Peter Wehner, that is. He is trawling again for right-wing “extremists” (I am now a recidivist offender) from his perch at Compassionate Conservative Headquarters, where GOP solipsists are determined not to be outbid by the Left when it comes to using your money to advertise their virtue — which is how you end up burdening an already tapped-out Medicare program with a prescription-drug entitlement that is underfunded by more than $5 trillion. From CCHQ, we learn that, when you really think about it, George W. Bush was way more conservative than that Reagan guy. In fact, when you really, really think about it, President Reagan was actually a non-ideological pragmatist who sagely came to terms with the New Deal and the Great Society — and those who say otherwise are Birchers, or birthers, or some other benighted genus of the species Right-Wing Nut Job that we’d just as soon keep down in the basement, at least until we need them on Election Day.
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Pete is exercised this time over my column from last weekend. In it, I argued that Medicare is a scam that ought to be ended, not preserved. Naturally, Pete doesn’t quarrel with my fact-based demonstration that, from the very start, Medicare was fraudulent: an unaffordable, unsustainable pyramid scheme whose proponents sought not medical insurance for the elderly but fully socialized health care managed by government bureaucrats. My sin, instead, is to engage in what Wehner takes to be a tactically disastrous dissent from Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to preserve Medicare through admirably ambitious changes in its structure. If “widely embraced,” my position would, Pete decrees, “reduce conservatism to a fringe movement.” Better, evidently, to proceed straightaway to national bankruptcy.
It is hard to decide where to begin with this critique. It gets wrong both the great and the small things, while misrepresenting the gravamen of my argument and misunderstanding my role as a commentator. To take the last part first: I am not a tactician. My role is not to devise a winning electoral strategy for Republicans, one that enables them to appear unthreatening to moderates while steering the ship ever so gently in the right direction — you know, maybe “bend the cost curve” so our great grandchildren can start living within their meager means a few decades after we’ve gone to our repose having spent all their money.
The commentator’s role, at least as I see it, is to try to figure out the correct answer to the big vexing problems of the day. Insofar as it is possible, this ought to be done irrespective of the politics. With its hold on the media and academe, the Left is disproportionately influential in shaping our politics; thus, if you allow your deliberations to be cabined by politics — that box we’re all supposed to be thinking outside of, until we actually do so — you’ll never get to the right answer. If two plus two is four, it may be fine for Pete to say, “Let’s go with six, because moderate voters really want it to be six, and the Left, after all, says it is ten, so six is reasonable.” From my perspective, it is preferable to go with four and then try to convince people that it is four, even if that means Pete will say I’m a Cro-Magnon. To make policy based on any assumption other than four will lead us to ten and to ruin.
It is not lost on me that politics is the art of the possible or that governance necessarily entails compromise. If I were a member of Congress or one of those “political strategists” you can’t swing a dead cat in a cable news green room without hitting, I would support the Ryan plan. It has serious flaws — I bet that, precisely because he is among the few adults in the room, even Ryan thinks so. But it is a big step in the right direction. As Pete says, and I concur, it is “substantively impressive.”
The problem with tacticians is that they conflate art with destiny, seeing the “possible” as the endgame, not a way station to something better. Wehner thus fails to grasp the import of one of his Reagan stories, in which the Gipper, having been chastised by his hard-charging young Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman for being insufficiently radical, grouses about self-destructive “true-believers on the Republican right.” Reagan’s point was not that the right wing ought to get with it, accept the entitlement mentality, and enact some boondoggle such as Bush’s prescription-drug plan. It was that they needed to “take half a loaf” if half a loaf was all you could get, and — here’s the critical part — “come back for more.”
Pace Pete, I don’t think it helps to tell Ryan how wonderful he is. We want him to succeed, and that means getting him to address the flaw that will prevent his coming back for more — that will, in fact, doom whatever temporary reforms he succeeds in enacting. For all the good that he does, Ryan is trapped in the politics box, and Republicans are paralyzed by Democratic demagoguery, because they have accepted the premise that Medicare is a sacrosanct entitlement. It is shortsighted to reinforce the paralysis by telling the pols they need to heed the demagoguery.
It is funny. Why does this column have no comments yet and Stiles's on how Lieberman suggests we fix Medicare have so many already?
Here were my comments to Stiles's:
First I said:
The only way to fix medicare is to privatize it. The time to fix medicare was in 1964 when, as Reagan's speech urged, it never should have been passed in the first place.
Until we get a legislature and president who understand the urgency of the problem, and that would mean an educated populace, we cannot fix medicare.
The reason we don't raise taxes to fix it is that the economy is in a mess and raising taxes will further depress an already depressed economy and will not bring in one extra penny of revenue.
Here are my solutions:
Cut spending and regulation massively in government.
Allow Americans below the age of 55 to choose whether they want to remain in the medicare system or go to a private fee for service system like it was before 1964.
Allow Americans to choose where to buy insurance, whether to buy insurance and what kind of coverage they want. Get the government out of this decision for those who opt out. (Medicare and Social Security are both ponzi schemes.)
Eliminate the IRS, eliminate all taxes on corporations, interest, dividends and capital gains, and install a 23% consumption tax. See the Neal Boortz book on this.
Do this by educating the public on why this will work better than any other plan.
(Now none of this will ever happen because we have legislators who like doling out favors and punishments and lobbyists who would be out of jobs and Americans who like having their hands out for gimmes.)
Until Americans understand that we are going to lose everything unless we do these things, no plan thus far offered is much more than a bandaid.
Then I said:
I read this column before I read Andrew C. McCarthy's column.
Read McCarthy at once and see how great minds think alike.
in health care, americans pay substantially more and get substantially less successful results than OECD countries that have a single payer health care system in which everyone is covered. like evolution this is science. it is measurable and testable.
your comments are like intelligent design. all fantasy and conjecture. feeling that it is right does not make it right.
