The current signature issue for liberals is national health care, through which they hope to provide full health care coverage for everybody, regardless of whether they want it or not, which will of course be paid for by everybody with an income in the top 50%, whether they want to or not.  Liberals justify this initiative by saying that it’s the “caring” thing to do.

And don’t you dare question the logic of this program, because logic doesn’t apply here; liberals know that it’s just the “right” thing to do.  Do you happen to think that the proposal to provide government insurance to everyone who doesn’t have private insurance will eventually drive private insurers out of business?  Well, you might come to that conclusion because, after all, government insurance will certainly be a lot cheaper.  It won’t be cheaper because it’s more efficient, though.    Government is the epitome of inefficiency.  No, it will be cheaper because, just like the existing Medicare coverage that senior citizens use, it will pay doctors less through legislated pay caps.

And when it becomes obvious that government insurance is, indeed, less expensive than private insurance, and that it furthermore is available to anyone without private health care coverage, it’s not a big leap to assume that any rational person – and yes, consumers are rational, or at least accountable for their own investments, as I’ve demonstrated in previous entries – will give up his private coverage in favor of the government variety.  The only way this won’t happen is if government coverage, because it’s cheaper, creates such a demand for medical services that they have to become rationed due to the short supply that will inevitably result when doctors, who will be paid less, begin withholding their services.  This is what happens in, for example, England, where private insurance is the only option for some people to receive some types of medical care within any reasonable time frame.  Of course, we should all ask ourselves just how caring is it to inflict such a system of rationed care on the poor, anyway?

But if you try to argue that human nature will inevitably and inexorably lead to these results with a liberal, one of likeliest comebacks will go something like this:  “We’ll put our smartest people on it.  They’ll figure it out.”  And when you then point out, as you should, that the smartest people in history couldn’t figure out how to change human nature, another likely response is to say, “We figured out how to put a man on the moon.  Surely we can figure out universal health care.”

That response captures the “logic” of liberalism in a nutshell, because it’s a true “apples to oranges” comparison.  Putting a man on the moon, while difficult, involved surmounting obstacles with technological innovation that was tractable through scientific research, for example developing bigger rocket boosters.  Making universal health care work is going to involve surmounting obstacles of a much less tractable nature, those that are driven by the nature of a human being to try to maximize his or her own wealth and welfare.  It reminds me of when the Soviet Union, which was determined in its early years to implement “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities” Marxist socialism, only to find that people weren’t putting forth a determined effort to help state-owned industries to succeed.  Instead, they were working on their own time to create wealth for themselves, either by stealing from their state-owned employer or by creating goods on their own to trade on the black market.  The Soviet’s answer to this was to try to create a “New Socialist Man”   –  someone who embraced socialist welfare over his or her own self interest.  We saw how that worked out.

So comparing health care to the space race really is an “apples to oranges” comparison.  One involved improvements in technology, and the other requires changes to human nature.  It's much easier to upgrade machines than it is humans, and it's arguable whether such upgrades would even constitute improvements in the case of people, given the experience with the "new socialist man" experiment.  It's best, in my opinion, to work with people just as they are.

One final point.  When your libbie pals’ best response is to say, “We’ll figure it out,” they’ve just lost the argument, because they’ve admitted that they’ve failed to reason out exactly what the inevitable consequences of their silly ideas are.  Just remember, hope and belief are no substitute for analysis and logic.