By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, October 08, 2016
I’m having a case of the Mondays on a Friday. I keep
poking at the computer screen like an orangutan with a Speak-and-Spell. (For
the kids out there, a Speak-and-Spell is what my generation called an iPad.)
I’m taking a much-needed vacation day from writing about that whole
presidential-election thing. But, when I look at the all the other headlines, I
kind of feel like I’m visiting a museum after the zombie apocalypse. It’s not
that these things aren’t important, they just seem like they’re from another
time.
You have to stare at the painting or the sculpture for a
few minutes until you can conjure the memory of why this stuff matters.
Take, for example, the dawning realization that Obamacare
is like a Claymation version of Wagner’s Der
Ring Des Nibelungen staged entirely with characters sculpted out of fecal
matter: The mother of all sh*t shows.
I know what you’re thinking: “Drew Brees is an
immortal who actually served as the 19th president of the United States.”
The interesting thing is that this means he and Alec Baldwin, who
coincidentally served
as the 13th president, may have to fight with swords because there can be
only one.
Oh no wait, that’s what I was thinking.
You’re thinking: “Great, now Jonah is going to do a
highly detailed uber-wonky analysis of risk corridors and premium-support
efforts with a special focus on Kentucky’s failure to make Kynect work.” But
fear not, as Bill Clinton said when they tried to get him to attend a
sex-addiction support group, I’m not going there.
It’s difficult to exaggerate how arrogant supporters of
Obamacare were back in 2009–10. Imagine trying to exaggerate the heat of the
sun to the point where people would say, “Look, I know the sun is hot. But come
on, it’s not that hot.” It’s the same
thing with the arrogance of Obamacare pushers. The English language simply
doesn’t provide the adjectives required to overstate the smugness of the Smart
Set during the fights over the Affordable Care Act. It wasn’t just that they
knew they were right, they acted as if critics were flat-earthers, birthers,
know-nothings, cranks, weirdos, and maroons. This was necessary because the
“reformers” were the protagonists in our MacGuffinized political discourse.
They had to be heroes and their opponents villains.
Obamacare was going to extend life-expectancies, save
money, wildly expand the number of people getting insurance coverage, improve
health care generally, lower premium costs, help small business become more
competitive, bring back Firefly,
restore Shoeless Joe Jackson’s reputation, transform pizza and beer into
carb-free fare, and make Bill Clinton’s mysterious cold sore disappear. Okay, I
made up those last few. But they were just as unlikely to come to pass.
I will admit, I was premature in my Obamacare grave dance
in 2013 when I wrote an, uh, rhetorically excessive gloat-o-rama. I read too
much into the fact that President Obama had hired the finest computer
programmers the Amish community has ever produced to design the Obamacare
website. It turned out that the lethal internal contradictions of Obamacare
needed more time to play themselves out, like a man stabbed with a Strontium-90
tipped umbrella or a victim of the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique.
But here we are. Take Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal:
States are reporting premium
increases of 60%, 70%, 80%. Insurers, sagging under losses, are fleeing. Nearly
a third of U.S. counties are now down to a single ObamaCare plan. Seventeen of
23 ObamaCare co-ops have imploded. Tennessee’s insurance commissioner warns her
state’s exchange market is “very near collapse.”
Brother Geraghty has more here.
Even Bill Clinton couldn’t stop himself from lamenting
the plight of hardworking Americans who “wind up with their premiums doubled
and their coverage cut in half and it’s the craziest thing in the world.”
But at least those obstreperous elderly nuns will have to
pay for birth control!
No, Obamacare will not collapse imminently — or maybe not
even ever. But that is not because it is “working” as a public policy.
Countries around the world have carried the husk of their far more socialized
health-care systems for generations. Rent control, the minimum wage, and
countless other economically ridiculous policies endure because they satisfy
the political needs of politicians, bureaucrats, and a whole phylum of
remora-like rent-seekers. That’s why Milton Friedman said, “Nothing is so
permanent as a temporary government program.” He should know, given how it was
basically his idea to implement tax-withholding from paychecks as a wartime
measure.
You might say that these programs also help real people
too. And that is true. But wealth distribution efforts always help someone. And those someones become
vested interests who demand perpetuation of the status quo. If the federal
government implemented a program to give every left-handed person in the
country $20,000 a year free and clear (no doubt to compensate for the fact that
such people are witches), you can be sure the Left Handed Association of
America would work assiduously to protect their entitlement.
The VA health-care system is a moral outrage, but it
resists actual reform because the interests of the VA bureaucracy and their
associated allies are more important than the interests of vets in need of
quality health care.
So it may be with Obamacare. For political and
psychological reasons, liberals are invested in the idea that Obamacare is
working. To the extent they are willing to concede it has problems, they are
problems that can only be remedied by giving the government more power and
control. Indeed, for many supporters, like Barney Frank, Obamacare was always
supposed to be a stepping stone to single-payer health care. This is the
essence of modern progressivism, the ratchet can only turn in one direction —
towards more power and control for the people in charge.
