War and Peace

"Ronald Reagan once said “history teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap”.

Walk alone down a dark alley in the wrong part of town and you are asking for trouble. Walk down that same alley with ten of your well armed friends, and you are likely to be left alone.

There was recently an article in a popular news magazine that posited the idea that nuclear arms make the world safer because nobody with them is willing to confront anybody else that has them. That was behind the MAD (mutually assured destruction) doctrine of the cold war. If both the Soviet Union and the United States had enough nuclear capability to wipe each other off the map, and no effective way of stopping incoming ICBMs, nobody would launch a first strike. While arming the world with nuclear weapons is not a safe or sane approach to world peace, we can learn something from that period of history.

There are bullies in this world who run governments as well as school yards and organized crime. Seeking peace is a good thing, but we must be aware that the bullies only respect and believe power. If you are overly reluctant to demonstrate your power, or if you sue for peace too anxiously, these bullies will interpret your behavior as weakness. Convinced of your willingness to avoid war at all costs they will be inclined to push you to the point where you have no choice but to capitulate or respond with force. If, for example, you are unwilling to allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, you can’t let them put you in a position where you will have to react with more force to a larger threat and cost more lives than would have been the case if you had clearly drawn your line in the sand at the beginning of the exchange and reacted with targeted force the instant that line was crossed. You will face anger at home and abroad, but you will have saved lives, money and, ironically, preserved the peace more effectively, by using force sooner rather than later.

The longer you wait to address hostility in the Iranians, North Koreans, Al Qaeda or even the Russians, the more egos are in play on the side of those aggressive regimes, and the less they believe your threats and ultimatums. You are enticing them to push you as far as they think they can, and that is likely farther than you are, or should be, willing to be pushed. The result is a much larger scale war than would have been the case with a sterner position and reaction in the beginning.

A clear example of that is Saddam Hussein. After the Gulf War there were terms set down for Iraq to follow. Saddam agreed to those terms, but repeatedly violated them. Little of consequence was done in return. The UN and the USA wagged their fingers and gave them stern looks. Then came September 11, 2001. President Bush was in no mood for a repeat. An ultimatum was given, allow UN weapons inspectors unfettered access to your country, go into exile, or be attacked. There are reports that tell us that Saddam’s generals believed he had weapons of mass destruction, because he believed giving that impression gave him cache’. Those reports indicate that he was convinced that the United States would not launch a major assault on his country. We see the results of those miscalculations.

We want peace. The United States does not seek war for conquest. We have not occupied or annexed a vanquished foe since the Indian wars of the 1800s. But we must realize that we value human life more than our adversaries do. We can’t let that desire for peace allow them to back us into a corner. We can’t give up weapons systems without getting something meaningful in return, and we can’t use fewer troops than is necessary to get the job done in Afghanistan, and we can’t wag our finger and talk sternly to Iran. We can’t wait until the cost of waiting is capitulation or more massive devastation.

Power Corrupts

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."...Lord Acton

We all have ideas that we believe to be important. For example, here I am writing a blog with the hope that anybody will read it and that if they do, I can change something. I, however, am pretty harmless. I will write what I think, and a few people will read it. Some may agree with me and others will not. There is an outside chance that my thoughts will reach somebody with some influence and power, but even if that happens, they are the ones with the power, not me.

But when we elect people to public office, we empower them to act on our behalf in ways that effect all of us. By electing them, we give them immense power. The higher the office, the more power they obviously have. And they have ideas that they think are important too. The difference is that they are in a position to do something about it.

When our economy was on the brink of collapse, those that we elected rushed to pass a bill to pull us back from the edge. That is what they should have done. But they had some important ideas about how government should run. They thought that as long as they had to pass a bill, they would spend $800,000,000,000 on a lot of things that had nothing to do with rescuing the economy.The economy appears to be recovering and only a fraction of that money has been spent, but it will be spent anyway. Most economists expect a slow and tenuous recovery, and many would attribute that, at least in part, to the policies in Washington.

There is little doubt among those in the financial world that something had to be done. But last November we gave Democrats something they had not had in decades. We gave them the Presidency, a large majority in the House of Representatives and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. I am not a big fan of the two party system, but that is far superior to a one party system. A one party system is what we gave the Democrats. We gave them more power than any political party has had in a very long time.

Among other things, we have had imposed upon us, in rapid succession, an economic bailout bill that goes far beyond bailing out the economy. The House has passed a Cap & Trade bill that, if passed by the Senate, many believe will not resolve the problems it was purportedly designed to remedy, but will hurt the economy that the bailout bill was intended to fix. Now there is an emergency to pass a health care bill that will give government unprecedented control over our lives and a large chunk of our economy.

Washington DC has a habit of making a mess of things as it is, but when we give one party such unchecked power, we can expect unchecked corruption.

Is Medicare a Good Model for National Health Care?

It is a rhetorical technique to state a debatable issue as if it were fact. It puts opponents at the disadvantage of having to play defense, and those who may be less well informed will have a tendency to assume your statement is true.

I keep hearing proponents of a government option in health care use Medicare as an example of how well it will work. The President did this Wednesday night. So, just how well does Medicare work?

Many doctors will not take new Medicare patients because the program underpays so severely as to make it impossible to earn a living if they see too many patients. Not impossible to earn a good living. Impossible to earn a living. Some Medicare reimbursements are so low that, depending on the doctor's overhead, each patient visit can be a few dollars either side of break even. It requires those of us with the kind of insurance that the administration and some in congress are villainizing to pay our doctors enough for our visits that they are able to afford to see Medicare patients at all.


Medicare is due to start bleeding money faster than it is taking in money in just a few years.


