And Mr. Deneen, you mention that “it seems we have yet to do a real accounting of the causes of this crisis and thus discern a true path to mitigation of the factors that precipitated those days and months of panic and this long period of simultaneous quiescence and discontent.” I thought a certain Austrian-Catholic wrote a book titled, I believe, “Market Meltdown…” that answered these questions?!?!

I think there are times when Economies of Scale actually run backwards, foisting inefficiencies or the unnecessary on the smaller scale . What bothers me is the assertion being made now that the Government …a competition averse institution…..wants to bring competition to bear on the Private Insurance Industry , hardly a bastion of cost competition. I really doubt the issue of service access, quality of care or cost will be remotely addressed by the solution proposed and there is a distinct chance ….given the trends of the last several decades that there will evolve a class Monopoly System of Health Care with the moribund Middle class joining the welfare class in a typically moribund Public Health Plan while the Wealth Class retains their private care and insurance system while prices continue to escalate. Higher taxes and deteriorating service seems to be the trend we are embracing in order to remain the Global Police for a Corporatized World.

Think about a fire insurance policy on your home, certainly a useful product. The actuarial tables are predicated on the notion of one fire, one claim. Now suppose that thousands of people decide to buy a policy on your home, hoping that it will burn down. Now its one fire, thousands of claims. But all but one of these claims actually cover a loss; the rest make a claim for a loss they did not suffer. Actually, it is a very sophisticated form of usury.

The life insurance securities duplicates this problem. There will be an inevitable move to sell as many policies as the market will bear, and to short the reserve funds or raise the price.

Your appeal to subsidiarity is well taken and in many ways constitutes a satisfactory answer to my queries. I would venture to say, however, that likely any government program to provide insurance in the wake of a failure of local communities to provide it would likely have to be administered at a more-than-local level (here in Canada health insurance is administered by the provinces) given the lack of ties existing of the populations to local communities, and hence the government in this case would have to be moderately “big” (insurance as it currently exists also tends to depend on an economy of scale to be solvent — though that’s no guarrantee of solvency of course).

Again, no disagreement, but an earnest desire to know what kind of state-intervention (or provision) can be compatible with your concern that local communities not be deprived of the ability to care for themselves. This is an issue with subsidiarity in general: if subsidiary communities fail to perform their function and “higher” communities (or levels of government as the case may be) “step in” to address the failure, how can this be done in a way that does not result in the permanent shift of responsibility and control of that function “up” the scale? It seems to me that this is a very pressing issue and one that has a great deal of consequence for addressing current policy against the background of the general diagnosis that Patrick Deneen offers. I don’t expect it to be resolved here, of course.

DeMoor, there seems to be an implied acceptance that government must be “big” to satisfy the requirements of a complex society and large population with the benevolent government running to the rescue of intractable problems confronting a “global population”. This is where the ruse begins. Subsidiarity is the key, appropriately scaled government response applied at the appropriate point of concern with an emphasis upon chaste restraint being a given. Any society which accepts the distance between the government and the governed as ours now does is laying itself open to third party special interests attempting to capitalize upon the distance. The upshot of this is that the local cannot help themselves and in the fullness of time, they become helpless by default.

It is not big that is an automatic evil here, it is when big overtakes any evidence that there was once a “little” that helped define what was “big” in the first place.

Agreed. And yet, my concern is how this diagnosis about what is “at [the] base [of]… this mutually re-enforcing cycle” can translate into policy and policy disputes. Is there a contradiction in having, say, big government intervene to provide insurance (say, health insurance) in the wake of “civil society failure” and simultaneously attempting to create an environment in which communities can be restored so as to make large-scale government intervention obsolete? What would that kind of policy look like? A whole-scale mistrust of “big” institutions like government as being the problem (or at least necessarily an ingredient in the problematic cycle) would seem rule this out and, perhaps with it, any approach to the problems that happens at the level of public policy. If government action is just a way of exacerbating the problem, then does the solution lie entirely outside of the realm of policy (perhaps in grass-roots organization, spiritual transformation, etc.); and, if so, where does that leave urgent policy questions.

I’m a sympathetic audience for your (and FPR’s) diagnosis of a number of problems but have reservations about the generalized suspicion of everything “big”. I’d love to see some reflection on what the appropriate role of the state is in fostering or enabling community, character, virtue, etc.

Still, recognizing this is where we are, are there ways that we could devise forms of (e.g.,) insurance that might begin to move us away from this false dichotomy? This might mean a governmental intervention, but of a very different sort, or perhaps efforts on the part of smaller and more local units to fill the breech. Yet those kinds of conversations cannot occur unless and until we understand our situation rightly.

As his novel The Way We Live Now shows, we’ve been a sick society for a very long time. One wonders when we’ll reach the bottom, where things finally fall apart because there’s no center to be found.