Birds, Bees, and the US Government
When a baby bird is growing up, there comes a time when the mother bird begins to dangle the baby’s food outside the nest, forcing the baby to crawl out and get it. Frequently, this will result in the baby bird falling to the ground, and hobbling in pain back to the nest, only to try again. But eventually the bird learns to control his fall, and in doing so, begins to learn to fly.
Why does the mother do this? If the pair was human, we might say that the mother is sadistic and enjoys seeing the baby suffer. We might say that the mother doesn’t care. We would probably arrest the mother on charges of child abuse. But could it be that the mother knows that the only way to teach something is for the pupil to suffer the consequences of their actions?
At the beginning of the semester, my physics professor put up a quote (I couldn’t find the attribution) on the first day of class saying that, “Teaching is creating situations in which students can only escape by thinking.” It seems to me that this is a doctrine we’ve lost in modern society. It’s now considered inhumane to force people to suffer the consequences of their actions when they refuse to think.
It’s (apparently) immoral to turn someone away at a hospital because they jumped off a two story building when they were high on hallucinogens and don’t have insurance. (True story: A relative of my roommate did this and <b>wasn’t</b> high on hallucinogens) It’s (apparently) immoral for me to not want to fund a national health care program that would spend 80% of its budget on preventable conditions that people were too lazy or too stupid to seek treatment for. And it’s (apparently) immoral for me to oppose the subsidization of programs that ultimately enslave people to the path of least resistance.
I must just want to see them suffer, just like all of the other evil conservatives, right? I must be too selfish and greedy to have any empathy for their situation. At least that’s what I’ve been told. But perhaps there’s another motivating factor. Perhaps I want them to learn from their actions, so that they don’t make the same mistake again.
A friend of mine once illustrated this point by answering the classic question, “Should you give a man a fish, or teach him to fish?” Her answer was that you should do neither, because the person will not have learned to think for himself, and when he moves away from the shore, he will starve again. It is only that starvation that will teach him to think, and then he can teach himself to fish. Delaying that starvation, and denying him the opportunity to learn is one of the cruelest things you can do to a person.
I’ve never understood how a fundamental law of nature understood by every creature large and small eludes a significant portion of the human race. To quote The Matrix, “You see there is only one constant. One universal. It is the only real truth. Causality. Action, reaction. Cause and effect.” A bee stings me, and I learn to avoid bees. Cause and Effect. It’s the way nature works. And the ultimate effect of entitlement programs is that people cease to provide for themselves, because they remove the causes that naturally drives people toward production.
This holds true even when the public is given “options”, because while there are options in the strictest sense, the market more closely resembles a monopoly. In the education market, it takes work to research and choose a private school, and that’s on top of the additional cost. Thus, typical families choose public schools, which may or may not be a better deal, largely because the government facilitates that choice, and makes it easy. This tendency towards public schools drives down competition, and gives the government, in essence, an unfair monopoly on the market.
Thus it perplexes me why we want to model our health care system after our education system. The evidence on our schools is clear – we lag behind practically every industrialized country on the planet. Do we think that that is a good system after which to model our health care system? We may not be mimicking this system consciously, but they are essentially the one and the same. The “Public Option” is no different from public schools, and the results will be no different from any monopoly – innovation will be stagnant, prices will be high, and inefficiency will abound.