John C. Wright's Journal

A reader comments:

Ask your coworker whether she supports sovietized health care if Dick Cheney were running the system, or Richard Nixon, or George Bush, or Sarah Palin.

The stereotype the Left enjoys is to paint Republicans as mouth-breathing Fundamentalists and misogynist racists.

If so, does she think the Fundies will allow women to get abortions if the Republicans control all the doctors and hospitals? Does she think the racists will allow the minorities equal access to health care? Does she think the misogynists will make good gynecologists?

I understand why they, the Left, don’t trust us and they want to run our lives for us. But they know our side wins elections too, from time to time. I don’t understand why they trust us, the Right, to run their lives for them?

Can any of my Left-of-Center friends explain this to me? If Halliburton, George Bush, Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, General Jack D. Ripper, Sarah Palin and Enron are running your health care for the benefit of their friends in the Pharmaceutical Industry, how does that help lower your doctor’s bills?

The sovietization of the American health care system, currently the best in the world, soon to be on par with that of Yugoslavia, continues without effective opposition by the Republican Party leadership.

One or two Republicans have spoken out, but there is no strategy, no coordinated effort to stop this monster.

It is not as if the defenders of the bill even have the slightest idea what they are talking about, or what they are voting into place. Your representatives in Congress, dear voters, have not read this thousand-page bill any more than they read the bill for the stimulus package: so while hacks for Big Brother continue to claim that private insurers will not be crowded out of the market, Investor’s Business Daily reports that on page 16 of the bill there is a provision which will make private insurance illegal.

Only if you, dear voter, take the time and effort to call or write to your representatives is there any chance of derailing this juggernaut.

The purpose of this legislation, no matter what it supporters say, is not to lower your health care costs. Their purpose is permanent control over your decisions. They want a trillion dollars industry under their control. I would not be surprised to find out they want to ration the care by race and minority categories, like college admissions, by quotas. They want to be in a position to reward their friends and punish their enemies. They want to put in place a permanent bureaucracy, permanently loyal to them, so that the Dems will be running the country no matter who wins or loses elections.

Sound paranoid? Perhaps. But I cannot shake the suspicion that, if its supporters really wanted to lower health care costs, they would look at the chain of cause and effect, look at the problem, and direct their attention to the causes of the problem. They would at least have a Freshman Econ 101 level of knowledge as to what sets the height of prices for goods and services.

If the mechanic never once looks under the hood, you can be damn sure he does not really want to fix the car engine. If all he does is ask you for your car keys, and tell you to sit in the back, but gives you no honest answer when you ask him why, you can be damn sure the mechanic is really after one thing: he wants you out of the driver’s seat. He wants to take you for a ride.

Nothing even remotely like a rational analysis is being done, either by the administration, their chattering fellow travelers in the media, or even among the private opinions of those who support this bill.

Instead the Administration talks nonsense, on the order of: "We will lower taxes while increasing government services without running up the national debt!" The politicians promise “If you like your private insurance you can keep it; if you don’t like it, we provide you another option; if you currently have no option, we will provide one for you.” Well, well. How generous with our children’s money you are being. Why not follow the wise policies of His Most Catholic Majesty Fruvous Moxy , king of Spain, make Friday part of the weekend, and give every new baby a chocolate eclair?

Providing public health insurance will crowd out private insurance, and even if the competition between a publicly-subsidized market and a private market does not kill off the private market, the government tightly regulate the private health insurance market now, and can simply render the publicly-subsidized insurers immune from any regulations or immune from lawsuits, which can target the private market to strangle and destroy it. Price controls cause shortages, and shortages provoke calls for additional price controls.

Eventually public policy decision will force economization of the limited public funds: expensive procedures and drugs will be denied those an actuarial tables says may die soon anyway: Grandma will be given morphine rather than expensive anti-cancer treatments, and accountants in Washington will be required by ordinary prudence to contemplate the cost-effectiveness of euthanasia.

