The War On Whatever

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 631,636 Americans died from it last year. Taking more steps to prevent the onset of heart disease, and developing more effective treatments, would save many lives. Therefore, I propose that every single adult in the United States dedicate themselves full-time to battling this deadly scourge. Some of this huge surge in manpower could be assigned to police the behavior of their fellow Americans, to ensure they never do anything that would increase their risk of heart disease.

Are there any objections to this bold and compassionate initiative? Well, you might say it’s unfair and inhumane to ignore all the other diseases people suffer from, in a single-minded push to wipe out heart disease. Would it help if I said we’ll move on to the next most common cause of death – cancer – after we eliminate heart disease? Cerebrovascular and lower respiratory diseases will be next up after we’ve cured cancer. Is it too much to ask for people dying of other diseases to hang tough while we devote 100% of our effort to helping the greater number of people suffering from heart disease? Well… yes, that is a bit too much to ask, isn’t it?

Another flaw in my War On Heart Disease proposal is the diminishing returns we would realize, from devoting our entire working population to the task. There are only so many laboratories, and not everyone can master the skills needed to provide useful assistance to our leading heart surgeons. It’s very inefficient to take master mechanics, computer programmers, or pastry chefs and turn them into mediocre lab assistants in cardiac research facilities. What sort of cold, gray world would we live in, if every single one of us worked at the same job, every single day?

You may have already skipped ahead to a related problem with my proposal: forcing everyone to work directly on the heart-disease problem would actually hinder useful research, for such research depends on contributions from many industries. The people working on cardiac research need computers, and high-quality laboratory equipment, which cannot be built by doctors who have dedicated their lives to studying medicine. They need buildings to work in, electricity to run their equipment, and food to eat. The advanced state of medicine, as with all other industries in our high-tech world, flows from specialization and diversification. Our economic and technological strength depends upon people developing many different skills, and exchanging their goods and services with each other. We have advanced far beyond the point where a doctor can be expected to blow the glass tubes for his own laboratory, or assemble and program his own computer systems.

Even if we modified our strategy for the War On Heart Disease a bit, and simply required 100% of our Gross National Product to be devoted to fighting heart disease, we would still produce inefficiencies that would hinder our quest for superior treatments – to say nothing of reducing everyone’s quality of life, particularly those who suffer from other medical conditions. The same principle applies on an individual basis, because a myopic focus on devoting every aspect of your life to reducing the risk of heart disease could make you vulnerable to other conditions, as well as draining all the joy out of living.

It might also have occurred to you, while reading my original proposal, that forming up a massive volunteer Heart Cop Corps, to police everyone’s behavior and force them to minimize their risk of heart disease, would be a ridiculously totalitarian approach. Even less draconian means of persuading everyone to engage in healthy behavior would become offensive to liberty if taken far enough. How much tax money should the government be able to extract from us, to fund a heart disease education program? How many public-service announcements should they be allowed to force TV and radio stations to run?

These objections to a total “war” on heart disease illustrate an important point about health care and economics. The economy is a means of allocating resources, and no amount of noble intentions can change the fact that health care exists within the framework of the economy. We can allow the economy to be shaped by the needs and desires of free people, or we can allow the political class to dictate where our resources will be invested. Government control is disastrous, because political considerations always trump efficiency and respect for individual rights. Command economies are not merely inept at allocating resources – they are inherently unable to correctly appraise the resources available to them. as you can see from the current avalanche of lunatic deficit spending.

The more complex an economy becomes, the less effectively it can be commanded by political forces. The medical industry is, all by itself, a fantastically complex economy, in which advanced resources must be assigned wisely to produce the greatest benefit for all patients. Politics have already done horrendous damage to this system: distorting the way consumers interact with providers, lumping routine and critical care together under the umbrella of “insurance,” and allowing politically powerful trial lawyers to impose exaggerated malpractice costs on health care providers. We should be discussing ways to decrease political control of health care, not radically increase it. In a government-controlled health care system, pressure from organized lobbies will over-ride medical science and economic considerations, to the detriment of everyone. Groups that currently work to secure private donations for treatment and research will have no choice but to become government lobbying organizations instead. The victims of medical conditions that don’t enjoy effective lobbying organizations will find themselves on the wrong side of health care rationing. Every disease will become AIDS.

Health care is inextricably bound up in the same massive economy as all of our other needs. It’s dangerous to pretend the intrinsic nobility of medicine makes it immune to economic forces, as the result of such willful blindness will be reduced quality and availability of care… which will lead to more suffering and death. Freedom produces the wealth and technology to most effectively address all of our needs. Command economies produce an endless series of “crises” that can only be fought through total “wars,” because the crisis and warfare mindset is the only way politicians can motivate the population to support their agendas. Everyone who isn’t enlisted in the War On Whatever ends up as collateral damage.

This post was promoted from GreenRoom to HotAir.com.
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