Die Quickly or Get Rich

Apparently, some congressman named Grayson has mouthed off about how the Republicans’ health reform strategy is to let the sick “die quickly.” Sad, but true.

I may try to formulate a rational approach to health care policy, but the bottom line is that it is not some kind of idealistic crusade for me. The bottom line is that if I run out of rationalizations, I’m not going to argue about it.

In my experience, all it takes is one spell of unemployment, coupled with an intractable, expensive health condition, in order to become radicalized about the issue. Twenty years ago, I used to care about libertarian and conservative principles in all things; not any more. After adding to personal health problems with expensive health conditions for my wife and daughter, along with other periods of unemployment, I no longer have any sympathy for people trying desperately to keep their income tax bills down to four figures.

It’s not that I think that I “deserve” free health care, or that people have a “right” to health care of any kind, or that I think everything would be done better by some gigantic central government entity. It’s a simple case of self-defense.

On certain issues, like this one, it’s personal. I may try to be rational about it, but I’m on a slippery slope to becoming feral and thoroughly unprincipled.

Crisis in the Education Cathedral

John J. Reilly, my favorite Roman Catholic writer,* points to an article called A Just War Theory of Homeschooling, which proposes the following:

The common approach to homeschooling today is inherently dangerous, because it may go against what our entire Western tradition and the Catholic Church herself teach about the education of the young – that education should not be done in the home, at least not for long, except during a time and place of crisis.

We will put aside the question of whether anyone, including Catholics, should be concerned with what the Catholic Church seems to teach about the education of the young. I’ve never been to a Catholic school, but I’ve known a few Catholics, atheists, and Protestants who have, and I’ve watched The Blues Brothers several times. Apparently they are effective at teaching certain things, but they also set the standard for authoritarianism with scary floating nuns.

Anyway, it is naive to frame this article as “an indictment of the Libertarian Right,” as if the author had teased out a commentary about American third parties from a papal encyclical. Fahey actually concludes that homeschooling is not inherently anticlerical and that the crisis justifying it will not soon pass; however, he does fret over “a rising individualism that is worming its way into our literature on homeschooling,” as well as the alarming fact that “homeschooling has risen alongside home-churching.” Darn that Luther! If only the people weren’t able to read the New Testament in their native language!

On the other side of the spectrum, the public will finally get a coherent picture of some present-day left-wing homeschoolers:

Home schooling sneaked up on us, or at least on me — Leslie has been mulling it over far longer. About three years ago, she started to burn out on her low-paid, high-stress job as a political organizer for a lefty nonprofit that was working to end the war in Iraq. At the time, we were in the not-so-unusual New York position of spending her entire income, and then some, on paying a nanny to spend far more waking hours with our children than we did.

Leslie decided to untangle this conundrum by quitting her job, ditching the nanny [...] and handling the childcare herself, at least for a little while. [...] She started hosting a weekly playgroup in our Brooklyn backyard and writing a blog, and before our kids were even 4 years old she’d gotten hooked into the New York “home preschool” network, a bunch of smart, high-powered, Type A women who’ve taken on their kids’ education as a challenge.

This struck a chord with Leslie in several different ways. She’s a hardcore nonconformist — yeah, she’s a lifelong lefty, but one closer to anarchism than socialism ….

Seriously, I don’t understand why anyone who claims to be a “liberal” or “conservative” even bothers with public schools. They don’t succeed at doing anything on either agenda, actually. Their main function is to subordinate the child’s curiousity and creativity to institutional mediocrity and boredom.

We’re not ready to surrender our kids, and ourselves, to a 10-month-a-year, all-day institution whose primary goal, at least at this age, seems to be teaching kids how to function within a 10-month-a-year, all-day institution.

The liberals who promote mandatory universal public education claim that it is necessary to sacrifice one’s own children for the sake of the greater society, and the conservatives who promote mandatory universal public education claim that it is necessary to sacrifice one’s own children as an example to the others. Both are really bad reasons to treat your children like dirty laundry.

O’Hehir describes the hilarious stupidity of the conventional attachment to public schooling:

Some people seem genuinely disturbed by our decision, on philosophical or political grounds, as if by keeping a couple of 5-year-olds out of kindergarten we have violated the social contract. Specifically, we have rejected the mainstream consensus that since education is a good thing, more of it — more formal, more “academic,” reaching ever deeper into early childhood and filling up more of the day and more of the year — is better for society and better for all children. This is almost an article of faith in contemporary America, but it’s also one that’s debatable at best and remains largely unsupported by research data….