Come now: let us reason together. If Medicaid and Medicare actually lowered costs, improved service, or provided more abundantly than private medicine, why do those on these programs inevitably purchase supplemental private insurance? Why are ever more doctors and hospitals refusing Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement? If it is such a great system, why is it failing? Since it is failing system, why are we contemplating expanding it to cover everyone?

Write or call. Do it today. Make your voices heard, I beg you.

upbraids me when I point out that a health care system run by self-interested politicians invites corruption. Only those who make contributions to the Party will get their liver transplant when Big Brother rather than Marcus Welby decides who gets treatment.

He thunders (or perhaps giggles playfully. On the Internet one never knows):

"Mr Wright, you need to look past the ideologies for a second a realize this: People just want affordable health care."

My dear sir, you need to look into ideologies for a moment to discover which of two competing theories of political economics delivers more and better health care to more people. Stripped of non-essentials, there are only two alternatives: liberty and tyranny.

Tyranny is always, always more popular. Caesar is always a Populist, not an Optimate: Big Brother is always for the Little Guy, the Forgotten Man. Hitler is always for the Volk; Stalin is for the Proletarians; Napoleon is for the Citizen.

"People would not be crying out for a socialist system if the privatized system actually worked."

It is to laugh. I would answer that Canadians would not be streaming over the borders into America if their socialist system actually worked, nor would patients be dying of bedsores and bedlice, nor would SARS swell to an international scare.

Likewise, I would answer that people would not be crying out for Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin to lead them in revolution, glorious revolution, if the previous system, the Monarchy, the Wiemar Republic, or the Czarist system actually worked. However, the fact that what followed was far worse than what came before it could perhaps be excused by the ignorance of the people doing the crying. We Americans have no such excuse: the facts about the European, Canadian, and Soviet models of public health care are unambiguous.

But perhaps that answer would be flip. That answer would assume we are distinguishing between two alternatives. We are not. We are distinguishing between reality and a rosy-colored daydream.

Discontent is caused by a difference between current circumstances and imagined alternatives. If the imaginary alternative is rosier, and yet false, they will be discontent. You perhaps assume people are not being mislead by false and extravagant promises.

Instead of assuming that artificially-inflamed popular discontent necessarily means that rationing a scarce good will make it more abundant, I suggest we analyze the causes of the perceived problem, and look at the costs and benefits of the alternatives.

Have you analyzed why the current system is underperforming? I suggest a thought experiment to you.

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You may now read the first ever  Wright’s Writing Corner entry, on my wife’s website. She interviews, well, me. Starting small, I suppose.

Please visit and leave a kind comment.

Here is the link:

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/72302.html

In reference to the Scholastic argument about an uncaused first cause, I have heard it claimed that infinite regression (while it may offend the laws of physics) does not violate the laws of logic.

In rebuttal, I would argue that infinite regress does indeed violate the laws of logic, on the grounds that it postulates, first, that every cause in the chain of cause and effect was set in motion by a prior cause, and then, second, that no first cause set the chain of cause and effect in motion.

If it is moving when nothing set it in motion, this contradicts the first sentence, which says every cause has a prior cause. But if it was at one time set in motion, then there is a first cause for which there is no prior cause, in which case, again, the first sentence, which says every cause has a prior cause, is contradicted.

In either case, the principle that every cause has a prior cause contradicts itself. There is no third possibility.

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"Mr. Wright, my questions were quite real–" I apologize for assuming otherwise, and ask you to forgive me.

"When you disparage people who claim to know the future, and who are True Believers, why does it not occur to you that your own views fall within those characterizations?"

Because I am a Christians as well as logician. The Seldon Plan as outlined in the Book of the Apocalypse, if taken literally, foretells tribulation, war, famine, plague, earthquake, darkness, woe, horror, deception, anguish and near-extermination for the faithful and everything we hold dear. It is only the very end, after time itself halts, that a victory will be known. If not taken literally, or if taken to refer only in elliptical language to the events of First-Century Syria, it offers even less clear a picture of Things to Come.

