The argument is over. The movement to prohibit private ownership of firearms has officially conceded defeat. The concession was made on Thursday by Chicago mayor Richard Daley, who responded to a press conference question about the effectiveness of Chicago’s gun ban by threatening to shove a rifle up the reporter’s fundament.
I’m not making this up. Daley held a press conference to discuss the city’s options should the Supreme Court overturn the ban on private gun ownership that has been in place in Chicago since 1982. In response to the irksome question Daley picked up a confiscated rifle from a display table and said, “It’s been very effective. If I put this up your butt, you’ll find out how effective it is. I’ll put a round up your, you know...” The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass discusses the whole sorry episode in his column today.
There are many interesting things about this performance by a famously irascible mayor. But the really striking thing is the absence of any attempt to defend the gun ban by the least semblance of argument. Perhaps that’s because all but the most fossilized opponents of gun rights are realizing that prohibition really is a bad idea.
The argument is simple, and to simple minds like Mayor Daley’s, irrefutable: if the overwhelming majority of murders are committed with firearms, then all we have to do is prohibit firearms and the murder rate will plummet.
Except that banned objects remain stubbornly physical: they do not simply vanish into thin air. The criminals certainly aren’t going to turn in their guns; they don’t pay any attention to laws anyway. And there are millions of guns out there in the hands of non-criminals. If you really want to take them out of circulation, you are going to have to implement police measures so intrusive that even the ACLU might be made slightly uncomfortable, despite their notable vacillation on the Second Amendment, the only one they won’t go to the wall for.
Let’s say we get every bit as serious about taking guns out of circulation as we are about, say, drugs. We’ve had more than thirty years of the Drug War, complete with raided homes, asset confiscation and periodic police corruption scandals, and you can still get heroin, cocaine and meth in every city and county in the U.S. Can anyone possibly still believe we could get all the guns off the street? If we get as serious about guns as we are about drugs, the only thing that will happen is that the gun dealers will get richer and gun gangs will kill each other over turf the way drug gangs do now. (And meanwhile the woman whose gun gets confiscated won’t be able to shoot her psychotic ex-boyfriend when he comes after her with a butcher knife.)
You can’t eliminate something that people think they need and that can be easily concealed without draconian police state measures. You just can’t. If you’re honest, you’ll admit that. Ask Americans if they want to live in a police state, and they will tell you no. But in the same breath, too many of them will call for the government to get rid of things they don’t like, like guns or drugs or illegal immigrants. They don’t think through the consequences. And they only get outraged about the police state measures that affect people they like. How many of the people now sanctimoniously canceling their Arizona vacations have called for the government to confiscate their neighbors’ guns?
But now that Mayor Daley has tacitly admitted that there are no coherent arguments for banning private gun ownership, maybe we can start discussing measures that might really reduce gun violence. At the press conference Daley said that if the ban falls the city will consider implementing registration and training for firearms owners. Now that’s more like it. This is the conversation we should have been having all along. You stand a much better chance of reducing the social harm caused by dangerous objects and behaviors if they are legal, so that you can require training and impose reasonable registration requirements.
But the NRA Neanderthals oppose registration, you say? Of course they do. If Mayor Daley wanted to confiscate your car, you’d be reluctant to tell the city where your car was parked. Political resistance to registration will fade when people are certain that the Daleys of the world have given up trying to take their guns.
And that should happen soon, because anybody listening to Mayor Daley on Thursday saw that the argument is over. The gun nuts have won.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Friday, May 21, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Arizona cracks down
Arizona’s passage of a law making illegal immigration status a state crime (as opposed to a federal one) and requiring police to check the immigration status of arrestees has set off a storm of protest, with demonstrations and calls to boycott the state and make it a pariah.
I’ve written about immigration before, and broadly speaking I’m in favor of it: in a world where capital can move freely around the globe in search of better investment opportunities, it seems only fair to let workers take their labor where they can get the best return on it. And accusations that immigrants take jobs from natives are overblown; they wouldn’t come if there were no demand for their labor.
However, mass immigration raises two legitimate concerns besides the economic issue: assimilation and the rule of law. These are what give rise to a lot of the opposition to illegal immigration, and worries about them can't be reduced to mere xenophobia.
In the United States, fears about lack of assimilation are somewhat exaggerated; American culture is powerfully assimilative and assimilation tends to happen of its own accord within a generation or two. The concern here should be merely to avoid measures that can retard assimilation, such as bilingual education programs (however well-intentioned ) that fail to help students make the transition to education in English.
For me the serious issue is the rule of law. The idea that the law is greater than any person, no matter how powerful, is the rock on which the open society rests. There is no greater check on autocracy and governmental misconduct than widespread respect for the laws that govern a society.
But this respect is not a given. It rests on two bases: democratic accountability and consistent enforcement. Our laws must be subject to revision in response to an informed electorate, and they must mean something once they are written.
In this light the Arizona law is a reaction to the pervasive sense that our government has simply not bothered to enforce the laws governing immigration. When large numbers of people residing in this country are not legally entitled to do so, and yet are able to live and work here with impunity, you can be forgiven for thinking that the government doesn’t care about the law.
So I don’t think the Arizona law is mere xenophobia. I think it’s a protest against perceived government indifference to widespread flouting of the law. That makes people angry. And calling them Nazis and trying to make Arizona out to be a new apartheid-era South Africa is only going to make them angrier. The hysterical tone of some of the opposition to the law does not aid clarity of thinking.
However. Understandable as it may be, the Arizona law is not the way to resolve the issues surrounding illegal immigration. It’s not that the government doesn’t care about our immigration laws; it’s that strict enforcement of them would be so expensive and intrusive that the population wouldn’t stand for it. I think we’re about to see this in action in Arizona. So maybe it’s time to take a hard look at the whole legal framework governing immigration.
I’ve argued before that the rule of law is weakened whenever laws are made for which the costs of enforcement outweigh the benefits gained. In such cases enforcement tends to be intermittent and arbitrary, and people lose respect both for the people who make our laws and for those who are expected to enforce them. In those cases, it’s time to reconsider the laws.
While difficulty of enforcement alone is no reason to ditch a law, difficulty of enforcement added to dubious benefits indicates a law that we might be better off without. If immigration has economic benefits, which I think it does, then treating it as a threat is a mistake. Of course, as with everything else, there are management issues and security issues, but those can be dealt with while accepting that immigration to the United States should be open to anyone who wishes to come here and contribute to our society.
