Chris Navin

Good piece, and quite fair-minded:

‘Democrats have been complaining — loudly and repeatedly — that Republican opposition tactics on the Affordable Care Act are unprecedented. This is true, but not for the reasons that Democrats are telling themselves. No political party was ever foolhardy enough to pass such a big bill, with such sweeping consequences for so many people, without the support of a majority of their countrymen and at least a few members of the opposite party. Once they had done this unprecedented thing, the unprecedented reaction was predictable — and indeed predicted by myself and others’

Do you remember the town-hall meetings and heated debates? There was principled opposition from the get-go.

From The Health Care Summit, Paul Ryan lays out his case:

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Arnold Kling graded the summit. In electing Obama for a second-term, and rejecting the ideas presented above, enough Americans elected to find out just what this bill is going to mean for their bottom-lines.

Richard Epstein, libertarian law & economics thinker, looks pretty prescient on what the law’s specific challenges are and how it wasn’t likely to succeed, certainly not by now, but perhaps never in some of its aims:

‘As I have noted before, there is only one type of reform that can make progress in meeting the three goals of a sensible health care system: cost reduction, quality improvements, and public access. That reform requires massive deregulation of the many market impediments that are already in place. Lower the costs, drop the excessive mandates, and thin out administrative costs, and people will flock back to the system voluntarily’

Sounds reasonable to this blog.

But politically feasible? Probably not.

The Obama team is huddled down in its bunker, still trying to make all of this work, and whatever happens, many of the President’s ideological bedfellows and political supporters really want it to work. Failing that, I’m counting on them to push solutions that line-up with their ideological goals.

Such is the story of politics, of course, but this blog has specifically objected to the forced redistribution, the aim to nationalize and perhaps socialize medicine, and the ambitious undertaking to fundamentally redefine the relationship all Americans have with their government.

Richard Epstein At The Hoover Institution: ‘The Obamacare Quaqmire’

Richard Epstein At The Hoover Institution: ‘Watching Obamacare Unravel’

From The New England Journal Of Medicine Via CATO: ‘The Constitutionality of the Individual Mandate’From If-Then Knots: Health Care Is Not A Right…But Then Neither Is Property?… From The New Yorker: Atul Gawande On Health Care-”The Cost Conundrum”…Sally Pipes At Forbes: ‘A Plan That Leads Health Care To Nowhere’…

Full post here.

‘David Thompson’s blog has become an indispensable resource for arguments against the public funding of contemporary culture. ‘

If you build the art museums, some people believe ‘culture’ will follow.

So what’s wrong with liking art, recognizing some inherent value in the pleasure it gives and importance in one’s own life, potentially to other lives, and more broadly to one’s own society in supporting public funding of museums and art education?

Follow the link for an interesting debate.

For the libertarians, Bastiat is mentioned, and for the pop-art lovers, so is David Byrne of the Talking Heads (featured in the NY Times):

‘I refrain from calling Byrne a socialist, but what goes unsaid here is that our objections are to a prior assumption by believers in state power, namely that because some undertaking is worth doing, that the state ought to be doing it. If Byrne is addressing society in the above quote (and I think he is to some degree, although largely by not making Bastiat’s distinction), he is doing so as if it were an aggregate, even an abstraction. This may be the essence of the statist mind: that an abstracted aggregate of other people ought to be devoting their energies to the effort I deem noble. It’s from there that the demands flow. The collectivist is not asking you to give up expenditures on your hobby to support his (even if his has been fashioned into a career), he’s asking the abstract aggregate to change its trajectory or support the arts or something nebulous and lofty like that. Cargo Culture springs into being when such demands are met.’

For those interested, here are a few central questions I’ve gleaned from many discussions and debates of my own:

–‘Who decides what is good and not good art, and what the public ‘ought’ to be viewing?‘

-‘Should artists of ambition, some talent and potential genius be supported, and if so, how? Does this support always incentivize them to make better art?

–Does institutionalization lead to the easier appropriation of art by the religious, the politicians, the speculators and patrons, the culture vultures and various other ideological interests?

And if you’re still with me, we can always complicate matters further:

Beauty is no quality in things themselves, it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.

–David Hume

Photo here.

Can we really talk about universals when we talk about beauty and a philosophy of aesthetics?

Related On This Site: When poetry went into the universities: Repost-From Poemshape: ‘Let Poetry Die’

Philosopher Of Art Denis Dutton of the Arts & Letters Daily argues the arts and Darwin can be sucessfully synthesized: Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

Conservative Briton Roger Scruton suggests keeping political and aesthetic judgments apart in the humanities:Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

How might Nietzsche figure in the discussion (was he most after freeing art from a few thousand years of Christianity, monarchy and aristocracy…something deeper?), at least with regard to Camille Paglia. See the comments: Repost-Camille Paglia At Arion: Why Break, Blow, Burn Was Successful