Perhaps it is God’s will to destroy the West for her sins; perhaps He shall preserve it. Any Christian who thinks he knows the plan of God is a fool.

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In order to simplify matters and deter unnecessary and wasteful medical procedures, from now on, whenever a patient in the Nationalized Institute for Care Expenditures needs a liver transplant, or other expensive procedure, rather than going to a doctor of his own choosing, he merely makes a large donation to the Democratic National Committee, or to the reelection campaign of the well-connected Democrat pol of his choice, and if he selects a winning pol, one with friends and influence in Washington, the patient’s need will be met.

Everyone else will suffer and die in lingering pain from easily treatable ailments while waiting on a purely fictitious waiting list, and so decrease the surplus population on the world.

Under the new plan, blue collar workers, Negros, Jews, Republicans, and Christians will receive the level of care currently enjoyed by the subjects of the People’s Soviet Democratic Republic of Canada, as part of the ongoing ethnic cleansing and eugenics project of our modern Progressives and their plans for a rational, scientifically-managed Wilsonian state: whereas donors to the DNC and their Party apparatchiks will receive a level of care only slightly below what we currently enjoy here in America.

Because the Democrat Party are in tune with the latest and most cutting-edge scientific theories of Eco-Mysticism, one proposal being debated is to allow females (as carriers of the Sacred Female Grail Mystery are called) will be given special privileges on the DNC list for DemoCare (as it will be called) if they sacrifice one of their children to Baphomet, or have an abortion, or engage in ritual temple-prostitution with Bill Clinton glorifying Gaia and the Dark Mother goddess, and perform abominations in the sacred groves of the High Places. This will decrease the production of human life, which has been redefined by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a greenhouse gas.

In order to calm the panicked public and silence the slander of reactionary elements disloyal to the People’s Revolution, the Obama Nationalized Institute for Care Expenditures controlling commissariat, known informally as the Health Care Czar, will consist of public figures whose principles, integrity, honesty, and judiciousness are utterly beyond question: William J Clinton, Richard M Nixon, Warren G. Harding, Tammany Hall, Boss Tweed, G. Gordon Liddy, James Carville, Boss Hogg of Hazard County, Wesley Mouche, Lex Luthor, and His Honor Richard Wilkins, mayor of Sunnydale, also known as Marchosias of the Pit. He is a Great and Mighty Marquis, appearing at first in the Form of a Wolf having Gryphon’s Wings, and a Serpent’s Tail, and Vomiting Fire out of his mouth. But after a time, at the command of the Exorcist he putteth on the Shape of a Man. And he is a strong fighter. He was of the Order of Dominations. He governeth 30 Legions of Spirits. He told his Chief, who was Solomon, that after 1,200 years he had hopes to return unto the Seventh Throne. So there is no reason not to trust great Marchosias, and these other noble and mighty overlords and potentates who will be in control of whether we live or die, or our wives and children and aged parents.

Have an ailing loved one? Mail in your campaign contributions early!

A scene from Alexander Nevsky directed by Sergei Eisenstein, music by Sergei Prokofiev. Practically the only thing the nightmarish empire beyond the Iron Curtain ever produced worth remembering with admiration, aside from a manned spaceshot or two. AH! The heart thrills to see the Crusaders, Hosptiller crosses emblazoned on their cloaks, rushing forward toward the boyars of Russia… Read the remainder of this entry »

In reference to this article, "The Seldon Plan", a reader (I withhold his name out of courtesy) writes in with some snarky questions.

Oddly enough, I said the exact opposite. My exact words were "First, it hypothesizes the existence of a Leftist who is not stupid or brainwashed. While I have met any number of Leftists who were stupider than they thought they were (of course, they usually think of themselves as geniuses), I have not noticed any remarkable difference in IQ."

This line is cryptic. If this is a coy way of accusing me of being coy, the accusation is a lie (not to mention being hypocrisy).

