The David Brooks Solution for the Out of Control Budget: He will Decide How Long You Live

For real.

David Brooks in his NYT column writes:

This fiscal crisis is about many things, but one of them is our inability to face death — our willingness to spend our nation into bankruptcy to extend life for a few more sickly months.

The fiscal crisis is driven largely by health care costs. We have the illusion that in spending so much on health care we are radically improving the quality of our lives. We have the illusion that through advances in medical research we are in the process of eradicating deadly diseases. We have the barely suppressed hope that someday all this spending and innovation will produce something close to immortality...

Years ago, people hoped that science could delay the onset of morbidity. We would live longer, healthier lives and then die quickly. This is not happening. Most of us will still suffer from chronic diseases for years near the end of life, and then die slowly...

Others disagree with this pessimistic view of medical progress. But that phrase, “marginally extend the lives of the very sick,” should ring in the ears. Many of our budget problems spring from our quest to do that...

My only point today is that we think the budget mess is a squabble between partisans in Washington. But in large measure it’s about our inability to face death and our willingness as a nation to spend whatever it takes to push it just slightly over the horizon.

There you have it, a clueless man, who believes a central planning authority should decide when you live and when you die.

Brooks doesn't specifically address a mandatory national healthcare plan, but that is generally part of the idea by those who promote "central planning deciders". These people don't understand basic economics and how private enterprise advances an economy. If people like Brooks are willing to kill people off by stopping their treatment, they are not going to have any problem forcing everyone into the same master plan. In fact, they will consider it a great thing that everyone is on their master plan of healthcare, life and death.

There is so much evil in Brooks's column that it is difficult to know where to start. First, it is that he puts the health of the elderly as the number one budget problem, ahead of the wars that the United States is engaged in.

Second is the entire problem of social planning in the health sector, Brooks is likely in favor of allowing us to choose what clothes we wear and how we style our hair, but because he views money spent on healthcare to be government money, he believes his imagined central planning commission should determine when you should die.

How's this for a solution, stop taxing and otherwise deducting money from people's pay checks for healthcare? Let them make their own decisionss as to what treatments they choose and when, if ever, they choose to end such treatments.

The growth in America has always been in the sectors that are most free from government interference. The personal computer industry and the cell phone industry are obvious examples. Part of the advancements in these sectors is the result of the fact that early on the very rich were willing to pay large sums for inferior products that the average person now pays a lot less for but are of much superior quality.

The dying rich are needed in healthcare because they are the only ones that have the money to pay for new experimental treatments that will advacne care for all of us. For Brooks to suggest that major medical advancement is near an end, is an indication of his failure to understand the basics of economics which explain that advancements take place in an environment of fierce competition and that the vastness of advancements are simply, in most cases, unknowable years before they occur . It is impossible for any of of us to know, for example, what apps may be developed for phones over the next five years, what internet sites may leapfrog over Facebook in five years. Was Brooks such a great seer at the start of email that he foresaw Facebook, Youtube and the NYT paywall? Yet, this man proclaims all major medical discoveries are likely over. Brooks in his column displays nothing but cluelessness as to how the world advances and an out of control ego which causes him to believe he can determine who should live and who should die.Bottom line: He is a very scary man.