One of the stranger things about daily life is that the most obvious answer, the one most likely to succeed at the lowest possible cost, is almost always declared unacceptable or even impossible by the people in charge. More often than not, the next best option is also eliminated, even laughed off. Somehow, the public debates always revolve around options that are unlikely to work or promise to make things worse.
This madhouse dynamic is most obvious when it comes to health care. The laws of supply and demand apply to all things. Prices go up when demand outstrips supply. Prices fall when supply exceed demand. Health care, like all other goods and services, must be rationed. That’s either done through price or through monopoly, which has failed everywhere it has been tried, leaving price as the best solution yet discovered.
Therefore, the most obvious way to make health care cheaper is to increase the supply. If we have more doctors, hospitals, pill makers and so forth, the price for their services will fall. The way government helps this along is by removing impediments to entering these fields. Government can also remove the artificial costs that make these fields less attractive. This is ground floor economics, yet it is never discussed anywhere by anyone.
Instead, the public debate over health care in America is one side with their insanely complex plans versus the other side with their insanely complex plans. ObamaCare is tens of thousands of pages of rules and regulations that no one comprehends. The results have been disastrous, but simply repealing it is considered madness. Instead, the only possible option is to pile on even more insanely complex plans, like throwing a drowning man an anchor. It’s as if the people in charge want the whole thing to collapse.
If you are a normal person looking at this, there are two ways you can go with this. One is you can doubt yourself and assume the issue must be vastly more complex than you can comprehend. I suspect many take this option, preferring to ignore it all rather than consider the other choice.
The other choice, the other way you can go is to try to understand why the people in charge insist on not doing the obvious, most sensible thing. Why are seemingly smart people allergic to the obvious? Mickey Kaus touches on this in this post:
If the Republican establishment is so panicked about Donald Trump — a wild, proto-fascist egomaniac with his finger on the button, in their telling — you’d think it would do the one thing that would almost certainly stop him: Surrender. By “surrender” I mean abandon their decades long dream of winning Latino votes through a magic pill called “comprehensive immigration reform” (known to its opponents as amnesty). After Romney’s 2012 defeat, conservatives like Charles Krauthammer argued that if they just caved to the Democrats on this one issue — immigration — they wouldn’t really have to change anything else. (“It requires but a single policy change ….”) In 2013, with Marco Rubio as their smiling pitch man, they tried desperately to sell out on immigration. They failed.
Today, Trump’s massive rallies can be interpreted as an expression of the historic populist undercurrent animating America’s white working class. Or they can be interpreted, with less sophistication, as Americans saying, as loudly as they can, “WE DON’T WANT YOUR F___ING ‘COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM.’” Either way, anger over elite “more immigration” plans is the molten core of the Trump eruption. Is there any doubt that if “comprehensive immigration reform” went away for good, Trumpism would wither? So why don’t Haley Barbour and Karl Rove call a big K Street meeting where they say, “Boys, we have to throw the damn yahoos this bone. We’re giving up on amnesty”?
My bet is most sensible people think that after the recent terror attacks, the people in charge will back off of open borders and the importation of Muslims. After all, the people are starting to get very pissed off over the Muslims. All across the West, the people are shouting, “Enough with the fucking Muslims!” Yet, the people in charge are out grinning like chimps promising to import even more Muslims. You would be forgiven for thinking that maybe they like it when Mohamed shoots up a mall or an office park.
That, I think, is the part that is hard for most people to face. It’s hard to imagine that President Obama or Angela Merkel or David Cameron really want to see their people suffer. It’s unfathomable that someone could be so deranged by self-loathing that they would commit their lives to pulling down the roof on their countries. It’s a madness that is impossible for normal people to contemplate, but what else is there?
The most obvious answer to the problem of Syed Farouk coming back from Saudi Arabia and murdering his co-workers at the Christmas party is to not import guys named Syed Farouk in the first place. But, that’s the obvious answer, the one most likely to succeed. Instead, the madmen in charge insist on building a police state so they can keep importing Muslim fanatics. There’s no reasoning with them. No amount of carnage will shake them of this disease that has driven them mad.
Politicians gain by favoring the stupid and useless. Good doesn’t bring suitcases full of money or gangs of thugs.
Regular people favor the good, and common sense, but are over matched because collectivists gang up, looters go where the loot is, and psychopaths will do great evil to gain power.
Democracy needs institutional defenses against evil ideologies like Islam or socialism. Like the ancient idea of making it legal to kill demagogues. We should definetly quit allowing tax exemptions for any organizations – selective enforcement will apparently assure unequal benefits. Also we must prevent courts from legislating somehow.
I’d say that it is fairly obvious that we have been, are, and will be, fucked.
Every so often due to carelessness or maybe profiteering some food problem erupts, like mad cow disease or crazy chicken fever or whatever. The solution is always obvious and accepted, to stop importation (or exportation) of said product. It’s somehow easy to to see that solution when people have a common bond and one mind. With the problem of illegal aliens is there are many axes to grind and many false arguments used to disguise true motives. We must stop the enemy, our elected officials forcing these invaders upon us regardless their origin, be it south of the border or Syrians being sent to infiltrate the west. BTW, Charles Krauthammer is not a conservative.
