Going Post-Political

In 2015, I wrote: “I was recently told that I’m too political, which is ironic given how strong the temptation always is to disengage from politics. However, doing so might be as dangerously unwise as trying to eliminate politics altogether. That said, the present political gulf seems to be widening to that point where it becomes unbridgeable, destroying friendships, dividing families, and ruining nations.” Unfortunately, the situation has only grown worse.

Despite my own confidence in language and the written word, there is apparently nothing that I can write or say that is going to change anyone’s mind … or even sway perceptions away from preconceived positions. Instead, everywhere I look, the political vitriol seems to be increasing. There is less and less interest in dialog or discussion—and the few who do call for reasoned discourse with political opponents are often ostracized or attacked by their own factions. The “other side” has simply become evil … something that must be destroyed by any means necessary.

The implications are unsettling. There are only two ways to resolve any dispute. We can reason with each other, relying on rational conversations to discover mutual benefit … or we can apply force, whether outright violence or mere coercion. In the current political climate, the opportunity for the former option appears to be diminishing rapidly. Differences of opinion have become existential threats … as it were.

Much of my own political motivation has been about avoiding violent conflict. We live in historically exceptional times, so the conflicts shaping up around the world threaten to be catastrophic beyond any previous experience. Furthermore, violent revolutions rarely accomplish whatever noble goals their leaders may espouse, even when they succeed from a military standpoint.

Violence is inherent in current political systems. It may be veiled or controlled, but it is always there, lurking within governments, no matter whether they are corrupt or benevolent. How can I change that fact? How can any one of us?

In truth, I think there are very few who want to change this situation. State power is seductive. The temptation to apply force when you have overwhelming amounts of it at your disposal is undeniably strong. Just a little coercion here or a little violence there … Couldn’t that solve any perceived ill? Even generally non-violent people aren’t willing to give up that option … especially when they can exercise it by proxy.

In light of this, violent conflict seems inevitable. If nothing I can do will change any of it, then why subject myself to the anguish and frustration of political vitriol?

… This piece has been in the hopper for over a year now. Obviously and unfortunately, some of my primary worry has come to pass. Cities have burned, and good people are alarmed as we approach another election in the supposedly United States. This piece was supposed to announce my political silence …

I didn’t publish it … until now … which is probably good, because I failed in my goal to be silent. I had to speak out at a certain time and place … and we’ll say that it didn’t go well.

Properly chagrined, I will admit that there is only one socially acceptable choice in the upcoming American election …

Revisiting a Heated Debate

Once upon a time, the debate over global warming and climatic change was mildly amusing to me. I could point out the false assumptions, the inadequate science, the contrarian historical evidence, and the typical human arrogance wrapped up in the matter, but I’ve grown very tired of it all now. As I noted several years ago, the obvious and most practical “solution” is already at hand, and I will revisit that in part today.

First, though, I put solution in quotes above because the most important potentially false assumption is that global warming is a problem at all. It may well be, but the facts are not yet in evidence for such a conclusion. Our models are inadequate and have failed to accurately predict outcomes thus far. Alarmism simply isn’t warranted.

Nevertheless, as I’ve previously stipulated, climatic change is something we should be concerned about. There is ample historical evidence for this, and in the longest term, we will have to actively manage the climatic conditions of our habitats, wherever or whatever they may be, if we would have human life and civilization continue indefinitely into the future. The short-term risks, though, are minimal and probably self-correcting.

The real problem, in my opinion, is that legitimate scientific inquiry and concern have been co-opted by political factions that are anti-capitalist and to some degree anti-human. They would slow, halt, or even reverse economic development for a variety of reasons, ranging from misguided environmentalism to outright misanthropy. These factions have spread the dubious alarm and fanned the flames of fear to engender public support for their political goals—and if their most radical proposals are enacted, billions of people will have to die. We will have replaced a remotely possible climatic catastrophe with a very certain political catastrophe.

For the most part, the way to mitigate potential climatic disasters is to keep doing what we have been doing throughout much of the modern era: lifting more and more people out of poverty through global economic development, reducing environmental pollution through improvements in energy technologies, and adapting to ecological changes when necessary. While our times are historically exceptional, these processes aren’t anywhere close to their theoretical limits. Taking the optimistic view, human civilization is only at the end of its beginning.