So I favor comprehensive immigration reform. Not a blanket amnesty, which would be unfair to those who have tried to follow the rules, but the institution of a process for regularization, a path to legality. It should involve some costs and some commitments on the part of the applicants, but it should offer the benefit of legal residence at the end of it.
It is simply impossible to seal the borders and expel all the people who are currently here illegally; it just isn’t going to happen. And it’s foolish to pretend that it is. The dynamics of the world economy have simply overtaken an obsolete legal regime, and it’s time to update it.
So make the illegals jump through some hoops; make them come out of the bushes and pay a fine and take an oath or whatever; but give them a chance to become legal. In the long run, that’s the best way to affirm the rule of law and assure assimilation. And then we won’t need laws like the one Arizona just passed.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
I’ve written about immigration before, and broadly speaking I’m in favor of it: in a world where capital can move freely around the globe in search of better investment opportunities, it seems only fair to let workers take their labor where they can get the best return on it. And accusations that immigrants take jobs from natives are overblown; they wouldn’t come if there were no demand for their labor.
However, mass immigration raises two legitimate concerns besides the economic issue: assimilation and the rule of law. These are what give rise to a lot of the opposition to illegal immigration, and worries about them can't be reduced to mere xenophobia.
In the United States, fears about lack of assimilation are somewhat exaggerated; American culture is powerfully assimilative and assimilation tends to happen of its own accord within a generation or two. The concern here should be merely to avoid measures that can retard assimilation, such as bilingual education programs (however well-intentioned ) that fail to help students make the transition to education in English.
For me the serious issue is the rule of law. The idea that the law is greater than any person, no matter how powerful, is the rock on which the open society rests. There is no greater check on autocracy and governmental misconduct than widespread respect for the laws that govern a society.
But this respect is not a given. It rests on two bases: democratic accountability and consistent enforcement. Our laws must be subject to revision in response to an informed electorate, and they must mean something once they are written.
In this light the Arizona law is a reaction to the pervasive sense that our government has simply not bothered to enforce the laws governing immigration. When large numbers of people residing in this country are not legally entitled to do so, and yet are able to live and work here with impunity, you can be forgiven for thinking that the government doesn’t care about the law.
So I don’t think the Arizona law is mere xenophobia. I think it’s a protest against perceived government indifference to widespread flouting of the law. That makes people angry. And calling them Nazis and trying to make Arizona out to be a new apartheid-era South Africa is only going to make them angrier. The hysterical tone of some of the opposition to the law does not aid clarity of thinking.
However. Understandable as it may be, the Arizona law is not the way to resolve the issues surrounding illegal immigration. It’s not that the government doesn’t care about our immigration laws; it’s that strict enforcement of them would be so expensive and intrusive that the population wouldn’t stand for it. I think we’re about to see this in action in Arizona. So maybe it’s time to take a hard look at the whole legal framework governing immigration.
I’ve argued before that the rule of law is weakened whenever laws are made for which the costs of enforcement outweigh the benefits gained. In such cases enforcement tends to be intermittent and arbitrary, and people lose respect both for the people who make our laws and for those who are expected to enforce them. In those cases, it’s time to reconsider the laws.
While difficulty of enforcement alone is no reason to ditch a law, difficulty of enforcement added to dubious benefits indicates a law that we might be better off without. If immigration has economic benefits, which I think it does, then treating it as a threat is a mistake. Of course, as with everything else, there are management issues and security issues, but those can be dealt with while accepting that immigration to the United States should be open to anyone who wishes to come here and contribute to our society.
So I favor comprehensive immigration reform. Not a blanket amnesty, which would be unfair to those who have tried to follow the rules, but the institution of a process for regularization, a path to legality. It should involve some costs and some commitments on the part of the applicants, but it should offer the benefit of legal residence at the end of it.
It is simply impossible to seal the borders and expel all the people who are currently here illegally; it just isn’t going to happen. And it’s foolish to pretend that it is. The dynamics of the world economy have simply overtaken an obsolete legal regime, and it’s time to update it.
So make the illegals jump through some hoops; make them come out of the bushes and pay a fine and take an oath or whatever; but give them a chance to become legal. In the long run, that’s the best way to affirm the rule of law and assure assimilation. And then we won’t need laws like the one Arizona just passed.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Building boom
The latest crisis in the Mideast peace process centers on Israel’s announcement of further construction in East Jerusalem just as U.S. Vice-president Joseph Biden was arriving to try to nudge everyone a little closer to the table. Israeli construction in areas that the Arabs consider subject to negotiation has become a major obstacle to getting the talks restarted, and the timing of the announcement looked like a provocation on the part of the Israelis. The U.S. fumed, the Israelis claimed the timing was an accident, and the Palestinians were unsurprised.
This brouhaha has followed a familiar script: Israel keeps building on land that the Palestinians think ought to be returned to them as part of a peace settlement, the U.S. makes token complaints, and the Palestinians refuse to talk as long as the construction crews are working. The problem seems intractable because the U.S. doesn’t want to bring too much pressure on Israel and the Palestinians understandably don’t want to seem to accept continued erosion of their territory by expanding Israeli settlements. So noise levels rise but so do the apartment blocks in Ariel and Neve Yaakov.
The whole thing rests on an unspoken assumption: that if a building is constructed by an Israeli crew, it must be occupied until the end of time by Israelis. Nobody ever says this, of course, but that seems to be the assumption, at least publicly. We read of “Jewish housing” and “Arab housing” as if Israelis and Palestinians were different species with radically different habitats, as if a faucet or an electrical outlet will only work for people of a particular ethnicity.
I have a suggestion for breaking the logjam: President Obama, or perhaps Secretary of State Clinton, should make a simple but very public announcement: “The United States does not take it as given that construction currently occupied by Israeli citizens must remain so, or that construction currently occupied by Palestinian citizens must remain so.”
The implication of this, of course, is that a peace agreement may entail border adjustments and population movement. You might think that this should go without saying, but apparently not. The assumption on both sides is that once the Israelis move in, they are never going to move out. It’s easy to see why the Israelis would wish to promote this view, but it’s harder to see why the Palestinians would accept it. If I were Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, I would say something like, “Let them build all those nice apartment blocks. The amenities will be much appreciated by the Palestinian families who move in when the land is ceded to us by a peace agreement.”
