going to have to limit health care in the interests of society. Or, as Sarah Palin says, you are going to have to have "death panels." Otherwise health care will eat the federal budget.

But this elite Democratic view presupposes that health care is delivered as a government program. It presupposes that lordly experts will formulate health care policy and implement it in beneficial 1,000 page bills. Other experts will make life and death decisions about granting health care or withholding it, on a case by case basis.

But what experts like Emanuel don't consider is that it doesn't have to be that way. If health care weren't a government program, and health care were treated as a human need much like the need for food and housing, then people would have to balance their need for health care with other needs. And government wouldn't be in the position of playing God.

Of course, that means that rich Americans would get all the health care they wanted, and poor Americans would get only basic health care. In other words, it wouldn't be that different from the current situation in the United States.

It also wouldn't be that different from the situation in Canada. In Canada, ordinary people have to wait for health care. They have to endure the usual waiting lists that are universal in government health plans. But rich Canadians can hop south of the border to get urgent health care. Guess what. There's a movie about this. It's called The Barbarian Invasions.

How much health care do people want? Obviously, if health care were free, they would want unlimited amounts. But it isn't. So there has to be a limit.

When it comes to limited resources you have to have rationing. You can have rationing by price, or you can have rationing by waiting lists.

Or you can have a sensible combination. We could force Americans to pay for a decent minimum of health care, such as basic public health, accident, neo-natal, and hospice care. We could invite Americans to sign up for insurance to pay for their less-basic care if they valued it enough.

This system would be a two-tier system, of course. Kinda like the system they have in France.

Oh, you didn't know that France has a two-tier system? That's odd. I wonder why. You mean to say that Michael Moore in his SiCKO didn't quite make that clear?

Warning: Obamites are Weaker Than You Think

Official conservative response to the Obama phenomenon is that he and his kind are crazy lefties, and that they'll stop at nothing until they've destroyed America.

Maybe there's a problem with that analysis. Maybe it overestimates the Obama folks.

We all know that you should never underestimate the opposition, you know, like liberals. But now that we've had President Obama for about six months we are starting to get a feel for him.

I think what we've got is a weak president.

President Obama is weak because he is inexperienced. Of course no president comes into office prepared for the job. But still, Barack Obama really doesn't have the experience he needs. What a president needs is experience getting out of a jam. Barack Obama has lived a charmed life up to now, with people making the weather for him. And we don't really know how much of the brilliant campaign was Obama and how much was David Axelrod and Co.

President Obama is weak because the American people really don't want what he is offering. They don't like his stimulus package. They don't like the bailouts. They don't like the cap-and-trade, and they really don't like the health plan. What do they like? They like his wife and kids.

President Obama is weak because the left is not helping. A lefty friend complained on a listserv that Obama was selling out on health care. He completely misunderstands Obama's problem. Obama would love to legislate "single payer" for his lefty base. But he can't. He will try his darnedest to get the closest he can to single payer, given what he can get through Congress. But it's beginning to look as if he is not going to get much. That's not a sell-out. That's reality.

To make matters worse, the president is trying to calm down the left by investigating the CIA. This is like playing with fire. All we need is another terrorist attack and Obama's presidency is in deep trouble.

Here's what is shaping up. Even with a big majority in the House, and 60-40 in the US Senate, the Democrats don't have the votes to go up against the American people. Republicans would die and go to heaven to get the kind of majorities the Democrats enjoy, for haven't had anything like it for over a hundred years. But it is looking as if the Democrats are going to waste their opportunity by trying to do stuff that the American people flat out don't want.

What the American people want right now is for its political leaders to right the economy and clean up the nation's balance sheet. If the Democrats won't do that for them, they'll find someone who will.

Let's Call It "Liberal Atavism"

In the Afterword in his Liberal Fascism Jonah Goldberg marvels that the perfect illustration of his argument appeared in 2008 and won the presidency. Liberal fascism means the whole apparatus of millennial Hope, real Change, Unity, audacity, cool clothes, big chin, big stadiums, greek temples. And Barack Obama was that One.

But Jonah is still upset over the use of the word "fascism," because it has come to mean "bad person" rather than the real thing, a movement that wants to make politics the whole of life. If he had his druthers, he'd choose another word.

