27 Mar 2017

Trump’s First Obamacare Repeal Attempt Failed, So What?

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One of my Yale classmates forwarded this columnn, featuring Nicholas Kristof gloating over the Trump Administration’s failure on Friday to pass a new health care bill in the House, to the class email list:

The Trump administration is increasingly showing itself to be breathtakingly incompetent, and that’s the real lesson of the collapse of the G.O.P. health care bill. The administration proved unable to organize its way out of a paper bag: After seven years of Republicans’ publicly loathing Obamacare, their repeal-replace bill failed after 18 days.

Politics sometimes rewards braggarts, and Trump is a world-class boaster. He promised a health care plan that would be “unbelievable,” “beautiful,” “terrific,” “less expensive and much better,” “insurance for everybody.” But he’s abysmal at delivering — because the basic truth is that he’s an effective politician who’s utterly incompetent at governing. …

Whatever one thinks of Trump’s merits, this competence gap raises profound questions about our national direction. If the administration can’t repeal Obamacare — or manage friendly relations with allies like Mexico or Australia — how will it possibly accomplish something complicated like tax reform?

———————

I replied:

Personally, I thought Trump’s healthcare bill failure was endearing. It confirmed that this administration is being run by amateurs rather than (shudder) practiced professional pols. The question we can now all ask is: can Trump learn?

I was happy that solid ideological conservatives stood their ground and defeated attempt No. 1. I am optimistic enough to believe that the GOP cannot fail (Get-on-board-or-else rhetoric notwithstanding) to return to the inevitable duty of repealing Obamacare. The next try will be better, and hopefully will omit the “covering everyone” and the “free lunch at other people’s expense” coverage for existing conditions. If your house is burning down, sorry! you do not get to phone in and buy fire insurance.

Someone once observed that the legislative process is like the manufacturing of sausages. It can have desirable results, but you will be happier if you don’t watch.

Nicholas Kristof is perfectly correct in one respect, of course. The democrat party is made up of people like Hillary Clinton and Yale’s own John Kerry, consummate shits and professional political operators who would make Machiavelli seem like a naif and Rodrigo Borgia like a wimp. Republican pols tend to be aging Eagle Scouts and Rotarians playing out of their own league. Watching the Congressional GOP take on the democrats is often very much like watching the Washington Generals play the Harlem Globetrotters. Republicans are handicapped by Constitutional Fideism, and a respect for Process, and being afflicted with ordinary decency.

However, the World’s turned upside down. Eight years of economic suffering while Caliban strutted on the national stage enraged the democrat party’s traditional Working Class base. There was a Populist Revolution and the Revolution wasn’t knocking on my door with pitchforks and torches. The angry mob was after Progressivism and the National Establishment. The ideology of the national ruling class and the party that represents it has shown itself to be intellectually exhausted and degenerated into a host of pathologies. The more established any of our institutions, the more debased its morals and the more insane its poses and pronouncements. Nothing in America is more Establishment than Yale, and contemporary Yale has become a national laughing stock and disgrace. The American People are naturally unwilling any longer to be led by a class of nincompoops and demoniacs who hanker after their own eradication and replacement by a new, more melanistically-favored and questionably-gendered population, and whose first priority is apologizing on all of our behalfs.

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Dan Kurt

re: “…who hanker after their own eradication and replacement by a new, more melanistically-favored….” JDZ

Marvelous rejoinder. As to Yale, have you watched this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM? In the video one sees a swarm of mainly light skinned Blacks enraged, angry and near rioting. Worth a look.

Dan Kurt



JDZ



Dan Kurt

Dear JDZ,

Should read you every day. But I have an excuse. Was suffering from food poisoning or a bacteria from last Tuesday on. Finally able to eat starting yesterday.

Dan Kurt



JDZ

My wife forwards to me links to items I posted days before all the time.



JK Brown

This fetish that has grown up regarding never failing, never admitting a mistake is very bad. Innovation, growth, becoming antifragile requires trying and failing till you get it right.

On the other hand, failure is death, sometimes literally under socialism, for the bureaucrat. And sadly, we’ve become a bureaucratic nation like Europe rather than an entrepreneurial, capitalistic society.

“Capitalism is a system under which everybody has the chance of acquiring wealth; it gives everybody unlimited opportunity. Not everybody, of course, is favored by good luck. Very few become millionaires. But everybody knows that strenuous effort and nothing less than strenuous effort pays. All roads are open to the smart youngster. He is optimistic in the awareness of his own strength. He has self-confidence and is full of hope. And as he grows older and realizes that many of his plans have been frustrated, he has no cause for despair. His children will start the race again and he does not see any reason why they should not succeed where he himself failed. Life is worth living because it is full of promise.

“All this was literally true of America. In old Europe there still survived many checks inherited from the ancien régime. Even in the prime of liberalism, aristocracy and officialdom were struggling for the maintenance of their privileges. But in America there were no such remnants of the Dark Ages. It was in this sense a young country, and it was a free country. Here were neither industrial codes nor guilds. Thomas Alva Edison and Henry Ford did not have to overcome any obstacles erected by shortsighted governments and a narrow-minded public opinion.

“Under such conditions the rising generation are driven by the spirit of the pioneer. They are born into a progressing society, and they realize that it is their task to contribute something to the improvement of human affairs. They will change the world, shape it according to their own ideas. They have no time to waste, tomorrow is theirs and they must prepare for the great things that are waiting for them. They do not talk about their being young and about the rights of youth; they act as young people must act. They do not boast about their own “dynamism”; they are dynamic and there is no need for them to emphasize this quality. They do not challenge the older generation with arrogant talk. They want to beat it by their deeds.

“But it is quite a different thing under the rising tide of bureaucratization. Government jobs offer no opportunity for the display of personal talents and gifts. Regimentation spells the doom of initiative. The young man has no illusions about his future.”

von Mises, Ludwig (1945). Bureaucracy



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