Moment of Truth

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: April 4, 2011

Vincent Amato, morning of April 5, 2011:

Well, David, you burnt the midnight oil on this one, covered all the bases, doled out the mandatory praise to various Republican leaders and apparently paid your dues to the Party for at least the next twelve months. It is interesting that you restrict your comments to "domestic programs," omitting any reference to the trillion or so spent on a war machine that even the sitting Republican Secretary of Defense argues is too fat. (Republican fretting over spending stops at the doors of the Pentagon.) Although this article, with its praise of Mr. Ryan, would seem to enhance his chances for a presidential nomination, I don't think that is going to happen. Ryan with his altar boy wholesomeness and intellectual patina is a bit too monastic; we'll probably see a Chris Christie candidacy; his is the perfect populist approach.

The substance of the changes you foresee and that you credit Mr. Ryan with introducing seem taken out of the pages of one of Orwell's dystopian novels. Having Ryan "grasp reality with both hands" is a nice novelistic conceit. Just whose reality is that? Even the notion that what the Republican Party is about is "reform" hearkens back to the by now long litany of right wing perversions of language and political metaphor. This is out of the same play book that in the late nineties fancied Soviet communists as conservatives, Republican strongholds as red states, and organized groups of right wing thugs as members of a Tea Party. (The last notion having stronger echoes of the South's confederates making claim to the events which took place prior to our own revolution than the original event.) Most historians trace the origins of social democracy back to the Bismarck regime in Germany. Bismarck, of course, only instituted his social welfare programs as a means of undercutting what he saw as the threat of socialism. With the demise of the Soviet Union, latter-day conservatives obviously sense the opportunity to roll back reforms that date to the 1870s, let alone our own New Deal reforms of the 1930s. The obvious goal is to completely privatize and put on a profit basis all human affairs.

The great irony in all this is that it is precisely the profiteering that goes on in our nation that is responsible for the exorbitant costs of programs that are more government inspired than government run. Our medical costs are twice that per capita of any other nation on Earth while our level of general health is far worse. Republicans conjure up citizens getting expensive CAT scans for bruised knees and otherwise taxing the medical system, while, in fact, the exorbitant cost of the American health care system is a byproduct of a moral set and a value system that finds it okay to profit--and profit enormously--from sickness. Remove the profit motive from the medical and pharmaceutical "industries" in the U.S. and the actual costs would diminish dramatically. Similar savings could be realized by once again empowering regulators at the much diminished FDA or OSHA, for example, to resume their roles as protectors of citizens' health.

And, finally, stop the charade of entitlements going to the rich as well as the poor in some false notion of equality that parallels the distorted distribution of wealth that our grossly unfair tax system has promulgated and encouraged.

(Posted to the New York Times, morning of April 5th. Will indicate later should it be printed.)