I am told that most Liberals and Progressives are unaware that the Conservatives claim that the kind of bureaucracy-mandated death referred to in the previous article would and must occur under Obamacare.
It has been a puzzle to me for decades how the Liberals could fail to understand basic rules of cause and effect, such as that when politicians force the market to lower prices on any good or services, the politicians must assign bureaucrats to ration those goods and services, and they are rationed according to political considerations, i.e., the weakest voting bloc suffers first and most.
Or such as that you cannot keep your cake and eat it too.
It has also been a puzzle for decades how Liberals could fail to understand that an ad hominem argument is not a logically valid form of argument.
I would recall many a time asking a Leftish what he would think of my words had they been uttered by some other man, presumably one of better moral character, or not a white Christian male, or whathaveyou. I don’t recall even one ever answering the question, or apologizing, or showing any awareness of their lapse in reason.
I have never heard a Liberal, for example, argue against what was intercepted in the Venona cables, or found in the KGB archives, but to this day I have heard them accusing Senator McCarthy of orchestrating a “witchhunt” and referring to Soviet spies and fellow travelers and useful idiots as innocent victims of irrational popular paranoia. I have heard many a Liberal denounce the Tea Party for being racist or being insincere or being violent, but never heard any Liberal denounce the Tea Party’s argument or principles, or even to show that they were aware, unlike the Occupy Wallstreet Movement, that the argument or principles existed.
I discovered, to my shock, despite all the publicity surrounding, say, Sarah Palin’s claim that death panels (as they have in other countries with socialized medicine) would be appointed in America, that most Leftists are simply unaware that the claim is being made.
They do not hear and dismiss these claims, they simply never hear the claims.
In my life so far, I have met exactly one Leftist who does not make ad hominem attacks. It is not their default mode of argument, it is their only mode of argument.I have always wondered why.
Why? Surely they were not persuaded by such a cheap and transparently childish tactic — or is every Liberal a Liberal because someone called him names, and to escape that shame, he adopts a set of incoherent beliefs and ritualized fetish-words? That could not be, for then the first Conservative who mocked him would likewise shame him into being Conservative.
With a thunderbolt of astonished clarity, I suddenly realized why this is, or, rather, what the great benefit intentional or not would be: if a man says that an opponent argues that price fixing causes rationing, or that politicians cannot be trusted to make decisions over your baby’s health, that man spreads his opponent’s message, even while denouncing it; but if that man denounces the opponent, saying he is a tool of moneyed power, or is a member of an ‘astroturf’ movement rather than a grassroots opposition, then no one who hears that man hears the message. All they know is that they opponent is a man of bad character.
It is simple, simplistic, and effective.
It fits into the paranoid fantasy world that describes all politics as a conspiracy of shadowy evil powers, Jews or International Bankers or ‘the Establishment’ or Capitalists or Crypto-racists or the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy, versus the scattered and helpless victims-groups.
It fits into the Manichean worldview of the Left. If every war on earth is a war between perfectly pure angels of the Left and perfectly evil racistsexisthomophobicislamophobicglobalwarmingdenying devils of the Right, then logically merely establishing one bad or selfish motive characterizes the opponent as “Rightwing” ergo a devil ergo wrong by definition without the need to discover his argument or know his position. It is refuting without taking the effort to refute; it is thinking without the effort of thought.
And, with the advent of Marxist or Freudian pseudoscience, the motive of the opponent can be declared to be unknown to the opponent. All the Marxist need do is claim that the alleged scientific rules of history show that each category of economic activity (wage-earning, investing, renting land) produces a separate species of man whose interests are all identical and yet whose interests with Darwinian ruthlessness oppose the other separate species, and further that the economic conclusions of each category are self interested self deception, an ideological superstructure unaware of the basic historical forces producing the conflict. The Freudian has a simpler defense mechanism — all he need do is pretend that he understands the mind of the person being denounced better than that person himself. And you will see this over and over again in the mouths of the Modern liberal.
I should have realized it long ago. It is obvious once you see it.
.
Been reading Hegel’s “Science of Logic”, which underlies and illustrates your point. In it, Hegel is (commendably) clear about what he’s doing: he’s substituting ontology for logic. Logic is for the ‘little people’ like natural scientists and mathematicians. Real philosophers have gotten past all that and just get their knowledge directly, somehow.
So, Hegel lays down the rules: logic can’t get you anywhere; you can tell who the enlightened are by simply checking to see if they agree with me. Corollary: trying to use logic is sufficient proof that you are unenlightened and wrong – if you got it, you wouldn’t be trying to reason about it.
This leads to some interesting structures in his writing. In “Phenomenology of Spirit” he begins with several incomprehensible – even by his standards – pages where he lays out his findings in a series of logical contradictions, then gradually backs into some discussion that could be read as illustrating his findings. It’s clear he’s doing this because that “method” – understanding the sum of concrete reality in an alogical flash, then sifting through the details to see how they can be understood within that flash – is what he’s ‘developed’ to supersede and replace logic.
