I am convinced that juicy fat is healthy. All science in the past 30 years says so, but before that the experts said fat was bad.
From Williamson's Shut Up, Have a Cheeseburger - So you say you want the best solution?
“How should we do x?” The main problem is not the answer, but the question itself, and the assumptions behind that question, the belief that an answer exists.
Some policies must, by their nature, be implemented at the national level. If you’re going to have a sovereign nation-state, you need a national defense apparatus (which is not to say you need our national-defense apparatus; there are alternatives), and you probably need a national immigration policy, etc. The basic architecture of the current American constitutional order, which is a remarkably wise and intelligent piece of work, contemplates national policies in those areas in which the several states interact with foreign powers and in those cases in which the states cannot coordinate efforts or resolve disputes among themselves on their own. That, along with some 18th-century anachronisms (post roads, etc.) and some awful economic superstitions (political management of trade, a political monopoly on the issuance of currency), constitutes most of what the federal government is in theory there to do. That and fighting pirates and others committing “felonies on the high seas,” of course, which is awesome, and we can all feel patriotic about fighting pirates.
But . . . if we look at federal programs by budget share, almost nothing that Washington does requires a national policy. There’s national defense, of course, at around 20 percent of spending; you may believe, as I do, that that number is probably too high, but national defense is a legitimate national endeavor. But most federal spending is on various entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and various other welfare benefits. There is not much reason for any of these programs to exist at all — government is a criminally inept pension planner and a thoroughly incompetent insurance company — and there is very little reason for any of them to exist as uniform, one-size-fits-all national programs. Start digging into that non-defense discretionary spending and you end up with very little more than a catalog of crony payoffs and political favoritissm.
There is no more reason to believe that a single government-run pension scheme is in each individual’s best interest than to believe that a single city or single model of car is right for everybody. And the people who design and plan these programs know that. The point of Social Security — like the point of insisting that health insurance is “a right” rather than a consumer good — is to redefine the relationship between citizen and state. That is the real rationale for a national pension scheme or a national insurance policy. For several generations now, we’ve been changing the very idea of what it means to be an American citizen. It used to mean being entitled to enjoy liberty and republican self-governance under the Constitution. Eventually, it came to mean being eligible for Social Security, functionally if not formally. Now it means being eligible for Obamacare. The name of the project may change every generation, and its totems may evolve from Bismarck to Marx to “the experts” — that legion of pointy-headed Caesars who are to be the final authority in all matters in dispute — but the dream remains the same: society as one big factory under the management of enlightened men with extraordinary powers of compulsion.
Bravo to him. I hate Washington with the aggrandizing, pre-fascist pseudo-Roman pretensions of that town, as if it were an imperial city with its statues, monuments, pillars, and memorials imitating ancient Rome. I hate the idea of a luxurious presidential mansion. I hate the pomp, the parties, and all of the government limos. I hate all the money that flows through there, tax dollars, lobbying dollars, legal dollars. I hate the idea of a "national art gallery" and a national theater and all those sorts of imperial trappings. I hate those giant buildings filled with bureaucrats with power over me. I hate the amount of power which is ensconced there. I think all of the grandiosity and money and power and scheming and careerism and celebrity is disgusting and un-American.
I even dislike Arlington cemetery. Those boys and men should be buried at home with their families, in my opinion.
George Washington would have hated his monument, and Lincoln would hate his. Those were humble men, not seeking idolization.