No! We’re at the beginning of the end! If we don’t do something right now, global warming will lead to mass extinctions and render the planet uninhabitable! Or so the alarmists would have us think. This doomsaying would be laughable … if it weren’t becoming the mainstream narrative believed by so many otherwise reasonable people.

That brings me back to the most obvious and practical solution to the technical problem of climatic management. The primary driver of climatic effects and cycles is solar radiation, sunlight. If we want to control or at least manage the terrestrial climate, the simplest and most direct way would be to control insolation, the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth’s surface.

There are several so-called geoengineering proposals that could achieve this, but the safest and most straightforward would be a series of orbital reflectors or shades. A constellation of such satellites could regulate global temperatures in a dynamic and very controllable manner, decreasing or increasing insolation as required. It’s a solution that would be both elegant and permanent.

The cost of such a program would not be insubstantial, but it wouldn’t be outrageous either. The technological concepts are decades old and would require no scientific breakthroughs to implement. I expect that initial development and deployment of the system would require less than $100 billion. Ongoing maintenance should be considerably less expensive, and follow-on benefits could likely repay the investments.

An array of solar reflectors would work well in conjunction with another proposed space-technology asset, the solar-power satellite. A fleet of these spacecraft could collect solar energy in space and beam it as microwaves to receiving stations, where it would be converted to clean electrical energy. While certainly not the only way to improve solar-power generation on Earth, space-based collection and re-transmission would overcome the reliability/availability problem that local ground-based collectors will always face.

Solar power holds a lot of promise even without on-orbit generation, but it probably can’t supplant hydrocarbon fuels in all applications. The real breakthrough in energy technology will be controlled nuclear fusion. Effective long-term implementation of that technology will also almost certainly require the exploitation of extraterrestrial resources, but the implications of essentially unlimited energy are staggering.

The availability of energy is at the root of all economic systems. The modern economic revolution is due in large part to the high energy density and relatively easy accessibility of our hydrocarbon fuels. Again, despite the doomsaying, petroleum is not going to be exhausted anytime soon. In fact, given unlimited energy, non-terrestrial resources and high-energy conversion methods can deliver virtually endless supplies. That’s when pollution and climatic effects should become our primary concerns.

A fusion-powered infrastructure would open a range of possibilities. Indoor, climate-controlled farming would become viable almost anywhere on the planet … and beyond. High-intensity water-purification and desalination processes would become affordable. Pollution reduction and capture technologies would become similarly inexpensive. And, of course, as basic survival needs became vastly easier to meet, societies would have more wealth to direct toward solving secondary and tertiary social problems.

In fact, the chief dilemma human civilization will face in the future may be surviving its own prosperity.

American Political Dénouement

Since the unexpected election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States, I have been struggling to frame my thoughts on the matter. Plenty of others have already described the electoral strategies and polling errors that explain why the political prognosticators got their predictions so wrong, so there’s little for me to add there … though I was equally wrong. Instead, I keep returning to the concept of an historical inflection point—a point at which things begin to change more rapidly than usual, whether for better or for worse. Recognizing the beginning of this inflection point drove one of the most dramatic decisions of my life, so the remarks that follow will be both personal and historical.

While many commentators have explained the electoral results accurately enough, only a few have touched directly on some of the deeper social and cultural issues. These are historically and politically interesting, so I will add my comments to the record here before indulging in more personal and philosophical commentary. However, my interpretation is no doubt incomplete … and keep in mind that where I impute political motive, I do not imply malevolence. Political organisms are fundamentally amoral, but I assume that individual political actors are pursuing good intentions—even if their would-be leaders are in fact sociopaths.

First, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee orchestrated the most impressive propaganda assault in American history, if not in all of human history. As frightening as it was, I do have to confess my awe. In collusion with the predominantly “liberal” mainstream news media, the Democrats engineered Hillary Rodham Clinton’s nomination over the more populist Bernie Sanders and positioned the obviously unelectable Trump as her opponent from the Republican Party.

Once he had secured the Republican nomination, the media launched an all-out attack upon Trump’s character. Donald Trump is boorish and impolitic, but that doesn’t make him a racist or a sexist. The allegations and “news” stories that I examined collapsed under minimal scrutiny, though I remain ready to be convinced by solid evidence. Again, very little malevolence is implied … at least below management levels. Would-be journalists pursued salacious stories until their political biases were confirmed and no further. In short, their work was lazy and incompetent, but I have no doubt that they thought they were serving the common good.

