Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
Lies
Big lies aren't new. About seventy
years ago, Hitler created several, and FDR created several others. The USSR was
based on big lies, and NATO was based, in part, on another set of big lies.
Fortunately, the U.S.A had a few leaders in the sixty years who were
fundamentally honest. Eisenhower told us to beware the military industrial
complex, and he was ignored. He was one of the very few fundamentally honest
ones, but we have had some leaders who were partly honest but greatly misled,
Johnson for one. Jimmy Carter for another, but he was not much of a leader.
Then there is the kind of leader
that is fundamentally honest but has been misled and takes the misleading as
fundamentally true. Gerry Ford and Ronald Reagan were such people. Going into
the details of each individual is not helpful, the important things are the
lies, how they are created, how to detect them, and how to eliminate them.
Redefining the terms that refer to the matter is the first step. The next step
is to act on the redefined matter, as if it were important. The debate over
"gay marriage" is illustrative.
The fundamental issue behind the
matter of gay marriage is not marriage, nor is it sexual preference or
orientation; the basic issue is whether all people should have the same rights.
A wide variety of government programs are available only to married people,
which clearly shows discrimination against people who are not married. The
easiest and fairest way to eliminate this disparity would be grant all rights
and privileges that married people have to people who are not married, or to
eliminate all privileges that married people have. In either case, everyone
would be treated equally. Instead of attempting to eliminate the inequality,
some people decided that they wanted those privileges, regardless of the fact
that they were discriminatory. The whole matter of governments being involved
in registering interpersonal relationships is relatively new. A few hundred
years ago people would have a local religious person give their unions a blessing,
or they might just live together without the benefit of clergy and call
themselves married. Either a religious or common law marriage was considered to
be valid. The registration of marriages happened at different times in
different places, but it was always a way to restrict the rights of people to
do as they wished, and it was an attempt to hold men accountable for any
children that they sired. But that was a few hundred years ago. Now the
registration of marriages bring with them a variety of privileges that may be
worth a significant amount of money to some people, and people who would not
get married for reproductive purposes want to get married for financial
reasons. The resulting change in marriage laws continues to move along, and it
probably will continue until a substantial part of the world has enacted such
regulations. I wonder when single heterosexual people will sue for elimination
of the financial advantages.
That is a minor issue and watching
it progress is almost humorous. The issue where redefinition has taken place
that is a major issue and may become a much larger issue is
"healthcare".
I don't like or use the term
"healthcare", because that implies health, and that is something that
is personal and only affected by individual activities, treatments, etc., so
generalizing health to the population at large is impossible. That extension
has changed the discussion about access to medical care, medical costs, and so
on from a matter of personal well-being to a matter of the health of a population.
Medical care is and should be dependent on medical problems, but the
politicians, ideologues, and popular media have changed it into something that
it is not and cannot be, a national problem; and now another President is
trying to make a personal matter a matter of concern for the country at large.
From experience we know that when the Feds get involved in something, quality
will deteriorate and costs will skyrocket. At present there is a minor problem
with the cost of medical care rising faster than the CPI, and that is a problem
for some people. There is also a mismatch between he supply and demand for
medical services and facilities; the medical people like to live in nice
places, while people who are sickly tend to live in other places. There has
also been encouragement for people to seek medical care for problems that can't
be helped significantly by medical care.
As the discussion is being played
out in the press and by the politicians, the quality and availability of
medical services are not the main issues; centralized payment and oversight of
the medical system are the principal matters. Availability and payment may be
major issues to particular individuals, but it is not important to the society
as a whole.
This is not to suggest that medical
services should not be available to everyone, but the drive for
"healthcare reform" will lead to higher medical costs, at least for a
period of time until the government takes complete control over the medical
establishment. At present, about a quarter of all medical costs are for
administering insurance, and there is no reason for that to decrease with
additional government regulations on the practice of medicine. It would be
reasonable to expect to see the expenses of most medical practices to increase
as additional reporting and record-keeping requirements are introduced by
government regulators. The costs to insurance companies that would be increased
by government regulations would also increase the net costs to most people.
At present, employment based medical
insurance is a transfer of money from healthy people to people with major and
chronic medial problems. For a healthy person the cost of insurance exceeds by
a large amount the cost of medical care. People in the insurance industry would
say that allows the insurance companies to build up reserves for the eventual
illnesses of healthy people, which would be reasonable, if it worked that way,
but the insurance companies simply convert those premiums into profits. For
most individuals it would make more sense to put some money away for eventual
major medical problems. That would pay off for many people, but for others
their estates would simply be larger.
Instead of learning the facts about
medical costs and insurance in the the popular press, we hear about a crisis,
and we hear about ideas to create a huge centralized bureaucracy to handle the
medical insurance situation. Some people even put forth the idea that the
government bureaucracy should be the actual insurer. None of those ideas would
help to correct any of the problems in the medical business (and there are some
problems), and those ideas would create worse problems, if they were put into
action.
These are only two matters where an
issue has been defined into a major problem. There are many other issues that
would be improved greatly, if the issue were discussed fully and openly, rather
than in the way that the press has defined the matter. Other such recent
matters include the invasion of Iraq, global warming, and even the present economic
recession and its causes and potential cures.