In the hands of Hegel, who, after all, was a happily married man in good standing at his local Lutheran church, there’s a certain, I dunno, harmlessness or good intention? that seems to be almost always on display in his writings – an example of what I’ve long refered to as the ‘Christian Hangover’ – having drunk deeply of Christ for centuries, cultures that have rejected or are in the process of rejecting Christ still tend to produce people who are roughly Christian in their outlooks.
For if you reject logic, you reject THE Logos.
Eventually, people sober up. Marx is almost right: he didn’t set Hegel right side up, but he does represent Hegel sobered up a bit – Marx realizes that Hegel’s rejection of logic is the rejection of God. But Marx hasn’t sobered up enough to see that his Utopia is still Christian insofar as it holds any appeal at all: no male or female, no Jew or Greek, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, they sold their belongings, gave the money to the poor and lived as brothers. And so on.
We now live in a world that is struggling mightily to sober up from their Christian Hangover, and doing a hell of a job. So, Mr. Wright, your attempts at logic are sufficient proof that you are on the wrong side of history. You have demonstrated beyond question that you are a member of the oppressor class. And your opponents not only don’t need to be rational, being rational would be abandoning the their principles and joining the Dark Side.
You have shamed me into agreeing. Ad hominem really is the strongest form of argument, and I will begin employing it post-haste.
Say rather that Ad Hominem is the most politically effective form of “argument” in a Democracy…..
Wow, I think you have come up with a profound insight. It makes sense. Once you control the mass media so that you can control the message, why would you put your opponent’s argument out there, even in weakened form? Better if people never even hear that there is an argument, only a bunch of bad, evil people who want to take away Grandma’s health care.
Of course, I am not disagreeing with Mr Wright, as I think the following theory is not mutually exclusive to his, but there is something else I’ve noticed when discussing with leftists on the internet.
Futurama once had the joke: “You are technically correct. The best kind of correct.” Unfortunately, over the years that seems to have become less of a punchline and more of an operating principle. People are obsessed not just with being “correct” but “technically” correct.
However, the problem arises because politics is largely a matter of taste. What one group of people are wanting to accomplish at a certain price, another group may find the price too high. Example: It wasn’t that long ago when many shouted at Republicans the Ben Franklin phrase about giving up freedom in exchange for security. Yet today we see many of those same people now willing to exchange their freedom for security from life’s travails in the form of “Obamacare”.
So, we are left with a paradox. Politics is something with no general right or wrong answer with right/wrong in a mathematical, 2+2 sense. (It might have right/wrong answers in a moral sense, but that is not very technical so it is not worth considering.) However, people have a need to be “technically” correct, they have made math and science their new gods and thus must have math & science agree with them. Thus, we get stupendously stupid phrases like “reality has a liberal bias”, which is as impossible as reality having a “chocolate” bias.
Nonetheless, having invested themselves as being the “party of science” and those of “reality is on our side”, leftists are caught in a conundrum. Other people disagree with them. How can that be? It would be like finding someone who disagrees with the sum of 2 and 2, and they are sincere (not trolling). How would you deal with someone who sincerely believed that two and two equaled green? You wouldn’t bother trying to go over the principles of mathematics with them, but rightfully call them mad.
Thus leftist behavior. For them to admit that people might have different, legitimate arguments, or might even disagree with them, would be for them to admit that they are not “technically” correct, and that maybe reality has no bias at all. That would kill their god, thus they have but one recourse…
It has been known, at least since Berger’s _Social Construction of Reality_, that the way an ideology disposes of its opponents is to pathologize them. I.e., to portray them as having some kind of psychological problem which calls for treatment rather than debate.
You don’t argue with the madman on the streetcorner. You either contact the authorities to have him taken away for “treatment” or you keep as far away from him as you can. Whatever you do, don’t make eye contact!
The liberal response to their opponents is this same kind of shunning, this same refusal to take the “madman” as saying anything worth serious consideration.
When liberals aren’t calling conservatives “evil racistsexisthomophobicislamophobicglobalwarmingdenying devils” they’re responding as if the conservative is quite literally insane — as you can see in their smug description of themselves as “the reality-based community.”