The Way the World
Works
One of the major themes of the book I’m working on should
be familiar to longtime readers of this “news”letter. It boils down to a simple
insight: Complexity is a subsidy. The more complex you make the rules, the more
you reward people with the cognitive, material, or social resources necessary
to get around them. Big corporations tend not to object to more burdensome
regulations because they can afford to comply with them. Dodd-Frank was great
for the “too big to fail” crowd. But it has been murder on community banks that
don’t have the resources to comply. As Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman
Sachs, put it:
It’s very hard for outside entrants
to come in and disrupt our business simply because we’re so regulated. We hear
people in our industry talk about the regulation, and they talk about it with a
sigh about the burdensome of regulation. But in fact in some cases the
burdensome regulation acts as a bit of a moat around our business.
But you’ve been hearing this stuff from me for years.
Let’s get back to the arrogance thing. It seems to me a big part of the problem
with progressive elites these days is that they lack self-awareness. That
elites arrange affairs for their own self-interest is an insight that was
already ancient when Robert Michels penned his Iron Law of Oligarchy. But ever
since the progressives concocted their theories of “disinterestedness,” they’ve
convinced themselves that they are not in fact a self-serving elite. Give
feudal aristocrats their due: They were a self-dealing crop of rent-seekers and
exploiters, but at least they were open about the fact that they believed they
had a divine right to sit atop the social pyramid. Today’s progressive
aristocracy is largely blind to the fact that their cult of expertise isn’t
really about expertise; it’s about organizing society in a way that reinforces
their status and power.
Well, most of them are blind to it. Occasionally the mask
slips. Jonathan Gruber, one of the chief architects and financial beneficiaries
of the health-care “reform,” told audiences that Obamacare was designed “in a
tortured way” to hide the fact that “healthy people pay in and sick people get
money.” They had to do it this way to get around the inconvenient “stupidity of
the American voter.” A feudal lord who talked this way about his serfs wouldn’t
get any grief for it. But in America such honesty gets you rendered an
un-person.
The Death of Trust
This is a much larger phenomenon than health-care policy.
It manifests itself throughout the media and the New Class generally. I
promised not to talk about the election, but I will make a glancing reference
just to illustrate the point. Mark Hemingway had a fantastic tweetstorm
yesterday (followed up by an article on the same topic). Dean Baquet, the
editor of the New York Times, was
asked about the press’ problems covering Donald Trump. He said:
I think that everybody went in a
little bit shell-shocked in the beginning, about how you cover a guy [Trump]
who makes news constantly. It’s not just his outrageous stuff . . . he says
things that are just demonstrably false.
I think that he’s challenged our
language. He will have changed journalism, he really will have. I was either
editor or managing editor of the L.A.
Times during the Swift Boat incident. Newspapers did not know — we did not
quite know how to do it. I remember struggling with the reporter, Jim Rainey,
who covers the media now, trying to get him to write the paragraph that laid
out why the Swift Boat allegation was false . . . We didn’t know how to write
the paragraph that said, “This is just false.”
As Mark lays out, this is outrageous nonsense. The Swift
Vets may have indulged in rhetorical overkill at times, but the simple fact is
that John Kerry was an outrageous, self-promoting, and slanderous liar about
his military service. The media, led by the New
York Times, circled the wagons around Kerry and turned “swift-boating” into
an adjective for political calumny. The proper definition of swift-boating
should be: “To raise inconvenient facts about a politician who lied.” As Mark
writes:
And so we have the editor of the New York Times citing the Swift Vets as
“just false” in the process of wondering why Americans don’t trust the media in
the Age of Trump. The answer is that media organizations such as the Times eroded all their credibility
trying to elect previous Democratic candidates by telling readers things were
definitively false when readers damn well knew that there were substantive
facts they were actively choosing to ignore. In fact, “Swift Vets” is now some
sort of media pejorative, even though the term is an Orwellian attempt to
recast and simplify events so as to obscure discomfiting and politically
consequential debates that New York Times
editors don’t want to have.
I’ve written about the media’s cry-wolf problem before.
The relevance here is that I don’t think most of the reporters and editors who
carried water for every Democratic presidential candidate for the last 50 years
believe that’s what they were doing. They convinced themselves that they were
being objective or “disinterested.” They served as praetorian guards for the
progressive elite without understanding just how many buckets of water they
schlepped up from the river bank. This is why I shed so few tears for the dying
of the myth of the “objective media.” Partisan newspapers are as old as
newspapers. What was new — and now dying — is this warmed over Lippmannesque
B.S. that there’s some kind of science to journalism that immunizes it from
partisanship. At least 19th-century newspapers were honest with their readers
about where they were coming from. Newspapers like the New York Times suffer from the same delusions that blind the
progressive elites generally. They think they’re just telling the hard truths,
when in fact they are telling the truths (and occasional lies) that support
their own self-serving narrative.
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