Since seeing Oleanna fifteen years ago, I have held David Mamet in high regard. Having read Why I Am No Longer a Brain Dead Liberal, I now have even more respect for him. The essay doesn’t speak directly to health care, but it does contain this highly relevant passage:
What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.
And sorrow is exactly what more government intervention in health care will inevitably produce. How’s that? Mamet provides a metaphor from the world of theater that illustrates how government creates perverse incentives:
The director, generally, does not cause strife, but his or her presence impels the actors to direct (and manufacture) claims designed to appeal to Authority—that is, to set aside the original goal (staging a play for the audience) and indulge in politics, the purpose of which may be to gain status and influence outside the ostensible goal of the endeavor.
In other words, the presence of the director (i.e. government) in any enterprise (including health care) will produce counterproductive behaviors that would not otherwise appear. How did Mamet come to this essentially libertarian view?
I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
If more self-styled progressives would read Sowell, Friedman, et al, a lot of bad ideas—including government-run health care—would disappear from the public discourse.
[HT Andrew Sullivan]
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