When Maggie Gallagher came to St. Paul to talk about marriage, the homosexual activists arrived also, with their, “Stop the hate!” signs. What they are proclaiming, (though is believe without realizing it) is the proposition that there can be no rational arguments opposing their beliefs. (And mostly, they can be impossible to reason with, as they, as scribes of the left, have abandoned reason.) Therefore, any opposition to what they want must, of necessity, be irrational, probably bigoted, and of course, homophobic. And so it follows, such vile untermenschen on the opposite side need not be dealt with reasonably. Their cars can be keyed, yard signs stolen, masses interrupted, and so forth. After all, the vile must be put away, jahwohl? And in Conscience and Truth, written by Cardinal Ratzinger in Feb. 1991 we read, (sorry, a long paragraph): In Psalm 19:12-13, we find the ever worth pondering passage: “But who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from my unknown faults.” That is not Old Testament objectivism, but profoundest human wisdom. No longer seeing one’s guilt, the falling silent of conscience in so many areas, is an even more dangerous sickness of the soul than the guilt which one still recognizes as such. He who no longer notices that killing is a sin has fallen farther than the one who still recognizes the shamefulness of his actions, because the former is further removed form the truth and conversion. Not without reason does the self-righteous man in the encounter with Jesus appear as the one who is really lost. If the tax collector with all his undisputed sins stands more justified before God than the Pharisee with all his undeniably good works (Lk 18:9-14), this is not because the sins of the tax collector were not sins or the good deeds of the Pharisee not good deeds. Nor does it mean that the good that man does is not good before God, or the evil not evil or at least not particularly important. The reason for this paradoxical judgment of God is shown precisely from our question. The Pharisee no longer knows that he too has guilt. He has a completely clear conscience. But this silence of conscience makes him impenetrable to God and men, while the cry of conscience which plagues the tax collector makes him capable of truth and love. Jesus can move sinners. Not hiding behind the screen of their erroneous consciences, they have not become unreachable for the change which God expects of them, and of us. He is ineffective with the “righteous,” because they are not aware of any need for forgiveness and conversion. Their consciences no longer accuse them but justify them.
One is reminded by that last sentence what C.S. Lewis said about tyrants. (Look it up.)
“All they know is that their opponent is a man of bad character.
It is simple, simplistic, and effective.”
Deadly effective, indeed. It obscures and kills truth in every mind with no solid attachment to good and truth and no ability to distinguish right and wrong, first of all in the minds of the perpetrators. It is a bullying technique.
It is always the same story: Men preferred darkness to light because…
Mr Wright,
The liberals do have a defense through a loophole in your argument.
You assume, very naturally, that
“goods and services, and they are rationed according to political considerations, i.e., the weakest voting bloc suffers first and most.”
So you assume ill-will on the part of bureaucrats. Rightly conceived, the “political considerations” are ordered to the common good and do not entail that weak suffer, voting bloc or no bloc.
Indeed, what are a ‘voting bloc’?. Do Americans vote according to some ‘voting blocs’ the way they do in ethic and religion ad caste-ism plagued Third World?.
If your reasoning be correct, that the political considerations now inevitably lead to some ‘voting bloc’ to the wall, then America is not fit to be politically ruled. As Founders themselves clearly recognized that the political rule is suitable only for a virtuous people, and as you suggest, the republican virtue as now can not prevent some ‘voting bloc’ from the wall, it means that America is not suited either to monarchic or despotic rule. Since monarchy may be ruled out, that leaves despotism. I remind you that despotism is the natural form of rule over irrational people.
Hi, Gian:
Mr. Justice Roberts dismaying decision about Barrycare has inspired somewhat similar thoughts in me. That is, if this awful law is not repealed, my fear is that this huge advance in the concentration of power in the central gov’t will make that gov’t more and more capricious, incompetent, and despotic. The most likely end result is a collapse of the US into anarchy and chaos in forty or fifty years. Order would most likely be restored by military dictators–and the dictatorship might become institutionalized in a new Caesarship. And I doubt we would be lucky enough to end up with a reasonably decent person like Augustus as the first Caesar. Oh, I have GOOD reason for the contempt I have for Barry and his Democrats!
Hail, Caesar! Sean M. Brooks
So you’ve found angels to govern us?
Bureaucrats, out of ill-will or sloth or love of their own procedures or the knowledge that they will not be punished no matter what they do, will ration things according to their own desires because they have no other rules with any teeth to them.
As someone that could (in some less polite circles) be considered a bureaucrat (or at least, I sort of work for them) I can tell you that the “soulless bureaucrat” is not entirely a joke most often because it’s not people making choices, but the system and rules put in place. I’ve never run into anyone that likes the system, but everyone is sure somebody must be creating and sustaining it. I swear, if demons are still around, they no longer bother possessing people…
See also: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BotheringByTheBook
I seem to recall somebody or other extolling the merits of a “government of laws, and not of men”. Are you really sure you want a system in which the individual civil servant can exercise judgement? Be careful what you wish for.
Doesn’t matter as the system is set up in such a way that things are determined at the discretion of the civil servant anyway. It’s a natural consequence of letting laws get too byzantine as eventually the only way to ever accomplish anything is to get some bureaucrat to bend/break the rules for you.
“Bureaucrats … will ration things according to their own desires”
You are not realizing that this is a killing argument against republicanism. The republic form of Govt. assumes a certain virtue in the citizens as the Founder themselves explicitly said that this form of Govt is for a virtuous people and is wholly unsuited to any other.