"If the political climate makes it too risky for elected officials to take that position, it’s up to the commentariat to change the climate."
Mr. McCarthy, this is the enduring challenge of conservative thought. My mouth waters when reading, digesting and formulating intellectual arguments for capitalism, limited government, freedom and the endless opportunities to excel and succeed in a country that embodies these qualities. Unortunately, Leftism is the default position of the uninformed and the dependent. Much like a new computer just out of the box, default doesn’t have much to offer. However, many folks just want to hit the easy button when it comes to understanding policy and the world around them. Conservative thought doesn’t work well on placards, unless one writes really, really small. Keep up the good work!
Are the elderly of, say, Laos or Ghana lesser human beings? If not, why aren't you clamoring for an international medicare system? Does your compassion end at the water's edge? Or do you recognize that our financial resources are finite, and at some point we must make difficult decisions?
And what have you sacrificed? Do you live in a less expensive home, drive a less expensive car -- deprive yourself of anything -- so that you can buy someone else health care? Or does mouthing platitudes about how much you care, demanding that someone else's wealth be confiscated, and demonizing people who realize that Medicare is an unsustainable Ponzie scheme qualify you as virtuous?
I agreed with Pete. Why pile-on Ryan. I understand McCarthy's point of commentator vs. policy shaper, but he should be careful or his columns will be seen as Barney Frank might say..."getting to luxuriate in the purity of his own irrelevance". McCarthy needs to learn how to move the needle of the public, not just us conservatives.
Andy, as always, an excellent rebuttal to the spineless on our side who think you can have freedom and collectivism co-exist and somehow manage it efficiently. When will these types ever learn? It is simply impossible, one is always on the march against the other (thus my problem with some libertarians who think you have to have freedom accomplish everything overnight and anything slower is a sellout). That's why your point was so right on, I don't care if it's light bulbs, Medicare or what, every day Republicans should be pushing for another area of more freedom, no matter how big or small. We, as you note, have to change the narrative.
The problem is one that Bastiat nailed so many years ago when he said "Government is that great fiction where everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else". This truth will not be easy to overcome, maybe impossible, but attacking Mr. McCarthy for trying to start the attempt is idiotic and we wonder why we are in the shape we are in.
Entitlement, enschmitlement. The question is what, if anything, a majority of Americans can vote to tax themselves for and thereby coerce an objecting minority to pay for.
To borrow from Ayn Rand: an army, a police force, and courts. Presumably McCarthy would permit state and local governments to coerce unwilling minorities to pay for things like fire services in places where, for example, high-powered water hose systems are better than bucket brigades in extinguishing skyscraper blazes.
But how about Project Apollo and the Hoover Dam, vast projects that no coalition of private charity, private enterprise, and state and local governments could do at all, let alone as effectively as federal programs? Yes, the Hoover Dam might eventually have been built, but it would have taken decades after it was actually finished in 1936. And yes, we would someday walk on the moon, but not in 1969. These projects were made possible at the times they were completed solely because they were federal programs.
Does McCarthy draw a Randian type, "only if absolutely essential" line? Or does he permit ANY coercion for things not absolutely essential, but nevertheless desired, by a vast majority of Americans? And if he does, aren't we just talking about line-drawing?
And if McCarthy is right, why? Why is private property more important than what people want? Do we necessarily degenerate into a nation of thieves feeding on each other if we dare stray from McCarthy's philosophy? Are too many "entitlements" a death knell for America? A single "entitlement"?
Yes, yes, yes! Excellent piece of writing, as usual, Mr. McCarthy. I thought the paragraphs in the middle beginning with "What I argued..." and "At issue..." made points that are particularly relevant to the debate. Thanks for your contribution, Mr. McCarthy!
There's a premise in here that only a small percentage of the elderly today qualify as needy and this problem can be dealt with by implementing some alternative welfare program (with minimal cost to the government).
Where McCarthy gets his stats from and how he can be sure this percentage will remain constant in the future is not mentioned.
The idea that such a program would be sufficiently tough-love and encourage people to leave it might satisfy the urge to punish those who failed to achieve wealthy status but it's unrealistic for those elderly for whom it will likely be their economic stop on the train ride of their lives.
I think introducing serious means testing for both Social Security and Medicare is a more realistic step towards reducing spending.
I agree that those who can comfortably afford their own healthcare (and I know that word 'comfortably' will be a firestarter) should be the first ones asked to sacrifice for those who cannot.
But such testing has to acknowlege that circumstances change: people feeling comfortable today may lose their entire resources to catastrophic illness (which will continue since people like McCarthy are dead-set against anything but fully market-driven healthcare costs).
Because people used to die young and we didn't have these expensive treatments, we used to spend $X on healthcare.
Now we spend an unaffordable multiple of $X keeping 80 year olds on chemo and giving them triple bypasses.
And you think the Democrats were suggesting death panels? What's going to happen when no private insurer will insure against the risk that an 80 year old will need chemo?
The answer is that the 80-year-old would receive the medical treatment that he was able to obtain through a privately-negotiated transaction using his own funds or the funds of a charitable caregiver. Ultimately, the answer is that the person would die, because death is a fact of our existence, albeit one that liberals would like to wish away, regardless of the impracticality, cost and foolishness of doing so.
Mike B,
Why do you write here? No one here wants socialism. "Why is private property more important than what people want?" What does that sentence mean anyway?
I want my private property. That's why I live in this country.
Want is not the correct word, though, when it comes to entitlements. No one is entitled to steal from others.
As for worrying about the elderly poor, what do you think is going to happen to them when Obamacare kicks in?
The best solution is the free market for most of us. The worst for ALL of us is the government trying to do it for us.
McCarthy is correct.