That would be taking a big chance of course, as long as the U.S. is complicit in promoting the view that a building constructed by Israelis can only ever house Israelis. I think this unspoken idea is possibly the greatest obstacle to progress in peace negotiations. If we want to support the peace process, we need to de-link it from the construction issue. And all it would take would be a simple announcement.
Announce that the U.S. considers eventual occupation of any Israeli construction in disputed areas to be subject to negotiation along with everything else, and watch how Israeli zeal for building in Arab areas would diminish. Watch how Palestinian reluctance to come to the table would evaporate. To make the announcement would be tantamount to saying that the U.S. is serious about promoting a genuine peace process.
Just a thought...
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
This brouhaha has followed a familiar script: Israel keeps building on land that the Palestinians think ought to be returned to them as part of a peace settlement, the U.S. makes token complaints, and the Palestinians refuse to talk as long as the construction crews are working. The problem seems intractable because the U.S. doesn’t want to bring too much pressure on Israel and the Palestinians understandably don’t want to seem to accept continued erosion of their territory by expanding Israeli settlements. So noise levels rise but so do the apartment blocks in Ariel and Neve Yaakov.
The whole thing rests on an unspoken assumption: that if a building is constructed by an Israeli crew, it must be occupied until the end of time by Israelis. Nobody ever says this, of course, but that seems to be the assumption, at least publicly. We read of “Jewish housing” and “Arab housing” as if Israelis and Palestinians were different species with radically different habitats, as if a faucet or an electrical outlet will only work for people of a particular ethnicity.
I have a suggestion for breaking the logjam: President Obama, or perhaps Secretary of State Clinton, should make a simple but very public announcement: “The United States does not take it as given that construction currently occupied by Israeli citizens must remain so, or that construction currently occupied by Palestinian citizens must remain so.”
The implication of this, of course, is that a peace agreement may entail border adjustments and population movement. You might think that this should go without saying, but apparently not. The assumption on both sides is that once the Israelis move in, they are never going to move out. It’s easy to see why the Israelis would wish to promote this view, but it’s harder to see why the Palestinians would accept it. If I were Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, I would say something like, “Let them build all those nice apartment blocks. The amenities will be much appreciated by the Palestinian families who move in when the land is ceded to us by a peace agreement.”
That would be taking a big chance of course, as long as the U.S. is complicit in promoting the view that a building constructed by Israelis can only ever house Israelis. I think this unspoken idea is possibly the greatest obstacle to progress in peace negotiations. If we want to support the peace process, we need to de-link it from the construction issue. And all it would take would be a simple announcement.
Announce that the U.S. considers eventual occupation of any Israeli construction in disputed areas to be subject to negotiation along with everything else, and watch how Israeli zeal for building in Arab areas would diminish. Watch how Palestinian reluctance to come to the table would evaporate. To make the announcement would be tantamount to saying that the U.S. is serious about promoting a genuine peace process.
Just a thought...
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Musing over the morning paper
In lieu of a single topic compelling enough for a post, a couple of random thoughts:
Health Care: I’ve been intending to write more about the health care debate, but haven’t been able to find a concise enough way to get at what’s wrong with the Obama approach. Now Steven Chapman has gotten at one important aspect of it, in his column in today’s Chicago Tribune. Democrats would always rather regulate than get the incentives right, which would be cheaper and administratively simpler.
It’s easy to demonize the Republicans for stubbornly opposing the Obama bill, and it’s legitimate to ask why they didn’t come up with meaningful reform when they were in power for most of the last decade. But as annoying as the Republicans may be, the awkward fact remains that on this score they’re right: the two-thousand page monster health care bill the Democrats want to pass is bad legislation. Congress should start over, scaling back Democratic aspirations for radical restructuring, and go for achievable, significant reform based on a few key ideas, like de-linking health insurance from employment and allowing interstate insurance shopping. There is a whole range of achievable proposals for health care reform out there at places like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, putting the lie to the accusation that conservatives have no ideas and merely want to obstruct progress.
But don’t hold your breath. We’ll likely get some version of the monster, costs will continue to spiral, and we’ll have to have the debate all over again in a few years.
Terrorism: In light of my post of last November 21 and some comments on it, I’ve continued to think about the best way to treat terrorism suspects. The question is whether captured terrorists should be treated as criminal suspects, with the whole range of procedural protections afforded them, or as enemy combatants, with more leeway for interrogation and the possibility of detention without trial.
I have tended to side with the position they should be treated as criminals, since that is what I believe people planning mass murder are; my thinking has been that to call them enemy combatants is to confer on them a legitimacy they do not deserve.
But there’s a paradox here: we grant far greater protection to the rights of criminal suspects than we do to enemy combatants engaged in legitimate warfare. If we’re at war and I can get the jump on you, you’re toast, and rights don’t even enter into the debate. Warfare involves a total suspension of rights, starting with the right to life. This is a good reason for thinking twice about going to war, but once you’re in, it’s the only way to fight one.
So critics of the Obama administration may be right to insist that criminal law procedures are simply too cumbersome and inflexible to effectively confront the ruthlessness shown by our jihadist enemies. They certainly consider this a war, even if some of us would prefer not to. However distasteful we may find Guantánamo, we may need it, the way we needed prison camps for Germans and Japanese captured in World War Two.
But it’s still an apparent refutation of our stated commitment to the rule of law and a debating point for our enemies to hold captives without trial for years on end. The Germans and Japanese were repatriated at the end of hostilities. How will we know when the hostilities have ended in the War on Terror?
I don’t know. I don’t think there’s an easy answer. And it should be pointed out that this is one of the evillest aspects of terrorism—it undermines confidence in legitimacy and provokes ruthlessness in response. But we still have to take on the tough questions. We may need Guantánamo, but we also need to decide what the limits are, where the line of demarcation is between warfare and criminality, and we need to make the case plainly both to our allies and our enemies.
International law recognizes the concept of criminality within warfare, and it may be on this basis that we can justify our handling of terror suspects. We can call them war criminals. But our commitment to international law has been questioned on the basis of our reluctance to support the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Can we insist on our right to pursue terrorists as we see fit while at the same time insisting that we are exempt from international standards governing the use of force?