So if your leaders, politicians and bureaucrats and other eminent men are so lacking in virtue, so irrational that they do things by desire and not impelled by common good and patriotism then you do not have a republic and you do not deserve it either.
Then it’s a killing argument against government — and anarchy, too.
The reason why it is not is that there are countervailing pressures on the citizen that there are not on a bureaucrat, to aid him in the pursuit of the right path.
Nonsense and rubbish. It is a killing argument against monarchy and autocracy, which are forms of government that rely on the assumption that there is certain virtue present in the rulers, so much virtue that no checks nor balances nor veto need by placed on their exercise of power.
A republic is precisely the attempt to put a limit on the power of the magistrates of government, first by having them be subject to the law of an independent judicial branch, second by having them stand for periodic elections, and third by limiting their powers in other ways. When a republic by vote authorizes an unelected bureaucrat to become an autocrat in a limited area, and because of necessity or because of gullibility or because of lack of forethought erects no check and no balance on the bureaucratic powers, then in effect the bureaucrat becomes an autocrat. It is PRECISELY loyalty to the republican ideas of government which argues against having an unlimited bureaucracy of absolute power.
Do you think I exaggerate? I am understating the case. I am one of the people whose First Amendment rights was taken away, not by a Constitutional Convention, nor by an act of Legislature, nor by the decision of an activist Judge, but by an unelected Bureaucrat when it was decided my Church must pay for contraceptives and abortifacients and trample the crucifix and burn incense to Caesar. If the core liberty on which the whole nation is based, a liberty MORE fundamental than any merely civic right, can be removed without a hearing by the stroke of a pen, do not say I exaggerate if I say the bureaucracy is an autocracy.
(as they have in other countries with socialized medicine)
It is claimed, even by certain conservatives, that the American system as it stands now, is pretty socialistic.
http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/RadioDerb/2012-07-06.html#04
” We’re socialized up to our eyeballs. What are Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP (the Children’s Health Insurance Program) if not socialism? What’s EMTALA, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, requiring practically all hospitals to provide care to anyone needing emergency treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay — what’s EMTALA if not socialism? What’s Medicare Part D, if not socialism?
We love socialism, and watch happily as presidents of every persuasion, liberal or conservative, sign it into law. EMTALA was signed into law by Ronald Reagan; Medicare Part D was signed into law by George W. Bush. The American people love socialism just as much as the people of any other advanced country do. We just don’t want to admit it. ”
“If you look around the world, says this reader, at the most comfortable, prosperous, peaceful, and happiest countries, what drives American conservatives crazy is that they’re all socialist.”
I agree that we’re too socialized now and need to get rid of it, but you left out a lot of what Derb said afterwards which puts a new spin on the saying. (namely, that socialism only works with a very homogenous culture)
It seems to me that access to doctors must be rationed somehow; we don’t have enough doctors for all the ailments – major and minor, real and imagined – that people would like treated. When you have a limited resource, you prioritise; or, as the case may be, you triage. Rationing will happen under any system: There’s always someone who doesn’t get the care he’d like to have, or needed to have. Sometimes he dies of it. Now, one may reasonably argue that apportioning by money is better than apportioning by bureaucracy; but one may not argue that the one is rationing and the other isn’t.
Additionally, if you apportion purely by money, you will find, sooner or later, some poor man’s child dying of pneumonia because the doctor that might have seen him got more profit from treating a rich man’s hangnail. This is not intended as an argument against rationing by money; equally awful scenarios would no doubt be found in a bureaucracy. That’s the nature of having limited amounts of a necessary resource. I’m merely saying that emotionally affecting stories are not, of themselves, sufficient to discard a system of rationing. Hard cases make bad law; precisely for that reason one ought not to decide policy on the basis of the hard cases.
Now, one may reasonably argue that apportioning by money is better than apportioning by bureaucracy; but one may not argue that the one is rationing and the other isn’t.
Sure you can: it’s a matter of defining the word “rationing.” In standard English usage, this is a good deal narrower than “apportioning,” which you are using as a synonym. Take a paradigm case: rationing during WWII. It would be an abuse of language to say that the situation before it was imposed was really just as much rationing as the situation after it was imposed, because not everyone had enough money to buy everything they wanted.
Very well; but in that case I suggest that the word ‘rationing’ is being used for its emotional significance, the connotation of limitation, rather than its strict meaning. Let us try to describe the situation unemotionally: There is currently some particular distribution of access to healthcare. A law is proposed which would create a different distribution and a different process for getting it. What are the merits and demerits of this law, as compared to what we have now? If you wish to show that the law is bad by citing anecdotes, please be prepared to demonstrate that such anecdotes would be more common than under the present law. Anyone can find a dreadful edge case, in fact there’s no shortage of them under the current system; the question is whether such cases are common or rare, and whether there is a tradeoff with less dreadful but more common average cases.
