i really think every american who goes to college should spend at least one year living in another industrialized nation with universal health care.
it certainly changed me; i was a libertarian before i went to australia. being there taught me that only in america does government not work (i’m talking first-world industrialized nations here). and that’s because there’s a large group of conservative ideologues that refuse to allow it to work — and in fact make supreme efforts to prevent it from working, if only to prove their theory.
it seems that american conservatives want to sabotage government purely out of spite. Commenter at TPM Cafe
That’s what we should have learned after Katrina: if government officials don’t believe government can work, its not working becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Government for the Bush Republicans has no purpose except to function as the bloated patronage system that we all loathe. Libertarians don’t have any keener insight into the many flaws of big governments, but their thinking that the solution is to shrink it guarantees to make things worse. It’s hard enough to make it work under the best of circumstances, but it can’t possibly work if such a large constituency within the electorate believes it cannot work. Libertarianism is a cop-out ideology that gives people an excuse to be cynical and lazy about their responsibilities to insure that government works for them. If they don’t insist on a government that is accountable to the will of the people, they will get a government that is accountable only to the will of the rich and powerful.
People like Ron Paul can decry all they want how Bush’s brand of conservatism has grown rather than shrunk the government, but they fail to see that the kind of government-bloating, crony-capitalist conservatism they condemn has emerged during the Bush years as the unintended consequence of Libertarian principle. What do Libertarians expect to happen if they take away government’s ability to restrict private power to pursue its interests in the political sphere?
So I’m fine to ally myself with those Libertarians who vigorously defend civil liberties and who see as daft and dangerous the arrogance of American imperial projects. But when it comes to worshiping the market as the great solver of problems the market cannot solve on its own–e.g., health care, environmental and energy problems–the more consistent Libertarians are, the more they are victims of their own second-rate thinking.
I see this as a cultural problem rather than a political one. Our
cultural mentality, insofar as it is so broadly sympathetic to libertarian ideas, sets the conditions for what’s possible in the
political sphere. So my fear regarding universal health care is not that it couldn’t
work, but that there are too many Americans who do not want it to work, either because they are philosophically opposed to it or because they have a vested economic interest in its not working.
A minority of wonks and lefties want a solution that would create a sensible system here similar to the one in France. But most Americans don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other, but probably buy into the French, Canadian, or Australian model because the U.S. won the Cold War anything that smells at all like socialism is an evil to be avoided.) So the policy that ensues from such a configuration of cultural attitudes virtually insures that any attempt to solve the healthcare problem will be half-assed and unworkable–proving, once again, that government just makes a mess of things. No–government doesn’t make a mess of things; fools do, and we Americans, in our confusion, seem too inclined to elect the fools who are guaranteed to give us messes.
It took the great depression to knock some sense into Americans eighty years ago. Nothing seems to get done unless there’s a major crisis. We seem powerless to do anything in this country unless adrenaline is saturating our brains. Politics is otherwise just about so many pigs feeding at the trough.
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