The real purpose of all this formal schooling is to get the kids out of the house and train them to stand in line and follow instructions while mommy and daddy get back to their ultra-important lives as economic production units….

Do we regret not exposing our kids to the intense cultural melting pot of New York’s school system? Sometimes, sure. But we’re also not exposing them to bullying, arbitrary systems of order and discipline, age-inappropriate standards of behavior, and the hegemony of corporatized kid culture.

Go, go, liberal anarchists! O’Hehir goes even further when describing the writings of an unschooling mother: “the breezy, dry English wit was akin to sticking a fork in the haunches of the angry and puritanical razorback hog that is the American Internet-reading public.”

Despite the high-pitched squealing of frantic public school defenders, I doubt that homeschooling will take over more than 10% of the population. It just isn’t practical for a lot of people, and there are many middle-class rewards for child-herding. In some towns, the only public gathering places are Walmart and the public school gymnasium, and the only newspaper content comes from high school sports.

Nevertheless, if you are a true believer in the Enlightenment Project, it seems very dangerous to have a “parallel society” consisting of the smartest, most independent parents and their children, apparently in league with the freaks and the paranoid hilljacks. It undermines the whole logic behind modern democracy to suggest that society may not come together in blessed political unity after a fractious debate, that a minority could split off and follow their own paths while claiming to still be a part of society. Yet, since modern public education does not emerge organically from local communities, it can hardly be said to be intrinsic to them; and the ahistorical, anti-intellectual mythos surrounding American public education will not survive a dramatic upheaval.

*John J. Reilly is currently my favorite Roman Catholic writer that I’ve actually read. I haven’t yet finished G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man,  and I listened to Thomas Cahill’s books on CD.

Illegal Aliens

Hercules Mulligan makes the argument here that America was founded as a Christian nation, and this is a recurring thesis among anyone interested in America’s founding fathers. However, he cites mainly John Jay and Alexander Hamilton for support, and otherwise refers to the historical background. Here is his summary:

Our Founding Fathers established a Christian nation – not the kind of Christian nation that was many of the Catholic nations in medieval Europe – but the Christian nation composed of a Christian majority, a nation that recognizes that our inalienable rights are given to us by God, and that it is the Bible that forms the basis of our fundamental laws. That is the Christian nation established by our Founders. It allows those of other religions to live here freely, and they are not persecuted for their beliefs; however, it is Christianity that was meant to shape our world-view as a nation, and others are simply allowed to live here freely and enjoy the benefits thereof.

This approach shows that America was mostly founded by Christians, that its founders assumed most of the citizens were Christians, and that its founders assumed that their understanding of Christian values were necessary for founding the kind of nation they envisioned. It also shows why this should be OK with Jews and Christians whose views were not explicitly represented, as well as those of other religions:  ”It certainly is very desirable that a pacific disposition should prevail among all nations. The most effectual way of producing it, is by extending the prevalence and influence of the gospel. REAL Christians will abstain from violating the rights of others, and therefore will not provoke war” (John Jay).

The problem is that from a legal and political standpoint, America’s founders did not “establish” a Christian nation. They did not dictate a particular set of beliefs or even require that anything about the nation be maintained as specifically “Christian.” They could have done this, but for some reason they did not. Personally, I think they were reacting to the 17th-century European religious wars and maybe also trying to win support from politically influential Jews, Freemasons, Deists, or Unitarians.

Now then, we can look back on that and say that all these things they said and did are obviously “Christian,” but they just didn’t spell it out. But is that the meaning of Christianity? Is a “Christian” anyone who acts like a Christian and talks like a Christian, who talks about God and about morality, but never goes to church, never talks about salvation through Jesus Christ, and doesn’t hold any particular set of beliefs as necessarily true? No, nowadays any Protestant Christian would call such a person a “New Ager” or a “seeker,” someone who thinks he is saved by works instead of by faith, or even a cultist, but not a “Christian.”