Ah, but here’s your problem:
The merits of something like healthcare can ONLY be examined in an emotional connotation. Else, how else are you defining “merits” of the rationing? If you mean some metric such as “cases solved” then having each doctor spending 5 minutes on a hangnail is “better” than multiple hours saving a dying child.
The merits of the system must ultimately be determined by appeal to the emotions of the people evaluating it, yes. But ‘rationing’ is intended to distract from the important data, and create emotions based on an irrelevant set of connotations. It does not point you to the people going into offices sick and coming out healthy, or conversely, going in sick and coming back crying because the doctor couldn’t see them. The relative incidences of these two scenarios are the data that should evoke the emotions to be used. But by invoking ‘rationing’ we instead get pictures of bombed-out British cities and ragged children in too-large overcoats, begging for “Gum, chum?”
If you want to say that you prefer the scenario of sick people being turned away because they’re poor, to the scenario of people being turned away because some bureaucrat did a cost-benefit calculation, that’s fine. That’s an honest argument. One could even argue that the fairness of the money procedure is so great that it is a worthwhile tradeoff against a somewhat higher number of children dead for lack of treatment. This is a value judgement. But to encapsulate all that in the buzzword of ‘rationing’ is dishonest; it is a rhetorical trick.
Except you’re using emotions to determine what data and connotations are important or irrelevant. Which is not honest either.
That you use “should” in your statement indicates a value judgement or dogma which you are implicitly using which you haven’t proven yet. First you must make the case that that data is preferable to other data etc.
Not entirely as first one must establish a common end goals and then discussion of costs to obtain those goals can begin. Of course, I see in a lot of these discussions a forgetting that pro-bono work trends to decrease as these bureaucracies (and similar) increase. Thus ending up where the poor tend to have a slightly lower chance of getting treated, especially as the rich tend to be well-connected to bureaucrats. Largely same result, one just gives an illusion of being “better”.
“Rhetorical trick” is funny coming from the guy that just said “higher number of children dead” without any support or data that he just complained about. As someone who’s worked in the medical field a lot, I can tell you that doctors are not soulless monsters who care only about money – they generally get into the field to help people.
Of course, they also know those that are genuinely down on their luck vs those that are just almost suicidal in their life choices (or at least, they are so bad at thinking things through, they make Darwin facepalm). Now, if we were to go with a metric of seeing how many useful societal members (that is, people who are at least trying to contribute) are helped medically vs the “dead weight” (unrepentant prisoners being an example), which do you think will work better? Letting local doctors and/or charities pick who to help or distant bureaucrats?
Doctors will suffer too, owing to the way their desire to help people will be hampered and thwarted at every turn by bureaucrats.
“Dead weight”? Why not speak of “useless mouths” or “lives unworthy of life”?
Because Rolf was just complaining about using emotional language so I wanted to make it as dry as possible to stay on the battlefield Rolf chose.
I agree that I did not give an argument for the data I suggested; that’s because I thought this was so obvious as to require no explanation. What the devil else would you look at? Blog comboxes?
I’m not actually disagreeing very strongly with the conclusion that Obamacare is a bad idea. (Although I don’t think it’s a civilisation-ending disaster.) It was the argument I objected to, not the bottom line.
Funny because my department as a whole is undergoing discussion of metrics. (not medical but a type of service) Do you figure out some way to weigh the problems solved? (such that 20 “hangnails” is worth about 1 open heart surgery?) Do you go by number of satisfied customers? How would you even begin to measure a system that has less problems because it is better at prevention than one that fixes more problems (but is poor at prevention)?
Even I don’t think it’s civilzation ending as much as freedom-ending. Still, while you’re right the argument might be flawed, we’ll need to agree on a replacement first.
I suggest that the word ‘rationing’ is being used for its emotional significance, the connotation of limitation, Almost: the term “rationing” is being used for the connotation of compulsion. A lot of us have an emotional reaction to being told we can’t have something, that doesn’t exist when we find out we simply can’t afford it. This is, I would suggest, a wholly appropriate emotional reaction.
Having said that, it may surprise you to know that I view myself as neutral and open to persuasion on the subject of health care reform. I doubt that comments on a blog are a venue that’s going to persuade me of any particular view on the subject, though.
Ok, so you’re basically making this argument:
Fine. I have no problem with that.
One system, monetary, apportions scarce resources by naturally seeking the greatest overlap between supply and demand, and this system rewards efficiency. The poor are indeed turned away. One system, rationing, apportions scarce resources by guidelines and rules crafted by a central planner, who cannot have all the information needed to make particular decisions in particular cases. Instead, the guideline of necessity are established by political considerations, such as by which groups support the powers that be, or whose suffering excites the greatest pity in the people making the decision, or can be make to excite suffering. The unpopular and politically disenfranchised groups are turned away.
