The stimulus is working!

[detbuch]

Originally Posted by spence

What I'm not hearing from the peanut gallery here (or anywhere for that matter) is how free market principals can be pragmatically applied to solve real problems today. I don't care how things might have been better had we behaved in a more conservative manner 70 years ago, tell me how we can adapt to the current situation and steer the ship.
-spence

When the ship drifts off course, the remedy is to steer it back on course, not just to go off on some uncharted destination. The ship of state is temporarily adrift because the captain has discarded the map. He has heard of a brave new world, a utopian place where the harsh natural place from whence he sailed holds no sway. It is a land of total fairness and good feeling, where all suffering is healed, where enemies have been vanquished by conciliation and discussion, where the tree of academe and its advanced postmodern method has deconstructed away all tracts, treatises, manifestos, constitutions, and all so-called concrete foundations that are over 70 years old. Ancient things no longer apply there. Not even values, principles, or concepts. All that matters there is the comfort, convenience, ease of access to all that sustains, at little to no cost. Cost is an ancient concept, value, principle. Especially attractive about this new land is the absence of the ancient, so-called "free market" values, principles, concepts. Economic "predators" have been eliminated there. The People, not persons, rule there. Personality breeds dissent, confusion, differing values, principles, concepts. All, in their wonderfull diversity, have been schooled by a superior pedagogy into a like-minded deferral to the great becefactor--the State.

Actually, plastic surgery and lasik, medical procedures not covered by insurance, but paid by the ancient "out of pocket" method, and which used to be expensive, have seen tremendous drops in price and are now "more affordable" due to ancient "free market" principles, values, concepts of competition. (Walmart, that competitive pit bull that liberals and unions love to hate, also comes to mind.)

The private insurance thing has inflated out of hand and is about to unecessarily morph into a bigger public form which will deliver less at higher costs, monetarily and socially. It is probably not "pragmatic" to instantly abolish all insurance (nor constitutional), but we can let the air out more gradually by reverting toward "out of pocket" plans like health savings accounts.