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And Then What?

Almost as a passing point in a long and interesting post, Arnold Kling says:

So, we should spend less on medicine and more on….what? Big-screen TV’s? smart phones? professional sports? My guess is that if Callahan got his wish and medical spending were reduced, he would not be happy with where money is spent, and his desire for socialist control would only increase.

And that my friends is at the root of this whole health care thing. You see it popping up in Environmentalism too. When inexpensive solutions to environmental problems reveal themselves, the green movement quickly turns against them. for example, if climate change was such a massive disaster, why isn’t nuclear much more popular? (I understand it can only power something like 40% to 50% of our needs – but that is still a massive improvement from where we are now). And now you see the greens coming out against solar (it makes the desert landscape ugly, and it uses lots of water to keep the panels clean), against wind (they ruin the view of the Kennedy family in Massachusetts, plus they kill some birds), against clean hydro (it kills fish), and so on. The point is that much of the modern environmental movement is a dressed up version of socialist control and massive market and capitalist hatred that is framed in a more “pragmatic” debate. The true greens will only be happy when our ability to produce and consume and trade are severely inhibited. If we were 100% carbon free right now, I guarantee the greens would still say what we are doing is unsustainable.

The same is true with health care. If politicians were serious about reform, it could be done with the stroke of a pen. But they are not. They are serious about further choking out market forces and they are really serious about imposing their version of top-down control on the rest of us.

Indeed, if health expenditures were halved, what would the elites have us turn our attention to?

One Response to “And Then What?”

  1. Harry says:

    If health expenditures were halved, they would still want our land, or if we didn’t have any of that, then whatever we had left over.

    I once asked the man who founded my company (when I was seventeen) what he would do if we ever became a communist country, and he very offhandedly said, “Well I’d be the comissar.”

    Then, I had no moral or econimic ammunition to reply, but I remember being appalled, having been taught about Machiavelli by my communist Hungarian sophomore medieval history teacher. From that time I vowed never to calculate so coldly.

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