What we’re seeing is that, once a health system gets nationized into an entitlement, the Left and the bureaucrats in place will go all-out to defend every last provision no matter how urgent the need for reform or how obvious the failings. That’s been on display with Paul Ryan’s efforts to reform Medicare and Medicaid, and it’ll be the case in fifteen years if Obamacare is still entrenched.
Bachmann’s big mistake was to get off message repealing ObamaCare.
If she wants to climb back into the race, attacks on ObamaCare — and the dangers of it becoming permanently entrenched — are her best option. And such focused attacks would have the great good fortune of being demonstrably genuine and not some desperate political pander.
She reached back to Daniels’ CPAC speech during her Fox interview last week. Hopefully she’s been studying up and can carry the ball a bit further.
I think this is excellent advice.
And if every little bit of that Obamacare criticism just so happens to overlap with Romney’s greatest weakness? Well, that wouldn’t be her fault.
So, Christie is endorsing Romney. Shocka!
Sorry – and I know he’s an extreme case but nonetheless – Obama has put me off even considering Congresspersons for the Executive position. It requires a different type of animal.
You don’t have to endorse her candidacy to applaud any good political argument she can muster though scooter, which argument can redound to the benefit of the nation as well as herself, or even, to the extent it should be thorough and truthful enough, accrue to the campaign of some other successful candidate, merely by finding itself a plank in the eventual Party platform.
sdferr – that’s a fair enough point, given that certain candidates use their candidacy as a bully pulpit of sorts (see Paul, Ron, Dr.)
Jeff’s point seems to be that “(i)f she wants to climb back in the race…” and I’m just saying that at this point, I don’t care what she says; she will not be a relevant candidate unless she demonstrates some real-world executive experience (and commensurate aptitude). That won’t happen before 2012.
The argument Jeff adduces would help Bachmann — in large measure because she discerned its importance from the beginning — happens to be the argument sternly facing the most consequential issue besetting the nation; that, while no other candidate has asserted the proper focus (for fear of upsetting?).
We need the argument, just as we need the necessary solutions to the problem. One aspect of executive leadership has to be prioritizing issues hierarchically, getting to the most important first, so I wouldn’t take the recognition on Bachmann’s part (should she return to it!) a mark against her executive abilities.
You know, there’s a point where something is so screwed up that it’s futile to talk about fixing it, and instead the thinking needs to shift to how to obsolete it. Washington is that screwed up, and who believes that it will ever get straightened out? I think the solution is secession. If the US breaks up, the problems with Washington all go away. Washington goes away.
And America goes away too. That is a price too far.
I thought her biggest mistake was being batshit crazy.
At least, that’s what my three-degrees-of-separation grapevine is telling me.
– There won’t be any secessions, the states are all so dependent on Washington money at this point it would take outright insrrection, and that would be not so good, something akin to throwing out all the babies, bath water, and the tub.
– But reversing UHC may just be a matter of simply not funding the majority of it and letting it wither on the vine. As of now its tied up in the courts with no end in sight, so it may just be a dead issue in the long run.
– Even if the Dems could stay in control, doubtful at this point with the economy continuing to tank, theres just no money, and nobody is going to vote for any more stimulous junk, save for a few congressmen who’s constituencies are directly tied to give-aways.
The problem isn’t just that every last jot and tiddle is defended ferociously, it’s that health care spending grows until there’s not room for anything else.
Consider Great Britain. The NHS has now grown to the point where Britain can’t sustain a navy. The MoD is even thinking of going in with the French on an aircraft carrier. This, despite the lesson that the Charles de Gaulle, flagship of the French fleet, can’t launch in rough weather. All the money is going to the NHS. The story repeats across the EU. 400 million people, and no ability to project power. No wonder they’ve decided to welcome EUrabia: they haven’t a choice.
Can we really afford to go the same way, given that just today it came out in the news that Iran has been plotting to blow up the Saudi Ambassador to the US – in the US?
I’m childless, and old enough that the rot probably won’t have gone too too far before I check out, but those of you with kids ought to be worried about what’s coming.
Anyway, if you want to destroy a society, socialized medicine is the way to go.
Secession at the state level would be silly, but secession at the personal level is all but guaranteed. The model is staring us in the face: Greece. Fully a quarter of economic activity in Greece is conducted off the books. We’re already seeing it here, as people resort to bartering, or just go Galt altogether.
There comes a time when it’s just too expensive to work under the State’s demands. Especially when the framework enforced by the State has been corrupted to favor the big players and the politically connected. Why would any entrepreneur pay for the privilege of excessive regulation, when the ‘reward’ for such participation is a legal system that costs even more money and mostly serves to enrich the Lawyers Guild and the biggest behemoths?
