All the News That’s Fit to Tint
You really have to wonder if gullibility can be epidemic. You have to wonder if our desperation to abdicate personal responsibility and to be “taken care of” is so profound that we’ll abide anything, even the complicity of the media on which we ostensibly rely to keep us informed (unless we’ve abdicated even our responsibility to be informed). You have to wonder if we’re so willing to be placated that we’ll accept the packaging of political agendas as moral pronouncements without question or logic. And you have to wonder why The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times chose not to quote “moral imperative” in their headlines, to say nothing of why they buried the story.
Let’s take a critical look at some terminology, shall we? Taking care of ourselves is a responsibility. Taking care of each other might be a moral imperative – but only if there’s a cultural consensus to do so. That’s what morality is: a cultural agreement to do this, but not that. Helping our neighbor is a good thing. Rolling a grenade under his door is not. We’re pretty much in agreement on cut-and-dried things like that. But not everything is quite so clear, especially when viewed through the clouded lenses of political promises, entitlements, and rights. Providing health care as a government mandate might be a cultural imperative – not a moral one – if it doesn’t precipitate the economic ruin of the culture. (”The operation was a success, but the patient died.”) But insurance is positively not a moral imperative. It’s a voluntary financial transaction based on The Law of Large Numbers: the small contributions of the many protect against the large losses of the few. And health insurance most certainly should not be a commercial imperative imposed by the federal government.
Do we honestly believe that if Ted Kennedy had ever worked a private-sector second in his life – or if he ever founded a business – he’d be prescribing this? How many would-be entrepreneurs – private-sector job creators – are likely to go for this deal?
Yeah, you can start a business. But you have to insure your employees medically, even if they have pre-existing conditions. Wait. There’s more. You can’t refuse to hire people because of those conditions because that’s discrimination. To make things even more interesting, we’re going to tax the business to Kingdom Come just because we can. This is not knee-capping, we promise; but if you make more than we think you should (Barney Frank’s working on that), we’re going to take that, too. Finally, if there’s any of it left after we get through creating government programs and government jobs – no, not private-sector jobs and certainly not wealth – we’re going to spread it around. Okay?
Right. Sign me up.
By the same logic – or the utter lack thereof – do we think that if Barney Frank had ever worked a private-sector second in his life, he would have avoided these questions, let alone consented to the provisions he’s trying to defend, or stormed out of the interview in a self-righteous snit? A government agency overseeing the executive compensation of commercial enterprises? If those enterprises took TARP money, that’s one thing (setting aside the reprehensibility of TARP). But purporting to act in the interest of shareholders in private-sector businesses when you’ve never worked in one? Is that anything other than a shameless power grab? Have we really gotten to the point at which it’s more important to count our perceived slights (”Why should she make that much money when I don’t?”) than it is to strive for our own opportunities? Have we actually concluded it’s better to depend on the government to define our opportunities and give them to us? Has any government, anywhere, been able to do that? Why do we believe it’s different this time? How did we lose our pride in earning our own keep?
A long time ago, in a land far, far way, we used to go to war over things like taxation without representation. We used to take umbrage when what belonged to us was taken. We used to think self-reliance was a good thing. We used to think boot-strapping, risk and reward, and equal opportunity were things to which we should aspire. Now we’ve succumbed to career politicians, paid to create more power for themselves, telling us what’s good for us when they’ve never actually done what we do, attempting to legislate equality (not equal opportunity), and wanting to take more of our money for the privilege of sustaining their pomposity and their ostensible intellectual superiorty. On the final frontier, they understand clearly why that’s a bad idea.
There are differences between rose-colored glasses, self-induced blindness, and the unwitting acceptance of opacity. In turning a blithe eye to the media’s political predilections for the first, let’s not contract the second. And let’s be careful we don’t have the third imposed on us, however unwittingly.