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Op-Eds

Send in the Clown: Scaramucci versus the Leakers

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Русский: Comedie italienne (Arlequin, Scaramou...
Русский: Comedie italienne (Arlequin, Scaramouche, Capitan, Mezzetin) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Italian  comic theater, Scaramouche is a clown, the boastful poltroon whose antics frequently bring him to grief.  Presumably new White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci’s name is related  to that tradition.

His personality seems tailored to it as well: He’s off to a running start with the boast that he’s going to put a stop to White House leaks. How? “I’ll fire everybody, that’s how I’m going to do it. You’re either going to stop leaking or you’re going to be fired.”

That would be cool, if he meant it and if the people he pink-slipped wouldn’t be replaced. But even draconian measures like mass firings won’t stop the leaks.

In Washington information is currency and there will always be staffers who are willing to spend a little of it in pursuit of their own careers and political goals. A White House job is at most a four to eight year gig, and unless you’re the president himself (maybe even then!) the goal is to use it to move up in the world. A positive relationship with the press comes in handy on that front.

Also, a good many White House leaks are approved of, and perhaps even originate with, people Scaramucci can’t fire. That includes one Donald Trump, aka the Leaker in Chief, aka POTUS. Sometimes it makes sense to let a piece of information — for example, a trial balloon concerning a tentative policy shift — come out via leak instead of formal public announcement so that it can be quietly quashed in the event of negative public response.

Scaramucci will fail in his boast. The White House will continue to leak like a sieve. He’ll either get used to it and turn his attention to other matters, or get fired over it, or both.

That’s a good thing. It’s exactly what Scaramucci would want if he subscribed to the high school civics version of politics. Per that mythos, “the people” are boss and Donald Trump and Anthony Scaramucci are mere hirelings. Any information they have, we’re entitled to, and leaks are as good a way to get it to us as any.

Of course Scaramucci and other members of the political class don’t believe that for a minute. To them, “the people” are so many piggy banks to be emptied and cows to be milked in pursuit of power.

Fortunately for us, reality has come into alignment with the mythos. The age of government secrecy is over. If Scaramucci doesn’t believe me, he might want to ask Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, or Julian Assange.  As Jesus said, “there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Healthcare: A House Divided Cannot Stand

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The latest healthcare initiative from the Trump administration and the Republican Party’s leaders in Congress seems set to sink just like the last version. Mitch McConnell can’t seem to round up the votes to push it through the Senate, if anything the House is more likely to tear apart than pass the Senate version, and the White House isn’t getting anywhere with its attempt to mobilize the nation’s governors behind attempts to modify the Affordable Care Act, aka “ObamaCare.”

Good. Even the most ambitious proposal up for serious consideration —  repealing ObamaCare and reverting to pre-2010 rules — is just nibbling around the edges of the problems of maximizing care availability and minimizing costs, as was ObamaCare itself. Sooner or later (and the sooner the better) one of two radical solutions will be adopted.

Note: “Radical” does not mean “extreme.” Per Oxford Dictionaries, it means “relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.”

Let me define the problem by mangling a famous Abraham Lincoln speech: A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this healthcare system cannot endure, permanently, half government-run and half kind-sorta private. I do not expect healthcare to disappear — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

The two real alternatives before us are:

Adopting a “single-payer” system in which the state takes complete top-to-bottom charge of healthcare; or

Radically reducing — even eliminating — the state’s role in healthcare.

As a libertarian, I support the latter course. Every government involvement in healthcare, starting with guild socialism and occupational licensure in the late 19th century (at the urging of the American Medical Association, to prop up profits for doctors) and proceeding through socialized healthcare for veterans (the VA), socialized healthcare for the elderly (Medicare), socialized healthcare for the poor (Medicaid) and partially socialized healthcare for everyone (from the Health Maintenance Organization Act to ObamaCare) has impeded care and raised costs at the expense of patients. A constitutional amendment requiring separation of medicine and state would be the best possible outcome.

But that seems unlikely to happen, doesn’t it? The big business players in healthcare (pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, “insurance” companies, et al.) would rather use government to protect their monopolies and pass burgeoning administrative costs on to the rest of us than compete in a free market. And the customers (patients) themselves have good reason to distrust what’s been falsely advertised to them as a “private sector” system.

I predict that the US government will adopt a “single-payer” healthcare system no later than 2030, and probably sooner. And while I oppose that outcome and believe its results will be far worse than a real free-market system would produce, I also suspect that those results will be better than the current half-fish, half-fowl, largely socialized but with fake “private” players sucking it dry, system.

Ultimately, it must be free-market or “single-payer.” Either way, I mostly just wish the politicians would stop tinkering and make up their minds.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Death Panels: Sarah Palin Was Right, Sort Of

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In 2009, former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin raised the kind of ruckus she’s known for with her comment on the then-notional Affordable Care Act, aka “ObamaCare.” In a Facebook note, she wrote:

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide … whether they are worthy of health care.”

Palin’s aim was rather off (she was grousing about an ACA provision allowing Medicare to reimburse patients for voluntary “end of life care” consultations), but as the world watches the unfolding tragedy of 11-month-old Charlie Gard’s terminal illness in the United Kingdom, “death panels” are suddenly newsworthy again. Palin’s core worry was relevant then and it’s relevant now. It’s also non-controversial, or at least it should be.

Healthcare is a “scarce resource,” by which I mean that there is more desire for it than there are doctor hours and hospital beds and bottles of medication to fulfill all that desire. In any healthcare system, therefore, care is going to be rationed. If people want or need ten units of health care and there are only nine units available, someone is going to lose out.

Rationing can be handled in a number of ways: Pricing in an entirely free-market system, quick triage in an emergency situation with multiple victims presenting varying levels of injury,  alleged experts in systems ranging from the bureaucratic mess of an “insurance” system in the US to the “single-payer” systems in the United Kingdom and other countries. While I favor a free-market system, my intention here is not to argue that point, but rather to point out that “death panels” are inherent in the overall situation.

While it’s heartbreaking that young Charlie likely faces death from mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, and soon,  that would likely also be true in the US. Most insurance companies would balk at paying for the experimental treatment his parents seek, and their ability to raise funding for it through charity is not the usual course of things.

The instant problem here is not that a panel of alleged experts at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital or at some other level of the UK’s National Health Service reached the painful decision to allocate the scarce resources at their disposal to someone or something other than prolonging Charlie’s life.

The problem is that, having taken that decision, those experts demanded that Charlie’s parents accept their authority in the matter, and successfully fought them in to court to prevent them from seeking treatment for him elsewhere.

While it so happens that Charlie is an infant whose parents are claiming the rightful authority to make that decision, the “death panel” precedent here could just as easily be applied to a terminally ill adult: “We can’t treat you any more, and we’re not going to let you seek treatment elsewhere either.”

That way lies the darkest evil and savagery. Free Charlie Gard.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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