Saturday, July 29, 2017

We Must Solve Our Problems or it's Just Going to be Communism

The nice thing about the left is that they have more or less the same solution to all problems, which is communism. So at least you know what you're getting. Predictability is the most important quality to any theory of thought, or at least that's what science tells us. And if we heed the advice of Sun Tzu, understanding the enemy is core to defeating them. The other side of this is that any open problems in society become leverage for the progs to advance their agenda. What we have now is problematic, let's try socialism is basically the Democrat platform.

Perhaps the best way to reproach them is to deal with society's problems. Easier said than done, no doubt, but eliminating liberal power means depriving them of an environment in which they can prosper by eliminating the problems the seek to exploit. Doing so won't quell the radicals. If they can't find a societal flaw they'll just invent one, but they'll get much less leverage out of that than a real problem with supporting evidence that many people in the middle are troubled by.

Let's look at healthcare, since it's in the news lately. One of the major flaws of our healthcare system is its dependency on employment. Lose your job and you lose your coverage. It's cruel. Insurance is intended to mitigate risk. I buy insurance because of the small chance I'll get cancer. I can't truly buy insurance if I already have cancer. There's no risk to mitigate, no uncertainty. I could no more buy health insurance with cancer than I could buy homeowner's insurance while my house is aflame. Insurance companies deny preexisting conditions for a reason. People who are cut off from their insurance benefits are thus stranded, because now there is no uncertainty about the state of their health.

There are a couple obvious solutions to this very real problem. The first would be to remove the government incentives for employment-based health insurance and let the problem work itself out. The second would be for the government to perform its job and to enforce legal contracts. Clearly people buy health insurance because if they succumb to some ailment, they expect the condition to be covered. Losing that coverage because of employment status is a legal loophole that should never have been permitted to start with. If I buy health insurance and get cancer, I expect the insurance company to cover my treatment until I'm cured or dead, whether or not I lose my job.

These solutions are not creative or difficult. They don't require brainstorming or compromise. They're just the obvious application of conservative fundamental principles. The government should not distort the free market. The government should enforce legal contracts.

Despite this really being an easy problem, the government response has only served to worsen the situation. They have responded by outlawing discrimination against preexisting conditions. It's as if the government said you can no longer refuse to grant someone homeowner's insurance just because their house is presently on fire. It fundamentally destroys the purpose of insurance, which is to mitigate risk. The government now forces companies to take on customers on whom they are certain to lose money.

What's interesting about Obamacare is that it's just about the worst possible solution. It is actually worse than just having single-payer (a euphemism for communist) medicine. There are at least some arguments to be made in favor of communist medicine, even though they're naively idealistic or they ignore history, but Obamacare is fundamentally flawed in all aspects. This is no accident. Liberals didn't have the political capital to impose communist medicine, but they certainly couldn't allow the painful problems of healthcare to be solved by the simple application of conservative principles. No, they need problems to exist to leverage their push for communism. They need healthcare to be broken. So they passed the worst legislation possible. Now there's an even bigger problem in medicine, which means there's even more opportunity for a communist solution.

If there is a silver lining to liberalism, it is that they force us to solve our problems. In the software world there is a catchphrase: broken gets fixed, shitty lasts forever. We often don't fix things until we have to. With liberals we can't let our problems fester too long, because they will just turn into communism. This is a great motivator for us to fix the things we should be fixing anyway. Healthcare should not be so expensive that it is the major driver of personal bankruptcy, and insurance benefits should not be tied to employment. By not solving the problem, we give the left leverage for their agenda, which also means the left is intrinsically motivated to create problems and sabotage solutions. The consequences of this for the right are apparent. We must be solving society's major problems, and we must be ruthless in suppressing the leftist propensity for treason. This is the only approach to prevent democracy's tendency to decay into socialist authoritarianism.

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