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Health Care: I’ve been intending to write more about the health care debate, but haven’t been able to find a concise enough way to get at what’s wrong with the Obama approach. Now Steven Chapman has gotten at one important aspect of it, in his column in today’s Chicago Tribune. Democrats would always rather regulate than get the incentives right, which would be cheaper and administratively simpler.
It’s easy to demonize the Republicans for stubbornly opposing the Obama bill, and it’s legitimate to ask why they didn’t come up with meaningful reform when they were in power for most of the last decade. But as annoying as the Republicans may be, the awkward fact remains that on this score they’re right: the two-thousand page monster health care bill the Democrats want to pass is bad legislation. Congress should start over, scaling back Democratic aspirations for radical restructuring, and go for achievable, significant reform based on a few key ideas, like de-linking health insurance from employment and allowing interstate insurance shopping. There is a whole range of achievable proposals for health care reform out there at places like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, putting the lie to the accusation that conservatives have no ideas and merely want to obstruct progress.
But don’t hold your breath. We’ll likely get some version of the monster, costs will continue to spiral, and we’ll have to have the debate all over again in a few years.
Terrorism: In light of my post of last November 21 and some comments on it, I’ve continued to think about the best way to treat terrorism suspects. The question is whether captured terrorists should be treated as criminal suspects, with the whole range of procedural protections afforded them, or as enemy combatants, with more leeway for interrogation and the possibility of detention without trial.
I have tended to side with the position they should be treated as criminals, since that is what I believe people planning mass murder are; my thinking has been that to call them enemy combatants is to confer on them a legitimacy they do not deserve.
But there’s a paradox here: we grant far greater protection to the rights of criminal suspects than we do to enemy combatants engaged in legitimate warfare. If we’re at war and I can get the jump on you, you’re toast, and rights don’t even enter into the debate. Warfare involves a total suspension of rights, starting with the right to life. This is a good reason for thinking twice about going to war, but once you’re in, it’s the only way to fight one.
So critics of the Obama administration may be right to insist that criminal law procedures are simply too cumbersome and inflexible to effectively confront the ruthlessness shown by our jihadist enemies. They certainly consider this a war, even if some of us would prefer not to. However distasteful we may find Guantánamo, we may need it, the way we needed prison camps for Germans and Japanese captured in World War Two.
But it’s still an apparent refutation of our stated commitment to the rule of law and a debating point for our enemies to hold captives without trial for years on end. The Germans and Japanese were repatriated at the end of hostilities. How will we know when the hostilities have ended in the War on Terror?
I don’t know. I don’t think there’s an easy answer. And it should be pointed out that this is one of the evillest aspects of terrorism—it undermines confidence in legitimacy and provokes ruthlessness in response. But we still have to take on the tough questions. We may need Guantánamo, but we also need to decide what the limits are, where the line of demarcation is between warfare and criminality, and we need to make the case plainly both to our allies and our enemies.
International law recognizes the concept of criminality within warfare, and it may be on this basis that we can justify our handling of terror suspects. We can call them war criminals. But our commitment to international law has been questioned on the basis of our reluctance to support the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Can we insist on our right to pursue terrorists as we see fit while at the same time insisting that we are exempt from international standards governing the use of force?
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Football curmudgeon
It’s Super Bowl Sunday, and in an hour or so I’ll be sitting down with a few friends to watch the big game. If I can find any trace of it, that is, among all the hype and hoopla and commercial frenzy and overproduced halftime extravaganzas and general cultural trash that has almost smothered the actual playing of the game itself. It’s going to be an ordeal, as usual.
I love football. I was imprinted on the game early in life; I grew up just across the railroad tracks from the football practice field at the college where my father taught, and some of my earliest memories are of going with my big brother to watch the players bang into each other. That was a spectacle to capture a four-year old boy’s heart forever. My desire to grow up and be a football player vanished only after I failed to grow up enough, topping out at about 135 pounds as an undersized bench-warming high school halfback.
But I kept watching-- my father, who had gone to the University of Oklahoma in the Bud Wilkinson era, was a fan, and watching football on TV with him was a bonding experience for my brothers and me. I vividly remember watching the Chicago Bears beat the New York Giants for the NFL championship in 1963, with my father’s friend Bill Wade at the helm for the Bears. I was hooked early, and I’ve been watching football for fifty years.
And in those fifty years it has gotten harder and harder to watch the game on television. A recent study by the Wall Street Journal confirmed what I’ve suspected for years—there isn’t a whole lot of football in a football telecast. Of the three-plus hours it takes to show an NFL game on TV, about eleven minutes consist of actual football. Yup, that’s right. Sit down to watch an NFL game, and two hours and fifty minutes of your time will be spent watching something other than football.
Part of it is the nature of the game itself, of course; you run a play, huddle, run another play, and so on. The action isn’t continuous. And that’s fine—there’s time between plays to savor, scheme, anticipate. That’s part of the game. But that aspect of the game unfortunately lends itself to the insertion of commercial announcements, as the marketing geniuses realized early on. And brother, is that a slippery slope.
The NFL sold its soul to the networks decades ago, and the networks have been piling on the commercial time ever since. They have made the NFL game unwatchable. They lost me for good when they started going back to a commercial after every kickoff. Touchdown, extra point, endless commercials, ten seconds for the kickoff and what’s this? Right back for more endless commercials. Go to a televised football game in person these days, and you will be struck with how often the game is halted for no apparent reason while everyone stands around doing nothing for three minutes. Those are the TV timeouts, and they ruin the flow and continuity of the game, absolutely ruin it.
The misery was compounded when they brought in video review of officials’ decisions. Now the game often grinds to a halt for five or more minutes, often at the most crucial juncture, while the ref sticks his head under a hood and watches the play from a dozen angles so he can come back out and make the wrong call anyway. Meanwhile, we are treated to more commercials.
I can’t watch commercials any more. I just refuse. I started muting the TV for the commercials about twenty years ago, and then after a while it was too much trouble to turn the sound back up, and I just kept the thing muted. Now I usually keep one eye on the game while catching up on my reading. If you’re thinking that means I’m paying less attention to the game than I used to, less than a real hard-core X’s and O’s geek would, you’re right. My passion for the game has waned a bit.