The President thinks there is so much "waste and abuse" in Medicare and Medicaid that cutting it out will fund nearly all of his new plan. If there is that much "waste and abuse" in Medicare, why not cut it out now?

Part of the reason is that in any bureaucracy there will be waste and abuse. The larger the bureaucracy, the more waste and abuse there will be. That is just the nature of the beast. Nothing runs perfectly and the larger and more complex the organization, the less perfectly it will run. It is fantasy to think you will eliminate waste and abuse any more than you can eliminate gravity. In order to get money out of Medicare he is going to have to cut payments in a system that already underpays to the extent that health care is now being rationed to the elderly by virtue of doctors not accepting new patients.

The President promised that a government run plan will be self-funding. That is the way the Postal Service works.

How long did you have to stand in line the last time you went to the post office? Postage rates have been increasing annually for the last few years and still the Postal Service is losing money. Rather than resolving the problems by being more competitive and customer friendly, they are talking about cutting delivery services to 5 days a week and closing some post offices. This is what happens when the government runs something. There are no competitive forces at play to compel creative thinking. It doesn't become a matter of providing better services to the customer. Do we really want to replace what is arguably a good health care system in need of improvement with a government monopoly similar to the Postal Service or Medicare?

Presidential Speech on Health Care

He may not be succinct, but The President does deliver a good speech. As was true for his campaign for office, he articulated many positions most Americans can agree with. Who wants to see a woman denied coverage in the middle of her cancer treatments? Who doesn't agree that everybody should be able to obtain affordable health care? Who would object to a government run health plan that was completely self-funding, did not compete unfairly with the private sector, and only covered the poorest 5% among us? Who would not want all of those things and have it not cost any money? Who doesn't want there to be a Santa Clause?

The goals the President laid out Wednesday night are accepted by Democrats, Republicans and independents. The debate has always been about how to get there from here. He threw in something of an olive branch on torte reform, though it was either so vague, or I was so stupid that I'm not sure what exactly was being offered.

To continue to demand a government option in the face of the public opposition to it is either dogmatism, arrogance, or political expediency. Expediency being the least objectionable of the three. After all, if he can't get enough votes in his own party to support a bill without a public option, he can't get the bill. He did leave a crack in the door but it is a narrow one. Some think he insisted on the public option then threw it out. That is not the way it sounded to me, but we will see.

Libertarians will have a difficult time with the idea of compelling people to buy insurance. I am among them, but I am a libertarian with a small "L". I am practical too. There are likely three purposes for the mandatory insurance.

First of all, in practical terms everybody is insured now, since it is illegal to deny medical care to those in need. So those who are uninsured can show up in an emergency room and get taken care of without paying for it. So even these people are receiving a minimal level of care now and paying no premiums. Although they may see the doctor less often, when they do see one, it is under the most expensive circumstances.


The second purpose is likely the fact that in order to prohibit insurance companies from denying or canceling coverage, you have to deal with something called adverse selection. That is the tendency of healthy people to postpone buying insurance until they need it. That gaming of the system destroys the concept of insurance as a risk pool, where we all contribute now because we don't know who will need the pooled money (premiums) we have all contributed or when that money may be needed. If we allow people to do that I don't know how we are going to be able to keep premiums at an affordable level.

The third reason is related. That is the additional healthy insureds are a carrot to get the insurance companies to support the program. Thus, this provision may actually be a means to keep the government option out of the final bill because insuring everbody means lower premiums for everybody, thus keeping down health care costs. So I am conflicted about this provision of the plan. There are practical reasons to support it, but their are philosophical reasons to oppose it.



For the sake of brevity, I will only deal with these items for now, but there will be more to come.

Don't Let Politicians Divide Us Into Opposing Teams

Why do we insist on choosing up sides in order to decide what we believe? During the last Presidential campaign somebody sent me a You Tube link that showed several Obama supporters interviewed on the street, being asked questions like, "What do you like most about Obama, the fact that he is pro-life or that he selected Sarah Palin for his running mate?". I'm sure there were plenty of people who caught on & were therefore edited out of the video, but there were certainly enough who supported both of his supposed positions to make an entertaining several minutes. These people didn't support Barak Obama because of his positions on the issues. They supported him because he was a Democrat, or because he was a liberal, or because he was black, or because he was articulate, or because their friends supported him. These people went along & allowed other people tell them what to believe about Obama and, presumably what to believe about McCain.

The most recent example is the healthcare debate. People are lining up on this, and stridently defending positions outlined by what appears to be their party of choice. A few days ago several people on Facebook had posted, ""No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. We are only as strong as the weakest among us." If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day." This is a sentiment most if not all of us can agree with. But this quote seemed to be being used, by and large, to promote a particular version of healthcare & to imply that those that don't support provisions in the bills now before congress are opposed to healthcare. But pay attention. Republicans have advanced several proposals to make healthcare both affordable and available to all Americans.

We can agree on many things that political teams in Washington DC want us to believe we cannot agree upon. If we refuse to let them set the agenda for us, we will be able to come up with something reasonable and bi-partisan.

Obfuscation

Why do we need 1,013 pages for a healthcare bill? Maybe for the same reason we need to hurry up & pass the bill yesterday, before there is opportunity to debate and improve it. The more that is in the bill, the more you can get passed what couldn't stand on its own.

If you can frame the argument as opposition to this bill is equal to opposition to healthcare reform, while putting everything you could possibly want, but never get passed on its own in that bill, the better your chance of getting things passed that the American people would never allow if they knew they had a choice.

Why not pass those provisions in the bill we can agree on, see how it works and go from there?