Two Weeks in Review

I spent the last two weeks on the continent.  I have a lot to write about.  Here are some of the random thoughts about my trip:

• When you’re painting “look left” and “look right” on your sidewalks at almost every single crosswalk to keep your population from mowing down the lifeblood of your economy – namely foreigners – on your streets, it’s time to get with the program and drive on the right side of the road
• If Americans drove on a different side of the road than the rest of the planet, we wouldn’t paint “look left” and “look right” signs on our sidewalks.  In that case, people would actually be dying in the streets (as opposed to now, in which nobody dies in the streets, contrary to what many mindless pro-public-health drones would have you believe).  As they would be foreigners, they would not receive Obamacare (or would they?)
• Obamacare would not have saved Mary Jo Kopechne.
• In neither Germany, Austria, nor Czech were fares for subways, trams, and busses enforced by turnstyles (or anything else).  If a congress taxed us as hard as theirs tax them and then implemented the “honor system” to fund its public transportation system, there would be open rioting in the streets.
• A drunk swarm of assholes is allowed to sing loud sports team songs and blow air horns on a crowded express train for three hours without any intervention by the staff of any kind.
• My idiot aunt and idiot cousin protested the G20 carrying signs that say “capitalism doesn’t work.”  Cheah.
• Does anyone actually believe anything that comes out of Hugo Chavez’s mouth?
• Every single waiter in Europe would be fired on the first night if they tried working here.
• Germany has recently banned all incandescent light bulbs, but the bathrooms in major municipal buildings have 500 watt hand dryers in the bathrooms that blow air at extremely high speeds.  They pay for the carbon credits this consumes by charging 1 euro to use their bathrooms.
• Halogen lamps might be 95% more efficient than incandescent bulbs, but this can easily be offset by leaving a halogen lamp on for 95% more time than you would an incandescent bulb.
• Europe is obsessed with “climate change”.  I’ve already started a portfolio of I-told-you-so’s so I can prepare for the hiliarity that will ensue.
• London is cold and its weather sucks; global warming would seriously help them.
• The Social Democrats got their asses handed to them in Germany’s election.  Sounds like all is not well in Shangri-la after all.  Capitalism doesn’t work, you say?  Seems that socialist Germany is willing to give it a shot.
• How can you screw up the simple engineering of a shower so badly and so universally?
• Christiane Amanpour is the least effective news personality I’ve seen in recent memory.
• Most of the people who think Oktoberfest is cool have never been there.  It’s overrated.
• I had to sign 30 or 40 documents in the presence of a lawyer when I bought my house, but now my wife owns half of it and I didn’t have to sign a single thing.

I bet you can’t wait.

What don’t you understand?

One of my former professors posted this on his Facebook status:

“Former Professor thinks that no one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.”

Yes.  And everyone should also be fed when they are hungry and warm when they’re cold and cool when they’re hot and drive a Ferrari when they feel like it.  We should all live in cloud castles and drive to “work” on rainbows.  Wait, as a matter of fact, why should we have to work?

Healthcare, like virtually all other things, is a finite resource.  We must establish some method of distributing it.  Period.

At present, we distribute it with money.  Healthcare goes, essentially, to the highest bidder.  This is, of course, evil, because it’s capitalist.  Heaven forbid something like money be used to buy a bigger share of a finite resource.

I believe many pro-socialized-healthcare people imagine in their minds that health care should be given out to “the sick”.  In their bizarre world view, “the sick” should get medicine for free, because it is paid for collectively.

But they seem to stop there.  They don’t ask the next logical question.  What does it mean to be sick, and who gets to decide?

Am I the only one who believes pro-socialized-medicine people have never met a hypochondriac?

As it stands today, if I’m feeling not-so-well, I have to make a judgment call about how bad I’m feeling.  If I believe that I am really, really sick – sick to the level that it will not go away by itself in a few days like 99% of sicknesses we experience in our life times – I will go to a doctor.  Even though I have insurance, I still have to pay a deductible.  Frugality motivates me to gauge my own use of the system.

The hypochondriac always goes to the doctor for everything, regardless of whether they’re a little sick or a lot sick.  Half the time, the hypochondriac invents fake illnesss, like fibromyalgia.  They waste a doctor’s time seeking placebos.

Even though I am not a hypochondriac, I would probably go to the doctor more often if it never cost me anything.

Pro-social people hear this and it warms their hearts.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could all go to the doctor whenever we needed to and not worry about money?

Yes.  If doctors were infinite, it would be a great thing.  But they aren’t.

Pro-social people hate to hear about rationing.  They call any fear of rationing an irrational fear.  But they only consider it to be irrational because they haven’t bothered to think this through at all.

Since we know that doctors and hospitals and medical services in general are finite, how can you not understand the distribution problem?

If we allow individual citizens to freely decide whether or not they need medical resources, it is 100% guaranteed that more people will go to the doctor more often than they do today.

Here’s a basic economic principle that is being ignored: supply and demand.  Today, the supply of health care is at or near the pace of the demand, because there’s a profit motive to meet demand.  If we sign a bill tomorrow that invents a way for the uninsured masses to visit doctors at a rate previously prohibited by financial concerns, the demand will radically outpace the supply.  It will take years or decades to fill the gap between supply and demand because doctors take literally decades to train.  The scariest part is that we may never fill the void because of collateral effects of  “free” health care, such as reduced salaries for doctors.  Pro-social liberals simply erase that argument from their minds.  In their minds, the idea that we might have fewer doctors because would-be doctors decide the rewards are not appropriate to the investment assumes that would-be doctors are motivated by something other than social justice, such as greed.  It is preposterous, they believe, to think that a doctor became a doctor for any reason other than to cure them when they’re sick.  Money never had anything to do with it.  Or so they like to think.