Because, you see, there are other aspects of the game that distress me. I’m old enough to remember when there was such a thing as sportsmanship. You respected your opponent, you didn’t brag or taunt, and you let the ref call the game. Now, football players act like prima donnas at La Scala on opening night, prancing and dancing and putting on airs not just after touchdowns but after every first down, every tackle, every routine completion of an assignment.
They need to watch some footage of the old-time players. When Jim Brown scored a touchdown, he handed the ball to the official and trotted back to the bench like a workman completing a competent job. When Dick Butkus made a routine tackle he didn’t act as if he’d defeated fascism or ended world hunger. In the old days players acted like grown-up men doing their jobs. But that’s gone, and we’re poorer for it.
So I’ll watch the Super Bowl; my friends will probably want to watch it with the sound up because the commercials, in an ironic triumph of money over meaning, have become as big as the game, and I’ll do my best to follow the drama of the game despite the excruciating, drama-killing nature of the TV coverage. I’ll root for the underdog Saints and I will probably get at least a little excitement out of the experience in addition to the indigestion.
But I’m going to leave the room at halftime to avoid all the schlock and go for a quiet walk, doing my best to remember when a football game was what you got when you sat down to watch a football game.
Last fall I went to a high school football game for the first time in about forty years. I went because my daughter was in the marching band, but I found myself unexpectedly captivated by the game. I stood in a cold rain and saw players who weren’t getting paid a cent, most of whom will never play beyond the high school level, playing their hearts out on a miserable October night, playing the game the way it’s supposed to be played, with no dancing, no taunting or chest-beating. The game was fluid, intense and dramatic. It was the best time I’d had watching football in years. Best of all, there were no commercials.
If you love football, try this: next fall, go see a high school game or an NCAA Division III game, a game the TV networks don’t care about. If you love the game, you’ll like what you see.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
I love football. I was imprinted on the game early in life; I grew up just across the railroad tracks from the football practice field at the college where my father taught, and some of my earliest memories are of going with my big brother to watch the players bang into each other. That was a spectacle to capture a four-year old boy’s heart forever. My desire to grow up and be a football player vanished only after I failed to grow up enough, topping out at about 135 pounds as an undersized bench-warming high school halfback.
But I kept watching-- my father, who had gone to the University of Oklahoma in the Bud Wilkinson era, was a fan, and watching football on TV with him was a bonding experience for my brothers and me. I vividly remember watching the Chicago Bears beat the New York Giants for the NFL championship in 1963, with my father’s friend Bill Wade at the helm for the Bears. I was hooked early, and I’ve been watching football for fifty years.
And in those fifty years it has gotten harder and harder to watch the game on television. A recent study by the Wall Street Journal confirmed what I’ve suspected for years—there isn’t a whole lot of football in a football telecast. Of the three-plus hours it takes to show an NFL game on TV, about eleven minutes consist of actual football. Yup, that’s right. Sit down to watch an NFL game, and two hours and fifty minutes of your time will be spent watching something other than football.
Part of it is the nature of the game itself, of course; you run a play, huddle, run another play, and so on. The action isn’t continuous. And that’s fine—there’s time between plays to savor, scheme, anticipate. That’s part of the game. But that aspect of the game unfortunately lends itself to the insertion of commercial announcements, as the marketing geniuses realized early on. And brother, is that a slippery slope.
The NFL sold its soul to the networks decades ago, and the networks have been piling on the commercial time ever since. They have made the NFL game unwatchable. They lost me for good when they started going back to a commercial after every kickoff. Touchdown, extra point, endless commercials, ten seconds for the kickoff and what’s this? Right back for more endless commercials. Go to a televised football game in person these days, and you will be struck with how often the game is halted for no apparent reason while everyone stands around doing nothing for three minutes. Those are the TV timeouts, and they ruin the flow and continuity of the game, absolutely ruin it.
The misery was compounded when they brought in video review of officials’ decisions. Now the game often grinds to a halt for five or more minutes, often at the most crucial juncture, while the ref sticks his head under a hood and watches the play from a dozen angles so he can come back out and make the wrong call anyway. Meanwhile, we are treated to more commercials.
I can’t watch commercials any more. I just refuse. I started muting the TV for the commercials about twenty years ago, and then after a while it was too much trouble to turn the sound back up, and I just kept the thing muted. Now I usually keep one eye on the game while catching up on my reading. If you’re thinking that means I’m paying less attention to the game than I used to, less than a real hard-core X’s and O’s geek would, you’re right. My passion for the game has waned a bit.
Because, you see, there are other aspects of the game that distress me. I’m old enough to remember when there was such a thing as sportsmanship. You respected your opponent, you didn’t brag or taunt, and you let the ref call the game. Now, football players act like prima donnas at La Scala on opening night, prancing and dancing and putting on airs not just after touchdowns but after every first down, every tackle, every routine completion of an assignment.
They need to watch some footage of the old-time players. When Jim Brown scored a touchdown, he handed the ball to the official and trotted back to the bench like a workman completing a competent job. When Dick Butkus made a routine tackle he didn’t act as if he’d defeated fascism or ended world hunger. In the old days players acted like grown-up men doing their jobs. But that’s gone, and we’re poorer for it.
So I’ll watch the Super Bowl; my friends will probably want to watch it with the sound up because the commercials, in an ironic triumph of money over meaning, have become as big as the game, and I’ll do my best to follow the drama of the game despite the excruciating, drama-killing nature of the TV coverage. I’ll root for the underdog Saints and I will probably get at least a little excitement out of the experience in addition to the indigestion.
But I’m going to leave the room at halftime to avoid all the schlock and go for a quiet walk, doing my best to remember when a football game was what you got when you sat down to watch a football game.
Last fall I went to a high school football game for the first time in about forty years. I went because my daughter was in the marching band, but I found myself unexpectedly captivated by the game. I stood in a cold rain and saw players who weren’t getting paid a cent, most of whom will never play beyond the high school level, playing their hearts out on a miserable October night, playing the game the way it’s supposed to be played, with no dancing, no taunting or chest-beating. The game was fluid, intense and dramatic. It was the best time I’d had watching football in years. Best of all, there were no commercials.
If you love football, try this: next fall, go see a high school game or an NCAA Division III game, a game the TV networks don’t care about. If you love the game, you’ll like what you see.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Book 'em
President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have come out in favor of show trials with pre-ordained verdicts for the men accused of planning the September 11 terror attacks.
At least that’s what it sounded like when Holder assured the Senate Judiciary Committee last Wednesday that he had told federal prosecutors that “failure is not an option” in the proposed trials, and Obama spoke as if the outcome were a fait accompli, saying that doubters would be reassured “when [Khalid Sheikh Muhammad] is convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.”
In other words, we wouldn’t be holding a trial if we weren’t sure what the verdict is going to be. What kind of justice is that? Inherent in the idea of putting someone on trial is the possibility, even if remote, that the defendant may be acquitted.
Now, a variety of arguments can be made against bringing the September 11 plotters to trial, including the tainted nature of the evidence and the need to protect intelligence sources, but what Holder and Obama seem to be saying is this: the possibility of their acquittal is simply politically unacceptable. And that’s a scary thing to hear from the people at the top of our judicial system.
The question of what to do with the prisoners taken in the fight against jihadism is tying the U.S. government in knots and forcing us to think about justice and the sometimes fuzzy line between war and crime. Driving the debate is the Obama administration’s desire to close the U.S. prison at Guantánamo, Cuba, which means figuring out what to do with the people we’ve been holding there for years without trial.
How can a country based on the rule of law justify holding prisoners indefinitely without trial? Well, you have to define them as enemy combatants, which means you can hold them the way we did enemy POW’s in World War Two. None of them got a trial, and nobody said they should have. They just got caught in the course of fighting for the other side, and we had to do something with them. Similarly, we scooped up a lot of people in Afghanistan in the fighting that followed our invasion there, and we didn’t have any crimes to charge them with; they were just on the other side. We couldn’t let them go or they would have gone back into the hills and gone on fighting us, so we took them to Guantánamo.
So far, so good. But in World War Two there was a definable end to hostilities. When Germany and Japan surrendered, we returned their prisoners. When will the War on Terror be over? Nobody knows. Nobody even knows what the criteria are. With asymmetrical warfare and long-running insurgencies we’re in uncharted legal territory. So we have people sitting in Guantánamo who have never been charged with a crime but whom we don’t want to let go.
We’re not sure how to distinguish between the truly dangerous ones and the ones who just didn't like foreigners marching up the valley, and we don’t know what to do with the latter. But after eight years, it’s getting harder and harder to defend continued detention without trial. A country that proclaims its respect for the rule of law cannot simply go on holding prisoners forever without any possibility of appeal or resolution. And Obama’s determination to resolve the situation has opened up a Pandora’s Box of thorny legal questions.
Some say that military tribunals are more appropriate than our criminal court system for dealing with terror suspects. Others say that these tribunals don’t offer adequate legal safeguards. Of course, that’s precisely the point. If you can’t face the idea of the defendant going free, you’re not going to accept legal safeguards.
To achieve justice in the treatment of the prisoners at Guantánamo, we have to make some distinctions. We have to decide if there is any element of legitimate warfare at all on the jihadist side, and if so, we have to come up with criteria for the eventual release of those prisoners who were engaged in legitimate warfare. If not, they’re all criminals. And if they’re criminals, we have to be willing to prosecute, with all that that implies.
Of course there are, in theory, laws of war, and people can be prosecuted for contravening them. That’s why we put the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg and hanged Tojo. But if we try the September 11 plotters as war criminals in military tribunals, isn’t that tantamount to conceding some element of legitimacy to their campaign against the United States? We didn’t try Tojo for making war, but for commiting crimes in the course of that war. Is global jihad a legitimate military enterprise, with the September 11 attacks an aberrant departure from it?
Not in my book. But it could be argued that resisting the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was legitimate warfare rather than terrorism, and if so, then some of the people at Guantánamo are prisoners of war in the classic sense. In that case, maybe the best course of action with regard to them is to send them back to Afghanistan and put them in Bagram prison with the other people captured in the current campaign there. We need to recognize that not everybody in Guantánamo has the same status and start sorting the guys who were just defending their turf from the ones who were devising ways of killing large numbers of American or European civilians.
For them, I don’t see any alternative to prosecution. Criminal prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad says to the world that we deny the legitimacy of attacks specifically targeting civilians. That’s not war, that’s murder. And if you’re going to bring criminal charges, that means you have to have due process, including the risk of acquittal. You’d better make damn sure you have a good case, but in the long run the legitimacy of our system will only be undermined by rigging the trials or refusing to provide them. And in the long run, American men and women are not going to go on fighting and dying in faraway countries for a system of dubious legitimacy.
So I think Obama and Holder have to stand up in front of the American people and say, “These are the people who planned the greatest mass murder in American history, and we are going to prosecute them, and if a fair trial leads to acquittal, then that’s just one of the risks of having a working judicial system. And if they are convicted we are going to put them in prison here on American soil, because they committed their crimes against Americans, and if that makes us the target of further attacks we will defend against those as we have defended against others in the past. And those are the risks of having an open society.”
That would take guts. We’ll see if Obama and Holder have them.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
At least that’s what it sounded like when Holder assured the Senate Judiciary Committee last Wednesday that he had told federal prosecutors that “failure is not an option” in the proposed trials, and Obama spoke as if the outcome were a fait accompli, saying that doubters would be reassured “when [Khalid Sheikh Muhammad] is convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.”
In other words, we wouldn’t be holding a trial if we weren’t sure what the verdict is going to be. What kind of justice is that? Inherent in the idea of putting someone on trial is the possibility, even if remote, that the defendant may be acquitted.
Now, a variety of arguments can be made against bringing the September 11 plotters to trial, including the tainted nature of the evidence and the need to protect intelligence sources, but what Holder and Obama seem to be saying is this: the possibility of their acquittal is simply politically unacceptable. And that’s a scary thing to hear from the people at the top of our judicial system.
The question of what to do with the prisoners taken in the fight against jihadism is tying the U.S. government in knots and forcing us to think about justice and the sometimes fuzzy line between war and crime. Driving the debate is the Obama administration’s desire to close the U.S. prison at Guantánamo, Cuba, which means figuring out what to do with the people we’ve been holding there for years without trial.
How can a country based on the rule of law justify holding prisoners indefinitely without trial? Well, you have to define them as enemy combatants, which means you can hold them the way we did enemy POW’s in World War Two. None of them got a trial, and nobody said they should have. They just got caught in the course of fighting for the other side, and we had to do something with them. Similarly, we scooped up a lot of people in Afghanistan in the fighting that followed our invasion there, and we didn’t have any crimes to charge them with; they were just on the other side. We couldn’t let them go or they would have gone back into the hills and gone on fighting us, so we took them to Guantánamo.
So far, so good. But in World War Two there was a definable end to hostilities. When Germany and Japan surrendered, we returned their prisoners. When will the War on Terror be over? Nobody knows. Nobody even knows what the criteria are. With asymmetrical warfare and long-running insurgencies we’re in uncharted legal territory. So we have people sitting in Guantánamo who have never been charged with a crime but whom we don’t want to let go.
We’re not sure how to distinguish between the truly dangerous ones and the ones who just didn't like foreigners marching up the valley, and we don’t know what to do with the latter. But after eight years, it’s getting harder and harder to defend continued detention without trial. A country that proclaims its respect for the rule of law cannot simply go on holding prisoners forever without any possibility of appeal or resolution. And Obama’s determination to resolve the situation has opened up a Pandora’s Box of thorny legal questions.
Some say that military tribunals are more appropriate than our criminal court system for dealing with terror suspects. Others say that these tribunals don’t offer adequate legal safeguards. Of course, that’s precisely the point. If you can’t face the idea of the defendant going free, you’re not going to accept legal safeguards.
To achieve justice in the treatment of the prisoners at Guantánamo, we have to make some distinctions. We have to decide if there is any element of legitimate warfare at all on the jihadist side, and if so, we have to come up with criteria for the eventual release of those prisoners who were engaged in legitimate warfare. If not, they’re all criminals. And if they’re criminals, we have to be willing to prosecute, with all that that implies.
Of course there are, in theory, laws of war, and people can be prosecuted for contravening them. That’s why we put the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg and hanged Tojo. But if we try the September 11 plotters as war criminals in military tribunals, isn’t that tantamount to conceding some element of legitimacy to their campaign against the United States? We didn’t try Tojo for making war, but for commiting crimes in the course of that war. Is global jihad a legitimate military enterprise, with the September 11 attacks an aberrant departure from it?
Not in my book. But it could be argued that resisting the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was legitimate warfare rather than terrorism, and if so, then some of the people at Guantánamo are prisoners of war in the classic sense. In that case, maybe the best course of action with regard to them is to send them back to Afghanistan and put them in Bagram prison with the other people captured in the current campaign there. We need to recognize that not everybody in Guantánamo has the same status and start sorting the guys who were just defending their turf from the ones who were devising ways of killing large numbers of American or European civilians.
For them, I don’t see any alternative to prosecution. Criminal prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad says to the world that we deny the legitimacy of attacks specifically targeting civilians. That’s not war, that’s murder. And if you’re going to bring criminal charges, that means you have to have due process, including the risk of acquittal. You’d better make damn sure you have a good case, but in the long run the legitimacy of our system will only be undermined by rigging the trials or refusing to provide them. And in the long run, American men and women are not going to go on fighting and dying in faraway countries for a system of dubious legitimacy.
So I think Obama and Holder have to stand up in front of the American people and say, “These are the people who planned the greatest mass murder in American history, and we are going to prosecute them, and if a fair trial leads to acquittal, then that’s just one of the risks of having a working judicial system. And if they are convicted we are going to put them in prison here on American soil, because they committed their crimes against Americans, and if that makes us the target of further attacks we will defend against those as we have defended against others in the past. And those are the risks of having an open society.”
That would take guts. We’ll see if Obama and Holder have them.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Dial 911 for health care?
The House of Representatives has passed its version of a health care reform bill, and it’s starting to look as if before too long we’ll get some kind of legislation that will transform the U.S. health care system.
I wish I had more confidence in the ability of the Congress to produce good policy, but I don’t. Given the way the legislative process operates, we are guaranteed to come up with something that, while it may increase the number of people insured, will almost certainly make the system more cumbersome and expensive. That may be better than the status quo, but then again it might not be.
The legislation will be cumbersome and expensive for two reasons: the Democrats’ preference for bureaucratic micro-management over sensible calibration of incentives, and the way legislation is produced, in which horse-trading and marker-calling play a larger role than sober policy analysis. Whatever comes out of Congress, it’s going to be ugly.
Will it solve the problem? That depends on what problem you’re talking about. We’ll probably wind up with more people covered by insurance. But I see nothing in the summaries I’ve read (not even our Congressional leaders have read the whole 2,000-page monstrosity) that will reduce the burdensome administrative costs of the system, which are the main reason we spend 16% of GDP on health care. We’ll continue to have a complex, jury-rigged mixed health-care system, and it will only get more expensive.
Maybe in a few years, when the staggering costs begin to focus minds, we’ll be ready for a new attempt at reform. Let’s hope at that point we’ll also be ready for some fresh thinking and a new approach.
The best discussion I’ve seen recently of the health care crisis was in
David Goldhill’s article on health care in the September issue of the Atlantic, together with readers’ reactions and Goldhill’s responses to them published in the November issue. Goldhill’s article analyzes the underlying reasons for the health care crisis, and suggests meaningful reforms.
The crux of his argument is that when patients do not directly bear the costs of medical care (because even routine care is covered by insurance), moral hazard is created, providers are insensitive to patient (i.e. consumer) concerns, and cost containment becomes impossible. Goldhill compares the current situation in health care to “paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance” and details the distortions that follow from that. I don’t know of a better analysis of the real problems with the current system, which the currently debated legislation in Congress would do nothing to fix.
Of course, not everybody buys Goldhill’s argument. Among those who wrote responses to his article was Mike Mahoney of Sandpoint, Idaho, who said, “Throughout history, when societies have found that a service was needed for the common good, that service was created, and people chose to tax themselves to provide it. Armies, fire departments, water systems, police departments—all were created and paid for as the need arose. It makes no more sense to expect only those who can afford health care to have it than it would to make sure you have a valid credit card before dialing the fire department.”
That’s a pretty good statement of the case for state-provided health care. And proponents of a system like Britain’s National Health Service are right in saying that such a system would be administratively much simpler, reducing the amount of resources wasted on paperwork. Of course, there are other problems with government-provided health care, such as waiting lists and constant budget pressures. Any system has to ration care somehow, and in a single-provider or single-payer system it’s politicians and bureaucrats who decide how much gets spent on health care. And that brings a whole new set of problems.
