President Barack Obama has appeared at a few town hall meetings recently, from which YouTube videos have been uploaded. I watched a couple of the most recent Videos,
Health Care and
Debate and wanted to make a few comments on them.
Firstly, our president is perhaps the best-spoken president we've ever had. His style of speaking, which to any ear, untrained or trained, feels simple yet strong, appealing and believable. He takes pauses at all the correct moments, has a genuineness and non-argumentative sound to his voice, and is has a generally pleasing sonic tone. He embodies all of the silly American ideals that we have, which is confident but not overly so, taking the middle road and protecting the average American citizen (whoever that is, my friends and I think that actually the average American would probably be a rather annoying person), and morally upstanding.
With regard to the health care points - The guy's question was a good one - can private corporations compete with a public option? Well the answer, while complicated, is actually very simple. Those who are able to provide the highest quality service for the lowest price will always prevail in a free market (given that the service is relatively standardized and a lot of other assumptions that need not be brought up now). If the public option does this, it will quickly gain the majority of the business. If it does so by relying on taxpayer dollars, then it does so illegitimately and is no longer the correct way to be handling health care from a governmental perspective.
It's likely that the rosy perspective that Obama paints is just that - a painted version of the invading "new way" of doing things. I would currently say, with limited knowledge on the issue, that it's likely that this will become just another form of redistribution. I'd guess that a majority of people will probably stay with private plans, but those who have no coverage or crappy coverage will switch to the public option, and those who pay taxes will shoulder the expenses.
The most interesting question in all of politics is what kind of autonomy and responsibility we give to people. Do we wish to make laws that let people freely do anything they'd like, or do we create egalitarian societies based upon laws that prevent anyone from straying too far from the mean of the commonwealth? The current system, modern social liberals would say, is flawed because we give too much autonomy to those who are in power, controlling the money, market share, or what have you of the major commoditised markets. They would argue, perhaps well-founded, that the Bill Gates and Warren Buffet's of the world are the exception, not the standard, and that people "at the top" pay no heed to those beneath them.
What is the classical liberal response to this? It requires that we must place autonomy and freedom at the highest point on our value scale (by notion of private property), and thus make all other values subject to these. Therefore things like taxes are gross disruptions of these essential freedoms because they are taking what is rightfully someones and using them for some other benefit, or only partial benefit to the taxpayer. The argument must be a moral one -- those at the top of the food chain must be implored to share what they've been given, either from predisposition, good fortune, or hard work, with the least fortunate.