Aside from this, rationing produces a perverse incentive to waste. During the gasoline rationing, for example, rationing was by districts, each receiving a calculated proportionate share. Those who were given more than the market would have given them were under a strong incentive to waste the fuel, lest the over-share be detected and their share cut in the future, and so they did not economize their use. Those who were given less than the market would have given could not, even though they were willing to economize, such as in the case where the gasoline trucks did not have enough fuel to bring the fuel to market, as absurd as that sounds. Such absurdities are not a bug of the rationing system, they are a feature, or, rather the feature — the idea is to distribute not according to how badly each paying customer wants the good, “want” measured by what they are willing to pay.
The word rationing is actually a neutral discriptor. The reason why it has a bad connotation is because the bad connotation exists in reality. It is the same reason way words like “poverty” and “waste” and “bureaucracy” have gained bad connotations. No one likes being poor, or wasting resources, or dealing with a problem according to centralized command-and-control systems with insufficient feedback. To call it a rhetorical trick is itself a rhetorical trick.
Mr Wright,
May I ask again who are the “unpopular and politically disenfranchised groups” that you fear will goto the wall in case of socialist health care in America?
There was one group that did went to the wall in 1973, the unborn. I believe the Supreme Court struck down the laws of many States that restricted abortion. So what good is the State sovereignty then?
Sovereignty is an Assertion, not a matter of laws. A sovereign does not plead his case, but asserts it.
Once again, you do not get to decide what the word “sovereignty” means. It is a legal term with a legal meaning. If the states are not sovereign, then they cannot ratify the Constitution, or amend it. If the states are not sovereign, then the United States is a kingdom, and not a federated republic. To argue that the subject provinces of the kingdom of America lack the power to amend the Constitution is a crackpot argument.
The voiceless group in America who will be squeezed out of health services will be the poor.
It is obvious that issuing insurance cards without increasing the number of doctors while lowering the rate of reimbursement for medicaid means that more patients will see fewer doctors who therefore will see each patient for less time or not at all.
And the number of doctors refusing to see medicare patients, on the ground that they government does not actually pay enough to pay for the service provided, surely must increase.
It is a rule of economics. You cannot keep your cake and eat it, too. There is no such thing as a free lunch. You cannot ration a good without producing a shortage of the good, because rationing forces the resources to seek a more economical use. Rationing produces waste, and waste creates an incentive for resources to move elsewhere, namely to a good or service or field where there is some return or reward for one’s efforts.
The other rule of economics is the Golden Rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules. In other words, the bureaucracy having control of the budget will economize according to its bureaucratic and political priorities, not the individual patient according to his.
Because the patients do not pay, the paymaster decides who gets treated and who does not. This means that, in order to economize (or ration) the health care, death panels will decide whose pain and suffering is worth the return on investment.
The old man needing a hip replacement will be told, since he is soon to die anyway, that his suffering can be tolerated by the bureaucracy, and euthanasia will be gently recommended to him; whereas the liposuction and plastic surgery of younger (and whiter) patients, whose family or faction has more political clout, will get a waiver and be allowed.
Or, if there is public furor over some case like this, then the opposite will take place, and some minorities, like Blacks and Muslims, will get deferential treatment, whereas other minorities, like Muslim Women and Catholics, will be ignored or excoriated. Which factions get the power to decide where the death panels falls may change from administration to administration, or as different fads of medical philosophy sweep through the halls of power — we have already seen fads of education theory change the schools nationwide and change them again and yet again as the winds blow, and no local school board has the power to teach according to their own local needs and local wisdom. Why would this not happen with medical therapy fads?
What makes you think you can keep your doctor or get to decide how he will treat you? IF SOMEONE ELSE IS PAYING FOR YOUR LUNCH, YOU DON’T GET TO SEE THE MENU!
Rolf — Of course you can have all the doctors you want. You can have more doctors than anybody wants. All you need is to have a lot of people go to medical school and pass the medical licensing tests. Right now, in the US, there is absolutely no shortage of doctors, which is why a lot of people who go to medical school and then choose to use their M.D. degree as something other than a physician in a practice.
Similarly, right now in the US, we have more lawyers than the law can possibly employ. This is true of many prestigious professions.
If youse guys over there need more doctors, we can ship ‘em to you.
By all means: Doctor time is not necessarily the limiting resource. For all I know it’s technicians with the skill to wield screwdrivers on the MRI machinery. The point is that there is clearly not enough healthcare to go around, at least if we go by what people want.
We do, however, have all the medicine we are willing to pay for, a different beast. (Barring some interference with the market like Congress’s limiting the number of a residency.)
And we will never have all we want because our wants are infinite.
I suspect that a truly free market would actually deliver rather more healthcare than the current one; licensing of doctors, for example, is precisely one of those conspiracies that Adam Smith spoke of, reducing the supply and thereby driving up the price. That aside, you are obviously correct that wants are infinite; that’s my point. The question is whether to distribute by money or by something else.