But Mahoney’s letter got me to thinking: why do we accept without question government provision of police and fire services, while the thought of government-provided health care sends half the electorate into a Don’t Tread On Me frenzy?
Maybe it’s because the term health care covers a highly disparate variety of things, some of which are more suited to government provision than others. The reason why it makes no sense to make sure you have a valid credit card before dialing the fire department is because when your house is on fire, it’s an emergency: you need help right now, and your ability to pay is, or ought to be, irrelevant. The same goes for police protection and any other emergency service. We have recognized in our society that in an emergency it’s appropriate to help now and ask questions later.
Maybe it’s appropriate to make the same distinction in health care as we grope toward the right balance of public and private financing. Some medical needs are emergencies: you get hit by a bus, shot by a gang-banger or ambushed by your failing heart, and it’s inhuman to pester you with questions about payment as you bleed out on the gurney. Maybe in this realm government-provided (or paid-for) medical care makes sense, and Mahoney is right in saying that we ought to join other advanced nations in just providing it, no questions asked.
But other medical needs are more predictable and more subject to things under your control, such as diet and lifestyle, and are probably not best handled by third-party payment, for the reasons Goldhill discusses. Maybe you ought to pay for routine checkups the way you pay for an oil change on your car or maintenance on your furnace. Maybe even antibiotics for your fever ought to come out of your pocket, (or your privately financed insurance policy) the way body work after the fender bender does. Maybe the proper approach for most health care needs is to budget and save and carry private insurance for unexpected expenses. And for people who can’t afford that, there can always be a government-provided safety net.
In short, maybe there’s not a single best answer for all our health care problems, and a government role is appropriate for some medical needs and not for others. It’s worth considering as we wait for the latest spasm of tinkering from Congress to complicate the system, because the next round of reform is going to require some outside-the-box thinking.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
I wish I had more confidence in the ability of the Congress to produce good policy, but I don’t. Given the way the legislative process operates, we are guaranteed to come up with something that, while it may increase the number of people insured, will almost certainly make the system more cumbersome and expensive. That may be better than the status quo, but then again it might not be.
The legislation will be cumbersome and expensive for two reasons: the Democrats’ preference for bureaucratic micro-management over sensible calibration of incentives, and the way legislation is produced, in which horse-trading and marker-calling play a larger role than sober policy analysis. Whatever comes out of Congress, it’s going to be ugly.
Will it solve the problem? That depends on what problem you’re talking about. We’ll probably wind up with more people covered by insurance. But I see nothing in the summaries I’ve read (not even our Congressional leaders have read the whole 2,000-page monstrosity) that will reduce the burdensome administrative costs of the system, which are the main reason we spend 16% of GDP on health care. We’ll continue to have a complex, jury-rigged mixed health-care system, and it will only get more expensive.
Maybe in a few years, when the staggering costs begin to focus minds, we’ll be ready for a new attempt at reform. Let’s hope at that point we’ll also be ready for some fresh thinking and a new approach.
The best discussion I’ve seen recently of the health care crisis was in
David Goldhill’s article on health care in the September issue of the Atlantic, together with readers’ reactions and Goldhill’s responses to them published in the November issue. Goldhill’s article analyzes the underlying reasons for the health care crisis, and suggests meaningful reforms.
The crux of his argument is that when patients do not directly bear the costs of medical care (because even routine care is covered by insurance), moral hazard is created, providers are insensitive to patient (i.e. consumer) concerns, and cost containment becomes impossible. Goldhill compares the current situation in health care to “paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance” and details the distortions that follow from that. I don’t know of a better analysis of the real problems with the current system, which the currently debated legislation in Congress would do nothing to fix.
Of course, not everybody buys Goldhill’s argument. Among those who wrote responses to his article was Mike Mahoney of Sandpoint, Idaho, who said, “Throughout history, when societies have found that a service was needed for the common good, that service was created, and people chose to tax themselves to provide it. Armies, fire departments, water systems, police departments—all were created and paid for as the need arose. It makes no more sense to expect only those who can afford health care to have it than it would to make sure you have a valid credit card before dialing the fire department.”
That’s a pretty good statement of the case for state-provided health care. And proponents of a system like Britain’s National Health Service are right in saying that such a system would be administratively much simpler, reducing the amount of resources wasted on paperwork. Of course, there are other problems with government-provided health care, such as waiting lists and constant budget pressures. Any system has to ration care somehow, and in a single-provider or single-payer system it’s politicians and bureaucrats who decide how much gets spent on health care. And that brings a whole new set of problems.
But Mahoney’s letter got me to thinking: why do we accept without question government provision of police and fire services, while the thought of government-provided health care sends half the electorate into a Don’t Tread On Me frenzy?
Maybe it’s because the term health care covers a highly disparate variety of things, some of which are more suited to government provision than others. The reason why it makes no sense to make sure you have a valid credit card before dialing the fire department is because when your house is on fire, it’s an emergency: you need help right now, and your ability to pay is, or ought to be, irrelevant. The same goes for police protection and any other emergency service. We have recognized in our society that in an emergency it’s appropriate to help now and ask questions later.
Maybe it’s appropriate to make the same distinction in health care as we grope toward the right balance of public and private financing. Some medical needs are emergencies: you get hit by a bus, shot by a gang-banger or ambushed by your failing heart, and it’s inhuman to pester you with questions about payment as you bleed out on the gurney. Maybe in this realm government-provided (or paid-for) medical care makes sense, and Mahoney is right in saying that we ought to join other advanced nations in just providing it, no questions asked.
But other medical needs are more predictable and more subject to things under your control, such as diet and lifestyle, and are probably not best handled by third-party payment, for the reasons Goldhill discusses. Maybe you ought to pay for routine checkups the way you pay for an oil change on your car or maintenance on your furnace. Maybe even antibiotics for your fever ought to come out of your pocket, (or your privately financed insurance policy) the way body work after the fender bender does. Maybe the proper approach for most health care needs is to budget and save and carry private insurance for unexpected expenses. And for people who can’t afford that, there can always be a government-provided safety net.
In short, maybe there’s not a single best answer for all our health care problems, and a government role is appropriate for some medical needs and not for others. It’s worth considering as we wait for the latest spasm of tinkering from Congress to complicate the system, because the next round of reform is going to require some outside-the-box thinking.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
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