Posted by
Andrews on Saturday, December 26, 2009 8:50:24 PM
I was thinking about ObamaCare and my last post ("
What the Right MUST Do In 2011") and realized that I was right in one thing. Maybe not in 2011, but if ObamaCare becomes law, and is not quickly reversed, in 10 years, or 20 years, if someone tries to repeal it, the argument will be "You want health care to be available only to the rich?"
Obviously you can see the error in that argument (I hope). We do not have ObamaCare now, and people far from rich get health care. In fact, even before Medicare and Medicaid, the poor and elderly got care as well. Which makes nonsense of current claims that ending Meidcare/Medicaid/SCHIP will result in the poor and elderly dying in the streets.
And that brings me to my point. Whenever we suggest repealing a political policy, and the critics start to make hyperbolic claims, we need to ask them if they really believe what they say. Was the country really suffering from 99% illiteracy before the mid 1970's? If not, then how can they say ending the Department of Education would "destroy education"? For that matter, was it true prior to nationwide public education that "only the rich" got any education? If not, then claims ending public education would produce this result seem a bit far fetched.
But then again, most such claims are truly absurd. A lot of policies on the left were created to solve only apparent problems, or problems whose scope was wildly exaggerated. From Upton Sinclair's lying exaggerations that created the FDA, to TR's antitrust hyperbole, to FDR's slandering of capitalism to modern claims that old people had to choose between medications and foodstuffs, exaggerations and outright lies are often at the root of social activism, and thus, most policies did not solve catastrophic problems, if they solved anything at all, but simply addressed small or non-existent problems that got an inordinate amount of press. And so, logically, repealing them would not have anywhere near the catastrophic effects predicted.
POSTSCRIPT
Of course many such programs actually do more harm than good. Many create new, worse problems, and some don't even solve the original complaint. But we can ignore that for the moment and simply focus on knocking down these absurdly florid claims of doom which will result from any reduction in the size of government. That alone will do a lot of good, if only by pointing out how absurd the claims of the opposition are.