If that happens – if supply falls short of demand – who gets to decide who gets treatment?  Let’s invent a hypothetical that reduces the rationing problem to a simple case:  suppose John and Jane both have Obamacare insurance.  Both are sick with the same illness that only one doctor in the world can cure.  That doctor only has time to cure one of them before the illness becomes fatal.

Who does the doctor treat?  How does he decide whether John or Jane gets treatment?  Does he go with first-come-first-serve?  Does he treat Jane because Jane is 10 years younger than John?  Does he treat John because John is a father of three and Jane has no children?  Does he treat Jane bceause John has a felony conviction?  Does he treat John because John is a citizen and Jane only has her green card?

In the world today, the doctor treats the one with more money.  “Cruel!  Horrific!  Terrible,” scream liberals everywhere.

I don’t understand how, in the mind of a liberal, it’s perfectly okay that people are allowed to use money to buy limited edition porsches and huge mansions but when it comes to saving their own lives, money shouldn’t be part of the equation.  Some other, more equitable system of distribution must be used instead.  Life (after it’s born), they claim, is precious.  Just because John is richer than Jane is not a reason to let John live and Jane die.

But I would challenge any liberal to come up with an answer to that hypothetical queston that could possibly be described as fair to all people.  Some might favor first-come-first-serve.  Some might favor curing the younger.  Some might favor curing the parent.  Creating a system of equity in distributing health care is not an easy task.

We already use alternatives to money in some scenarios, such as organ donor lists.  Those are generally first-come-first-serve, with the caveat that you must be a candidate, meaning you are not likely to reject the organ, and that you don’t have a condition that will destroy the new organ as quickly as it destroyed your old one, etc.  All these decisions are made after careful review by a committee of professional medical experts on a case-by-case basis.

We aren’t likely to have enough doctors in the trenches, so to speak, let alone enough doctors to form a review committe to determine which 100 people out of the 1,000 who requested flu shots this year will get them.  Even if we could, is that really what you want?

You might think you do, but wait until you are stricken with a life threatening illness.  When you are facing your own death, you will use any and every trick up your sleeve to save your ass.  As I’ve said before, would you rather be bankrupt or dead?  My professor whines about people going broke to afford medicine.  What’s the alternative?

You wonder why even in the countries that have socialized medicine you read about cases of private insurance, bribes, and black-market organ transplants.  Civic virtues vanish entirely when death is at stake.  Very few people are willing to die for the good of strangers.  We call these people heroes.  No matter what you’d like to believe, America – nor any country – is full of heroes.  It’s one thing to die in the service of a great cause like vanquishing a great evil.  It’s another to let yourself die so you can give a random stranger you’ve never met that liver transplant that would save your own life.

Pro-social people know this.  The idea that they may be put head to head in a John-Jane situation and lose out on the cure because they’re the poorer of the two terrifies them.

It terrifies me, too.  My solution is to become wealthy so that I can afford to keep myself and my family alive when we become ill.  The liberal solution is to change the rules to take away their opponents’ advantages.  They would rather roll a dice or hope they got sick first than lose out.

Put another way, our current healthcare system awards healthcare based on merit – that merit being how much you contributed to society.  Liberals want a healthcare system based on random luck.   No thanks.

“But Evan!  Money isn’t merit!  It’s not the democratic way!”

Au contraire, dear reader.

How does money, and our capitalist economy, work?  Let me explain.

I show up to an office building every day, and I sit in it for 8 hours and do stuff.  Somebody out there – another American, my employer - believes that what I do is worth a lot of money to them, so they pay me.  Some other American – our customer - thinks my company produces things they want to buy.  Some other American - my customer’s doctor – keeps my customer alive so he can buy my company’s product.  Every single dollar I earn and spend comes to me because someone voted to give it to me.  That’s how capitalism works.  I dare you to come up with a system that could be shown to be more democratic than that.

Back to our hypothetical. the very fact that John has more money than Jane means one of two things: either a large supply chain of other Americans decided that John contributed more to their lives than Jane did, or John was more careful than Jane about keeping money in the bank so that when the time came to pay a doctor, the money would be there to spend.

Again, I challenge you to find a system that is more fair.  You won’t.

“But Evan!  John was born very smart and Jane was born not-so-smart.  John can get a white collar job but Jane can only work in a factory, so of course John will have more money.  It isn’t fair!”

No, it isn’t fair.  Life isn’t fair.  Let’s pass legislation that makes it illegal for God to create children that are smarter than others.  In fact, let’s make it illegal to reproduce biologically.  Let’s create a nation of clones all born with exactly the same abilities and potential.  Oh wait.  On second thought, let’s not.

What part of all this don’t you people don’t understand?  Please, enlighten me.

Are the Hensel Twins allowed to get married?

The Hensel twins are a pair of conjoined twin girls who have two heads and one body.  They have one set of working lady parts.  From the perspective of the state, they are considered two people.  They have indpendent driver’s licenses, birth certificates, social security numbers, etc.

Suppose they want to get married.  Are they allowed to marry the same man, or two different men?

From a legal perspective it seems pretty clear that, if they wanted to marry a single man, only one of them would be allowed to be legally married to that man.  If they wanted to marry two different men, that would be pretty weird, huh?

According to the twins they intend on getting married and having children.  They did not disclose their thoughts on this issue.

I don’t have an answer for this question.  I just thought I’d bring it up since everybody likes to chime in on what should be legal when it comes to marriage lately.  Well, not lately.  All of that prop 8 nonsense has totally fallen off the radar since Obamacare is the cause celebre du jour.