Any place that puts hackery on the front page is suspect.

In any case, I will continue reading, but finding hackery so soon is more than a little disappointing. If public and media conservatives didn’t have such a reputation for it, maybe it wouldn’t be such a problem.

Jake

It’s sad that you looked at one sentence and thought you had learned enough to launch an attack on the Mises Institute, deeming them partisan hacks. First, I don’t see how being opposed to socialized medicine makes one a partisan hack. Second, if you’d kept your mind open and read just about anything else on the site, you would have have noticed the Mises Institute isn’t partisan in the least. Finally, your comparison to other countries is useless, since the US is far from having anything even approaching a free market in health care. Besides, there are myriad other reasons that people in the US have lower life expectancies (e.g. poor diet, lack of exercise) that have little or nothing to do with our health care system.

“We have seen how the “single payer” systems “cut” costs: they deny care.”

What total bs. Outcomes are what matter, not the individual pieces. And outcomes are far better in nations that have universal health care. In Canada, for example, the average life span is something like greater than in the US. Mexico is lower than the US by about the same amount as Canada is greater. Is that our claim to fame, that we are halfway between Mexico and Canada?. 2008 estimates of life expectency rank the US at 45th. Behind almost all of Europe, Canada and obviously several other countries. The majority of those countries have fully socialized medicine. Medicine that costs less and does more.

Here’s a list of industrialized nations ranked by life expectancy at birth and whether or not they have some form of socialized medicine and the per capita expense:

Nation Type of Care Life Exp at birth Per Capita Exp (2003)
Japan s 82.07 $2249
Sweden s 80.63 $2746
Australia s 80.62 $2886
Switzerland s 80.62 $3847
France s 80.87 $3048
Iceland s 80.43 $3169
Canada s 80.34 $2998
Italy s 79.94 $2314
Spain s 79.78
Norway s 79.78 $3769
Israel s 79.78
Greece s 79.39
Austria s 79.21 $2958
Netherlands s 79.11 $2909
S Korea s 79.1
Luxembourg s 79.03 $4611
New Zealand s 78.96
Germany s 78.95 $2983
Belgium s 78.92 $3044
UK s 78.7 $2317
Finland s 78.66 $2104
US p 78.06 $5711
Denmark s 77.96 $2743
Ireland s 77.9 $2455
Portugal s 77.87
Poland s 76.88
Czech Rep s 76.42
Mexico p 75.84
Slovakia s 74.95
Hungary s 72.92
Turkey s 72.88

As can be seen those nations that might best be compared to the US have have greater life expectancy at birth and it costs about half what it does in the US. The rates came from the CIA factbook. The per capita date came from Kaiser Family Foundation site.

The bottom line is that if one looks at outcomes and then costs, the system in the US is terrible when it comes to treating the nation as a whole. Undoubtedly, some people get the best care in the world in the US. If they can afford it.

If that’s quote I presented at the beginning of this comment is the kind of wisdom to be found on Mises, reading there could be tough sledding. Partisan hackery is never fun to read.

Jake

The Austrian economists have been accurately and sensibly been explaining why we are in the current economic mess.It sounds as though you are reading Keynesian economists who advocate some variation of government intervention and dictatorship to “fix” the economy and bring those greedy “capitalist” bankers and other “free market” corporations in line. Of course these particular bankers and corporations are not interested in abiding by the free market, welcome government intervention, and are and always have been instrumental in the destruction of the voluntary market for their benefit at the expense of people who work hard, are productive, save part of what they earn, and live within their means.

If you are interested, you can learn a lot about Austrian economics and about economic history at mises.org.

I think economists are waking up to the fact that their science rests at least partly on assumptions and models that just aren’t valid. Expect a sea change in the next few years.

Jake

So in your scenario, the Amish, it is not the society I would fault – actually, I wouldn’t fault anything in your scenario, as the real determinant is the youth of the chooser. Youth being another way of saying inexperienced.

Staying, later in life when knowledge is perhaps greater, is a choice.

I am human because I exit, or something like that. :)

Exiting is influenced by culture, but it is an integral and irreplaceable part of human nature. Species survive because at least some members chose exit over loyalty. You and I here today because multiple times in the past, our progenitors, human and otherwise, chose to flee, to exit a bad situation. We are also here because other progenitors at other times chose to stay, to exercise loyalty.

Individual human beings span the spectrum from those who always exit to those who always stay. Neither extreme is good. Most of us are not at the extreme and so are open to modification of our inclinations, to moving the pointer in the loyalty direction in this case.

To do that, all we have to do is remove the reasons to leave. Work being the number one reason, in my estimation. Find a way to allow a being to make a good life where they are and they will stay.

Part of the issue of choice is one of maturity. Making the best choices we can and then accepting the consequences, whatever they might be, is not something that comes to most of us when we are young. It certainly didn’t come to me in my youth. If it can be said to have happened at all, it happened within the last decade, and I am nearly 58.

Jake

The “choice” for loyalty eliminates certain other choices, a condition that we think that we avoid when we inculcate a culture of constant mobility, disloyalty (or “cosmopolitanism”), and the ideal of self-recreation. The Old-order Amish (for instance – though perhaps not the ones about which Weasly writes about!) fully allow their young to consider leaving the community and to live among “the English.” They have that choice – indeed, are encouraged to consider it when the time comes. Most choose not to exercise that option, instead accepting baptism in the Church and thereby acquiescing to the expectations of the community. They choose to limit their choices, in a sense. Now, perhaps a liberal would say that they never really had a “free choice,” since they were so fully formed by their culture that they couldn’t conceive of living outside it. That would be correct – but if that’s the case, then we must acknowledge that liberalism is not neutral to outcomes. It seeks to foster a certain kind of society and certain kind of individual, and that kind of individual and society will be one that does not inculcate a strong sense of loyalty and resultant community.

To push this idea further: if we are shaped by a liberal conception of fully free choice – the individual as abstract chooser – are we not also being “shaped”? Is not our inclination to valorize the choice of more choice itself the result of a finger being put on the scale by the “culture” in which we live? Haven’t we thus had certain choices demoted, in that case (just as much as in the case of the Old Order Amish)? If so, we should not be surprised to witness a society that has the effect of undermining and even destroying those qualities of character that are needed for a strong sense of community. Is this a matter of indifference?

These are an interesting and not very easy set of issues to think through. But the invocation of “choice” is at once finally too simplistic and problematic.

Unless I read you wrong, you suggest reducing choice is the way to build community. I say, make the choice to build community possible. In today’s world, where mobility is synonymous with “getting ahead”, community suffers. So lets work to make getting ahead more broadly defined (essentially, more modest), and lets work to make it possible to both get ahead while staying in place.

People are empowered by choice. They are diminished by a lack of choice. A community of diminished beings is a diminished community.

Jake

That is, when we are isolated, alone and most fully individuated, we are most likely to turn to the assistance of the central government when (inevitably) the going gets rough. By contrast, when we live among a strong community of fellow citizens with whom we regularly consort and build relationships based upon trust, history and memory, we are more likely to turn to those people closer to us when times prove challenging.

Monday morning irony time. I came across this AP article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which talks about the difficulty certain of the Amish communities in Indiana are having with unemployment and the increasing use of state unemployment benefits by members of those communities. According to the article, a large chunk of the Amish population is/was employed in the RV industry, which has declined substantially, pushing some onto the public dole. I find it ironic that as individualist Americans rediscover the virtues of community in hard times, the communitarian Amish (at least in Indiana) are finding their community unable to support its members and are turning to the state for assistance.