We’re going to be looking at a huge gray market, and organized crime that will look a lot like today’s corrupt government. On the bright side, as we used to say in Philly, at least organized crime is well organized.
Anyway, if you want to
destroyfundamentally transform a society, socialized medicine is the way to go.FTFY.
That’s a really good point Squid. Obama business-hate is tantamount to Prohibition redux, though with the emphasis shifted from life-enhancing alcohol to life-enhancing profits as the bitter focus of elimination.
If the states secede, they can have all the money that otherwise goes to Washington. That’s even better.
Any why is that?
Isn’t it incumbent upon you chuckwithcheese to persuade us that change cannot come in the more orderly processes of politics than in the fraught changes of declarations of independence potentially necessitating force of arms? That is, is it enough that you assume your conclusion?
The same headline could be said of just about *every* government program.
I wonder: Has there ever been a time in which our nation has bravely undertaken actual Conservative experiments? I mean, we’re always told that we just have to “try” some batshit crazy Liberal idea, be it Social Security or the War On Poverty or Medicare or the Department of Education, and every single time, we as a nation mindlessly decide to “try it out.”
And yet, despite the fact that every single time we “try” a liberal idea, it fails, we *still* as a people believe the con artists when they pull the next experiment out of their hat?
At what point do we as a nation start to actually try experimenting with a TRULY different ideal? Have we really just reduced ourselves to being a nation of mooches and other unproductive leeches?
(If so, which state do y’all think is going to re-kindle the fires of secession first?)
Any why is that?
Because it would tremendously complicate the business of doing business. Because I don’t want to negotiate 49 free-trade agreements. Because I don’t want to have border crossings between MN, IA, and WI. Because I don’t want to constantly remember the current conversion between Gophers, Hawkeyes, and Cheeseheads. Because I don’t want to face the Manitoban Threat all on my own. Because I don’t want to pay International rates to fly or call or ship something to Denver. Because I don’t want some jackass in Chicago deciding to form an army of hungry city folks to take food from the countryside.
Enough, or shall I go on?
That’s a bewildering question Brian, assuming you would agree that the architecture of the American government was from its Constitutional inception the most radically liberal endeavor ever undertaken in the history of human political action, remaining so to this day.
I’m sure we have an old one hanging around that hasn’t been used in a century or so. We really ought to dust that one off and give it a go.
(If so, which state do y’all think is going to re-kindle the fires of secession first?)
My speculation (current arguments with Chuck notwithstanding) has been that California goes under, Washington promises a bailout, and Texas decides it’ll go back to the whole Republic thing. Texas has size, a unique identity, an economy that others will want to trade with, and a populace that would make potential invaders think twice.
I can see Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas choosing Austin over Washington in fairly short order. Ideally, the new Republic would stretch to Edmonton, but that might take a while. Or not; the combination of the continent’s food and energy production, with the Mississippi River system to tie things together? Hell, I almost want to live there right now!
James Taranto truly shines today.
It’s already complicated. All the federal regulation would be gone. The only new regulation would be what we’d create, which I have to think would be less.
Seems like the states could figure out ways to streamline this. Border crossings in many places in the world are utterly painless.
You probably could face that Manitoban threat on your own, by yourself, and not break a sweat.
Why would you unless the flying, calling, or shipping companies decided to gouge you? In which case, a competitor could pick up a lot of business by doing it for less.
Should they be found in the countryside of Michigan, they could be dealt with appropriately, and the nation of Illinois might have trouble doing much about it.
And for this list of problems, you get no EPA, no Department of Education, no bloated Homeland Security and nationwide airport body scanners, no NPR funding, no endowment for the arts, no federal entitlements. Seems like a pretty good trade to me. MSNBC, Fox, and John Stewart would have nothing to talk about. The professional pundit class would be out on their ass.
Government is the problem. Let’s just get rid of one.
Any why is that?
– For all the reasons Squid cited, and an almost endless list of others.
– Moreover, it would require a strong majority to have any chance of working, and as complex as society is these days, an interminable amount of planing and logistics.
– We can’t come to a consensus on toilet paper fot the Capital hill restrooms, not a chance it would work.
I think California’s the straw that breaks it too. It practically runs itself like a separate country already, and the only way it can keep from going under is to redirect the tax revenue currently flowing to Washington to itself.
Chuck, you seem to be of the opinion that the 50 states would be all peace and harmony after we broke up the Union. I think some might, and others would not. I think trade agreements would have to be revisited regularly, as each State’s government changed over time. That would be a pain in the ass. I think trade disputes would be inevitable, and that some of them would get very ugly. I think that switching carriers wouldn’t change a goddamn thing if Colorado decided that every incoming package or call was subject to tariffs.