Let's solve Jonah's problem. Let's call it "liberal atavism." Atavism (from the Latin, ancestor) is an "evolutionary throwback" such as, in humans, multiple nipples. Fascism, as it developed in the early 20th century, was always an atavistic yearning for the old days of blood, soil, living room and tribal community.

"Atavism" has been used in a cultural sense. An example is F.A. Hayek's article "The Atavism of Social Justice." Social justice means, if it means anything at all, Hayek argues, a return to the moral framework of the hunter/gatherer band, its strict hierarchy, and its strict adherence to instinctive tradition and sharing.

The problem is, of course, that under hunter/gatherer rules the earth can only support a few million people, who live in constant conflict. (Up to half of men died violently in hunter/gatherer cultures, and never sired children, according to paleontologists.) In the modern world, where capitalist rules of law and contract operate, there is much less conflict, and people compete to serve strangers rather than kill them.

But the new order is instinctively wrong, and people are always hankering for a return to the simplicity of the hunter/gatherer band. Liberals, for all their love of science, want this too. And because they are articulate and powerful they can do something about it.

So when President Obama talks about "share the wealth" he is proposing an atavism. He is proposing to return to the world of the "atavus, a great-grandfather's grandfather." And he is proposing to return to a world of conflict, as we can see already in the tumultuous Town Halls of Demcoratic congressmen.

But it looks like he has a problem. Lots of people don't want to give up their freedom to go hide in an atavistic Obama world. And it looks like they may be willing to fight to keep their freedom.

Ted Kennedy, RIP

It is the end of an era. Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) is dead at 77.

For at least a generation, Ted Kennedy symbolized what it meant to be a liberal: fighting injustice with government programs.

Historians may say that Kennedy spent his life fighting injustices that were already well on their way to solution before he was born, but that is not the point.

Ted Kennedy was a man who believed in the liberal faith of using government to help poor people and the disadvantaged, and he lived his faith every day. As a senator who was well liked across the aisle, he was reportedly highly effective in advancing his faith. He used his position and his seniority to pile government dollars into social programs of all kinds, especially health care and education.

Ted Kennedy's personal shortcomings are legendary, of course. So would the shortcomings of meny men if they were to be illuminated by the light of day. But, sinner as he was, he kept the liberal faith.

Our task, of course, now that Ted is gone, is to right the grievous injustices and cruelties that now lay heavily on the nation after a century of progressive politics. But that is a task for the morrow.

Today we celebrate the life of Edward Kennedy, American and statesman.

We Need a Good Scapegoat

Scapegoating has got a bad name in recent years. Probably it's because our liberal friends don't like being blamed for the many failures of their welfare state.

But scapegoating is clearly a necessary part of life in human community. When things go wrong you need to pile all the blame on something or someone. That's what Rene Girard writes in Violence and the Sacred.

You cast the scapegoat into outer darkness. Only then can life go on, cleansed of the swirling cesspools of guilt and failure.

Very often in the past the king had to die to expiate the sins of the world. Christianity has gone the whole hog on this. God sacrifices his Son to expiate the sins of the world.

In modern democratic practice, we throw the bums out every couple of elections. At least, we throw the presidents out, focusing all our frustrations of the symbol of the nation. (President Bush is gone now, liberals. Time to move on.)

But I think we need better closure on the mortgage meltdown. I think our liberal friends are getting off cheap by blaming bankers and bonuses and Wall Street deregulation.

It can't be just the bankers that are to blame. That's because ever since the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 finance has been a government program. You could blame the bankers back in the 19th century when the US didn't have a central bank. But not any more.

No, liberals. The problem wasn't bankers and bonuses. The problem was you and your Fannie Mae and your Freddie Mac and your Community Reinvestment Act and your villainous liberal politicians that bullied banks into making sub-prime loans.

So we need liberal scapegoats. And we know who they should be. Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA). The egregious errors and unrepentant arrogance of these two legislators are not to be borne.

(It is delightful that the villainous firm of lawyers in The Pickwick Papers, the chaps who hound poor Mr. Pickwick into debtors prison, went by the name of Dodson and Fogg. Pretty cute, eh?)

We must pitch Dodson and Fogg--I mean Dodd and Frank--out of Congress.

Otherwise justice will not be done. Otherwise we will not have propitiated the gods. Otherwise we will not have concentrated all our guilt and shame into the necessary scapegoats and cast them out into outer darkness.

Voters of Connecticut and Massachusetts! The nation expects you to do your duty.