Wire Report

(NoThirdSolution: David Zemens) – For many people (and yes I’m jumping to conclusions and making sweeping generalizations here) “No one should die because they can’t afford health care” is the weasel way of saying “I want someone else to pay for it” without sounding like a panhandler. So, take what follows with a grain of salt, OK?

On that note, someone’s Facebook status said:

“No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.”

No one should die just because they were born in sub-Saharan Africa, either. But they do. Doesn’t make it fair, but it happens. For every “poor” or underprivileged Westerner complaining about their lack of “health care” (NB: even the poorest Americans have access to better health care than, I would venture to guess, 85% of the earth’s population has ever had), there are a million people living on $1 and a cup of rice each day — so cry me a river.

Every one of us will die at the crossroads of some particular circumstances, time, and place:

• Some of us die in our sleep. Some of us are merely in “the wrong place at the wrong time”.
• Some of us will die because the technology to cure what ails us has not yet been invented.
• Some of us will die because we made poor choices that presently impact our ability to care for ourselves, and
• some of us will die unfortunately through no direct fault of our own, because we can’t afford to pay for the technology that does exist.

To lament the fact that some people die under seemingly inopportune circumstances is folly; it ignores the lion’s share of the equation. Financial circumstances are a scapegoat, because at nearly any time and place where the individual isn’t DOA, a change in financial circumstances might forestall death for a few hours, days, weeks, or months.

You’ll get no arguments from me, if you say that “health care is too expensive”: blame the AMA cartel, the FDA, blame “Big Insurance”, etc. But national health care is health care fascism; the insurers want guaranteed profits, guaranteed customers for life, and Uncle Sam to pay the bills. They want to sell you your own welfare.

You’ll get no arguments from me, if you say that “the system” needs to be reformed: specifically it needs to not be a system at all. People aren’t permitted under the law to care for themselves or to arrange for the care of others. Or because the consumer is not the customer, and the customer enjoys certain tax privileges that the consumer does not, etc. Or because people have been conditioned to believe that “insurance” should pay for an annual check-up and dental exams and all sorts of other routine maintenance instead of just providing for accidents and serious illnesses.

The problem is that health care, medicine, long-term care, etc., is damned expensive. Government is the problem in health care, which keeps it unaffordable.

Asking or forcing others to pay the costs, which you can’t afford, will do nothing to actually solve that problem; it just shifts the burden, messing up someone else’s life circumstances, exacerbating the problem for the future.

About the Author: David Zemens

David Zemens is the Editor & Publisher of No Third Solution, and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business and a Master’s degree in Economics. A self-taught libertarian, David has recently begun delving in to “agorism” a political philosophy developed by Samuel Edward Konkin III, which aims for a society built on voluntary associations and exchange, thereby resulting in a true free market. He considers one-day subverting state propaganda completely by opting to teach at the local community college. David currently works as a market-research analyst and he and his wire were happily married in September of 2008.

Joseph Marohl

In high school and college, I felt loyalty to my schools’ teams only when I personally knew one or more of the players. I’m amazed when, at about this time of year, I see friends and acquaintances around these parts, decades out of school, get apoplectic about NC State, Duke, or UNC basketball. With some people, I’d be risking bodily harm even to voice this concern to their faces.

It’s basically all in fun, I know that, a way to vent, to aerobicize one’s loyalties and group identifications. To some extent, I wish I could join in on the fun. Really, I do. But another part of me remains not just disinterested but distrustful—as if, as Noam Chomsky suggested, such sideline enthusiasm for team sports is just indoctrination in the herd mentality, group-think brainwashing, and conditioning to respond favorably to jingoism.

I might go a little further—and say such concerns can be distractions from the business of a democratic republic. As the Roman satirist Juvenal so famously put it—with heaps of irony: “Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed commands, consul-ships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things—Bread and Games!” (Satire 10, trans. G.G. Ramsay, 1918)

Or, to modernize, Doritos® and NCAA®!

Arguments about ideas, especially ideas that strike me as important and about which I’m curious—such as religion, culture, the state of the world, or politics—are very worthwhile. I thrive on reasonably heated (but mostly reasonable) discussions.

Another thing (but related): I’m not a good partisan. I’m really just not much of a joiner at all—sometimes just clicking a “send” icon to rally with Moveon.org is more than I’m prepared to commit to. I’m sorry if this offends—and I assure you I’m anything but wishy-washy—and I abhor unthinking relativism and the “paralysis of analysis.”

Still, I do not have a mindset compelled to bend every new found fact to a pre-existing ideology. I try not to be a knee-jerk liberal or a knee-jerk anything. I do not feel bound to bottom lines, constitutions, creeds, manifestos, or scriptures. I haven’t decided yet whether this deficiency makes me more or less a person of integrity.