I just listened to a speech by a former politician who cited his reasons why he believed that America was founded as a Christian nation:  because the Declaration of Independence refers to a Creator, because numerous inscriptions and plaques in Washington DC dedicate things to God, because America’s founding documents imply Christian values, and because the legislative chambers feature a picture of Moses. However, the same argument could be used to show that America was founded as a Jewish nation, a Mormon nation, a Moslem nation, a Jehovah’s Witness nation, or a Branch Davidian nation. There is no specifically Christian witness, just a lot of references to an ambiguous Creator God and some morality derived from the Old Testament (“Judeo-Christian” values, not “Christian” values).

I don’t have a problem with this ambiguity, but there is no basis for claiming that it presents a Christian witness. Christianity comes from the people and from the local communities of people, not from the government. It is entirely possible that America is not sustainable as a free nation and a constitutional republic without a majority Christian population and the tacit acknowledgment by state and federal government of the importance of religion.

However, if the people of this country abandon their cultural heritage and religious traditions, there is no law, no judge, and no police force who should straighten them up ideologically in some kind of parody of 1555 England, 1642 England, 1794 France, 1979 Iran, or 2009 Saudi Arabia. There is no “Christian” version of brutal government oppression that I want to establish, and that would be the only possible reason for claiming the legal and political establishment of a “Christian nation.”

Protesting Government Indoctrination

Today I heard a radio program about the national protest against government indoctrination. Apparently, September 8th of this week was some kind of nationwide protest by conservatives, in which they pulled their children out of public school for a day in order to protect them from government-sponsored propaganda intended to indoctrinate them into accepting a socialistic, authoritarian worldview. I’m told that these patriotic parents were rebelling against a fascistic leader cult and showing their children the true meaning of liberty-loving independent thinking by boycotting the government indoctrination centers for a day. Hurray for these brave souls rising up against their oppressors for the sake of their children!

UPDATE:

Oops! I guess it wasn’t a boycott of public schools after all. Following in the footsteps of those other socialist pinko figureheads, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, President Obama had decided to address public school children directly while they were in captivity. The rebellious parents were in fact NOT protesting against a president addressing a captive audience of children or children being forced to accept socialistic secular humanist indoctrination.

NO, these “conservative” parents are actually all in favor of public schools storing their children away for them every day and forcing them to accept lies. They just wanted this particular politician to stay within his daily allotment of free universal media coverage, his weekly allotment of exclusive radio airtime, and his quarterly allotment of free prime-time television airtime, and not to interrupt children in the middle of their evolutionary biology or sex ed classes.

This type of “conservative” parent disgusts me because they are so desperate to enlist the government in educating their children. All they want is for the government to “do its job” of telling their children what to think and how to “socialize” properly with their peers, and they will go to great lengths to make sure that everyone is spending that $10,000 per child in just the right ways. Every time I hear about these pathetic losers mobbing school board meetings, harassing teachers, or whining about dress codes, all I can think about is how they deserve what they get in terms of dumbed-down children. They’re lazy, self-centered, and hypocritical, and the liberal public school advocates are perfectly correct in despising them.

UPDATE:

Dana writes:

Both Bush’s went much further than Obama toward making our schools a national stage for federal education politics.  Granted, Obama wishes to go further still, but the course has already been charted.

For twenty years, we steadily shift the power in education from the local community toward the federal government, and do nothing but occasionally grumble.  The president makes a speech, however, and we call for a National Keep Your Child at Home Day.  Suddenly, we’re worried about brainwashing in a “totalitarian-type telecast” befitting “banana dictators.”

FFQF: Comments Policy

 

The Censure of Fools or Knaves is Applause.

Samuel Adams to Elizabeth Adams, December 13, 1778; in The Founders on the Founders (2008), ed. by Kaminski.

Sick and Wrong

Matt Taibbi is wrong on several points, but I enjoyed his take on the situation:

Sick and Wrong

I like this:

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

However, he is wrong when he says that we have an “urgent national emergency” and when he says that a single-payer system is used by “every single developed country outside the United States (with the partial exceptions of Holland and Switzerland, which offer limited and highly regulated private-insurance options).” I don’t think Taibbi knows anything about Singapore or Germany, for example.

What Taibbi probably meant to say was that every developed country has some kind of system to provide health care to every citizen, whether it is through a single-payer system, a government-run insurance plan, a government subsidy for private insurance, or government-run health care facilities. The United States, on the other hand, rations health care according to the intrinsic value of each individual, which is calculated by dividing their financial net worth by the number of incurable diseases they have.

