USA: Forged in Freedom

(An argument between me, Robert Burack, and Bob Bowen at http://www.weeklyfilibuster.com)

BURACK: Continuing war. Economic collapse. Global threats. Dilution of values. Natural disasters leading to poverty and suffering.

It can all get pretty heavy. Earlier this year, Bill Maher remorsed about the country’s seeming lack of ability to do “great things”. I agreed wholeheartedly. Then we elected Barack Obama.

It’s a new year – a new possibility. The first one hundred days of a presidency are usually the most productive, and I’m excited to see what is going to get accomplished. It’s just going to be nice to finally have a President that asks us to sacrifice something – to be better as a collective whole. Because, if we learned anything in 2008, it was that we’re all in this together.

CAVEDON: We do great things as persons, not as a nation. America was founded on the premise that persons ought to be free, not that nations ought to accomplish “great things.” The greatest things we’ve ever done, like putting railroads across the country, reaping wealth that put Europe to shame, creating a unique literary tradition, making films that are the best in the world, putting man into the sky to fly, and creating not one but two machines that let us communicate globally in an instant (telephones and computers) was all done by personal initiative and effort.

We can do great things. Let’s not politicize everything and look to the government to crusade and dream for us. That’s dictionary “totalitarianism” – the idea that the state should have total ambition, total reach, and total resources ready to address any issue that “the people” want it to.

BOWEN: Let’s look at what we have done together. We put a man on the moon. We saved Europe and became rich at the same time with the Marshall plan. We ended racism in our legal systems with the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. We used Social Security to save our senior citizens from abject poverty. We faced down Stalin and Khruschev. We ensured people’s life savings with the FDIC. We proved to the world that democracy could work and now event the most brutal totalitarian regimes pretend to be democratic.

If that were all, then we would meerly be a wonderful nation. Democracy is not all about individuals. Some of it is about what we choose to do together. The tasks that we recognize are simply too great to do alone. It is those tasks on which a national spirit thrives. We face great challenges in the next several decades, but with a track-record like the one we have, we have reason to be confident.

Every day, people suffer and die of terrible diseases. How is it acceptable that we are doing less than everything that we can to cure cancer, MS, AIDS, huntingtons, alzheimers, and dozens more? This is the work of a great nation. In the richest country in the world, middle and working class people are bankrupted by medical bills because we are the only nation in the world without universal health insurance. We owe it to the uninsured and the under-insured to fix our system.

By the way, something I had to get out: to lay railroads across this country we exploited Chinese immigrants to pay them low wages in jobs with high fatality rates because of racism. Let’s not tout that as one of our greatest achievements.

CAVEDON: We put a man on the moon; I’ll chalk that one up for the Feds. Saving Europe? Please. We didn’t enter the war until we were directly hit, at which point doing anything less would have been cowardly. The Marshall Plan helped make inefficient bureaucratic welfare states throughout Europe possible by breaking prosperity away from economic sanity. We ended racism in our legal systems, sure, but never forget that it was legal systems that made institutional racism possible. We used Social Security to force every American, no matter how well-off or far-sighted, to buy into socialized pensions that will either bankrupt themselves in a few decades or face privatization (not to mention that our seniors were NOT living in abject poverty before Social Security and the market has grown by a third in the past forty years! Show me any Social Security account with that kind of growth, even after factoring in recession!). We faced down Stalin? Where? We faced down Khrushchev by taking American missiles out of Turkey quietly – hoorah humility. We proved to the world democracy and free markets could work by being rich and free without central control of our lives and money.

America is doing more research than any other nation on the planet to research cures for everything from cancer to HIV/AIDS to genetic diseases to heart disease. Our private system of health research and insurance means that people can choose to pay for more experimental treatments than they are elsewhere. In the UK, every treatment must be certified by a central government body. One of the criteria they use for certification is cost effectiveness. If a treatment does not extend average life expectancies by a certain amount per pound spent, it is not approved. A recent kidney treatment extended average life spans by six months in patients; unfortunately, the government cost ratios mandated at least a year of improvement before the drug could be used. In America, you are free to make your own choices about the kind of treatment you need with your doctor. Unfortunately, new HHS Secretary Daschle’s plan could change that: http://www.reason.com/news/show/130726.html

Universal health insurance will not come without dramatic new government control of the health care system. 130,000 pages of Medicare regulations already set the standards for what is cost-appropriate. Believe me, I’ve purchased more than one wheelchair and other pieces of medically necessary equipment through private insurance and still had to have my needs meet state standards. As long as the government is footing the bill for health care, it and not competition, my freedom to pick insurers, and my doctors will have the power to ultimately say what I can consider. If we want to truly help the poor, let’s limit tort and liability so that doctors can take patients as Good Samaritans and make house visits without fearing the lawyer. Let’s give more tax deductions for research of new drugs and cut back on restrictions that prevent people from freely choosing alternative and experimental treatments. Let’s shrink down Medicare and Medicaid so that more private insurers can be innovative with their coverage plans.

Finally, as for railroads, the labor standards sucked and were abusive, fine. In the end, though, it is perhaps more of a testament to the dedication of Chinese immigrants that the system came out as well as it did, just as Southern agriculture is a credit to the slaves who built it from nothing. In so much as the overlords and task masters get credit, you are right, it is wrong because so many were forced to work without contracts they freely entered. Perhaps, though, the end result is a source of pride for the people whose ancestors still worked through it all and made something impressive. But then, I’m just another white guy from the middle class who cannot really speak of such things.