“Once upon a time all governments had monarchies. That observation didn’t prove monarchy was a better system.”
That’s John Cochrane describing the common argument among health care “advocates” that no free-market in health care exists anywhere in the world. By the way, I suppose you can say the same thing about government schooling.
This is directly from the Progressive bible.
The argument goes, history ultimately proceeds from bad to good. Louis XV and Ivan the Terrible were bad. Therefore Progressivism is superior to economic freedom, and therefore socialized medicine and education are superior.
If you disagree, you are a cave man. Not a GEICO cave man (hipster).
The other argument is that we are the only modern advanced nation that has not completely socialized medicine, and that we had better get with the program.
This argument has been around a long time, witness that Joe Biden avers that he had been waiting for it every Christmas Eve since he got a Lionel train around the tree, and we finally got Obamacare under the tree after the Cornhusker Kickback. This was a Big Deal! OK, Joe added a word, which if used by Dick Cheney to tell Patrick Leahy to cool it is offensive.
Which brings us to Progressivism being old, outdated — popular when monarchy (Duke of Windsor) and cigarette holders (FDR, Wallis Simpson) were in vogue.
I am not saying there are no new good ideas, or that old ideas are all bad or good. Every day — check that
— every year, assuming I have bothered to plug myself in, there are new ideas for me, and one thinks of how impossibly stupid I could have been about what I was talking about. It is easier to admit if I go back a decade or more. Then again…not all of it was wrong, far from it.
Right now we are ruled by another set of old guys, yuppies, who are stuck in time. A great many never took a good laboratory science course where they learned, for example, facts like valences, or the limits of what could be derived as conclusive. As one of WC’s correspondents said recently, they do not know enough theory to clean bar glasses.
Thus five hundred billion can roll of Mike Geithner’s lips as if he were asking for a half packet of equal in his coffee, but then he is if anything a gifted presenter. Maybe he really believes it.
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