Of course, that is the historical irony. The mainstream media exercised their greatest moment of influence just when they lost control of the public narrative. Even though they couldn’t sway the overall architecture of the electoral cycle, alternative media sources on both the political right and the political left could and did point out mainstream propaganda on countless occasions. Though this honesty didn’t change my own curmudgeonly vote, I’m quite sure it did influence many, many others.

Here, I must also note that no grand conspiracy was required. Both parties were simply acting in their own interests. The Clinton campaign worked hard to make sure that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be displaced by another upstart, and the left-leaning media wanted to actualize its vision for the arc of history. As the WikiLeaks releases showed, there was direct collusion to some extent, but general goals were shared regardless.

Second, political kinisthesis had its effect, if barely. Voters have been sorting themselves throughout the United States. “Liberals” have been migrating to the coastal and urban bastions of restrictive regulatory schemes, high tax burdens, and generous public welfare benefits. “Conservatives” have remained in or moved to the rural reaches of “flyover” country, where governments are a little less intrusive. These latter voters tipped enough of the right states in Trump’s favor to win him the Electoral College, even though Hillary won the more populous states.

I retreated from California partially in acknowledgement of this effect just over three years ago. While my adopted state of Washington also went to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party has been losing ground in this arena, dropping 3.4 percentage points since AD2008. Other electoral results suggest political change, as well. For example, my county commission tipped from Democratic officers to “independents” this time around. Contrast this trend with California, where an even more dominant Democratic Party held onto its position or made moderate gains … and where the Republican Party lost 5.5 percentage points since the AD2012 Presidential contest.

This process is ongoing and may in fact accelerate in the coming years, as “conservative” cohorts of the baby-boom generation retire and migrate out of expensive “liberal” states. (I may have been ahead of the curve on this particular social surge.) The importation of left-leaning future voters has been exposed as the Democratic Party’s main countermeasure to this trend, but it will probably be stalled for at least the next four years. Even then, efforts to normalize illegal immigration have mostly affected states that the Democrats already control—but I will return to demographic transitions a little bit later.

My study of history has broadly focused on identifying causal relationships or their agents and their long-term social effects. This holistic examination of historical causation has given me the faintest glimmer of understanding for the historical forces and possibilities that act upon human civilizations. As usual, these are easier to recognize in hindsight, and no one has advanced a satisfactory theory of historical prediction to my knowledge, so what I attempt might best be described as metahistorical analysis.

At least, it is a means to understand why your initial prediction was wrong. What you thought would happen—or wanted to happen—just wasn’t historically possible. That’s where I was at the end of AD2013, when I made the decision to leave California. The historical model I was working to actualize collapsed. California was not going to become the state I needed it to be within my lifetime … or more importantly within my daughter’s lifetime.

The arc of American history had entered an inflection point. Therein, the possible outcomes became especially murky. Dramatic change comes out of inflection points. They can be times of glorious revolution or of horrific social disaster. We’re seeing the beginning of that now—and human civilization may lie in the balance.

Global historical trends may be better served in some future post, but as we emerge from the inflection point, they will all become relevant. The United States has merely been on the leading edge of Western history by some combination of luck and genius, becoming the bellwether of Enlightenment culture. If we Americans fail, the odds of Western civilization surviving the 21st century drop considerably, I suspect.

What did the election mean in this respect? Will President Trump and a Republican Congress tip us up the positive curve? Would a President Hillary Clinton have sent us down the negative curve? I don’t know. I expected terrible developments under a Clinton administration, but these also might have stoked the political will to make real positive change—or they might have literally destroyed the republic. The Trump years will avert any immediate disaster, I’m quite sure. We have at least a second chance to shore up the institutional safeguards that protect constitutional governance and individual opportunities and freedoms. However, if that fails to occur, I doubt the political will can ever again be rallied to fight for those values.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be—and there has been no shortage of jokes wondering about what’s happening on the “real” timeline. Impressive as it was, the collusion to put Hillary Clinton into the White House backfired. An honest election would have seen Bernie Sanders, championing progressive socialism for the nation, facing off against someone like Rand Paul, advocating for individual freedom and opportunity. Important issues would have been discussed … and the future of civilization would have been decided in an informed manner.

Instead … we called each other deplorable names.

