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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s either done through price or through monopoly, which has failed everywhere it has been tried, leaving price as the best solution yet discovered.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s as if the people in charge want the whole thing to collapse.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>:<\/p>\n If the Republican establishment is so panicked about Donald Trump \u2014 a wild, proto-fascist egomaniac with his finger on the button, in their telling \u2014 you\u2019d think it would do the one thing that would almost certainly stop him: Surrender. By \u201csurrender\u201d I mean abandon their decades long dream of winning Latino votes through a magic pill called \u201ccomprehensive immigration reform\u201d (known to its opponents as amnesty). After Romney\u2019s 2012 defeat, conservatives like Charles Krauthammer argued that if they just caved to the Democrats on this one issue \u2014 immigration \u2014 they wouldn\u2019t really have to change anything else. (\u201cIt requires but a single policy change \u2026.\u201d) In 2013, with Marco Rubio as their smiling pitch man, they tried desperately to sell out on immigration. They failed.<\/em><\/p>\n Today, Trump\u2019s massive rallies can be interpreted as an expression of the historic populist undercurrent animating America\u2019s white working class. Or they can be interpreted, with less sophistication, as Americans saying, as loudly as they can, \u201cWE DON\u2019T WANT YOUR F___ING \u2018COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM.’\u201d Either way, anger over elite \u201cmore immigration\u201d plans is the molten core of the Trump eruption. Is there any doubt that if \u201ccomprehensive immigration reform\u201d went away for good, Trumpism would wither? So why don\u2019t Haley Barbour and Karl Rove call a big K Street meeting where they say, \u201cBoys, we have to throw the damn yahoos this bone. We\u2019re giving up on amnesty\u201d?<\/em><\/p>\n 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<\/a>. All across the West, the people are shouting, \u201cEnough with the fucking Muslims!\u201d Yet, the people in charge are out grinning like chimps promising to import even more Muslims<\/a>. You would be forgiven for thinking that maybe they like it when Mohamed shoots up a mall or an office park.<\/p>\n That, I think, is the part that is hard for most people to face. It\u2019s hard to imagine that President Obama or Angela Merkel or David Cameron really want to see their people suffer. It\u2019s 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\u2019s a madness that is impossible for normal people to contemplate, but what else is there?<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s no reasoning with them. No amount of carnage will shake them of this disease that has driven them mad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading