During the 2004 election, John Kerry and John Edwards went around telling people there are no jobs out there, even though at the time America had much lower unemployment than Canada, France, Germany, or almost any other developed country. But, catching Senator Edwards on the stump in an old mill town in New Hampshire, I saw what he was getting at. There are no jobs like the jobs your pa had, where you could go to the mill and do the same thing day in, day out for forty-five years, and it made it so much easier for swanky senators come election time because there were large numbers of you losers all in the same place when they flew in for the campaign stop, and the crowd was impressive, whereas now they have to prowl around town ferreting out small two- or three-man start-ups, which takes a lot longer and to be honest never looks so good on the evening news. Watching Senator Edwards pining for the mills, I wondered if he wasn’t having a strange premonition of his own obsolescence. The rise of big business was also the rise of Big Government. This isn’t 1934. In an age of small start-ups and home businesses and desktop publishing, we don’t need a one-size-fits-all statist monopoly.
We have unnecessarily complicated too many areas of human existence.
Complexity justifies even more government intervention, leading to even more impenetrable complexity. After all, if health-care costs are the issue, it isn’t very difficult. As every economist knows, third-party transactions are always more expensive, whether the third party is an insurer or the government. If I go to a movie, I’ve got a general idea of what it ought to cost me.
If I’m expecting to pay ten bucks and the clerk says “That’ll be $273.95,” I would notice. But most of the people in a hospital waiting room have no idea whether the procedure costs $200 or $2,000 or $20,000—and they don’t care: their only concern is whether the third party will grant access to it. I know what a movie ticket costs, I’ve no idea what a broken leg costs. Nor does anybody else—because there are so many third parties interceding themselves between your bone and the doctor that there is no longer a real market price for a broken leg. So if, as Massachusetts has done, you mandate universal third-partyism, your costs by definition will increase. There’s no mystery about it. As a businessman, Mitt Romney should have known that.
Third-party transactions are always inflationary. So let’s return as much of daily life as possible to a two-party system—buyer and seller. You’ll be amazed how affordable it is. Compare cellphone and laptop and portable music system prices with what they were in the Eighties, and then ask yourself how it would have turned out with a government-regulated system of electronic insurance plans.
The most important place to start correcting America’s structural defects is in the schoolhouse. The Democrats justified ObamaCare on the grounds of “controlling costs.” What about applying the same argument to education? The object should be not to universalize college and therefore defer adulthood even further, but to telescope schooling. Even if one over-looks the malign social engineering, much of what goes on in the American schoolhouse is merely passing the time. In 2011, a study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that fewer than half of America’s undergraduates had taken a single course in the previous semester that required twenty pages of written work. A third had not taken a single course demanding forty pages of reading. Forty-five percent of students showed no improvement in critical thinking, reasoning, or writing by the end of their sophomore years.11 Writing, reading, thinking: who needs it? Certainly not the teachers of tomorrow: students majoring in education showed the least gains in learning.
Six-figure universal college education will only reinforce a culture of hermetically sealed complacency. Instead, it should be possible to teach what a worthless high school diploma requires by the age of fourteen. You could then do an extra two years on top of that and give people a
College should be for those who wish to pursue genuine disciplines, not the desultory salad bar of Women’s “Studies,” Queer “Studies,” or 99 percent of the other “studies.” As a culture, we do too much “studying” (mostly of our navels, if not lower parts) and not enough doing. Vocational education, even for what we now dignify as “professions,” would be much better. So would privatizing education entirely.
It’s not so extraordinary that on the brink of fiscal catastrophe the Obama Democrats should propose the Ultimate Entitlement—health care.