Taibbi also thinks that doctors have to fill out claim forms for “each and every one” of the “more than 1,300 private insurers in this country.” Well, they are all “private” only in the sense that they aren’t centrally controlled by the federal government; and no doctor deals with all 1,300 of them, since most states are dominated by two or three.

Basically, Taibbi is blinded by his adherence to a single-payer system. It is true that a centralized administration can lead to cost savings in any industry, due to the elasticity of clerical productivity versus demand for it. However, it does not necessarily lead to cost savings, especially if it ends up being contracted out. If the US ever offered a less restrictive public insurance plan than Medicare or Medicaid, it would probably contract out all the administrative work to private insurers anyway. Sorry, buddy, but the dream of Soviet-style American communism really is dead.

Here are other places where I think Taibbi does well, though, since they show off his political astuteness:

The president and the Democrats decided not to press for the only plan that makes sense for everyone, in order to preserve an industry that is not only cruel and stupid and dysfunctional, but through its rank inefficiency has necessitated the very reforms now being debated. Even though the Democrats enjoy a political monopoly and could have started from a very strong bargaining position, they chose instead to concede at least half the battle before it even began….

In many ways, the lily-livered method that Obama chose to push health care into being is a crystal-clear example of how the Democratic Party likes to act — showering a real problem with a blizzard of ineffectual decisions and verbose nonsense, then stepping aside at the last minute to reveal the true plan that all along was being forged off-camera in the furnace of moneyed interests and insider inertia. While the White House publicly eschewed any concrete “guiding principles,” the People Who Mattered, it appeared, had already long ago settled on theirs. Those principles seem to have been: no single-payer system, no meaningful public option, no meaningful employer mandates and a very meaningful mandate for individual consumers. In other words, the only major reform with teeth would be the one forcing everyone to buy some form of private insurance, no matter how crappy, or suffer a tax penalty. If the public option is the sine qua non for progressives, then the “individual mandate” is the counterpart must-have requirement for the insurance industry….

By blowing off single-payer and cutting the heart out of the public option, the Obama administration robbed itself of its biggest argument — that health care reform is going to save a lot of money. That has left the Democrats vulnerable to charges that the plan is going to blow a mile-wide hole in the budget, one we’ll be paying debt service on through the year 3000. It also left them scrambling to find other ways to pay for the plan, making it almost inevitable that they would step in political shit with seniors everywhere by trying surreptitiously to whittle down Medicare. As a result, the Democrats have become so oversensitive to charges of fiscal irresponsibility that they’re taking their frustrations out on people who don’t deserve it. Witness Nancy Pelosi’s bizarre freakout over the Congressional Budget Office. When the CBO questioned Obama’s projected cost savings, Pelosi blasted them for “always giving you the worst-case scenario” — which, of course, is exactly what the budget office is supposed to do. When you start asking your accountant to look on the bright side, you know you’re not dealing from a position of strength….

To recap, here’s what ended up happening with health care. First, they gave away single-payer before a single gavel had fallen, apparently as a bargaining chip to the very insurers mostly responsible for creating the crisis in the first place. Then they watered down the public option so as to make it almost meaningless, while simultaneously beefing up the individual mandate, which would force millions of people now uninsured to buy a product that is no longer certain to be either cheaper or more likely to prevent them from going bankrupt. The bill won’t make drugs cheaper, and it might make paperwork for doctors even more unwieldy and complex than it is now. In fact, the various reform measures suck so badly that PhRMA, the notorious mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical industry which last year spent more than $20 million lobbying against health care reform, is now gratefully spending more than seven times that much on a marketing campaign to help the president get what he wants….

The much-ballyhooed right-wing scare campaign, with its teabagger holdovers ridiculously disrupting town-hall meetings with their belligerent protests and their stoneheaded memes (the sign raised at a town hall held by Rep. Rick Larson of Washington — keep the guvmint out of my medicare — is destined to become a classic of conservative propaganda), has proved to be almost totally irrelevant to the entire enterprise. Aside from lowering even further the general level of civility (teabaggers urged Sen. Chris Dodd to off himself with painkillers; Rep. Brad Miller had his life threatened), the Limbaugh minions have accomplished nothing at all, except to look like morons for protesting as creeping socialism a reform effort designed specifically to change as little as possible and to preserve at all costs our malfunctioning system of private health care.