Imagine if one out of every million Toyotas exploded taking out a city block. We would shut down Toyota. Look at the panic over VW rigging their emissions. They are facing tens of billions sin lawsuits.
“Prices go up when demand outstrips supply. Prices fall when supply exceed demand.”
UNLESS, of course, either the demand, OR the supply, is artificially “tweaked”.
Let’s have a look at higher “education”, or Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice.
Corn ethanol certainly jumped the MOMENT it became “mandatory” as a fuel adulterant, as did the cost of vehicles with engines redesigned to “accommodate” it. I’ve noticed a gradual lack of ” up to” 10, (or 15)% numbers disappearing on “MAY contain Ethanol” stickers on fuel pumps.
In idle moments I like to think of myself as a future historian, writing (magnetic-etheric visualising?) about these troubled times of ours. One thing I imagine that I would soon fasten on would be that not only did many not notice what was happening to their world but among them were people who actively sought to increase the problems.
But more astonishing to any future historian — and one that would take some explaining — is that the ones who made matters worse (either for personal gain or through plain stupidity) had the continual, even aggressive, support of people lower down the ladder who wanted the obvious problems and the threats to continue or even increase.
The historian would study the writings and the footage of our time and see people angrily wanting the demise of their safe, sensible world to come faster and faster, and wonder not only how it happened but puzzle how to explain it satisfactorily. How, the historian will wonder, did it happen when someone said “muslim killer” who turned out to be both a believer in Islam and a murderer, that hordes of non-muslim people (who failed to see they had most to lose by the imposition of a misogynistic, narrow-minded and anti-freedom death cult in their cosy world) would attack the person who stated an undeniable truth?
I would love to be there and see how that can be explained away.
Garet Garret, The Revolution Was
In a revolutionary situation mistakes and failures are not what they seem. They are scaffolding. Error is not repealed. It is compounded by a longer law, by more decrees and regulations, by further extension of the administrative hand….When you have passed one miracle you have to pass another one to take care of it, so it was with the New Deal.
The revolutionary historian…. will be much less impressed by the fact that it was peacefully accomplished than by the marvelous technique of bringing it to pass not only within the (traditional) form but within the word, so that people were all the while fixed in the delusion that they were talking about the same things because they were using the same words. Opposite and violently hostile ideas were represented by the same words. This was the American people’s first experience with dialectic according to Marx and Lenin.
I have long described the United States government decision process as follows :
A major problem / issue is identified and a team of experts is assigned to recommend the optimum solution. The team of experts determine that the best approach to solve the problem/issue is to identity the most effective, cost efficient and capable of being implemented in the most time efficient manner possible. The team presents the details of their proposed actions for solving the problem/issue to those who sponsored their investigation and the sponsors promptly dismissed the team’s proposal as being unworkable.
The ultimate result is the that the investigation recomodations are never approved and implemented and another team is appointed and directed to conduct another independent investigation and the process is repeated again.
The lesson from the above is simply that the investigation results will never see the light of day, as the optimum solution will never be implemented because of the large number of self interest’s that will never agree to implement the recommended plan.
Exactly this: import the Instruments of our Demise, ie., Moslems, and then double down on the burgeoning police state to secure the safety of the citizens. Never do the obvious, which is halt all Moslem immigration, close down mosques preaching jihad, and tell the current population to assimilate (for real) or exit, stage left. No, the Elites will continue their deconstruction of the Western world until enough people are willing to stop them. By that time: civil war.
“the madmen in charge insist on building a police state so they can keep importing Muslim fanatics”. Other way around.
Yes. you nailed it. Islam is their sword.
That is the great debate, isn’t it? Are they building out all of these “security” measures to convince the public it is OK to flood the nation with migrants. Or, is it they are using “terrorism” to justify building out the police state?
My sense is it is both.
The chicken, or the egg? First, they imported scads of undocumented voters, then, to prove the theory that progressive love conquers all they imported an openly hostile population. Like a drug which is discovered to have an unintended benefit greater than the design, they quickly grasped the symbiotic benefits this presented for the power of the state. Always at the root of their thinking was a giddiness that they could finally project a future where unprecedented electronic wizardry would secure their lives and opinions from their real boogey man, an armed and cantankerous people who valued liberty and other quaint things past their due date. All citizens who were not violent would embrace the surveillance state out of self interest. What conservative does not embrace powerful measures of security? It is beyond his ability to imagine that, were there little domestic security, there would also by necessity be no Muslims here.
We don’t ask what St. Frank Roosevelt would have done, because we already know.
Whatever the reason, most on the Right see this as the beginning of a century of bloodshed while the Left sees it as the beginning of a New Era of Peace and Prosperity. Personally, I see historical parallels with 9th century Viking invasions.