Waiting for the Verdict: Healthcare Reform and Political Philosophy, Take Two

We are still waiting for the Court to rule on the ACA—they’re going to drag it out to the last minute.   I’ve got 4 versions of a post in response, so while we’re waiting, I’ll use one I’ve been thinking about and fiddling with for awhile. I was trying last year to work out a personal political philosophy.  My first stab at that didn’t hold up very well—a few people accused me of being Libertarian after reading it, and I knew that wasn’t true.  I think those elements stood out because I was trying to imagine myself in others’ shoes and looking for a way to be more inclusive.

So here’s take two.  I had the thought maybe my problem was the way I equated Government with The People.  I get tired of hearing “The Government this” and “The Government that”, as if we have nothing really to do with it—us and them.  It actually works out better, though, if I separate the two concepts.

We are still waiting for the Court to rule on the ACA—they’re going to drag it out to the last minute.   I’ve got 4 versions of a post in response, so while we’re waiting, I’ll use one I’ve been thinking about and fiddling with for awhile. I was trying last year to work out a personal political philosophy.  My first stab at that didn’t hold up very well—a few people accused me of being Libertarian after reading it, and I knew that wasn’t true.  I think those elements stood out because I was trying to imagine myself in others’ shoes and looking for a way to be more inclusive.

So here’s take two.  I had the thought maybe my problem was the way I equated Government with The People.  I get tired of hearing “The Government this” and “The Government that”, as if we have nothing really to do with it—us and them.  It actually works out better, though, if I separate the two concepts.

If we define the Government as an abstract thing, not as specific people or jobs, we don’t have to give it moral content.  Let’s just say corporations aren’t people and neither are governments.  Only actual human beings should really be counted as persons.  To be democratic, a government must only be able to accommodate a content assigned to it by voters.  So the only features it has to have are reversibility and responsiveness to the people.

That has nothing to do with big or small government, freedom of speech, civil rights, marriage or anything specific. Lots of different democracy formats are out there —our founders picked a representative republic.  It avoids responsiveness turning into random flailing.  Too bad we left holes for corporations to interfere so badly with responsiveness, but we could fix that.

What about content?  Laws can’t really make us good or protect us from massive badness.  They work best as a formal commitment to ideals we already have.  They are supposed to help us weed out the “cheaters” in the system—they don’t help much when too many of us are cheaters.  Without the spirit, letters of the law fail. 

We could pass the most wonderful healthcare reform law in the world, perhaps with another brief Democrat controlled government, but it would never work as intended without the majority of us wanting it to function.  It would wind up full of red tape and so hard to use it would get thrown out after the next election.  That’s what happened even to the ACA, no matter what the Court decides—it was ruined from the get go because we didn’t commit to the purpose of insuring everyone.

This is one area the Randians and Libertarians have gone off course.  If we monitor our government structure so that it remains responsive, all that stuff about being made to do something “at the point of a gun” is malarkey.  Poor Ayn never really did completely understand the point of a representative democracy, which is not a gun but a ballot—perhaps she was too scarred by her experience in the former USSR.    If we vote to do something and we don’t like it afterwards, guess what?  We can change it.  If we try single payer health care—really try it, with our very best whole-hearted effort from all political corners—and we hate it, we can go back to what we had.  I’m sure it wouldn’t take any time at all for those insurance companies to regroup.  They are like the sand monster in Spiderman.  But we won’t want to change. 

 It’s also where the Democrats have gone off—no number of laws will help if we can’t get the hearts of the people to endorse them.  It’s not that we shouldn’t codify our intentions.  It’s that laws and rights need to emerge from a solid ground in our own morality or they’ll always be perverted.  Failing to understand that makes us pile on ever more complicated, expensively enforced rules that continue to be broken.   It annoys conservatives to the point they don’t want to talk to us and have a horror of any new plan we come up with.  

Government doesn’t need to get bigger any more than it needs to be drowned in a bathtub.  What needs to get bigger?  We do.

We have two jobs—protect the reversibility and responsiveness of our system, and help each other be better people.  All the good things we could do, using our government—giving each other the most freedom possible (in areas ranging from speech to livelihood to marriage and more), respecting privacy, educating ourselves, building safe and healthy communities to live in, caring for the poor and disabled while honoring their work, stewarding our environmental resources, taking part in global humanitarian and peace efforts, pooling our resources for quality healthcare—are not really part of government itself but reflections of who we are. If you look in that mirror and don’t like what you see us becoming, you have work to do.