Reasons for optimism

@georgeob1,

Quote:

the Obama Care law (that no one in the Administration actiually read)

Thank god that you and Hannity and Michelle Bachmann read it, george!

But aside from that, what evidence do you have for your often repeated claim? What's the normal procedure for bills of 160,000 words? What comparably-sized bills initiated by the Bush or Reagan were read by someone in those administrations? How do you know?

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Just as an addendum on that last post, one of the reasons I so despise the current trends in the US towards hugely expensive campaign contests is that individual candidates including sitting politicos and their teams have to spend so much time just raising money. Bills of the size and complexity of the ACA or even small bills won't be profitably studied by one single person but by large teams with related expertise. To the degree that such political staffs are tied up trying to hump in money, to that degree they are doing something quite other than governance. And that isn't even to mention the inevitable problems of corruption that attend such a system.

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@blatham,

Reasonable questions.

I have not read the entire text of the ill-famed Affordable Care Act, or even a major part of it. I also doubt that our President or any of his senior advisors read it either. Indeed it took an unduly sympathetic Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to save it from a deserved death over one of its very central provisions - a penalty for non-participation masquerading as a tax.

I will however concede that our hapless House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi , in one of her very rare lucid moments, captured the essence of it in her "We'll have to enact the bill to find out what's in it."

The bill reveals amazing confusion over just what constitutes "insurance" which is usually used to identify provisions to mitigate the financial consequences of rare, unlikely events. By the time the liberal academics finished larding it up with their favorite stuff, it was neither insurance nor useful to any of its potential purchasers.

Nearly all the claimed gains in the "Number insured" under ACA come from additions to the publically funded MEDICAID program, and not from the bastardized "insurance" scheme the deluded academics created. In their efforts to control costs the designers forced the consolidation of medical service providers, while purporting at the same time to double the demand for their services. Should we concratulate them for their intelligence in attempting to siumultaneously increase the demand for medfical services while reducing the supply of providers? (A breathtaking innovation in economic thought!!)

The ACA will be a long remembered relic of ill conceived hubris on the part of progressive "reformers" who it turns out were not any smarter than the rest of us and indeed a good deal less understanding of human nature than even non college educated white men.

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@blatham,

blatham wrote:

Just as an addendum on that last post, one of the reasons I so despise the current trends in the US towards hugely expensive campaign contests is that individual candidates including sitting politicos and their teams have to spend so much time just raising money. Bills of the size and complexity of the ACA or even small bills won't be profitably studied by one single person but by large teams with related expertise. To the degree that such political staffs are tied up trying to hump in money, to that degree they are doing something quite other than governance. And that isn't even to mention the inevitable problems of corruption that attend such a system.

I think the real take away here is that Bills (or regulations) of the size and complexity of the ACA do not constitute good governance. We should have far less of such things..

Donald Trump has given us all a recent example of a much lower cost campaign than (say) the well-financed Clinton/Democrat machine this year.

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"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy." (Ernest Benn)

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@layman,

That certainly illustrates how our Friend Batham practices the art of American politics from his perch in Vancouver BC. (I suspect that with the ascent of Trudeau II he finds nothing to criticize at home. Alternatively it might simply be relatively boring up there.)

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

I think the real take away here is that Bills (or regulations) of the size and complexity of the ACA do not constitute good governance. We should have far less of such things..

Vast and complex societies such as the modern US aren't amenable to models that derived from earlier and much simpler societies. Though the attendant problems of this situation are numerous and sizable, if you move to eviscerate governance at the federal level, then any conception of "America" makes no sense. A bill of rights or constitution makes no sense.

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

Alternatively it might simply be relatively boring up there.)

I'm told that a hoser's idea of "excitement" is watching curling match on TV, so what's that tellya?

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

That certainly illustrates how our Friend Batham practices the art of American politics from his perch in Vancouver BC. (I suspect that with the ascent of Trudeau II he finds nothing to criticize at home. Alternatively it might simply be relatively boring up there.)

This is really a very simple matter. If you take walk down a street in Canada or Holland or Britain or New Zealand and ask the people you meet to talk about US politics, you'll normally get a lot of somewhat informed commentary. But if you walk down a street in Cincinnati or Dallas or Crooked Bend, Ohio and inquire about politics in Holland or Australia or Spain or Canada, you will not get much if anything in the way of informed comment.

There's a simple reason (aside from geographic isolation which you share with Canada). The US is the reigning imperial power in the world. Others around the world understand the consequences of this.

