Government monopolies don’t innovate. Profit seekers do.

I have been a fan of national health insurance. It has seemed absurd to me to base health insurance on place of employment and the happenstances of the market place. A civilized culture should be less ruthless about its health care than ours seems to be. Conscience and decency demand better.

But the fly in the ointment is that government monopolies don’t innovate. Profit seekers do. What is true about other goods and services in a capatilistic society is also true when it comes to health care – the profit motive will yield the most good for the most people. This is an undeniable empirical fact.

Our future experience in health care will depend in large measure on keeping the profit motive at the core of health care.

I am no expert in this field, but I imagine that 80% of all the health issues we face are rather routine and managable. We do not need a doctor making $300,ooo a year taking care of us in such cases. Nurse practictioners are more than capable of handling the vast majority of our health needs. It is that 20% that needs attention and for us to receive the excellent care we desire, those doctors are going to have to paid handsomely for the expertise – the research, the development of procedures and protocols, the tools, the diagnostic equipment. These are things that are not going to get done if the profit motive is depressed. Of course, now many of the cures we consider routine were at one time cutting edge and the result of companies and individuals seeking profit. When that instinct is depressed we will find a parallel depression of quality of care.

That is the way it is. We can imagine another world in which this would not happen. But in this world it will happen. If we depend on altruism to get the job done, we are deluded. Anyone who is dealing with government knows that the mindset of performance is “no matter what I do, I will not lose my job and you must be satisfied with what I do” mentality. Do we expect this to change when it comes to health care?

No one laughs at God when….

I am a fan of the West

Right here is where I want to live while I am on earth. My citizenship is in heaven and the Kingdom of God has my loyalties. But that does not make me blind to the benefits and blessings of Western civilization nor the commitment it deserves from people who mean to do well by their fellow man.  This is not a popular thing to say in academia where such a statement defies the prevailing wisdom that no culture can be “better” than another culture. Underneath this denial is the assumption that there is no objective standard which is rooted in the transcendent and which can be discovered through rational discourse. It is exactly this which is the cancer of the college world.

The Politically Incorrect Guide( to Western Civilization to the rescue. It is written by Professor Anthony Esolen–one of the team-teachers of Providence College’s Development of Western Civilization Core Curriculum. (In my mind the companion volume to this book would be D James Kennedy’s What If Jesus Had Never Been Born, a thought experiment in imagining what western culture would look like had Jesus and his influence been stripped from the West).

This is what is written on the flap of the book.

Everything you should know–but PC professors won’t teach–about our Western heritage

Western civilization is the envy of the globe. It has given to the world universally accepted understandings of human rights (rooted in Judeo-Christian principles), created standards for art, music, and literature that have never been equaled, and originated political and social systems that have spread all across the planet.

Unfortunately, the fog of political correctness now obscures these and other truths about Western civilization. Leftists and Islamic jihadists find common cause in assailing Western “colonialism,” “imperialism,” and “racism” as its defining characteristics. Guilt-ridden Western leaders and public figures speak of their cultural patrimony in disparaging terms they would never dare to use about a non-Western culture. And in the academy, “multicultural”-minded professors flatter students into believing they have nothing really to learn from Sophocles or Shakespeare.

But now, Professor Anthony Esolen–one of the team-teachers of Providence College’s esteemed Development of Western Civilization Core Curriculum–has risen to the West’s defense. The Politically Incorrect Guide(TM) to Western Civilization takes on the prevailing liberal assumptions that make Western civilization the universal whipping boy for today’s global problems, and introduces you to the significant events, individuals, nations, ideas, and artistic achievements that make Western civilization the greatest the world has ever known.

Today–with the West imperiled as never before by the global jihad and threats from China and elsewhere–defending the West has become an urgent imperative: if we don’t value what we have and what we have inherited, we will surely lose it. The Politically Incorrect Guide(tm) to Western Civilization is an essential sourcebook for that defense.

I am finding that there are many in the evangelical church who have reached the critical point in cynicism when it comes to the value and blessings of Western culture. It is a cultural death wish. Preserving and developing our cultural heritage is a task worthy of the Christ-follower.