FFQF: Civic Religion

 

When the Congress first met, Mr. Cushing made a Motion, that it should be opened with a Prayer. It was opposed by Mr. Jay of N. York and Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina, because we were so divided in religious Sentiments, some Episcopalians, some Quakers, some anabaptists, some Presbyterian and some Congregationalists, so that We could not join in the same Act of Worship. Mr. S. Adams arose and said he was no Bigot, and could hear a Prayer from a Gentleman of Piety and Virtue, who was at the same Time a Friend to his Country. 

John Adams to Abigail Adams, September 16, 1774; in The Founders on the Founders (2008), ed. by Kaminski.

This is an interesting snapshot of what was considered religious diversity in 18th-century America. We should note that there were also certainly Deists, Roman Catholics, and Jews who were considered to be patriots as well. They were probably not thinking too much about atheists, “Mahometans,” “Hindoos,” and so forth, because there was a presumption of a certain degree of cultural homogeneity.

This is what people mean when they say that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” Despite the fracturing of Protestantism, religion was still closely tied to culture at various levels. The amorphous group we sometimes call the “Founding Fathers” repeatedly write about the necessity for “true religion” and virtue, as well as certain secular qualities such as patriotism and sound reasoning. Religion was not separate from the “rest of society,” but they assumed that a certain ecumenism and civic religion would prevail in public venues such as Congress.

From my study of the Founding Fathers, I cannot see them advocating what today is considered to be a wholly secular government. That was accomplished by Robespierre during the French Revolution, providing the model for every truly secular government since then, up through the USSR, China, Burma, and North Korea. They also weren’t planning on a Protestant theocracy along the lines of Cromwell’s protectorate. The Founding Fathers knew about the Roundheads and the Jacobins, and neither were considered as ideal models.

Rather, the Founding Fathers clearly intended for people to practice their culturally distinct religions locally and affirm a Deistic civic religion at the national level. This is actually the position of the US government even today, and I think it is quite functional as a political compromise.

However, there are problems in this arrangement for the large numbers of people who desperately need to latch onto some superstition or magical figure, while at the same time furiously rejecting anything that smells like Grandpa’s religion. So, they might pick neo-paganism or evolutionism, Deepak or Oprah, UFOs or furries, crystals or angels, Obama or Bush. It’s all idolatry to me. What specifically irritates me, though, are the Christians who ignore Jesus Christ and the Bible, and instead raise up the civic Deism of the federal government as their “true religion”; then they turn around and start judging other Christians for not being committed enough to their civic religion.

Magical Medicine Men

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

From this article, I learned that the academic definition of “the placebo effect,” as well as the use of structured clinical trials to determine the efficacy of a drug, are less than 60 years old.

Yet, the pharmaceutical industry as we know it today, mass-producing pills in carefully measured quantities, was developed in the nineteenth century. Even today, many prescription drugs are just concentrated and/or synthesized forms of “natural medicines.” Moreover, medical doctors in the US have only been professionalized (as the AMA and any state affiliate would define it) for less than 100 years. All of these factors together do not strengthen the case for medical science and the pharmaceutical industry as triumphs of the scientific method, but rather show their idolization to be examples of after-the-fact rationalization.

Zombies versus Vampires

For all the pod-born whiners who think that history is about as deep as the weekly news cycle:  I have no sympathy for your anguished nail-biting over Obama and his zombie minions.  When the Bush cult was in full swing, I was seriously embarrassed to be associated with any “conservatives” except those on the radical right-wing fringe. I cringed at the creepy vampire smiles and glazed eyes as the undead praised Bush’s holiness and his muscular religiosity. That is why I don’t get all lathered up about advocates for the biggest political failure in world history, the communist state; because anyone who is worried about those losers is probably hip-deep in a political campaign to get everyone on board with the next hypocritical civic-religion torture nut.

FFQF: Extraordinary Madness

My temper in general has been tranquil, except when any instance of extraordinary madness, deceit, hypocrisy, ingratitude, treachery or perfidy, has suddenly struck me. Then I have always been irascible enough, and in three or four instances, very extraordinary ones, too much so. The storm, however, never lasted for half an hour, and anger never rested in the bosom.

John Adams to Skelton Jones, March 11, 1809, from The Founders on the Founders (2008), ed. Kaminski