After America - Mark Steyn [168]
DE-MONOPOLIZE
We also need a new trust-busting movement to bust the dominant trust of our time—the Big Government monopoly that monopolizes more and more of life. It is depressing that the government monopoly is now so taken for granted that much of our public discourse simply assumes the virtues of collectivism. For example, it’s often argued that, as a proportion of GDP, America spends more on health care than countries with government medical systems.9 As a point of fact, pre-ObamaCare “America” doesn’t spend anything on health care: hundreds of millions of people make hundreds of millions of individual decisions about what they’re going to spend on health care. Whereas up north a handful of bureaucrats determine what Canada will spend on health care—and that’s that: health care is a government budget item. If Joe Hoser in Moose Jaw wants to increase Canada’s health-care spending by $500 drawn from his savings account, he can’t. The law prevents it. Unless, as many Canadians do, he drives south and spends it in a U.S. hospital for treatment he can’t get in a timely manner in his own country.
While we’re on the subject, why is our higher per capita health spending by definition a bad thing? We spend more per capita on public education than any advanced nation except Luxembourg, and at least the Luxembourgers have something to show for it.10 But no one says we need to bring our education spending down closer to the OECD average. Au contraire, the same people who say we spend too much on health care are in favor of spending even more on education. You can make the “controlling costs” argument about anything. After all, it’s no surprise that millions of free people freely choosing how they spend their own money will spend it in different ways than government bureaucrats would be willing to license on their behalf. America spends more per capita on food than Zimbabwe. America spends more on vacations than North Korea. America spends more on lap-dancing than Saudi Arabia (well, officially). America spends more per capita on health than Canada, but Canada spends more per capita on doughnuts than America. Yet the Canadian Parliament doesn’t say, well, that shows that we need to control costs so we’ve drawn up a 2,000-page doughnut-reform bill, which would allow children to charge their doughnuts to their parents until they’re twenty-six years old. Ottawa would introduce a National Doughnut Licensing Agency. You’d still see your general dispenser for simple procedures like a lightly sugared cruller, but he’d refer you to a specialist if you needed, say, a maple-frosted custard—and it would only be a six-month wait, at the end of which you’d receive a stale cinnamon roll.
During the 2004 election, John Kerry and John Edwards went around telling people there are no jobs out there, even though at the time America had much lower unemployment than Canada, France, Germany, or almost any other developed country. But, catching Senator Edwards on the stump in an old mill town in New Hampshire, I saw what he was getting at. There are no jobs like the jobs your pa had, where you could go to the mill and do the same thing day in, day out for forty-five years, and it made it so much easier for swanky senators come election time because there were large numbers of you losers all in the same place when they flew in for the campaign stop, and the crowd was impressive, whereas now they have to prowl around town ferreting out small two- or three-man start-ups, which takes a lot longer and to be honest never looks so good on the evening news. Watching Senator Edwards pining for the mills, I wondered if he wasn’t having a strange premonition of his own obsolescence. The rise of big business was also the rise of Big Government. This isn’t 1934. In an age of small start-ups and home businesses and desktop publishing, we don’t need a one-size-fits-all statist monopoly.
DE-COMPLICATE
We have unnecessarily