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In all fairness, we all tend to think of our own positions as the only possible sane, moral correct, logical and self-evident positions. When confronted with someone who thinks differently or oppositely, the explanations to which you can attribute this really are quite limited in possibility; you may presume your opponent is:
1) Ignorant — His reasoning is correct as far as it goes given the data he has, but through no fault of his own he simply does not have the information needed for a correct answer.
2) Incorrect — He has all the data, but the reasoning by which he arrived at his conclusions contains an error somewhere; or some of his data is faulty due to circumstances beyond his control.
3) Indifferently Indolent — He is aware of incomplete data or potentially incorrect reasoning but does not care enough to correct these faults.
4) Wilfully Ignorant — Any and all combination of the above where the insufficiency is deliberately not addressed, not out of sheer sloth or unawareness that it is required but for a venal or personal reason; fear of what admitting error would demand or cost, perhaps.
5) Irremediably Stupid — He simply does not have the necessary brainpower to comprehend your position, short of many years of training or education.
6) Irredeemably Evil — Like Wilful Ignorance but worse, in that there is no self-deception and no pretence to oneself of altruism or indifference in one’s motives: the opponent’s beliefs are attributed to pure selfishness and malice, and any effort to promote them is considered to be malevolent in character.
7) Incomprehensibly Insane — The opponent’s thought processes are deemed completely incompatible with yours, and yours with his; his beliefs are so obviously and self-evidently wrong that you cannot even imagine how to tell him that they’re wrong, any more than you could imagine explaining the difference between colours to a blind man.
These are arranged in rough ascending order not only of “how morally responsible do I hold the person for their state of error?” but of “how productive a use is it of my time to try and correct this?”. Most people are happy to correct what they see as a simple error or unawareness, and are willing to forgive people for them; most people will not even bother dealing with someone they genuinely believe to be stupid, evil or insane, or forgive them for those flaws.
What makes the fanatic is not, in itself, how many of his beliefs are at level 6 or 7 compared to others’, but how quick he is to move up the scale when assessing others’ beliefs.
ADDENDUM: There is, of course, the eighth explanation for the discrepancy: “*I’M* Wrong!” But it gets progressively harder to conceive of this or admit it the higher up the scale you’ve gotten yourself.
Sadly there was no ‘like’ button so this response will have to suffice.
Yes, me too. That was excellent.
I do not deny your point. The original post above was trying to make the point that, in addition to Leftists calling Conservatives evil and stupid and very evil and very stupid, the ad hominem attack not only relieves the Left of the burden of forming an argument, it prevents any disinterested onlookers from having even an indirect knowledge of what the argument is.
Ironically (or should I say “satanically”) the use of this argument also makes the Conservative tempted to shove the Leftist upward on the Great Scale of Fanaticism — I know I am much quicker to dismiss Leftroid arguments than I was in my youth, since, thanks to the Internet, I have been drenched with a ranting excess of them, and the Lefties never apologize, retract, retreat, or even show the slightest self awareness that being illogical is bad, that you LOSE rather than WIN the argument once you abandon logic. It makes me and other Conservatives far less willing to argue or listen to arguments with Leftists, or to respect their differences of opinion as being respectable.
Historian know of the opinions of various early Church heresies because, and only because, the orthodox writers wrote scraps and quotes from the heretics against whom they argued in order to refute them. Their writings themselves did not survive, mostly because preserving and transmitting manuscripts was difficult, and unpopular ones did not command enough resources among successive generations to survive.
Imagine if it had been Leftists instead of Christians. None of the arguments of the heretics would have been preserved, and none of the pagan learning and art and lore that did not serve Dem Party interests. All we would know about Tertullian or Pelagius was that they were Bad Men who destroyed jobs and kept offshore bank accounts and owned stock in Halliburton and wore women’s dresses and shot Kennedy and lied about nukes in Iran and oppressed the proletarians and, and, and…
You are correct, of course; my own drift rightward was solidified by the far greater tendency of conservative writers and bloggers to fisk opposing assertions in much more cited detail, accurate quotation and logical structure than the reverse. I am reminded of Screwtape, who said, “The whole trouble with argument is that it moves the conflict onto the Enemy’s own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I recommend He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below.”
Radical progressivism is, like Screwtape, an immensely practical (in a certain sense of that word) ideology; as Alinsky himself would probably proudly admit, it doesn’t care how you defeat your opponent as long as you defeat him, and it is perfectly willing to exploit any weaknesses thus engendered in opponents with nicer codes of ethical conflict. Losing an argument but winning the contest is a perfectly acceptable trade-off.
To me, the tragedy of the Scale of Fanaticism is that a conflict of irreconcileable values can sometimes force otherwise benevolent and rational people into hostile confrontation simply because people are more willing to believe in an evil motivation they think they understand rather than a different conception of good they cannot accept. “X has just told me he believes Y; yet only the crazy, stupid or evil could believe Y; but X is self-evidently neither crazy nor stupid; therefore X must, despite all contrary evidence, be evil.”