In breaking his ties to an anarchist organization, William Morris, the Victorian artist and socialist, wrote, “Men absorbed in a movement are apt to surround themselves with a kind of artificial atmosphere which distorts the proportions of things outside, and prevents them from seeing what is really going on.”

I stopped being a “true believer” of any sort by age 29. Though I am registered to vote as a member of the Democratic Party and happily voted for Obama last November, my mind is more dialectic than partisan, so I’m more a small-letter politico—democrat, republican, anarchist, radical, socialist, libertarian—which is to say “not actually a politico at all.”

I like to challenge (rather than to confirm) my ideals, principally by taking frequent long, hard looks at reality and seeking challenging input from knowledgeable people with varying values, interests, and affiliations.

It’s good to resist whatever conditioning one’s had to take sides automatically, without checking each position by the facts, without mulling the facts over. No doubt it makes life more difficult and sometimes more lonely not knowing what colors to wear, to have to wait to see who plays the better game before deciding whom to cheer. And sometimes I take shortcuts, but always with a sense of bad faith and guilt. (And, by the way, letting distrust corrode into cynicism is the worst kind of shortcut.)

Distrust of certainty, cant, and jingoism is healthy. Can you really respect anyone whose whole philosophy, whose whole politics, whose whole values, fit on an 11×3-inch bumper sticker?

Joseph Marohl

In my British literature class today, we were discussing Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, in which Carlyle, who lost his faith in the Calvinist religion he was raised in, conservatively argues that the forms of Christianity (in particular, the idea of duty) have value in structuring culture, even in an age of doubt and skepticism.

Several students raised the issue of religion and meaninglessness and morals, arguing that without a belief in God there can be no morals because life then has no meaning.

Carlyle’s point, though, is that work and action have meaning even without a fundamental faith in myths of origins and without a clear view of the future towards which one is supposedly working. His stance is that doubt is better than faith when doubt works in the interest of a genuine love of truth and faith provides only a pleasant fantasy in which one cocoons oneself from the harshness and indifference of history and the cosmos.

People who say that they need belief in God because existence would be too terrifying without it are, at heart, pleasure-seekers—even worse, as Carlyle implies, because they are pleasure-seekers willing to sacrifice truth on the altar of comfortable illusion.

To act, for Carlyle, is better than to believe. Some students objected though that moral action has no merit apart from a belief in a God who judges those actions. I pointed out that the Greeks developed a sophisticated moral sense based on the needs of society, quite apart from their gods, who, as forces of nature, acted any way but morally.

One student objected, stating that this precisely was her problem with “secular philosophers”: they argued about morality—what made a man or a republic good—but failed to find a center or reason for moral behavior. And therefore each successive philosopher debunks the findings of his predecessor, and we are then left with a belief in nothing.

I pointed out that religion did not solve this problem any better—because just as philosophers cannot agree on their conception of the Good, theologians cannot agree on their conception of God—and, further, a 21st century Christian’s concept of God is markedly different from a 19th century Christian’s concept.

At bottom, there is a problem with idealism, I think. The purity of concept that idealism demands is incompatible with taking action, because no real action can embody an ideal. Our choices are then to preserve moral ideals—encase them, codify them, study and defend them—or to act on them.

Simply to preserve principles of morality is a form of idolatry, one that does nothing to ensure that culture grows and flourishes. Its focus is entirely purity of form, and that purity must never be sullied by crass action—such morality has limitless capabilities, but no duty to act.

To act morally, though, means to rub shoulders with the realities of life at a particular time, under particular circumstances, and in the process almost certainly to watch as that morality mutates or evolves into something altogether different. But it is the latter morality, not pure and not ideal, and constantly mutating, that has the force to push culture forward—whereas the rarefied ideal morality is decadent, self-absorbed, and impractical.

Surely, then, it is better to pursue goodness in one’s actions—even at the risk of making mistakes, perhaps even in unintentionally doing harm (and here it’s useful to remember that Carlyle hated utilitarianism, which argues that ends justify means, regardless of intentions—and judges results in terms of statistical norms)—than to define and defend a pristine goodness that is impossible to perform.

Though I can’t say that I buy into all of Carlyle’s ideas—and hardly any of his Tory politics or love of duty for duty’s sake—I think he’s on to something here. Certainly the problem with the great ideologies—Christianity, for instance, or, for that matter, liberalism or conservatism—is that they are prone to self-absorption, endlessly refining themselves and polishing themselves up to the point that they cannot be touched, much less performed.

We cannot reduce morality to a set of rules without destroying the dynamic power of morality. Likewise, we cannot simply believe in moral precepts and believe that that belief, without works, without action, without performance, is enough. And we cannot so spiritualize or intellectualize morality that it loses touch with ordinary human existence—or fails to address real human problems, such as hunger, homelessness, panic, and despair.