What is historically possible? We’ve accomplished many great things in the 300 some years since the Enlightenment, and we’ve made some terrible mistakes. Some of these mistakes are obvious in retrospect (unnecessary wars, ethnic pogroms, and other episodes of unjustified violence). Others were more subtle, and some were metahistorical in nature, beyond the scope of individual or corporate actors to manage. For example, the direct political empowerment of women occurred almost as soon as it was historically possible, but the institutions of democratic governance built up by men over the last few thousand years were not designed for women’s different decision-making priorities and processes. Without adequate safeguards, a certain amount of social damage has resulted from this political transformation, affecting crime patterns, family cohesion, and perhaps even cultural survival. Again, little or no ill intent was involved. The sociological basis for human male and female behavioral differences had not been studied at the time of the universal suffrage movements, and the ongoing and almost religious refusal in some quarters to acknowledge that these differences even exist remains a significant part of the problem.

No one expected D. J. Trump to be elected, but his election moved us out of the inflection point—as would have Hillary Clinton’s. I was wrong. The political prognosticators were wrong. We all forgot the underrepresented demographic in American electoral politics. Right or wrong, we’ll be living with the consequences for at least several years to come. The question that remains is whether American political factions can still settle their differences peacefully in the long run.

Toward the Voluntary Society: An Introduction

All too often, political philosophy is an exercise in utopianism, the construction of imaginary, idealized societies. On their face, these visions are impossible to realize given disparate human motivations, actions, and desires. The processes proposed are also frequently illogical, invoking non sequitur after non sequitur in their explication.

Marxism is perhaps the most famous example. On his projected path to a stateless, classless communist society, Karl Marx predicted that, despite their own rising standards of living, the working classes in prosperous capitalist economies would revolt against the owning and ruling classes. Thereafter, socialist dictatorships would be established to control every aspect of cultural and economic development in order to eventually eliminate all human inequality. Then, somehow, this totalitarian state would simply surrender all of its power, giving way to a completely free society, where each individual person would produce according to his ability and consume according to his need. Though all attempts at its practical application have failed at every step, Marxist ideology is still immensely popular for obvious reasons.

The reasons why Marxism would never work should be equally obvious, but I’m not writing today to critique Marx. Rather, I want to introduce another political philosophy and explicate it without magical thinking or utopian idealism. The voluntary society I will describe may be no more achievable than Marx’s communist paradise, but I think it can be approached much more closely through the application of ideologically consistent libertarian philosophies and realistic political processes.

All of this presupposes that human freedom is a desirable outcome. I can understand and accept that not everyone shares this goal. Indeed, slave states have flourished throughout human history and have created widely revered cultural landmarks. For those who see such states as the superior way to live, nothing that I can say or do will ever change their minds. Instead, I want to chart a possible course for those who do value human freedom but struggle to understand why the current paradigm also appears to be failing to deliver it.

I will follow with a series of essays discussing various aspects of the voluntary society and how they might realistically be achieved. None of these will demand the adoption of any one model of social or economic organization. In fact, I will argue that all organizational models are permissible within a voluntary society so long as they adhere to just two fundamental moral principles.

On that moral foundation, we can move toward the voluntary society in a logical fashion. This will also account and allow for human differences that other political philosophies have simply and improbably hoped to erase. The choices demanded won’t be easy by any means, and some of the ancillary outcomes that will be implied may be disconcerting where they can’t be mitigated, but this is the only path toward lasting freedom—one that won’t vanish in the mirage of utopian fantasy.

Of Wolves and Men

The photograph above has been circulating on social media in recent weeks. It purports to show a wolf pack, wherein the old, sick, and weak set the pace for the group from the front, the young and strong make up the center, and the dominant male watches over everything from the rear. Some of my “liberal” friends have commented favorably on this social structure. One even remarked that it’s “how we should act …”

While the picture is beautiful and illustrates how different social groups can survive, I find it deeply ironic that compassionate “liberals” would recommend it as a model for human society. Let’s look at the wolf pack more closely to see why.

The old, sick, and weak are placed in the vanguard of the pack. This may let them set the pace, but it also puts them at the greatest risk for attack by hostile wolves or other predators. Should an attack come, then the stronger members of the pack have the option to flee safely or to counterattack the distracted enemy.

When the pack makes a kill, the wolves usually feed by rank. The dominant pair eat their fill, followed by the lower ranks. The old, sick, and weak get whatever scraps are left when the stronger wolves are done. As a result, they may grow weaker still.

Rivals for dominance within the pack are often expelled or killed. Outcasts face great difficulty surviving on their own—much greater difficulty than a single, able-bodied human would face. If these lone wolves manage to survive but can’t eventually start their own packs, the may turn to poaching and other desperate pursuits, making them the criminals of the wolf world.

Wolf packs are also highly territorial. When they meet, there is usually hostility. In other words, the primary relationship between different wolf populations is warfare. These conflicts are one of the main causes of death among wolves, accounting for over half of all fatalities in some cases.

And when the old, sick, and weak wolves can no longer walk, they will ultimately be abandoned by the pack to die in isolation and suffering. In lean times, they may even be killed and eaten by their own pack mates.

When our old, sick, and weak can no longer move, we will carry them—sometimes to a fault. Human groups can be just as competitive as rival wolf packs, but we thrive through cooperative competition (at least within free markets). We try to shelter our outcasts and to protect our defenseless. Despite our self-ascribed penchant for violence, the trend for advancing human civilizations has been the pursuit of peaceful relations between nations.

Our principal failure, at least in the enlightened portion of human society, is not a lack of compassion. It is misplaced and misdirected compassion. We have allowed the hand extended in help to be used to pull all of us down. We have failed to properly understand social problems, and we have repeatedly failed to learn the lessons of history.

Ironically, wolf society is exactly the harsh, dog-eat-dog paradigm that so many “liberals” falsely accuse “conservatives” and libertarians of desiring. Those of us on the political right (nominally or otherwise) who advocate for individual freedom, personal responsibility, and equality of opportunity do so because of our compassion for others and because of our desire to reduce human suffering. We want to see the weak grow stronger, the disadvantaged become prosperous, and the downtrodden regain dignity. Through no ill intent of its ideological proponents, the left would expand poverty, helplessness, and subjugation as a cause and consequence of its pursuit and application of political power.

And when the leftists finally succeed, human society may indeed begin to resemble the brutal reality of the wolf pack once again.

The Benefit of Labor Unions

The humorous picture says it all, doesn’t it? Thanks to labor unions, we enjoy five-day workweeks, break time, overtime pay, and so forth. It sounds great on the surface … except for the little problem that it’s not really true.

While labor unions certainly did champion these things—a point I will return to shortly—it was employers who first implemented such reforms. They did so for one very simple reason: to improve productivity. Efficiency studies conducted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries AD demonstrated that a worker’s effectiveness would decline quickly after a certain length of time without ample rest periods. Why pay one worker for 16 hours of labor, when two eight-hour employees can produce significantly better results for the same price?

As an aside, vacations and other extended leave times were a touchy subject for historical reasons. In the early years of the industrialized economy, employers faced the problem of workers who would simply disappear after several weeks or a few months. This was a holdover from earlier impermanent employment traditions. Historically, agrarian laborers had to work regularly only during the planting and harvesting seasons, saving enough money to last them through the winter or other down times. This cultural mindset took a good deal of time to change in the continuous-production environment of the industrial economy, so employers were equally slow to allow latitude for time off and continued employment.

Nevertheless, the competition between corporate management and organized labor was having synergistic effects within the free market, improving working conditions, increasing profits, and generally enriching everyone. That’s when things went too far. While the labor unions hadn’t brought about the workplace reforms on their own, what they did manage to do was to get them mandated by law.

Today, this legislative achievement is commonly presented as a great benefit for working people. In fact, labor laws have simply limited workplace flexibility, often to the detriment of the worker. Younger workers—those just getting started in their careers—are particularly handicapped. Eager and full of energy that their older compatriots may lack, these workers are often willing to work harder for longer hours at lower pay rates. Doing so would allow them to increase both their income and experience much more rapidly, but labor laws prevent employers from “exploiting” their enthusiasm and productivity—making it that much harder for young people to build solid financial futures.

Similarly, union shops tend to encourage mediocrity in the name of protecting workers from arbitrary employers. The least competent workers get to retain their jobs, but the best workers see little reward for their efforts. The consumer ultimately gets a less satisfactory product or service at a higher price.

Labor unions have become an entrenched part of the political system, just like any other moneyed corporate interest group. The unions themselves can easily become focused more on expanding their own influence than on improving the lots of individual members. However, as they are co-opted and subsumed by political parties, the unions actually lose power. When a given party can take their members’ votes largely for granted, what else can organized labor accomplish?

None of these problems mean that labor unions are a bad thing. Like any corporate entity, they have strengths and weaknesses. Unions are at their best when it comes to collective bargaining, which can give employees as a whole the same short-term advantages enjoyed by an employer over an individual worker. Of course, both employers and union members can still suffer in the long term, when they misjudge market conditions.

The fundamental problem faced by both unions and corporations is their desire to use the political process and the coercive power of the state to advance their own interests. The result is stagnation and inefficiency. The corporations protect established businesses by making it more difficult for entrepreneurs to enter the marketplace. The unions protect the positions of veteran workers at the expense of fewer opportunities for those entering the workforce.

While labor unions can be an asset to the worker at the bargaining table and have had and can still have an important voice in establishing the healthiest and most productive working conditions, they certainly don’t deserve all of the credit for workplace reforms and improvements. Furthermore, the dangerous excesses of unionism also have to be recognized—just like the dangerous excesses of large corporations and other powerful commercial interests. All of these entities will be tempted to use government authority for their own selfish goals. When this happens, we all pay the price.

The Myth of Peak Oil

More accurately, perhaps, this post could be titled “The Myth of Steady-State Technology” or “The Myth of Zero Marginal Utility.” In short, though, the concept of peak oil is that petroleum production will reach a maximum point and then decline as global reserves are rapidly depleted, leading to a shock in the energy economy and an overall contraction in the general economy. For the alarmist, this idea can have dire implications, while the optimist may see little more than some minor inconvenience.

However, at either extreme, the idea is still seriously flawed. There is certainly a limit to the terrestrial supply of petroleum, but peak-oil alarmism often, if not almost always ignores the technological innovations that overcome various extraction problems and the economic forces that spur those innovations. Techniques such as hydraulic fracturing have made the extremely large ancient deposits easier and less expensive to access. Simply stated, as long as “fossil fuels” remain economically desirable, technological development will continue to open previously unobtainable reserves for centuries to come.

Of course, none of this is without controversy. Concerns about environmental pollution have moved to the forefront of public discourse, even as geopolitical problems have begun to retreat. Luckily, cleaner fuels and more efficient mechanisms have been steadily mitigating pollution problems for several decades now—unless, as many today do, we consider carbon dioxide to be a pollutant. In the developed world, particulates and toxic byproducts have been drastically reduced, and the air quality has noticeably improved.

Human health and prosperity have reached unparallelled heights in our petroleum-fueled modern age This situation is historically exceptional, so it’s impossible to say whether our current population is sustainable or whether any potential correction would be catastrophic and painful or gradual and painless. What we can say is that the lack of access to oil won’t be the cause of any contraction in the near future. The only barriers that we face are political, not technological or economic.

Affordable Medical Insurance

Now that the Affordable [sic] Care Act has been revealed as a legislative scam and may shortly be facing its legal and political comeuppance, let’s think about what real reform might look like. Once again, I claim no special expertise, nor do I think that I have all the answers, but there has to be a better solution than another legalistic monstrosity like the ACA or some bureaucratic nationalized monopoly. Here are a few ideas that I’ve gleaned from my observations.

Provide a tax credit for medical insurance and divorce said insurance from employment. The income tax isn’t going away anytime soon, but we can protect the employees while ending the dysfunctional relationship between employment and medical insurance and bring the ultimate consumers back into the decision-making role. (Using my present employer as an example, that would mean a $5,000 to $10,000 raise per year for every employee.) The market will provide a range of options from costly, comprehensive health-management plans to inexpensive, catastrophic insurance policies.

Eliminate statutory barriers in the interstate insurance marketplace. Laws and regulations that hinder insurance providers from operating across state lines artificially reduce competition and drive up costs in disadvantaged markets. We sign onto international free-trade agreements, but we don’t even have free trade within our own country.

Establish a non-profit public insurance corporation as a moral equalizer. If an agency operating at cost can provide better service at lower prices than can “greedy,” profit-driven insurance companies, then the market will force down overall prices. A public option can also guarantee access to insurance for customers with pre-existing conditions and for other uninsurable individuals.

Finally, you’ll notice that I’ve been talking about medical insurance. Health care is a more holistic concept and can’t be properly insured, because insurance is a means of mitigating unpredictable financial risk. Health care involves routine, predictable expenses, so trying to allay such costs through third-party agency is less efficient and thus more costly overall. That, of course, is exactly what we have been doing, which explains why health insurance is so ridiculously expensive.