The Rewards of Hubris
So here, as if on cue, it being a new day and all, came the Obama administration Monday to announce new arrangements for the way the country does business.
The new big idea: Tell all those banks how much they're going to be allowed to pay executives; let them know the gravy train leaves the track here and now; Washington has their number.
"The [bank pay] proposal," says the New York Times, "is part of a broad set of regulations on executive compensation expected to be announced by the administration as early as this week."
Father knows best, so sit still, kiddies. We bought, last election, into this arresting new way of living. It will be with us for a while. Until ….
Until, perhaps, the cut of the emperor's new clothes becomes clear. Can't say exactly how long that will take, but if I were high in the councils of the Obama administration I would be reading the Greeks for insights into the payback for hubris—that being the administration's foremost product, evidenced as often as not in silken oratory.
The decree on executive compensation—which is to apply even to banks that have paid back their TARP loans and extricated themselves from the worst consequences of government oversight—is more of the same from the temple of Obama. More pride, more promising, more hubris: We'll renew the auto industry and build fuel-efficient cars we defy Americans not to buy; we'll knock together the Arabs' and the Israelis' heads; we'll substitute water and wind for oil and coal in our energy calculus; we'll "prepare every child, everywhere in America, to out-compete any worker, anywhere in the world."
And of course—naturally, you bet—we'll make health care available to every American: the project our do-everything administration has put on the fast track for this summer.
Various voters may wave their hats in the air and cry hooray. A different kind of sentiment overtakes others: the impulse to look for a storm cellar, because, brother, days of reckoning, when they arrive, aren't pretty.
It seems pretty clear that just such a day will dawn soon for the Obama crew. Exact predictions are vain, but the Democrats, against their own reading of the case, are staring disaster in the face. They can't deliver on all this: the harder they try, in instances such as health care, the graver grow the likely consequences for them, starting with loss of moral and intellectual credibility.
Health care indeed threatens to become our frisky administration's banana peel—its first and central crisis; the one, possibly, that destroys public faith in the administration's ability to do anything constructive. Not that the Democrats can't pass a bill of some sort. It's that they can't pass one we can pay for, now or at any time in the future. The kind of bill that would provide uniformly excellent medical care to all Americans—at a time when Medicare, the last gargantuan entitlement program, nears impoverishment—is an ideal that doesn't correspond to reality. Unless, to be sure, with true reforming zeal, we redefine. In that case, it's enough to imagine that we can pay by taxing "the rich" or the policies that business now offers employees; or cutting medical costs (which already outstrip all other costs) by some magical means.
Some of it, in the technical sense, Congress can do—like raise taxes. What Congress can't do is make Americans like the outcome when taxes rise and health care gets harder and costlier to procure.
Unassailable belief in the unassailable competence of government is the Obama administration's signature tune. You hear it whenever the teleprompter powers up. Yes, we can! "Can" what? "Can" everything.
It is a remarkable moment we inhabit, but it can't last. A coterie of—it would seem—cool Olympian deities has taken upon itself the remaking of America: failing to appreciate the built-in limits of competence and exertion.
The gods always were mythological. They just didn't know it.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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Obama is the punishment we get for the go-go, kill-kill Bush years: 8 years of guns and butter, death and debt, war and welfare, torture and inflation.
Well, we all knew the day of reckoning for the country was coming, and soon we must face the other thing we also knew was coming: the hardship and danger.
Among the enormous problems confronting this country is the fact that an electorate would actually put this loon in office. This is an age in which pessimism and reality intersect and become one and the same. Perhaps the modern state as represented by the U.S. and the Soviet Union are unsustainable and unworkable. In the background I hear the sane voice of John Randolph.
I wish some political figure would be honest. The lack of universal health care in this country does put US companies at a disadvantage with most of our competitors. There are however solutions to this problem that don't involve changing our health care system. Tax policy can also level the playing field. Health care must be rationed in some way. The capacity to spend money on health care is almost limitless and becomes more so every day as the population ages and technology advances. Rationing can be done by price or availability but it must be done. There really should be some sort of national dialogue about these issues before radical change is made.
I once floated a modest proposal in one of my public finance classes on how to handle health care for the indigent. It was to declare them all to be veterans of the War on Poverty, and dump them into the Veterans Administration system. My leftist classmates were aghast at such an awful fate, why the hapless victims would die like flies! But, this is what they were truly proposing. They may also have presumed that somehow, they, themselves would be allowed to opt for the properly funded health care system. Andrew Stanton is indeed correct. Healthcare is inevitably going to be rationed. Presently it is rationed according to the level of insurance one has purchased or been granted. ObamaCare is going to be rationed according to the tenets of affirmative action, victimhood, and other politically correct notions. Yuri Maltsev once told me that any socialist health care system had two tiers. One for the nomenklatura, and the other one for the average person. He once worked in a hospital there in the Soviet Union of the latter tier, and his stories of it were gruesome. He said that the U.S. elite under HillaryCare could opt for the Postal Service plan, and that is the one that would be funded. I presume that a similar system is on the drawing boards in the West Wing now, and is being groomed for action shortly.
Universal health care is infinitely better than the Obama/Romney plan, which is the worst of private/public insurance. For God's sake, let's either go single payer or completely private. What we have now is merely a corporate-government scheme, much like our banks, corporations and military thrive off of and we suffer the consequences. Yet, health care is the only thing that seems to piss off a lot of people. As someone with private-health insurance who recovered from cancer and without bankruptcy(number one cause of bankruptcy is health care neocon twits), I sympathize with both sides. However, were I without my insurance, I would have been completely desolate today and most likely dead. Where is the Christian position on this? Didn't our Christ say "the least among you?" We're better off getting rationed by the government than having the corporations profit off of dieing Christian citizens while the illegals continue too leech off the system. As a follower of distributism, I recognize the utopianism inherent in my position. But please do not combine the worst of both worlds into a nightmare.
We should have a universal healthcare system before imperialism, this is where America went wrong and Europe was right. I personally am against having a universal health care system, but it could easily be afforded with all the money we are currently spending on maintaining our empire. It is also a better solution than this mess of a private/public system which we have now as I am a union worker who receives nothing at all in the way of health benefits.
Bill:
As always, an inciteful piece of analysis.
We are in the earliest stage of the Obama Largesse. We have enjoyed the appetizer, suffered through the entree and await what we hope will be a tasty desert. Regardless of our view of the meal, however, we have yet to receive the proverbial tab and, so, our perspective of this newfound "Change" is incomplete. We have not yet been asked to pay for it all.
I believe you are right to suggest that Obama's stretch will end when we get the bill. People will soon understand that the dollar they are paid with is near worthless and inflating daily so as to reduce its purchasing power. They will also understand that "tax the rich" is what they say in Washington when they really mean "tax 'em all!" As one of my dear friends once said, "this is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better."
Keep getting the word out and God bless!
Obama is the punishment we get for the go-go, kill-kill Bush years: 8 years of guns and butter, death and debt, war and welfare, torture and inflation.
Well put. Had the Republicans spent the Bush years building up the conservative movement, especially the paleo-con part of the spectrum, they might not find themselves out of power today. But the best they could come up with was another GOP hack, McCain. No wonder people are demanding "change".
@ Burke101 - "But the best they could come up with was another GOP hack, McCain. No wonder people are demanding “change”."
McCain was the "Maverick" though; His campaign commercials told me so.
John McCain also told us we are his personal friends.