I was listening to an interview with Democratic Rep John Conyers where he said these words (and I will quote them exactly)
… the public option’s only available, which is the only way you’ll manage costs and give some competition to thirteen hundred other health insurance companies, the only way he could have gotten that through is that progressives held their nose and voted for the plan anyway.
I included the last portion only to show you how clever the progressives are in that they try very hard to keep the Progressive political label separate from the Progressive educational label, even though both are born of an interesting merger of Messianism and Darwinism at the end of the 19th century. In other words, our schools are supported by the state that needs them.
But what I really want you to notice is his truly extraordinary statement about competition. There are, he tells us, 1300 insurance companies.
But they don’t have any competition.
The only way they can have any competition is if there is a state agency that oversees a 1301’st insurance option.
Rep. Conyers is a very smart man and had to know what he was saying. Either, therefore, he is brazenly dishonest, which I don’t have reason to believe, or he is thinking within a paradigm that prevents him from seeing the most blatantly obvious facts.
If 1300 insurance companies are not competing with each other, and that is possible, then there is already too much of a public option involved. What I mean is that in any market, if you have 1300 companies sharing the market and not competing with each other, it is because the government has already divided the market up into the shares each company gets.
Now, to increase competition, he says, Rep Conyers wants to introduce a force that has no fiscal responsibility, no need to make a profit, and no reputation for running things well anywhere else.
We are watching the dominoes fall on what I have called “the catastrophic continuum.”
A long time ago, we decided to socialize large portions of our economy. Many people benefited from this process, especially the very poor or the leaders of the largest companies.
But a force was put in motion that, in my opinion, guarantees the end of free society.
Put simply, when the wrong level of government identifies a problem that others (citizens or politicians) ought to be solving, it never passes up the opportunity to seize power.
It displaces those who are responsible to fulfill the duty in the first place. Those displaced are delighted, even convincing themselves that they are free.
But the solutions offered by the state inevitably, as a matter of scale, create even more problems than they initially tried to deal with.
But they control reporting and accounting, so they can, as we say, cook the books.
So when the seven problems that replace the one problem are realized by their victims, they feel helpless and call out to the only power big enough to come to their aid: the state.
And the generous and kind-hearted state, funded by the generous and kind-hearted (though increasingly irresponsible) citizens, multiplies the seven problems by another seven, each crippling one set of citizens by usurping their duties and another by putting them under its matriarchal control.
Look at Social Security, welfare, the VA hospitals, public education, Medicare, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (during their state owned eras), etc. etc.
As the state expands, people are left with an increasingly empty sense that they don’t influence their own lives very much, so they’re going to go ahead and make a difference.
So they get into politics.
Our state is what it is today because the American people are fundamentally irresponsible. That may expalin why any politician who calls for responsibility is so dreadfully feared by the Progressives who control the media and the state and the schools.
It’s been a deep week in politics. I wish I had time to gather my thoughts more tightly together. I love government. I love my country. I just wish each would mind their own business instead of imposing their insecurities on others in the guise of ideologies.
