Vermont’s Loudest Economist (TM) Art Woolf chimes in today, on that free-market website named in honor of the strong, vigorous free-market Irish economy. (Yeah, the Irish economy that’s now the Sick Man of Northern Europe. Don’t know if that’s what Art & Co. really aspire to, but never mind.)
He’s promoting an essay by tiresome conservative Walter Russell Mead* about the fatal flaws of President Obama’s health care reform. In which Mr. Mead, naturally, does not mention the substantially worse flaws of the current system.
*Any conservative thinker who dares to triple-name himself is automatically suspected of tiresomeness; the suspicion is confirmed beyond doubt upon reading a few lines of Mr. Mead’s murky prose.
This essay was posted on March 29; I guess Mr. Woolf has been so busy flogging worthless housing studies that he’s fallen behind on his Internet reading. One of the lines that made Art go all tingly:
It is a perverse but very real fact of life that the more complex and rich the system to be regulated, the less the “experts” and the goo-goos have the political power to impose their vision on the regulatory process.
The invocation of “goo-goos” sent me running to Wikipedia, which I’m sure is the reaction Mr. Mead was hoping for. “I’m smarter than you,” he chuckles over a snifter of brandy, “I know obscure political terms from the 19th Century!”
Per Wikipedia, “Goo-goos” is slang for “Good government guys,” originally a group of New York City political reformers who were responsible for the 1894 defeat of the Tammany Hall political machine.
Seems a worthy accomplishment, at odds with Mr. Mead’s connotation of haplessness. However, the term later took on the sense, as Wikipedia puts it, of “a mildly derisive label for high-minded citizens and reformers.”
So good on ya, Wally! You know your archaic political terminology! That Yale education comes in handy, don’t it?
But I digress. My point, to quote Ellen DeGeneres, and I do have one, is that I concur with Mr. Mead’s assessment of the trouble that “experts” get into when they try to understand “complex and rich” systems.
Exhibit A: Art Woolf, attempting to understand the economy and “impose [his] vision” on it. Nothing but trouble there, just like Mr. Mead says.
is their own suggestion of how to contain costs while ensuring that no one goes without healthcare. It is not sufficient to take swipes at bonafide efforts for reform that are already on the table.
To do so is to have no skin in the game.
I’m sick of the smugness of rich guys who will never be without the means to buy whatever it takes to extend their worthless lives. Of course they prefer to leave things as they are; just as Dickensian child-labor profiteers saw no need for reform in those appalling circumstances.
We are the only advanced country where it is still acceptable to leave large segments of the population without health coverage. And still, we are spending more on healthcare than any country in the world.
What is your big answer, Mr. Woolf? If you think it can help, use your “lifeline” to call Mr. Mead.