Nudging Toward the Public Option

George Rebane

Truthout.org is one of the left-wing sites that I regularly visit to catch the view from the other side.  They’ve been known now and again to heroically attempt a reasonable explanation for the odd socialist policy that may benefit from such treatment.  Their best shot at defending the ‘public option’ component of Obamacare is taken by Lawrence Wittner, a professor of history, in the piece ‘When "Public Options" Serve the Public - and When They Don't’.

Unfortunately the man comes up a bit short when he tries to construct a taxonomy of government services, or what we see as sorting apples and oranges.  Now you understand, as an historian this kind of stuff should be his strong suit.  But then, even those who can’t, also deserve work, don’t they?

In this piece he does a mighty job of equating the government’s entry as a ‘competitor’ into the healthcare insurance business to its involvement in law enforcement, fire fighting, and running city parks.  Since we have accepted the latter with not much fuss, letting a non-profit agency of Big Brother mix it up with regulated private insurance companies in the market place should not be a problem – it’s the same thing, isn’t it?  We note that the only tool in his kit seems to be ‘private is bad, the collective is good’.

Life is too short to take such liberal academic archetypes seriously, and waste the time of high caliber RR readers in a detailed and drowsy rebuttal.  Nevertheless, you do have to keep an eye on them, because to most people they appear to speak from Olympian heights.  So I recommend a read of this short piece to see what the Left considers as intellectual support for Obamacare.  Note also all the little phrases about the rich having to pay their proper share and other little attentions to class.  (And in passing you may muse on what kind history Lawrence Wittner pours into the empty vessels that dutifully assemble in his classes.)

In the final analysis the public option is intended to be a nudge toward complete socialist healthcare in America.  It has been so identified by several liberal Congressional leaders.  Nudge? that’s also the name of the recent book (lots of weeks on the country’s best seller lists) by R.H. Thaler and C.R. Sunstein on behavioral economics and techniques that governments should use to gently herd us into choosing and accepting their policy desiderata for us (more here).  The basic method it promotes is that government should make the other alternatives so bad that our remaining choice is really no choice.  Oh, did I mention that Cass Sunstein is also Obama’s Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs – aka the ‘Information Czar’ who wants to make sure that blogs like RR don’t nudge you in the wrong direction.

Comments

[Mikey McD]

ONE of the issues that strikes me as hateful in the Obamacare/socialist agenda is the utter disdain for wealth producers. Why does our country still allow such discrimination to go undefended (the rich are undeniably attacked)? Targeting the "rich" is no different than taxing African Americans different than Caucasians, Jews different than Christians, or the fat less different than the skinny.

[Dixon Cruickshank]

The one item I have noticed also is who is actually for it - it appears all that are not going to be in it, The US Gov employee's will not - the unions and all state workers will not - the AFL -CIO will not none of the unions- they will still be able to be their own - oh by the way there's 10B in the bill for the unions to keep running their's too. So who left ??? us