DE-COMPLICATE
We have unnecessarily complicated too many areas of human existence.
Complexity justifies even more government intervention, leading to even more impenetrable complexity. After all, if health-care costs are the issue, it isn’t very difficult. As every economist knows, third-party transactions are always more expensive, whether the third party is an insurer or the government. If I go to a movie, I’ve got a general idea of what it ought to cost me.
If I’m expecting to pay ten bucks and the clerk says “That’ll be $273.95,” I would notice. But most of the people in a hospital waiting room have no idea whether the procedure costs $200 or $2,000 or $20,000—and they don’t care: their only concern is whether the third party will grant access to it. I know what a movie ticket costs, I’ve no idea what a broken leg costs. Nor does anybody else—because there are so many third parties interceding themselves between your bone and the doctor that there is no longer a real market price for a broken leg. So if, as Massachusetts has done, you mandate universal third-partyism, your costs by definition will increase. There’s no mystery about it. As a businessman, Mitt Romney should have known that.
Third-party transactions are always inflationary. So let’s return as much of daily life as possible to a two- party system—buyer and seller. You’ll be amazed how affordable it is. Compare cellphone and laptop and portable music system prices with what they were in the Eighties, and then ask yourself how it would have turned out with a government-regulated system of electronic insurance plans.
DE-CREDENTIALIZE
The most important place to start correcting America’s structural defects is in the schoolhouse. The Democrats justified ObamaCare on the grounds of “controlling costs.” What about applying the same argument to education? The object should be not to universalize college and therefore defer adulthood even further, but to telescope schooling. Even if one over-looks the malign social engineering, much of what goes on in the American schoolhouse is merely passing the time. In 2011, a study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that fewer than half of America’s undergraduates had taken a single course in the previous semester that required twenty pages of written work. A third had not taken a single course demanding forty pages of reading. Forty-five percent of students showed no improvement in critical thinking, reasoning, or writing by the end of their sophomore years.11 Writing, reading, thinking: who needs it? Certainly not the teachers of tomorrow: students majoring in education showed the least gains in learning.
Six-figure universal college education will only reinforce a culture of hermetically sealed complacency. Instead, it should be possible to teach what a worthless high school diploma requires by the age of fourteen. You could then do an extra two years on top of that and give people a
College should be for those who wish to pursue genuine disciplines, not the desultory salad bar of Women’s “Studies,” Queer “Studies,” or 99 percent of the other “studies.” As a culture, we do too much “studying” (mostly of our navels, if not lower parts) and not enough doing. Vocational education, even for what we now dignify as “professions,” would be much better. So would privatizing education entirely.
DIS-ENTITLE
It’s not so extraordinary that on the brink of fiscal catastrophe the Obama Democrats should propose the Ultimate Entitlement—health care.
After all, the Entitlement Utopia is where they reside. What’s more remarkable is that a couple of years earlier the Bush Republicans should have introduced a brand new entitlement all of their own—prescription drugs.
Entitlements are the death of responsible government: they offend against every republican precept. Regardless of government revenues or broader economic conditions, they “mandate” spending: they are thus an offense against one of the most basic democratic principles—that a parliament cannot bind its successors. In a sense, they negate the American revolution.
They are taxation without representation—for, as we well know, no matter how the facts on the ground evolve over the decades, entitlements are insulated from both parliamentary oversight and election results. That is why the battle has to be won in the broader culture. Entitlements have to be delegitimized. “Human dignity,” writes Paul Rahe, “is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one’s own affairs.”12 When the state annexes that responsibility, the citizenry are indeed mere sheep to the government shepherd.
DE-NORMALIZE
You can win this. Statists overreach. They did on “climate change” scaremongering, and the result is that it’s over. Hollywood buffoons will continue to lecture us from their mega-mansions that we should toss out our washers and beat our clothes dry on the rocks singing native chants down by the river, but only suckers are listening to them.
They overreached fiscally, too. On January 20, 2009, Year Zero of the Democrat utopia, it seemed like a smart move to make “trillion” a routine part of the Washington lexicon. After all, what’s easier to spend than a trillion we don’t have? If most of us cannot conceive of what a “trillion” is in any meaningful sense anyway, how can we conceive of ever having to “repay” a trillion? There was method in the madness of the Democrats’ baseline inflation. Yet they never quite closed the deal, and now all its many citations do is remind even the most innumerate that the Democrat project is a crock, and the word itself is merely shorthand for “money we don’t have and will never have.” The spendaholics tried to normalize “trillion.” They failed. Let’s keep it de-normalized and, while we’re at it, de-normalize “billion,” too—or, at any rate, “tens of.” Units that are beyond the size of your pocket calculator should not be part of the public discourse.
Nevertheless, both these victories were close-run things. Had it not been for the leaked emails of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit warm-mongers (showing the collusion and corruption of scientific “peer review”) and had it not been for a small band of grossly abused “climate denialists” to leak them to and get the word out, the Copenhagen deal might well have passed. Liberty cannot survive if only a few are eternally vigilant. We need more. We took our eyes off the colleges, and the high schools, and the grade schools, and these and many other institutions were coopted by forces deeply hostile to the American idea. So push back, beginning in kindergarten. Changing the culture (the schools, the churches, the movies, the TV shows) is more important than changing the politics.
An election is one Tuesday every other November. The culture is every day, every month, every year. Politicians are, for the most part, a craven, finger-in-the-windy bunch. Like Milton Friedman says, don’t wait for the right people to get elected; create the conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right thing.