We can point to several States that are already pretty fucked up. I think we can identify a few more that would be also be screwed if Uncle Sugar went away. Those states are unlikely to reform themselves overnight, which means the rest of us would have some very dysfunctional neighbors to work with. So I’m not going to casually assume that all our border crossings would be easy, or that import tariffs would be consistent, or that turning a huge amount of domestic trade into foreign trade would be simple. If you honestly think that Illinois and Michigan wouldn’t slap huge tariffs on everything coming over the border, then I just don’t know how to argue with you.
Yes, some of my examples were tongue-in-cheek, but my overall point is that the Union, at its core, provides some very valuable services regarding interstate commerce and national defense. You know, the things our Founders agreed to back in the day. Doing away with the Union means having to do all of those things on our own, with 49 different neighbors of varying levels of functionality and friendliness. I’m not sure that seeing the end of the EPA is really an adequate tradeoff.
@26: I’ve long thought the next step for California would be for the Federal Government to federalize California’s debt, and make the rest of us our brother’s keeper.
Were that to happen you can sure a bunch of states would go the same way, and ultimately it’d be katie bar the door.
States that have been relatively frugal would (I think) object to being asked to bail out their spendthrift neighbors. It wouldn’t be too far from that to closing state borders and ignoring the Feds entirely. After all, they don’t have *all* the guns, and broke to boot, how would they pay/feed/move/arm troops?
Note that I’m assuming all 50 states would secede. This is because I believe that the first to secede would be those who are most able to go it alone. With each that leaves, the remaining Union is weaker, since it’s losing its most valuable members. It isn’t long before the remnant Union has nothing to offer its remaining members.
I would kick Massachusetts right in the nuts. I’m just sayin’.
And you know who suffers the most in this scenario? Colorado. Maybe Amazon, Verizon, and FedEx would just decide that they’re simply not worth the trouble.
I’m just done believing that the federal government is fixable, and I think it’s naive to think “If we only elected the right people…” I think 20 years has been long enough to wait for the right people to show their faces and get elected. And, I’m having trouble figuring out what the Union is providing that’s equal to such a significant portion of my income plus the debt it’s accruing on my behalf. I’m not saying a breakup of the US wouldn’t have downsides, but would it be a net worse? I’m thinking it would be extremely liberating for 50 economies.
Problem with secessions, cwc, is the Civil War that tags along with.
I think that if the 57-state union did break up successfully, the result would be a bunch of smaller, regional unions. They’d aggregate based on economic and political affinities as well as geography, so that New Jersey and the New England states would end up as clients of New York, and ~poof~ now you’ve got an eight-state federal union that will almost certainly go unitary within a generation.
If it happens while I’m living in Georgia I fear I would miss out on joining the Federal Republic of Texas because of the chip Atlanta carries on its shoulder; we’d end up agglomerated with Tennessee, Alabama and Florida, probably Mississippi and maybe the Carolinas.
I don’t think a second Civil War would necessarily result from a break-up. In fact, the break-up would result from the coup that would be staged to try to prevent a civil war sparked by D.C.’s fiscal collapse and the resulting economic upheaval. While the new regime tries to consolidate its power inside the Beltway, the rest of the country would get while the getting was good, and D.C. would manage to hang onto Maryland, Delaware, eastern Pennsylvania and the in-Beltway counties of northern Virginia.
Or so the time-traveling aliens told me…
“D.C. would manage to hang onto Maryland, Delaware, eastern Pennsylvania”
anyplace in pa with marcellus, utica, or upper devonia shale ain’t going with that failed state.
I was thinking along the same lines as McGehee.
If California splits in two, as the canary that croaked in the coal mine could do, look out.
And you know who suffers the most in this scenario? Colorado. Maybe Amazon, Verizon, and FedEx would just decide that they’re simply not worth the trouble.
No shit, Sherlock. You wanna tell me how this makes it easier for me to call friends or business partners in Denver? You’ve gone from saying “Just switch carriers!” to “There won’t BE any carriers!” and somehow I’m supposed to think this is an iron-clad rebuttal?
I’m just holding out hope that local politicians accountable to local citizenry will be less idiotic than grandstanding asshats in Washington juiced up by national media groupies and handing out favors to lock up lucrative post-public-servant lobbying carriers.
CO has near limitless ways to fuck things up today if it so desired, and I don’t look to Washington to Keep CO Smart. It’s just not a given that CO would rush towards idiocy if were even more autonomous and locally accountable.
But today, when CO gets and inbound ass fucking from people near the Potomac, the people of CO lack the clout to achieve a remedy.
I don’t *know* what would happen if the Union broke up, but it seems like the incentives for good governance would increase.
I can call friends and family in Canada pretty easily.
Just as easily as my neighbor across the street actually.
A lot of work and a lot of negotiation went into making that possible, Lee. One can be hopeful that such arrangements would not be difficult to replicate between the states, but I’m not going to take it for granted.