Re: David Cross on Health Care

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 12:34 PM, Karl <[email protected]> wrote:
> > The US military is very effective... at certain things.
>
> **ever been military and ised the military system?  I have, and it has more than
> enough horror stories.

Well, it all depends on *what* efficacy is being measured.  I'd say
the Pentagon is especially effective at justifying it's budget every
year.  It does a better job of securing funds and personnel than just
about anything else in history.  They regularly solve logistics
challenges (of their own making), the likes of which have never been
seen before.  Very impressive.

"Institutions, like organisms, seek survival for themselves and their
descendants...  Institutions aren’t simple tools. Organizations aren’t
implements. And when a sufficient number of institutions coexist, they
function like an ecosystem. They neither work nor do not work. They
survive, reproduce, replace, predate, evolve, alter, consume, and
grow. They are no more responsive to the individuals contained within
than a person is to a single cell... So look. You have organizations
that were constituted largely in secret for purposes that may, in
fact, have little relationship to what Whitehousespokesperson or
Undersecretaryofdefenseivewhatnot says they were, which, once
constituted, proceeded quite heedless of what their ersatz original
raisons d'être were, and which now constitute an ungovernable,
boundless, self-sustaining, self-referring system of unimaginable
complexity. " [0]

So yeah, *that's* what I think the military is primarily effective at.

> > In part, by spending less on defense.
> **yes, and if we did that, what would be the world consequences?

In terms of peace, it depends on which boondoggles are cut and how.
Constraints can be healthy.  Certainly we're spending proportionately
more than any other nation, and I don't think that all of that is
justifiable as "defense" or "security".

> Not in terms of peace, in economy.

Oh.  :-)

> The US military drives some countries economies...

Not to mention some counties and some states.  I live in MD; we're the
wealthiest state in the country primarily because of our cushy federal
government contracts, many of them military or "intelligence" in
nature.  But all of this puts me very much in mind of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window


To tie my digression back to Paul's original thread, I'm personally
skeptical that our national government will turn any large project
into net positive for society.  The weirdness that was the recently
passed health care reform bill only confirms that belief.  The
weirdness that is our best example for what a super-enormous
government undertaking on the scale necessary for universal healthcare
even more so.  Although I'd be pleasantly surprised to be proven
wrong.  And our *current* health care system is not one that I'd like
to defend.

But, if we are going to be a "statist" society anyway, I'd prefer a
larger proportion of our collective funds go towards creating value
and steering away from market failures (e.g. health insurance) than
towards destroying value (e.g. certain aspects and actions of our
military).  In as much as we're stuck with a warfare-welfare state,
I'd prefer it tilt a little bit more towards the latter.  In as much
as I'd like to move towards a stateless society, I'd prefer to remove
the state provided crutches first from those that don't need them, and
continue to provide them to those who aren't (yet?) being provided
them through stateless means.

-- 
Nick

[0] from http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/07/boundary-extinction.html,
which is not meant as an endorsement of any of that blog's opinions
other than the excerpted text.  Although I think that's a good and
relevant article.

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