Willing? WILLING? You make it sound as if I am reluctant to speak, rather than overeager. Here are some of my previous posts on the subject. They have titles like DUES LO VEULT and ISLAM IS A BARBARIC RELIGION. I am not exactly hiding my opinions under a basket. Read the remainder of this entry »

I just today received a courtesy copy of the mass market edition of NEW SPACE OPERA TWO edited by Strahan and Dozois. What I did not know is that they gave my story, ‘Far End of History: A Tale of the Eighth Mental Structure’ (takes place in my Golden Oecumene background–all for you, Atkins fans) the anchor position.

The anchor position! By ancient custom among anthologists, the biggest draw is usually the first story in the table of contents, to get the reader to pick up the book, and the second best is the last story to get the reader to keep reading till the end.

This is a signal honor that will almost make up for my mad grief at not winning the Prometheus Award. Now I am sorry I tore my garments and poured all these ashes in my hair. If I did not know better, I would say my excessive yet unmanly wailing might make me, at first glance, seem a little shallow.

Besides, now my frail yet fickle ego can be propped up by this transitory dignity! Frail egos are wonderful things, are they not–serving one is sort of like being the slave of a half-insane but half-drunken werewolf overlord on a planet with multiple moons. Often I wonder why bondage to the ego is considered by modern philosophers to be the paramount of liberty.

But no matter! Release the pigeons of happiness! Reduce the Agonizers to half-voltage! Allow the workers a half-cup of watered-down grog! For I am slobbery with happiness! The anchor position is mine! Mine, I say! Command the stonecutters to erect my monument of green iridium next to the Pharaoh, but bigger, and with a neon nimbus crowning my pshent!

Nay, larger still! Where is Lens Larque, the Demon Prince of Dar Sai? Perhaps he will sculpt for me a monument of equal size and dignity to his own. Send Kerth Gersen to look for him. 

…. Unless Strahan and Dozois just put the authors in alphabetically, in which case my story got last position because the volume contains no reprints from Zelazny or Zindell. Hmph.

In any case, it is a good story, one of the ones I am least discontented with, so I hope some kind reader somewhere will read and enjoy it.

Well…THE GOLDEN AGE did not win the Prometheus award it was up for…but neither did the other books I was expecting. Instead, LORD OF THE RINGS won the coveted prize.

http://sfscope.com/2009/07/2009-prometheus-award-winners.html

Funny that a tale of mystical Norse-medieval sentiment would win out over an openly pro-Libertarian morality play about individual effort. Gee, I even had a scene where one character lectures another on Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage, and in the appendix  I mention the drawbacks of allowing a central bank to interfere with the credit market. Whether it is good or bad storytelling to mention Ricardo in an SFF book, I would have thought this was the sort of thing pro-free-market readers would rejoice to read.

Ah well, maybe artistic merit counts for more than partisan ideological purity after all. So I dare not complain.

However, this means I will not be writing that science-fictionalized version of F. A. Hayek I had been planning: THE GALACTIC ROAD TO STAR SERFDOM, in which R. John Galt, a golden robot programmed with the Three Laws of von Mises,  together with space-outlaw Santiago and the smart-alec detective "Win" Bear Kropotkin, matches wits with the evil parallel-universe version of Hari Seldon who, just as the Galaxy is breaking free of Imperial dominion from the planet Splendid Wisdom, uses Cleometry, the predictive science of history, to attempt to smother cosmic freedom once more into a single Second Empire, by means of credit and currency manipulation. Hijinks abound when robot Galt falls in love with the fierce yet lovely space-locomotive magnate Dagny D’Anconia. You’ll be breathless with boredom at the fifty-page long speech the superrobot gives over galactic radio, explaining his metaphysics, epistemology, and economic theory!

Instead I will write something staring a space princess. I mean, if Tolkein can win the Prometheus Award by portraying a divinely sanctioned monarch like Aragorn (Elessar I to historians) I should be able to do the same with my Princess Aura-Leia. 

