Stay classy, America

This doesn't directly impinge on me, since my subnormal conversational skills, palpable insecurity, unsettling lack of eye contact, facial expression, or vocal intonation, and abhorrence of the accursed light of the sun make the threat something of a moot point, but it still caught my attention: Pseudo-nonpartisan political group Rock the Vote has put out a new video urging people not to have sex with anyone opposed to health care reform. (Hat tip: Crash Landing.)

Ironic, really. Whenever I see something in the news about the efforts of liberal statist groups like Rock the Vote, "I wish these people would stop trying to fuck me" are usually the first words to pop into my head.

I suppose straddling the line between socialism and fascism counts as "bipartisan"

The debate over health care has had me thinking about the question of where to draw the boundary between a a private firm intertwined with or heavily regulated by the government and an arm of the state that merely maintains the forms of the private sector. It's been frequently pointed out, correctly, that the obvious purpose of the "public option" is to serve as a Trojan horse for single payer. Even without the public option, though, the "reforms" that seem most likely to pass would effectively eliminate private insurance.

The most frequently referenced issues, now that the public option seems to be out of the running, are the insurance mandate and insurance for people with preexisting conditions. The mandate is basically a payoff to the insurance industry: The government imposes new controls on them requiring them to do things that do not make financial sense if you're actually in the insurance business, and in return the government will force everyone to buy their product. The insurance companies get more money, the government gains greater control of health care, and the benevolent champions of the working man in Washington, D.C. get to impose a large, regressive I-swear-it's-not-a-tax on everyone.

In this scenario, in what meaningful sense is the insurance industry "private" any longer?

The insurers would be government agencies in everything but name, and the insurance they “sell” would simply be a welfare program (albeit one that, like social security, would produce a net transfer of wealth from the relatively poor to the relatively rich) disguised as a commercial transaction. They would exist to serve purposes chosen by the government, their activities would be controlled by the government, and their funding would be given directly to them by the entire population under threat of government force. They would have some internal autonomy and some scope to compete with each other, but that means little to this issue. Even communist countries experimented with letting the managers at state-owned factories make some independent decisions. They'll be about as "private" as a public school district.

The only notable difference, so far as I can tell, is that the people in charge of distributing insurance will be making a hell of a lot more money than your average Department of Health and Human Services manager.

Is actually learning some basic facts about a politician before you start worshipping him too much to ask?

So, President Obama has announced the deployment of more troops to Afghanistan. To their credit, more liberals have attacked this decision than I expected. In many such cases, however, my respect is somewhat tempered by the fact that many of them are getting indignant about the fact that their beloved has betrayed them by doing exactly what he had always explicitly said he intended to do. Obama advocated the idea of escalating in Afghanistan well before he was elected, after all. He became the "peace candidate" because he was Not Bush, and Bush was a warmonger, and so Not Bush must be a great lover of peace. QED.

The result is actually remarkably similar to the subject of a recent post, the myth of Leon Trotsky the good Communist. Both men have an admiring mythology built around them that is not only at odds with the facts, it is explicitly contradicted by the glorified hero's own words!

This is a predictable outcome of both the way Barack Obama ran his presidential campaign and the way most of the media covered it. The elections always heavily emphasize general concepts tied to strong emotions- Freedom, Hope, Compassion, Children, Patriotism, Danger, Those Other People We Can't Stand- but Obama went further in emphasizing cheery platitudes and good vibes over actual policy and political philosophy than any other major politician I can recall in my lifetime. He was a unifier, he was pragmatic, he was nonideological, he was understanding he was hopeful, he was an historic milestone in America's racial history, he was Not Bush. Most of the mainstream media, thoroughly biased in Obama's favor and not especially politically incisive even at the best of times, indulged this.

John McCain often wasn't all that much better, his persona heavily dependent on his military service and on the reputation as a "maverick" that he had received during his stint as the media's favorite Republican earlier in the decade. I'll say this much for McCain, though: I doubt anyone supported him because they had fallen under the impression that he was a peacenik or a supporter of gay marriage or an opponent of big business.

It's not that Obama didn't have concrete beliefs- his campaign site had an extensive platform outlining his proposed policies. And yet, such was the fervor around him that he was able to rally a passionate following with the most vacuous campaign since "Tippecanoe and Tyler too". He isn't anti-war, but he's a man of powerful charisma who seemed like he ought to be, and who people wanted to be anti-war, and that was enough.

The "uninsured Americans" Trojan horse

One of the main issues that allegedly motivates calls for health care "reform"- be it instituting single-payer, a "public option," insurance mandates, requiring insurance companies to accept all patients or charge the same amount regardless of risk, or some combination- is the problem of people who can't get insurance because they are poor or already too sick to get insurance. The problem, we are told, is that people with preexisting medical conditions can't get insured, and thus are either deprived of medical treatment or are impoverished paying for it. Similarly, people too poor to have insurance let problems fester untreated because of the expense. The extent of this problem is exaggerated greatly, since the most commonly cited statistics lump people who can't get insurance together with people who have simply chosen not to, but it does exist.

As is so often the case, this is a problem with roots in previous government interventions. The tax code and various government regulations encourage people to use insurance for everything medical-related, including routine and foreseeable expenses, which encourages greater consumption and less concern for cost, which drives up the price of medical services, which increases the amount of money the uninsured have to pay out of their own pocket. Another contribution to the plight of the uninsured comes from all the various conditions and treatments the law says insurance companies MUST cover, which outlaws stripped-down insurance polices that would be within the reach of more people.

