March 23, 2006
Sustainability
In comments, I pointed out that while I tend to think of European economies as basket cases, the reality is that a Norwegian business person with a good position leads a good life. Social services are high, job security is guaranteed, the coffee is very good, the fjords look beautiful in the late spring... I look at demographic and economic trends and say "Yo, Jan, this is not gonna last!"
Yet another advantage of classic liberalism is sustainability. Ludwig von Mises noted this in his 1927 masterpiece, Liberalism, from which I proudly call my beliefs classical liberalism. Mises predicted the Second World War, fascism, communism AND their eventual defeat by free people. One wonders if he did as well on stock picks or the final four office pool.
Free markets are self correcting and the mechanisms for sustainability are all built in. Marxism has shown it can survive in limited amounts for a limited time, but it is not sustainable. Great Britain and the United States seem to be doing pretty well with classical liberalism, provided they can stay the course.
Discussing Britain's National Health Service (NHS) with a friend who was employed in the UK for three years, he blew my mind with a great line. He said "Americans would never tolerate the poor health care in the UK for a second; Britons would never tolerate our broken payment system."
I've thought about that for months (the sagacious friend surely forgot it in minutes). Was there some equivalence? Both systems are broken in a way. Yet it was clear to me that my wife's stroke would have killed her anywhere else but the US and that my MS treatment and diagnosis options would have been reduced under socialist health care.
The answer ("Mike, I've got a response to that thing you said five months ago!") is that in five years, the NHS will still, if I may use a medical term, suck. They will throw more money at it and technology will help a little, and they will reform it, but it will not be world class, befitting the stature of Great Britain.
In the US in five years, health care will still be expensive, but the procedures that are expensive today will be cheap. If Health Savings Accounts (A Hayekian-not-Marxist idea) are allowed and take hold, most health care will be cheaper. The classic liberal solution is self sustaining, the Marxist solution will require constant tinkering and additional resources to continue.
JK: As a fellow traveller along the MS path (doing the walk?), I am currently aware of only 2 countries where an individual with said curse has a snow-ball's chance: Israel and the US. Is it any wonder that both of these are also the top hated states in the world today? Socialism/Marxism where the welfare of the individual plays second fiddle to the welfare of state/society would never bother looking into the programs to treat myoptic issues regarding the brain. Why repair a broken cog when you can always harvest a new one from amongst the teeming throngs?
Posted by: mdmhvonpa at March 23, 2006 10:57 AMGreat stuff JK. And it's a perfect opportunity to explain a natural analog that I've pondered during countless hours driving a tractor to harvest horse hay.
The great scourge of hay farmers is noxious weeds. Some weeds are not a problem, since they are somewhat palatable to horses and don't degrade the feed quality of the finished product, but others are truly undesirable. The most obnoxious weed I've dealt with in the past couple years is kosha. Kosha is not harmful, it's just a much lower quality feed plant than grasses are, and it doesn't bale well. (City slickers know kosha as "tumbleweed.")
Anyway, back to the point. There are two methods I've tried to keep kosha from growing in my fields - spraying and crowding out. Spraying has an immediate effect but there's so much of the weed that it takes a huge amount of herbicide to kill it completely. And even then, there will always be more seeds in the soil to start new plants that will have to be sprayed again. Sustaining this process is expensive in time and materials. The other approach involves planting grass seeds and irrigating the field to provide favorable conditions for the grass to grow in. Irrigated soil is a less favorable condition for the weeds than dry soil but more importantly, once the grass plants reach a few inches in height they block the sunlight from reaching the soil and simply out-COMPETE the weeds. Once the grass is established this NATURAL process SUSTAINS itself season after season.
To me, this is a perfect analogy for the competition between liberty and tyranny in human civilization. It takes hard work and foreknowledge of how things work to establish liberty in a world of tyranny but once you do it will naturally flourish and out-compete tyranny, as long as you continuously monitor the conditions and nurture it a little bit. Just as individual grass plants will thrive and prosper on their own to create a better pasture, individual humans who thrive and prosper make society better too.
Of course, humans are not plants. Humans have free will, and without a philosophy of individual rights and using force against others only in self-defense, some people choose to become human weeds. In those cases, rational free men are forced to resort to human weed control measures. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants."
Posted by: johngalt at March 23, 2006 10:59 AMjg, excellent analogy. Even this citified guy likes it.
mdmh, I had seen the MS stuff on your blog but didn’t know if it was you or a family member who had it. I am less likely than some peers to run down our crazy health care system and I have calmed down a bit these days, but my predilection toward the big pharma firms is so strong, people think I must be on the take. It is Arnold Kling’s “Folk Marxism” that makes people hate the societies wealthy enough to value individual life, as you say.
No walk for me, but I rode in the MS150 pledge bike rides for a few years before I was diagnosed, so I feel I have some Karma in the bank.
Heads up my friend. I know from your blog that you, like me, have found a lot of joy in important things like friends and family. This is still a wonderful world, as Pops told us many years ago.
Posted by: jk at March 24, 2006 8:39 PM | What do you think? [3]