“I would recall many a time asking a Leftish what he would think of my words had they been uttered by some other man, presumably one of better moral character, or not a white Christian male, or whathaveyou. I don’t recall even one ever answering the question, or apologizing, or showing any awareness of their lapse in reason.”
If they didn’t answer the question I suppose they wouldn’t have given this answer, either; but out of curiosity, what would you have said if they had answered something like:
“I do not have to consider what I would think of your words were they uttered by a more moral person, or someone not a white Christian male, for nobody but a white Christian male of poor moral character (but I repeat myself) could utter those words and believe them. It is like asking me how I would attempt to burn coal if I found it to be day-glo plaid instead of black, or like me asking you if God can make a rock so heavy He can’t lift it; it is pointless to try answering a question which negates itself by definition.”
One of the defining characteristics of the Progressive/Gnostic (Prognostic?) mindset, as you’ve pointed out before, is a commitment to the principle that what you think is so irrevocably shaped by heritage, environment, and self-interest that there’s really no such thing as “common logical ground”; any attempt to say “Let us use disinterested logic” is met with the narrow-eyed suspicion that the very proclamation of disinterest is the surest proof of ulterior interest.
But what makes this republican machinery of elections and checks and balances work?
What makes a losing candidate give a graceful speech and retire?
What makes a General commanding ten divisions obey now this man and next year another man?
What makes a citizen pay taxes and obey an unarmed policeman?
It works by self-government in the citizens and officials. You must assume it, otherwise the best constitution in the world is nothing.
Thus, a minimal level of rationality in officials must be assumed.
You can not assume that the politics would necessarily lead to some blocs going to the wall. That is just giving up on the republic.
Sounds to me like you’ve rediscovered Bulverism, which has been around far longer than the 1940′s when C. S. Lewis coined the term. The tactic, as far as I can tell, dates back to Genesis 3, where the serpent sets aside the command of God by slyly implying that God has an ulterior motive (it’s essentially the original “Da Man is jest trying to keep you down” argument).
While the left have certainly turned Bulverism into something of an art form (e.g., the term ‘homophobia’ as used is essentially a one-word Bulverism, as by applying it to anyone who disagrees with a homosexual lifestyle, it basically asserts that their position must come from an irrational fear), by no means are they the only ones who use it. That, in part, is its danger. As Lewis put it: “Until Bulverism is crushed, reason can play no effective part in human affairs”. Once you allow Bulverism as a ‘valid’ argument, everyone ends up using it, and there is no place left for actually reasoning about the merits (or demerits) of a particular argument. As you note, you no longer pay any attentions to arguments (in that sense) at all. All that’s left is speculating on the motives that supposedly underlie your opponent’s position and asserting the truth of those speculations without reflection.
Yes and no. The tactic Lewis describes (and I wish he’s come up with a catchier name for it!) is nothing more than the psychological form of ad hominem, and it has been around as long as man has had tongue and wanted to use words to move his fellow man. No, what startled me was that the tactic does so much to spread pure ignorance, for a man thinks himself an expert on a question, and able to settle the matter in discussion, when all he knows is a list of speculations about the vicious motives or intellectual incoherence of the opposition.
I have to admit I always rather liked the term “Bulverism”; it’s so onomatopoeically English.
In a possibly aggravating exercise of hair-splitting, I’ll suggest that there is a uniquely modern difference to Bulverism; though it is without doubt a form of ad hominem, it’s a descendant of post-Enlightenment moral relativism in that it’s the only form of ad hominem which delegitimizes an argument on the grounds of its advocate’s interest. Belittling a man’s character or his intellect as old as the hills, but for most of human history I don’t believe it was, in itself, considered to disprove an argument to point out that the arguer had a stake in the argument’s outcome. Most arguers did; why else would they argue it? When someone says, “You only believe that because you are a Christian,” it used to be perfectly acceptable to say, “Of course; if I *didn’t* believe it I *wouldn’t* be Christian. What’s your point?”
It was only when it became admirable to no longer place your own perspective as the default state of rightness that accusing someone of failing to do this held weight. The fatal paradox is that this adumbration of pure disinterest is immediately combined with a fundamental conviction of its impossibility; only those who have no interest in an argument’s outcome can be trusted to argue impartially, but the very act of choosing to make an argument can be taken as implying an interest in the outcome. Denying this interest is merely proof of dishonesty, which takes you straight back into classic ad hominem.
But that goes to the bigger problem which underlies both Bulverism and classical ad hominem: Very few people are willing to presume good faith on the part of an opponent any more.
A very good indicator of a blog writer’s political leanings is his language. Lefties/libs have filthy mouths — they do not cherish self restraint or respect for others. Even if they sound conservative at first, if they also curse, they will eventually drop their veil and reveal their true beliefs.