Fixing that is out, needless to say, since the people who most loudly profess their concern for the uninsured are generally the same people who would scream bloody murder at the thought of people who can't afford gold-plated insurance buying a more modest version they can actually afford. To many people, actually getting the disadvantaged more access to medical care is less important than being able to boast about being the sort of big-hearted idealist who believes the disadvantaged should have access to the best medical care imaginable, and big-hearted idealists don't lower themselves to facing the unpleasant tradeoffs that exist in a world of scarce resources.

It's certainly a plight that ought to inspire sympathy, harming people whose lives are already harder than most. It's not surprising that this issue would loom large in any criticism of the existing system. There's a question that is almost never raised, however: What does any of this have to do with the proposed reforms?

As a libertarian, I think these people could be helped far more effectively and justly through market processes and civil society, if only the government would get out of the way, but what if I were a statist setting out to aid the uninsured? For a moment, let's take it as given that any sort of deregulation is off the table, and that this is a problem that requires a government solution. In that case, the solution to the problem is quite obvious: Set up a government assistance program, funded out of general tax revenues, for people who can't get insurance and have it buy them medical care as if it were an insurance company. It would, essentially, be a “public option” specifically for people who are currently shut out of private sector insurance due to poverty or illness.

Problem solved, and with far less government expense, distortion of the marketplace, inconvenience to the general public, or divisive political acrimony than any of the actual major proposals. There is potential for fraud and abuse, but no more so than any other welfare program and probably less than many. As government solutions go, this is relatively simple, and it's really just a logical extension of things the government already does now. It's modest size and consistency with the precedent set by existing forms of government assistance would make it far less controversial than what's actually being proposed.

Supporters of greater government involvement in health care have other arguments for their program, of course, but the issue of the involuntarily uninsured is simply irrelevant to the question of whether the health care system as a whole needs some sort of radical change imposed by the government. If you're really concerned about a small segment of the population being deprived of a resource and want the government to make sure they have access to it, give them the resource. When faced with the plight of people who can't afford food, liberals generally advocate giving them food stamps or monetary benefits. They don't use the needs of the desperately poor to argue that the government should nationalize agriculture or run Public Grocery Stores to compete with Wal-Mart and Safeway.

This ought to be a political slam dunk, winning support in Congress from every Democrat and many moderate Republicans. Libertarians and some fiscal conservatives might object, but there would be nothing like the storm of controversy that has raged. It wouldn't preclude further legislation creating other government interventions relevant to other problem areas of the health care system if they are needed. If Obama had proposed it upon taking office it would have almost certainly passed already; that is surely a selling point given how frequently we're told that getting help to the uninsured is a dire necessity that must be accomplished quickly, before more lives are lost. The need to help people who can't get insurance is cited by liberal supporters of health care reform more than any other issue, and this would address that problem quickly and without holding the issue hostage to far more intense arguments over proposals for more sweeping government intervention.

There are limitations to my proposed alternative It wouldn't turn every American into a captive customer of the insurance industry. It wouldn't allow the government to turn private insurance into a concealed welfare program where taxes paid to support beneficiaries are disguised as payments to supposedly private companies for their services. It wouldn't give the government greater control over everybody's personal health care choices. It wouldn't create a means for the government to crowd private insurance out of existence altogether.

It would, in short, solve (as well as a government solution can, anyway) the problem that provides the lion's share of the justification for a major increase in the government's involvement in medicine care without setting the stage for the destruction of private sector health insurance and total state control of medicine. And what “reformer” worth his salt would want that?

The Trotsky myth

Over at A Terrible Blogger is born, blogger rmangum has a post speculating about why Leon Trotsky's reputation has been so strong among so many Western intellectuals, given the ample evidence that the idealized image of a man who would have created a humane, non-repressive communist state if only he hadn't been outmaneuvered and exiled by Stalin is pure fantasy. He attributes this to the fact that Trotsky's image was far more intellectual than that of Joseph Stalin, making him easier for Western intellectuals to identify with.

I think there's something to that. It fits in with the Western intelligentsia’s attitude toward the crimes of Stalin- the Moscow Show Trials and purges of his own Party comrades like Kamenev and Zinoviev always loom much larger than horrors like the Ukrainian terror famine, even though the latter took far more lives. The famine killed millions of nobodies, peasants, whereas the Show Trials were directed at people Western intellectuals actually identified with and felt empathy for. There’s another reason I would place more emphasis on, however.

The state always disappoints, if judged according to its own promises and propaganda, and communist states tend to do so more dramatically than most. The Western Left always seems to be looking for a left-wing despot to idolize, but as a given tyrant’s crimes become harder and harder to hide or ignore admiring him becomes increasingly awkward and a new, less tarnished idol needs to be found. Stalin gave way to Trotsky, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Min, and the like; now it's Che Guevara. The advantage Trotsky has over most of these rivals is that – like Che Guevara- he was never a head of state, and thus offers far more open space to imagine what might have been.

The fact that he died violently- again, like Che Guevara- gives even more chance to ask, "What if?", as well as adding the sanctity of martyrdom and the romance of a life gloriously burning out instead of fading away. Death also saved him from living long enough to be associated with communism as it looked in its later days in Europe- dull, gray, crumbling, unromantic, uncool.

If we're knowledgeable of Trotsky and honest with ourselves about him and about communist regimes generally, we know that what might have been would have been horrible, but his lack of political power means that, unlike Joseph Stalin (or Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, etc.), there is no mountain of human corpses tied prominently, specifically, and unambiguously to him that can spoil our fantasy by forcibly directing our attention to his true nature. Instead, communists and communist sympathizers can use him as a blank canvas to paint their own dreams.