An inflexible idealism, though awe-inspiring to look at, never gets its hands dirty. In effect, in reality, all it can do is criticize and destroy. Nothing, in fact, that leaves a grimy footprint can ever measure up to its pure ideals.

And, as Carlyle puts it, the gulf between capability and performance is immense. Moral and political ideologues work best when they have no power whatsoever—but display a sense of vast though untested capability. Then they can stand on the sidelines and shine superiorly.

Joseph Marohl

To prove something means to put it to the test, not necessarily (in fact, seldom) to provide certainty on the matter. In that sense, the phrase “the exception proves the rule” makes sense, that is, a counter-proof gives us the opportunity to put a position’s logic on trial.

A good many things can’t be proved. They are, in fact, the very same things that cannot be disproved—life after death, the existence of a personal deity who creates and provides for all that exists, the assurance that your dog loves you, and so on.

To prove your position, provided it is a position and not a matter of verifiable fact, you must state your position precisely—that such-and-such exists, that it is good or beautiful or useful, that it means something, that it has causes and effects, or that we should conduct ourselves in particular ways because of it.

“The proof of the pudding is in the tasting.” Experience and experimentation are the guidelines to solid proof.

It must be publicly testable. Your intuition and feelings and the way you were brought up may all be excellent ways for you individually to be certain about the world around you, but they don’t constitute proof. They are almost useless, by themselves, in reaching the sort of compromise and consensus that life in a democracy demands. (Note: The Athenians who gave us Western democracy also gave us logic and argumentation.)

Proof must be available to the senses—especially other people’s senses, not just your own—a tangible object, an observed event, a predictable and immediate cause or effect, a deduction from premises which are themselves available to sense and experience, a comparison to something already known, a settled definition, or something that can be measured or counted.

Ideally, proof does not depend on authority or expertise, but if authorities, experts, or eyewitnesses are allowed into an argument, they must be credible—that is, knowledgeable on the matter under discussion, honest, and disinterested.

And our conclusions must be valid—which means they must follow directly and inevitably from the proofs we use.

If something can be proved, it can be argued about—it can also be disproved. Some things—such as that the earth orbits the sun, that human life has value, or that every independent citizen in a democracy should vote—have been already proved to the extent that most people no longer argue about them—and the proofs against them have fallen into disrepute—but these matters have been argued in the past, and they could be argued again sometime in the future, should new, reputable counter-proofs ever appear.

Thus, some things that used to be unarguable—that torture is never justified, that marriage can exist only between one man and one woman, that what’s good for General Motors is good for America—have recently become arguable because circumstances and change have provided new evidence for putting these assumptions to the test.

A good measure of what a society is all about is what it chooses to put to the test—and how swiftly and how carefully controversies are put to rest.

It is not a good reflection on American culture, for instance, that the issues of abortion, civil rights, and the death penalty have been allowed to roil over decades with little or no effort to rise above prejudice, preconceptions, and self-interest to study these matters and test them according to fact and reason.

Likewise, it is not a good reflection on America or its leaders that they have been swifter in declaring a new war, in a matter of a week usually, with hardly a word of debate on the matter, than in fixing its infrastructure, which—from its education system to its levees to its prisons to its voting booths—has been sagging for decades now.

What we tend to focus on in this society—in the mass media and beside the office water coolers—is almost never what proves to be the matters of much importance.

Hurricane Katrina exposed the neglect we have paid to poverty and racism, and 9/11 revealed how slipshod our security is and how arrogant our view of the rest of the world is, and the current financial crisis draws our attention to the nation’s burgeoning debt and the greed and illogic betrayed by its sense of luxury and entitlement.

Yet up to all this, we fussed over (I choose not to say “argued”) whether O.J. was or was not guilty, or whether Lindsay is or is not a lesbian, or whether George W. Bush deserved his Yale degree or his honorable discharge from the Texas Air National Guard.

This summer, when McCain selected Palin as his running mate, how quickly our attention shifted from what qualified her to be vice president to how well McCain’s staff “vetted” her (i.e., followed standard operating procedures) and how funny she was and how much her clothes cost. Just for the record, her qualifications were matters that could, with some effort, be put to the test. Her sense of humor, to take the weakest link, is harder to prove or disprove. What her clothes cost was just a matter of verifiable fact.

Here’s my point:

We are a nation primed to act on impulse and feeling—not altogether bad things and certainly necessary to motivate action. But we lack the patience to put matters of great importance to the test, to ask for proof when it is needed and, instead, to ask for too many lurid and sensationalistic details when they are irrelevant.

What does that say about us, as a people? (The answer is not altogether bad—but it’s not flattering either, for a nation as rich and powerful as we—still—are.)

Do I know what I know because it “feels” true inside me, where it cannot be touched by reason or fellow feeling, or because I have confidence that, if I have to, I can put it to the test?

Both, I think (and feel).