8 thoughts on “Burning The Ships””

  2. It’s the way the left usually work. First you create a problem, then you come in with your new, improved solution to the problem… which, oddly, is never to remove what you originally did to create it.

    So, yes, Obamacare will destroy the healthcare industry. But, no problem, we’ll just eliminate the whole tiresome private sector nonsense, and the government will run everything, and it will all be just lovely.

    1. “But, no problem, we’ll just eliminate the whole tiresome private sector nonsense, and the government will run everything, and it will all be just lovely.”

      Certainly the stated goal of Obama and other Dems with regard to health insurance.

      1. I don’t know if this is widely known on either the Right or the Left, but this, I believe is something I gleaned from discussions over at McMegan (Megan McArdle).

        There is a lot of “socialism” that is privatized and always will be privatized.

        It is kind like the question, does the Army still build its own guns (OK, OK, this is my rifle, this is my “gun”, this one’s for shooting, this one’s for “fun” — heard that one from the retired MP who ran the rental counter where I took GA training) at the Springfield Arsenal or is this all contracted out to Armalite or Colt Industries or whoever?

        I am told that Medicaid is essentially the 50 states with Federal backing, and that the states contract with private insurance companies “behind the scenes” to administer each of their state Medicaid programs. This entity called “CMS” has similar arrangements with Medicare?

        There is a lot of “stuff” from the Left that the George W Bush Medicare D was a “sellout to the insurance and drug companies”, but any medical plan will involve the drug companies as the FDA is not going to set up shop manufacturing pills any time soon. Similarly, were we to go with “single payer”, I am sure some insurance companies will be involved as intermediaries surely as modern weapons are made by private companies and not by government arsenals.

        So it is almost a certainty that U.S. socialism will take the Fascist model, that is, cooperation between government and business contractors and goods and services rather than the Communisit model, i.e., the “design bureaus.”
        The thing to remember is that Big Capitalism will always be comfortable with the slide-to-socialism because they are not going to be “taken over” and they will always get their cut. I think that is the thing that we are always forgetting, and something that I have been slow to “get”, why Wall Street and Silicon Valley were so comfortable with Mr. Obama. Kind of like Krupp and I.G. Farben being comfortable with . . . well, you get the idea . . .

        1. It’s not just America. The brilliant wheeze of the last Labour government in the UK, when they discovered the National Health Service hospitals were run down and renovations were unaffordable, was to get private companies to build and maintain hospitals and the government would effectively just rent them while claiming they’d massively improved the NHS. Which wouldn’t have been a bad idea, except they were spending other people’s money, so they agreed to contracts where they end up paying $500 for someone to come in to change a light bulb.

          A huge amount of the ‘private sector’ in most developed nations is almost entirely dependant on taxes for its income and should really be considered part of the public sector. As you say, this is why there’s so much ‘private sector’ support for socialism.

    2. Yes, because despite the fact that every one of the big government operated health care programs suck like a black hole, we can trust them to get it right when they’re in control of everything.

      “Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”
      “But that trick never works.”

  3. The Cortes expedition was *not* mounted from Spain, but rather, from Cuba. It wasn’t even planned from Spain, and he had been in the Caribbean for fifteen years when he left Cuba. Bad history like “Hernán Cortés landed in what is now Mexico from Spain, after the long and arduous ocean journey typical of the early 16th Century” is the sort of thing that irritates the heck out of me. If a pundit like McLaughlin is going to use history as a cudgel, he needs to get his basic facts straight. It’s the sort of thing that signals a Gell-Mann Amnesia warning – what else in his article is likewise ill-researched or mis-edited?

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