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There's probably nobody left to convert to communism in Canada. It's a more challenging task here in the States. Merely dropping the words "corporation" and "profit" doesn't seem to automatically incite people and elicit a fervent vow to dedicate oneself to the overthrow of capitalism here, for some damn reason.

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@blatham,

blatham wrote:

This is really a very simple matter. If you take walk down a street in Canada or Holland or Britain or New Zealand and ask the people you meet to talk about US politics, you'll normally get a lot of somewhat informed commentary. But if you walk down a street in Cincinnati or Dallas or Crooked Bend, Ohio and inquire about politics in Holland or Australia or Spain or Canada, you will not get much if anything in the way of informed comment.

Well I've never been to New Zeland so I won't offer an opinion. However I have been to the other countries you listed (and more), and I've consistently found about the same levels of ignorance and prejudice that I enouunter here.

blatham wrote:

There's a simple reason (aside from geographic isolation which you share with Canada). The US is the reigning imperial power in the world. Others around the world understand the consequences of this.

You overstate our present position, but that aside, this is the only meaningful part of your post. The fact is that in the U.S. one can readily get fairly well informed commentary about China, Russia, the EU and other equivalently large influential powers, as I'm sure you can also get it in Holland, Australia, Spain or Canada. In short there is no difference, and your only point is our size and relative influence along with those of other like powers. Oddly you confine your venom to the United States. Why?

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@blatham,

blatham wrote:

Vast and complex societies such as the modern US aren't amenable to models that derived from earlier and much simpler societies. Though the attendant problems of this situation are numerous and sizable, if you move to eviscerate governance at the federal level, then any conception of "America" makes no sense. A bill of rights or constitution makes no sense.

The space between our current level (and detail) of Federal governance and that required for our size and complexity is vast indeed. We are very far indeed from eviscerating Federal governance. You are presenting a false dilemma.

The EU is currently providing us all a look at the continuing demise of a bureaucratic state.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

Oddly you confine your venom to the United States.

Venom? Interesting word choice. American politics and culture is a key area of interest as, say, physics is for you. Or European politics? And, of course, where I bring in commentary other than my own, it is about 99% American in origin.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

The space between our current level (and detail) of Federal governance and that required for our size and complexity is vast indeed.

That's your ideological position, as we understand.

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Quote:

Dan Gardner ‏@dgardner 3h3 hours ago
It's nice to see abject humiliation and public grovelling haven't diminished the preening self-righteousness of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

Well, yes. There's another reason for optimism.

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@blatham,

Well I find some hope for Rubio : Cruz is far too reptilian for my taste. Happily, with Trump's ascent, both are on the shelf for now .... as are the Clintons' (though they are so probably far more permanently) ..

So it is indeed a reason for optimism.

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@georgeob1,

Cruz is quite a creature, ain't he. I saw video footage his campaign had done where he was sitting on a sofa with his mother and said that she prayed for him every day, sometimes for hours. His mother looked gave him a look that very clearly gave away what she was thinking - "How could I have birthed and raised such a lying piece of crap?"

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@blatham,

Quote:

Cruz is quite a creature, ain't he. I saw video footage his campaign had done where he was sitting on a sofa with his mother and said that she prayed for him every day, sometimes for hours. His mother looked gave him a look that very clearly gave away what she was thinking - "How could I have birthed and raised such a lying piece of crap?"

That may have been one of the moments he was telling the truth, his mother may have been praying that God would cast the demos out of Ted.

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@reasoning logic,

Quote:

his mother may have been praying that God would cast the demos out of Ted.

Or possibly praying that no other mother might have to give birth to a demon. That this guy had such a high level of support from the modern right tells us much that's pretty frightening.

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@blatham,

blatham wrote:

That this guy had such a high level of support from the modern right tells us much that's pretty frightening.

How high was Cruz' "level of support"? Not much in my estimate, and I cartainly don't see anthing frightening in it. Cruz certainly did all he could to lead the most disaffected elements of the Republican members of the Congress, and he was partly successful at that ... for a short time, though he failed to extend his support far beyond that, and lost the primary contest to an outsider. Now he has been largely eclipsed by a relatively moderate (in terms of policy aspirations) competitor (Trump) who has, through his stunning victory, proven far more efffective in garnering broad spport in the Party. Indeed the disaffection of the former tea party element of the Republican delegation in Congress has apparently disappeared from view. We shall see if that lasts, but I am optimistic.

We evidently agree that Cruz is, even on a good day, very hard to love, but you do appear to see a conspiracy under every Republican rock (or pebble).

I'm no fan of the Progressive movement in the Democrat party but I accept that they believe in what they advovcate and generally mean well.

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