Health care and liberalism

A thoughtful, if still too market-unfriendly discussion in the Wall Street Journal, today.

Health debate isn't about health

But this is encouraging:

"The real point is that there are ways out of this box. One would be to make a public-insurance plan merely a fallback, to be exercised only if private insurers aren't offering enough options in all markets. The other would be to take the suggestion of Senate moderates and replace the public option with nonprofit insurance cooperatives as an alternative that doesn't require the government to be directly in the business. In an environment less charged with arguments about government's proper role in the economy, both might be easier for each side to accept."

That second proposal would be a way forward that is much more genuinely consistent with liberal values. Ironic that "liberals" would likely make the biggest stink about such a proposal. But most of those folks aren't really all that liberal, when it comes down to it, except as a means of getting whatever what they want when they want it. Meaning, not very liberal at all.

The more liberal path takes liberal values - meaning liberty - seriously. It takes seriously a free market, a free democracy, and the need for voluntary commitments from citizens rather than solutions imposed as a matter of government fiat.

The more liberal path recognizes that power that is used to try to manipulate the consciences and actions of citizens will never even come close to the genuine and voluntary commitments of liberal democratic citizens. There's a reason Stalin and Hitler lost. And it wasn't the porn staches.

It is those sincere and voluntary commitments that make liberal democracies more genuinely strong. And it is where we force otherwise as a function of our lack of faith in ourselves and one another where we are weak.

The failure of humanity to recognize this distinction and to romanticize and defend the weakness and cowardice in aggression as a means of bullying others to get our way is responsible for most of the serious avoidable tragedy that human beings have inflicted on one another. It is one of the most serious and persistent mistakes in human history. Tragically, it was responsible for more death and destruction in the 20th century, in terms of total number of people killed, than perhaps any other century in human history. And it was the vindication of its more liberal alternatives that looked to be the surest lesson from that century.

Until liberal peoples decided that they could no longer bear their liberality any more.