The Greater Good

Too often, changes made in nations for the “greater good” end up needing to be retracted when these changes do more harm than good.

The Law of Supply and Demand

This is always true when government ignores the laws of economics, especially the law of supply and demand.

The classic example of this law is most familiar with food purchases.  When beef is high, consumers buy chicken or pork and this is associated with food commodities like sugar and tea.

You can see this with oil. When oil demand goes down, oil prices drop.  It is also true with labor; if there is a surplus of labor, you can pay less and still get employees.

I view all goods and services as commodities along with labor. These are all commodities that are affected by supply and demand and consumers will base their decisions on price.

When government takes over industries to subsidize them, the price goes up and this cost eventually hits consumers. This is exactly what has happened with healthcare insurance and college costs.

I realize that healthcare and education are not viewed by most people as commodities they can refuse to buy when the price is too high, but consumers are already adjusting their view of healthcare and education and it is done more often than you would think.

The popular belief is that we need healthcare and education and should not refuse it. The value of these can be questioned, so it really is a matter of price and outcome and many citizens attempt to get a better deal.

The unsustainable cost of healthcare and education are good examples of industries that have been killed with kindness.  The assumption voter made was that the government would pay these costs, but now they should understand that they are now paying higher costs than they would be paying had the government not intervened.

There were political movements to get government to over-subsidize these industries.

The effect of government subsidies can be seen when they move a military base to a sleepy town and the cost of everything quadruples overnight. And when they leave that sleepy town, property values crash.

Whenever governments disobey the laws of economics by over subsidizing them, they are setting up these industries for corruption and failure. They have no incentive to keep their costs in line and when the music stops, they are not finding chairs to land in.

Medical insurance was cheap before 1964. But companies didn’t want to pay for retiree medical, so they bought some congressmen and senators and got ready to shift the cost to government. Medicare was passed in 1964.

Healthcare

Before 1964, the poor were given medical treatment by charity practices and county health facilities, but many physicians and counties wanted to shift this responsibility to the federal government, so Medicaid was passed in 1964.

The practice of medicine had advanced with the introduction of penicillin in 1945 and voters were in awe. This meant that inflammation could be treated and the long list of contagious diseases could be treated and infections could be treated.

Penicillin was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming, Professor of Bacteriology at St. Mary's Hospital in London England by accident. Pfizer scientists developed penicillin in useable form in 1944 and patients were cured in 1945. This was huge and has been responsible for saving millions of lives and is the primary reason for the rise in life expectance from age 62 in 1940 to age 75 form men and age 80 for women in 2000.

The polio virus work by Jonas Salk in the 1950s was additional evidence that medical research was valuable, but voters seldom realize that our biggest medical advances have not been achieved by unlimited government spending. It often starts with some obscure scientist who discovers something useful by mistake and then tells everybody about it. Other scientists are there to work on it.

Politicians wanted to take advantage of the seductive powers of promising to eradicate all other diseases and medical equipment and pharmaceutical companies were anxious to expand. The work on DNA started by Mendel in 1857 had advanced. Watson & Crick won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for identifying the chemical structure of DNA.

Voters were apathetic and few questioned the decision to have government subsidize healthcare and fewer objected to the unconstitutionality of Medicare and Medicaid.

The entire healthcare establishment jumped on the bandwagon and Medicare and Medicaid passed with no regard for future unintended consequences. The US government spent $billions on research and subsidies.

The credibility of medicine took a hit as generations saw lots of toxic cancer treatments that didn’t work and still no cures.

The credibility of government education took a hit as generations saw their education system turn into a propaganda tool for the Left.

Funding should follow the discovery of something that works. That was not the case with US government funding of healthcare or education.

Education

From the 1600s to the 1900s, Americans read the Bible. Those who did this learned to read and went on to read other books.  There was no government Department of Education, but people were free to learn using their own initiative. Despite this lack of control, most of our inventions were developed during this period.

Private prep-schools and colleges were established in large cities during the 1800s and this allowed gifted and wealthy students to study law, medicine, science, languages and literature. Everybody else stayed on the farm.

After the 1900s, a small group of academics began to promote public schools and politicians agreed that what citizens learned should be controlled.

Public schools worked for students who could sit through “one-size-fits-all” classes, In the early part of the 1900s, public schools enabled students to gain enough proficiency to allow for a 1 through 8 grade system. After child labor laws were passed, they extended “high school” to grade 12 and started to “dumb down” the curriculum.

In 1961, SAT scores peaked and started to decline. There had always been students who dropped out of school, but now graduation rates were slipping, especially in the lower income schools. Teacher salaries increased and education costs rose, but outcomes got worse.

In 1979, the federal government established the US Department of Education to give grants to educational institutions, but the curriculum didn’t improve.  Instead, rather than devise better ways to teach reading, writing and math, schools started feeding Liberal propaganda into the curriculum.

Colleges also added Liberal propaganda and spent $billions on building pretty campuses, while neglecting to teach what students needed to know to earn a living.

We in business have always hired the best applicants we could find. We first looked at job experience and would often hire the smartest applicant regardless of degrees.

Now in 2018, we are looking at this expensive mess and wondering what to do with it.

We do have the technology to return to “self-learning” via the internet. Students are beginning to choose this to avoid having to pay back a big student loan debt.

The “greater good” we attempted to impose in healthcare and education was an expensive failure. The “investments” enshrined in our National Debt and Unfunded Liabilities have been wasted. Remember to thank a Democrat.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader