O O Ø O O O O
On Mayonnaise, Beer, Schools, and Hospitals
An argument for free market everything.
Let’s talk mayonnaise.
I happen to like Hellmann’s. You may prefer Kraft. We can both go to the supermarket and buy our mayonnaise of choice, and it has no adverse effect on the other person. You get yours, I get mine, and as long as the companies convince enough people to enjoy their products, we’re all happy.
Let’s talk beer.
I love Wild Rose IPA. You might like Alexander Keith’s IPA. (You’ve got such lousy taste in mayonnaise, why would I think you have good taste in beer?) When we go to the bar, you order yours, and I order mine. Just so long as there’s enough people ordering both to anchor the two kegs, we’re all swell. (For the record, there’s never enough people to anchor a keg of Wild Rose IPA. )
In an open market, my preferences don’t overrule yours. We are free to disagree.
Let’s talk education.
I believe in evolution. You may believe in creationism. (Kraft mayonnaise, Alexander Keith’s IPA, and creationism. Now that’s moral equivalency.) If I want my children to be taught evolution, and you want yours to be taught creationism, we can’t go to the free market to choose curricula. We have to go down to our school boards and fight each other over whose ideas get taught. We’re not free to disagree peaceably. School monopolies turn what could be an open market of ideas into a political struggle.
Now, saying we can’t go to the free market for education is false. We’re all allowed to put our children in private schools, as long as we can swallow the pill of having to pay school taxes to fund other people’s children being taught a curriculum we don’t support, while paying again for private eduction. Still, it can be done, and many people who believe in the primacy of their children’s education make the commitment to do so.
Now let’s finish with health care.
If I’m sick, I’m willing to spend my own money to get a private MRI scan, if necessary. You might prefer to wait in the queue at the hospital. It doesn’t matter what either of us think. It’s illegal for us to be treated by anyone except the state monopoly on health. We don’t even have the choice of paying to subsidize the public system while paying a second time to be treated privately, as this is against the (unconstitutional) Canada Health Act. What’s worse, since our health care system is state run, it too is a political animal: hospitals are opened and closed for political reasons, doctors and nurses are paid on a political scale, and even questioning whether or not the state monopoly should exist has become a political anathema.
I’m not just questioning it here, I’m specifically denouncing it.
We are free to choose our own mayonnaise and beer. We are not free, however, to choose how and by whom our children are educated, or how our own bodies are treated and cured. When did we get our priorities so backwards?
Evan Spence
Tuesday, April 29, 2003
PD DXCVII
Feedback
Reader Matthew Sendak points out the fluid relativity of priorities. Or is that the relativity of fluid priorities?
From: Matthew V. Sendak
Subject: Beer, mayo, etc.
Sent: Sun 2003-06-01 12:39 AM
Evan,
Reading your beer, mayonaise, etc. rant today, my thoughts went to the situation that I am in here.
I have options in healthcare—I live in the U.S. As long as I (or Blue Cross/Blue Shield) is willing to pony up for an MRI or a CAT or a prostate exam, I can get whatever I want done to my body. By that doctor from The Simpsons, if I like. No questions, really. (Mind you, my girl couldn’t get any healthcare at a reasonable price until we got hitched, but that really isn’t the point.)
But I don’t have the option of Wild Rose IPA, as we don’t believe in keg beer in this city (Montgomery, Alabama) and there is no constitutional amendment (yet) that declares my right to decent beer inalienable. Indeed, moving to a “better” city to remedy the beer situation is nearly impossible, as there isn’t a city in this country that hasn’t ensconsed their liquor-laws in absurdity. I am left to palate Guiness in the Can(TM) when I’m feeling really up-scale.
By and large, it sucks equally. I don’t go to the hospital much, so I can’t appreciate the freedom to be probed and explored in ways only my checkbook could imagine; I could foreseeably mind if I were to come down with something tragic, but I’m not feeling the bliss of a terminal illness yet.
But I do go to bars a lot, and feel the disasterous after-effects of “States Rights” each and every week. Short of commuting to Canada every time that I want a pint (or a measly 12 oz., as the case may be).
I will leave out discussing evolution, as that would be something that might send me to hell (in the eyes of my fellow voters), and what good would that do?
Cheers,
-m@