Economy
Thomas Sowell makes a clear point about Medicare-for-All
How was the left able to take heat away from their Medicare-for-All proposal, and more specifically the estimated $32 trillion price tag over a decade? They tripled down with the Green New Deal, which some estimate would cost upwards near $100 trillion.
So, the price tag of the Democrats’ desired replacement for utterly failing Obamacare is to take current government control over healthcare and put it on a regiment of steroids and methamphetamine. When you’re going through Hell, keep going, I suppose.
But all of this could be alleviated if voters and politicians took a moment to think about the prospects of Medicare-for-All logically. Let’s erase, for a moment, the Utopian notion that taxing rich people extreme amounts will give us enough money to make healthcare free for everyone while also improving the quality. That’s the goal, right? Cheaper, better healthcare is what most people want. Conservatives believe it’s best to pull government administration out of the equation and put it all on a competitive capitalist model that has worked for nearly every other industry for over a century. Hyper-leftists want to add more government control.
Conservative commentator Thomas Sowell has some thoughts on the matter. One in particular can be wrapped up into an eloquent quote that should be ideological checkmate allowing us to win the healthcare debate.
“It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.”
Of course, our version of checkmate requires common sense, logic, and basic math skills. These attributes aren’t as readily present on the left, therefore they might hear this logic and still think single-payer makes sense.
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This will be the first and hopefully the last time I speak out against a government plan to privatize anything. But as much as I like a blanket approach to taking control away from government in the vast majority of situations, the plan to privatize public parking in Nashville is so loaded with problems, it shouldn’t move forward.
I first heard the details of the plan when I read about the rare occurrence of a Democratic mayor wanting to privatize an element of city government. Generally, Democrats push for more control over their territories, not less, which is why I was hoping to find an instance where the realities of limited-government federalism and capitalistic privatization was seeping into the psyche of a Democratic leader. What I found was appalling: a desperate mayor, David Briley, throwing anything he could against the fiscal walls in hopes of making it stick. His city faces a woeful budget shortfall, something that should not be happening in a city as vibrant and growing as Nashville.
But, they need money immediately to make up the shortfall before the end of the fiscal year and this seems to be their last resort following an atrocious set of attempts to sell off public land to make up the cash difference. The attempt was so botched, the city council passed a resolution preventing such an attempt from being used in the future to cover operating expenses. But now, they’re ready to push the parking privatization scheme through with a rubber stamp and hopes nobody will look closely at the details.
The latter is unlikely, as many are already speaking out. Mayoral candidate Carol M. Swain urged the city to halt the plans, clearly pointing out it’s a very bad deal:
Nashville must oppose Mayor David Briley’s public parking privatization plan
We the People of Davidson County and surrounding areas will be adversely impacted if Mayor Briley, who is up for re-election, can push through this deal that would entail a 30-year commitment.
No agreement of this magnitude should be for more than any one term of the mayor’s office.
Once they have the contract, there is nothing to prevent the bid-winning private company from also raising rates until they match rates common to larger cities such as Chicago and New York City.
As Swain noted, this is a 30-year deal that essentially turns a public revenue source into a for-profit scheme that will sacrifice the people’s control for decades in exchange for saving a single year’s budget. The loss of future revenues and control aren’t the only things at stake, though. The deal will include increases across the board for citizens of Nashville, including:
- A rise in the number of parking spots designated as paid that will essentially double them over four years
- Increased cost per hour by 25 cents
- More than doubling fines from $11 to $25
- Decreasing free parking times by four hours per weekday
- Removing free parking on weekends
- Removing free parking for green vehicles
The mayor is pushing the deal as a way to innovate and catch up with the rest of the nation, citing technological improvements. But any such improvements could be made by the city, as could the changes to the times, costs, and fines, so his points are moot. The reality is this: They need cash now and they don’t have any other schemes that can work this quickly.
