Stirring up apathy
The oft-quoted wisdom “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing” comes to mind. (Though nearly always attributed to Edmund Burke, it was likely a Bartlett’s error that lives in infamy….but that’s another story…)
Mark Steyn has this good piece at NRO on a political strategy that wouldn’t seem to occur to anyone less than shrewdly calculating.
Big government depends, in large part, on going around the country stirring up apathy — creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it’s easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them.
Rings true, doesn’t it?
Take health care. Have you read any of these health-care plans? Of course not. They’re huge and turgid and unreadable. Unless you’re a health-care lobbyist, a health-care think-tanker, a health-care correspondent, or some other fellow who’s paid directly or indirectly to plough through this stuff, why bother? None of the senators whose names are on the bills have read ’em; why should you?
We’re faced with a gamut of huge issues right now and we’re overwhelmed. So….what?…..we trust the people in charge are going to figure it out because we’re too busy getting by. But by saying ‘you fix it’ and believing the political rhetoric that sounds like they will, government is growing very large.
“Health†is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System — or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.
More important, there is a cost to governmentalizing every responsibility of adulthood — and it is, in Lord Whitelaw’s phrase, the stirring up of apathy. If you wander round Liverpool or Antwerp, Hamburg or Lyons, the fatalism is palpable. In Britain, once the crucible of freedom, civic life is all but dead: In Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, some three-quarters of the economy is government spending; a malign alliance between state bureaucrats and state dependents has corroded democracy, perhaps irreparably. In England, the ground ceded to the worst sociopathic pathologies advances every day — and the latest report on “the seven evils†afflicting an ever more unlovely land blames “poverty†and “individualism,†failing to understand that if you remove the burdens of individual responsibility while loosening all restraint on individual hedonism the vaporization of the public space is all but inevitable.
The key part of that bleak snip is the last sentence. And this:
A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.
But here’s the kicker:
I get a lot of mail each week arguing that, when folks see the price tag attached to Obama’s plans, they’ll get angry. Maybe. But, if Europe’s a guide, at least as many people will retreat into apathy. Once big government’s in place, it’s very hard to go back.
Resist apathy with all your might.
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Healthcare is a big ticket item just like a house and a car. They all require your undvided attention, reseach and decision making. But when you buy a house, you are assured of your monthly price for 15 to 30 years (what a deal–your rent is guaranteed against inflation!). When you buy a car, you are guaranteed what you are going to spend for that car (Get where I’m going here?) But with healthcare you can shop around for the best plan at the best price and find next year that same plan can be completely changed. Plus you discover the finer points of the plan at the worst time of all, when you finally have to use it!
But really when it comes to healthcare, most folks have a nanny, their employer.
I admit this strikes close to home since my healthcare plan, altho’ I never used it last year, raised my rate by 17% this month! And they had no problem denying my one and only visit to the doctor as being “out of plan”!!!!! I am convinced that the only people who don’t think there is a problem are those who provide health insurance coverage and those who get it from their employer. Consider the plight of the employer. He, along with the HR department, shops for the best plan at the best price and provides it for their employees. For all this work, his corporation gets a tax credit. But the plan’s cost is not static. It shifts from year to year depending on lots of variables. If the corporation holds onto his employees, which many business consultants say is the key to corporate survival, he pays a price since a large percentage of his employees become older and more costly to insure. If lots of folks use the plan, that could affect cost as well.
What I mean is that your employer does not have a clue what healthcare costs are going to be next year. If you are a CEO of a newspaper in this time with spiralling downward revenues, trying to survive by cutting costs, this is a real struggle. The upshot of all this is that your employer is looking seriously at dropping healthcare or giving the employees money and letting them shop for their own. And if reform is not in place now, those with employer plans will find out very soon what their employer knows now, that healthcare takes up a third of your administrative tasks, costs more than its worth, and goes up each year almost by as much as your total cost savings in other areas.
It is in all of our interests that we reform the system now. The business model from the employer’s side is just not working, and is making America less competitive. The US Chamber of Commerce is not acting in its members best interest here. But there are some corporations who get it.
“The legislative process is just beginning, said Greg Rossiter, a Wal-Mart spokesman. In an opinion editorial earlier this month, Wal-Mart President and Chief Executive Mike Duke said health care “is too important to let special interests choose sides, go to their corners and battle it out.â€
Thank you, thank you, thank you for pointing out Mark Steyn’s post. Yes, I was beginning to give up, to feel apathetic about all these huge issues. After readying your comments, I went home and wrote to my Congressman about the climate change bill. I e-mailed my letter to others, urging them to copy it and send it to their representatives. Thank you Sheila! I enjoy listening to you on Relevant Radio.