Universal Public Healthcare: Myriad Conservative Opportunities
Once it comes, universal public healthcare will be very popular indeed. It always is. In every country where it has been introduced, that is what has happened. A conservative defeat? Only if you want it to be. Only if your let yourselves treat it as such.
That popularity will make it very difficult indeed to spend on pre-emptive wars, or on maintaining a global network of military bases, money that could have been spent on healthcare instead. Yes, you’ll still have the public healthcare. But you won’t have the pre-emptive wars or the global network of military bases. And at the end of the day, treating the sick really is better than waging such wars or maintaining such bases, if that is the choice on the table.
This rapidly much-loved service will not be able to work without some concept of how many people there are in America, nor without a national language that, even if they don’t necessarily speak it at home, everyone can nevertheless speak. Joe Wilson’s argument against coverage for illegal immigrants is not an argument against universal public healthcare. It is an argument against illegal immigration. Making it an argument against what is now his own party’s economic ideology, against his own Presidential candidate last year, against his own Senate candidate last year, in favor of that candidate’s sadly defeated opponent, and in favor of that opponent’s election to the House next year. In place of Joe Wilson.
Ah, I hear you cry, but you have universal public healthcare in Britain, and you still have these wars, and an immigration problem, and a language problem. Yes, we do. And no argument is stronger here than the arguments that I have just set out. Wars? “That money could have gone on the NHS” is the argument-stopping complaint the length and breadth of the land. Immigration? “The NHS can’t cope” has the same effect, and is increasingly used by the remaining handful of authentically working-class Labour MPs. They have, of course, been thinking it for years. Now, like their voters, they are saying it out loud. Not before time. So learn the lesson. Don’t wait. Be saying it from the start.
One could go on. Make the most of it. There’s going to be a lot of most to make.
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David,
The Democratic Party elites are funded by bankers, lawyers, and insurance companies. They have no interest in cheap, national health care for the (legal, native-born) working class. We cannot marry the economics of the mainstream of the White House- or Congressional-level Democratic Party to social conservatism. They are not social democrats.
I think you’re understimating the willingness of the Fed to print money and the willingness of the federal government to borrow and spend it. You’re also understimating the power of identity politics over the champions (and perhaps some of the foes) of national healthcare.
There’s absolutely nothing conservative about the people who are creating it or the people who will be staffing the massive beauracracy that will administer it.
Mr. Lindsay, at this point I think you keep harping on this just to provoke people. Universal public healthcare in America is UNCONSTITUTIONAL! What part of that is hard to understand? Nothing in the Constitution authorizes it. The liberals will say it is not necessary that it be specifically authorized, but that is partially what makes them liberals. They support a “living and breathing” Constitution. Conservative do not. We support original intent and enumerated powers. That is partially what identifies us as conservatives. We want to conserve what the Founders intended and left us. God figure. This is really not rocket science. Go figure. You just don’t get American conservatism.
Yet the wars and population replacement continue.
Dan,
Public health care is no more unconstitutional than the Iraq or Afghan wars, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, and various armtwisting mandates the feds put on the states.
You cannot revert to the 18th century and live in an agrarian republic with almost no central state. Even if it sounds pleasant, it is a dialectical impossibility. Such a state cannot defend itself and maintain any cohesion.
Real conservatism doesn’t need national pecularities. Anyone who defines a specifically AMERICAN conservatism as basically 18th-19th century paleoliberalism is only conserving the irrational.
Thomas, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are grossly unconstitutional as well. (I can’t tell if you are conceding that point or trying to suggest that my point is unreasonable because those things couldn’t possibly be unconstitutional.)
You can’t turn back the clock, so to speak, but you can expect that your government actually follow the law and not ignore it. If you want Medicare, SS, etc. then amend the Constitution. Don’t pretend it grants an authority it doesn’t.
And while conservatism is primarily a disposition, it will necessarily have “national peculiarities” because it is attempting to conserve different things. It is not a universal doctrine. That is why English conservative Lindsay just can’t get us.