I'm Back

I can't believe it has been a year since I posted here. I quit posting for a variety of reasons, but I've recently decided to orient my life toward authenticity. So, though my fears tell me that I may lose relationships if I speak openly, I'm moving past those in pursuit of something real. So, in keeping with my declaration, here is something that I recently wrote for one of my classes. It is rather tongue-in-cheek. If anyone reads it, I hope you at least have a laugh.
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The Search for Missing Conservatives

In following the news lately, I’m struck by a mystery that no one seems to be discussing… Where have all the conservatives gone? Were they spirited away in the twinkling of an eye?

Of course, there are a lot of people carrying guns to town hall meetings who claim to be conservatives and there are even legislators shouting in front of television cameras like Longhorns watching the Sooners make a touchdown, but I haven’t heard anyone defending the capacity of the invisible hand of the market and the rational decisions of consumers to achieve the most efficient solution to the country’s health care crisis. If the conservatives were around, someone would be talking about the ability of Americans to make their own decisions about insurance, and they would defend the people’s right to options. With no one arguing these things, it is certain that the conservatives have left the building.

So, who are these conservative impostors that gather at rallies, spend their afternoons talking into the can at the radio station or debating healthcare proposals in Washington? I think most of them are actually neo-liberals who embrace the role of government in solving problems and meeting societal needs. Unlike traditional liberals, though, they believe that government should solve the problems of those with the greatest resources. Currently, tax subsidies are provided to employers who offer health insurance to their employees. According to a study by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, these subsidies primarily benefit the wealthiest wage-earners in the country as you can see in the graph below.

In the current situation, "private" insurance receives all kinds of "public" support from government in the form of tax exemptions and subsidies, and "public" insurance has elements of private insurance, in that people pay premiums which are supposed to finance the group plans they are in. So, it seems pretty clear to me that the conservatives disappeared a long time ago and the neo-liberals who’ve stolen their identity have experienced tremendous success in transferring society’s responsibility to care for the wealthy to the government.

With conservatives in the country, the value of competition would be on the agenda and the power of individual market choices to drive inefficient and undesirable producers out of business would surely be heard on the afternoon talk shows, or in the paper, or at least on Twitter. Heck, conservatives would turn a deaf ear to any corporation on industry that whined about being driven out of the market, because that is what the market is supposed to do – separate the wheat from the chaff. However, in a letter that I recently received from “conservative” Senator John Cornyn, I was surprised to learn of his concern for protecting insurance companies from competition. He wrote, “I believe that a new government-run health insurance plan will devastate private insurance markets by acting as a competitor, regulator, and funder.”

Government already regulates and funds private insurance, so I can only believe that he is concerned that they be protected from further competition. He is convinced that offering a public insurance option would drive insurance companies out of business, which sounds a lot more like a bleeding heart liberal trying to save the spotted owl from extinction. The absence of Darwinian economics is to conservatives like the absence of water in the pond is to fish. When the pond is dry, don’t bother looking for the fish.

Finally, conservatives know that government programs are wasteful and inefficient. A lot of conservatives even dare to publicly admit that all government programs are tyrannical and committed to the harming of its citizens. While the neo-liberals have certainly sung the conservative tune in their predictions of death panels and bureaucrats sending women with breast cancer home to die, their fear that private insurance companies would be driven out of business suggests that either they believe that people are not rational decision makers and need government to protect them, or that they believe that a government program could be run even more efficiently than a private corporation. Either argument would cause a conservative to roll in their graves. Since America hasn’t experienced any earthquakes lately, I think the dead ones must be missing, too.

This is truly the epic mystery of our time. Perhaps the disappearance of American conservatives should be the subject of Dan Brown’s next book, because this certainly smacks of a conspiracy far bigger than missing symbols and secret societies. And, maybe if we find the conservatives, we’ll figure out where the bees went, too.