There’s a solution to all this: cut budgets. Fiscal responsibility should not be obfuscated by get-cash-quick schemes that will harm Nashville’s citizens. Make cuts. Increase revenues long term. Make Nashville as business-friendly as possible. These are the ways that work in America. Corrupt land deals and desperate privatization schemes always hurt in the long run. This time, they’re hurting Nashville in the short term as well.
Nashville’s parking plan is the equivalent of taking an important part of many citizens’ daily lives and pawning it off to pay the city’s bills. They’re giving up 30 years of control to save a single year’s budget.
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A short video on how technological innovation born of economic liberty has changed the world.
History is more than dates, places and battles. In many instances it’s technological advances that change the world for the betterment of all mankind. In this case it’s the story of French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson and his creation in France of the first all metal slide rest lathe, the forerunner to all modern machine tools in 1751.
Lathes had been around for centuries, but lacked the precision with hand held cutting tools. The slide rest of the Vaucanson metal lathe that provided the control to produce metal part of exacting dimensions. The lathe is said to be able to produce every other machine and machine tool. This advancement changed everything.
The producer of the video references a profound chart of World Population GCP and per Capita GCP 1 –2008 AD from data of the late Angus Maddison, similar to this produced by the Visual Capitalist, we credit them for the chart and commentary:
For thousands of years, economic progress was largely linear and linked to population growth. Without machines or technological innovations, one person could only produce so much with their time and resources.
More recently, innovations in technology and energy allowed the “hockey stick” effect to come into play.
The video was produced by Machine Thinking last year.
While some may quibble about which particular machine produced this miracle The larger point is that the machines of the industrial age profoundly changed what people could produce.
As the video noted the average person in 1600 was no better off economically than someone thousands of years earlier. This is what is called the Malthusian trap and for seven thousand years, it was inescapable no matter what we did.
Machine tools such as this changed all of that, one person could produce what had taken many. This surplus could outpace births, allowing the economy to grow at an incredible pace as seen in the chart. All from the genius of the mind undergirded by the Economic liberty of the free-enterprise system. This is why this is vastly superior to the societal slavery of socialism.
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Sawyer
March 19, 2019 at 1:22 am
I’m not stereotypical of any leaning except for as much choice as is possible as our Creators have provided – free will to become as rotten as we choose or as good as we choose.
This is a great common sense quote from Thomas Sowell. The one big way I differ from the commentary on that statement is saying that capitalism has worked until now so why change it. It used to work for much of the middle class and it’s always worked for the upper class and for the lower class to some degree it has worked by providing non-capitalistic programs, like social security and Medicare/Medicaid and affirmative action (to help everyone be equal as laid out in the constitution) and with public housing and food stamps and other nutrition programs and with public (social) education where every property owner pays into it and in some cases Pell grants for higher education, etc. If those programs were strictly capitalistic and privatized they would be like the many corporations where their stock holders were more important than helping people have that equality they were supposed to have as Americans, even the ones forced to come to the U.S. or to escape persecution by the religious and/or secular and/or corporate institutions and oppressive of choice governments. Some say private enterprise would come to the aid of the poor but if that was the case where do we have major examples of that. The Christian behemoths, so called non-profit organizations would much rather send their constituents money to anyplace but the U.S. Look at the privatized prisons and how they have no accountability and the privatized parts of the military, an example of which was Halliburton that received millions more than it documented in it’s role of supplying the military in Iraq, that came from the US taxpayers and according to many military personal didn’t take care of their needs very well. Then there are the private security firms. One was named Blackwater for a while. The contractors by the thousands were paid far better than the American service members.
T.L. Brink
March 19, 2019 at 2:36 pm
That’s it? a one-sentence quotation devoid of facts is supposed to be the definitive statement? How about this counterpoint “It is amazing that some economists believe that we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication with a government bureaucracy to administer it, but do believe that we can do a better job with less money by having dozens of private insurance bureaucracies administer the plans and extract executive salaries, bonuses and profits.” Of course, we could actually look at the percent of GDP each nation spends on health care … but that would should that the current U.S. system is the least efficient.