Let me recommend this article from Russ Dvonch in his ‘Heroic Hollywood’ series THINKING INSIDE THE BOX. It proposes no novel theory of writing, merely that craft needs structure. But what makes the article readable and interesting (to me, at least) was the observation of how deeply and completely thematic elements pervade the writing.

In his case, he is talking of screenwriting, but the general point is valid for loftier types of writing, such as world-wrecking space operas about space princesses, which all here know is the paramount and culmination of Western Art since Homer. The example he uses is the James Bond flick GOLDFINGER, and he notes how one thematic element is repeated in the advertising, plot, dialogue, imagery, costumes, and props. He carefully notes how the three elements that make a Bond film memorable — sex appeal, violent conflict, the dashing spy — are firmly tied back into the one image of Gold.

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/rdvonch/2009/07/06/heroic-hollywood-thinking-inside-the-box

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genesiscount boldly ventures to answer some of my pointed questions about the Leftist plan for dealing with animplacable Jihadist enemy.  He writes:

Read the remainder of this entry »

Several nations in Europe are cowed by the threats and menace of the paynim, and are even now dhimmi in everything but name; Canada likewise, as the Mark Steyn case indicates. Radio talkshow hosts and Dutch PM’s are barred from Great Britain. Statues of pigs and dogs are removed. The Muslims control who may enter the country, and what may be published or discussed in public. There have been small outbreaks of dhimmitude in America, but they are growing larger.

You see, it is as predictable as anything in this unpredictable world can be: Western culture may be devoted to religious freedom, but the counterculture (who now rule us) is devoted to freedom from Christianity, and tolerates only inoffensive and non-demanding beliefs, New Age blither, or theosophic or bogus versions of Oriental religions we might call McBuddhism. The hostility of the counterculture toward Christianity has become more open in recent years, but they have never pretended anything but contempt for the opiate of the masses.

Since the Mohammedans also wish to reduce the Christians to death or dhimmitude, they are the natural allies of the counterculture–despite that sexual liberated potheads, perverts, orgiasts, adulterers, panderers and pornographers (all the folk the Larry Flint generation calls heroes) are the first to be buried up the waist and pelted to death with stones under Sharia law. A chaste and temperate Christian or Jew runs afoul of no commandment of the Prophet, if he pay his dhimmi tax. In other words, the barbarians within the gates are the natural allies of the barbarians without the gates, before the gates are opened. And after?

I recall reading — I cannot find the quote at the moment — the account of a Christian lady from Lebannon, who before 1967, watched her parents and their friends urging the government to relax certain restrictions against Muslims in the name of social justice (only Maronitescould serve as commander or the army, for example, or head of the central bank), and once the Muslims had enough power and confidence, thanks in part to their help, these same compassionate  reformers were killed like dogs in the street, their bodies left unburied for the crows, because one infidel is no different from the next.

But that is the end of the process. Here is one more story from near the beginning. I make no pretense of vouching for it, aside from saying that I am not surprised. You may read and decide for yourself.

http://www.answeringmuslims.com/2009/07/special-report-sharia-comes-to-dearborn.html

David Wood  says Christians were singled out for legal and illegal harassment at a public festival in Dearborn, Mich. He sums up:

I am curious to hear from anyone on the Leftward side of the political spectrum what your plan is, what policy you suggest the West embrace, to deal with an implacable enemy?

Do you believe there is a peaceful means to reduce their threat? Do you think giving the Jihadists money, or power, or apologies, or giving them Isreal will placate them?

If that is the your belief, what is the basis for this belief? On what facts is it founded?

How would you defend this belief from a skeptic?

(Aside from an ad hominem attack, I mean. I am refering to a convincing defense, a defense on the merits, not a witticism mocking the intelligence or moral rectitude of the skeptic himself. Among grown-ups, discussions concern the subject matter of the discussion, and are therefore not merely background noise to a word-game of moral preening.) 

Hat tip to Mark Shea at CAEI: