A pox on shock jocks who talk to block mosques: the case for building the mosque at Ground Zero

When I was 18 and stranded in JFK airport for 7 1/2 hours on a high school trip to Europe, my English teacher Mr. Parris Bushong pointed to a group of three people--a dark-bearded Hasidic Jew, a suit-wearing white woman, and a paraplegic black man--all in a circle talking and laughing quietly together. "That, right there, is America," he said.

When I think of America, I don't just think of waving corn fields and dusty roads with pickup trucks: I also picture immigrants getting off the boat in New York City under the shadow of skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty, opening Italian delis and Irish churches and Jewish textile shops, grimy beret-wearing kids carousing in the city streets shouting "youze guys wanna play some stickball?" - all in search of opportunity and freedom in the bubbling cultural milieu that is America.

So when a group of Muslims wants to build a mosque near Ground Zero, I say let them! - not because I begrudgingly accept their freedom to do something I disagree with, but because the right of Muslims to build a mosque near Ground Zero is the very essence of what America means and is. My image of America, of people coming together from all parts of the world to live and prosper together, is undermined less by the terrorists who flew planes into that great melting pot of a city than by the crazed hoards who now descend upon it, demanding that the very freedoms they say the terrorists want to destroy be revoked.

How are we even having this debate? What is the argument against the mosque - that it would be "insensitive" of people who share the same religion as the terrorists to build a mosque close to the site of the tragedy? But wouldn't that sort of depend on most Muslims being terrorists? Let me put it a different way: if you do not believe that most Muslims are terrorists, is it still possible to make a logical case for being offended by a mosque? Timothy McVeigh grew up Catholic and was both a Republican and NRA member - must cathedrals, elephant statues, and NRA ranges keep their distance from Oklahoma City?

In any case, whether or not I'm offended is kindof a moot point, as the Bill of Rights doesn't contain a right to not be offended. The freedom of religion, on the other hand, is protected not just by the First Amendment, but by the first words of the First Amendment. If we think it's fine to throw that away just because a religious building hurts our feelings, how can we even call ourselves Americans?

True weakness isn't giving in to Muslims who want to build a mosque, but in giving into our basest tribal fears of outsiders - the very fears that give "terrorism" its name. After the two towers came down, I said, "Build them back!" Far from a memorial, I wanted to tell the terrorists, "we won't be defined by this tragedy - you knock these towers down, we build them right back up." Similarly, a mosque at Ground Zero of the terrorists' handiwork is not a sign that they've won, but a monument to how little their handiwork has changed us - proof that their best efforts to sow fear have not shaken our commitment to freedom... for ALL Americans.

Opponents of the mosque say they are protecting "our way of life," but in America, that very phrase is a contradiction - for the American way of life (such that it exists) is defined by there not being a singly-defined American way of life. Whether someone wants to burn a flag or pledge allegiance to it, to build a mosque or a church or an organic garden, our freedom to do those things--not our opinions on their appropriateness--is what defines us as Americans.

Which is why when Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich and the swarming masses, pulsating and waving signs with grotesque energy like some stepped-on ant colony, say that Muslims don't have a right to build a mosque at Ground Zero, they aren't just wrong: they stab at the heart of what it means to be an American. Restricting the right of a group of citizens to build a mosque in the name of protecting freedom is literally bringing Orwell's cryptic words to fruition: that all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.

The freedom of religion has always been America's first freedom, and a few raggedy terrorists hiding in caves aren't going to change that - that can only be done by those whose reptilian brains the terrorists whip into a fight-or-flight hysteria against outsiders.

Are Sarah Palin and Martin Feldstein closet universal health care supporters?

Why opposing health care "rationing" makes you a socialist

When I took Prof. Marty Feldstein’s intro economics course at Harvard, he was fond of defending inequality with the parable, “If a rich man and a poor man came before me, and I gave one dollar to the rich man but nothing to the poor man, the poor man has nothing to be angry about. He is no worse off for the rich man having the dollar—indeed, he is in the same circumstance as before.” The implication is clear—if one person receives something but another doesn’t, there’s nothing wrong with that, since no one is made worse off.

So Prof. Feldstein’s op-ed in yesterday’s WSJ, in which he ominously warns that “the Obama strategy is to reduce health costs by rationing the services that we and future generations of patients will receive,” is more than a bit disingenuous. Because if he believes that a decision not to fund a treatment constitutes “rationing,” then he’s implicitly acknowledging that health care is a universal, fundamental right that government must provide. In fact, if you think health care “rationing” is a bad thing, you MUST support not only government-funded healthcare, but UNLIMITED government-funded health care—which makes you more of a socialist than President Obama!

I’ll explain.

Start with Prof. Feldstein’s basic argument: if the government funds health care, it will inevitably have to decide which treatments to pay for and which treatments not to, so as not to go bankrupt—thus “rationing” health care. This is no different from the more outlandish assertions by other Republican shysters, who demagogue about bureaucratic “death panels” (Sarah Palin) and “pulling the plug on Grandma” (Sen. Chuck Grassley); it’s just less fiery.

Of course, all these arguments about “rationing” are transparently ridiculous. (And I’m not even talking about the fact that private health insurance companies already make bureaucratic decisions about what to treat and what not to; I’m interested in the logical/philosophical aspects of the debate.) You’d think a Harvard professor would know better.

Think about it this way. If you come to me asking for two dollars and I give you only one, no sensible person would call that “rationing”—I am under no obligation to give you anything, so you should just be happy with the one dollar I did give you. By the same token, if the government decides not to pay for a treatment, that’s not “rationing,” but rather a choice not to provide something it was never obligated to provide; the decision leaves you no worse off than you would have been if no public health care option existed.

Unless, that is, health care is a fundamental right.

The logic is pretty simple. Definitionally, “rationing” is when government PREVENTS you from getting something you could have otherwise obtained, or WITHHOLDS something which it is obligated to provide. Let’s start with the first possibility. If publicly-funded insurance prevented you from obtaining health care, it would mean that all Americans were prohibited both from buying insurance on the private market AND from using their own funds to pay for treatments not covered by the government. Unsurprisingly, Feldstein tries to prove this is President Obama’s goal, claiming:

The White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report in June explaining the Obama administration's goal of reducing projected health spending by 30% over the next two decades. That reduction would be achieved by eliminating “high cost, low-value treatments,” by “implementing a set of performance measures that all providers would adopt,” and by “directly targeting individual providers . . . (and other) high-end outliers.

Feldstein makes it sound like President Obama would go above and beyond limiting what government pays for, and would actually outlaw the provision of “high cost, low-value treatments.” Sounds pretty scary, right? Except that it’s a complete distortion of the actual report, the result of cobbling together out-of-context quotes from pages 13, 19, and 18 (respectively) to change the meaning of the report.

For example, while the original report’s recommendation is to “facilitate the development of a set of performance measures that all providers would adopt and report,” Prof. Feldstein misquotes the report to say that the state will “implement a set of performance measures.” It’s a subtle change that makes a big difference. The first merely describes a role for government in developing a set of standards for evaluating the quality of treatment patients receive. Sounds reasonable—don’t you wish you had some way of comparing doctors’ quality before choosing one? But Feldstein’s misquote makes it sound a whole lot scarier, like it’s a bureaucratic mandate.

Similarly, “targeting individual providers… and outliers” does not refer to targeting treatments for elimination, as Feldstein implies, but rather targeting exceptionally high-cost geographic regions to reform payment methods, so that providers would be paid for quality of care and not quantity of procedures.

Clearly, fears that President Obama plans to limit what you can freely pay for out of pocket are 100% made up; indeed, no reform proposal on the table would do this. So with the possibility for health care prohibition debunked, accusing President Obama of “rationing” care implies that government is withholding something it has to give you, which would require that you acknowledge health care as an inalienable right.

But wait, it’s not just government’s withholding of treatment that’s bad—it’s the very fact of government (not doctors) making the decision about treatment. Right? Well, that’s not quite accurate. With a public option, the decision is not over which treatments you are legally allowed to receive, but which treatments the government will give you money to pay for. For someone who can’t afford health insurance, “no treatment” is the status quo without the public option. By providing some funding where none would have been otherwise, the public option can only EXPAND choice, and it’s a lie to say otherwise.

To illustrate the point, let’s try to imagine a scenario involving one of Sarah Palin’s “death panels.”

Grandma Betsy is sick. In fact, she’s on her last leg, and is only kept alive by expensive machines—with the government footing the bill. But even the pricey life support can only delay death another two months at most, and after a while, a faceless bureaucrat notices something amiss: a grandma in small-town America is racking up enormous medical bills, despite her no longer being a productive member of Obama’s socialist paradise. A quick calculation that her remaining months’ value to society does not justify the cost of keeping her alive, and the local Death Squad is off to pull the plug on poor Grandma. Payments are ceased, and Grandma can no longer afford treatment, so the treatment stops.

Sounds scary, right? Until you realize, that’s the situation Grandma Betsy would have been in WITHOUT government-supported health care (e.g. Medicare). If she was poor, she wouldn’t have been able to afford expensive end of life treatments in the first place. And if she had private insurance, you better BELIEVE the insurance company would fight tooth and nail to pull the plug (with coma victims, for example, private insurance companies like to get the worst diagnosis—persistent vegetative state—since it allows them to cease paying for care).

So if, as Sarah Palin implies, not paying for Grandma’s treatment makes you a “death panel,” then clearly Palin believes SOMEONE must pay to keep Grandma breathing—and for whatever treatment she wants, regardless of cost. And that someone, it turns out, is the government. Palin’s infamous tirade against universal health care actually begins with the criticism that “government will simply refuse to pay the cost.” In other words, the reason we should not have government pay for health care is… that if we had government pay for health care… government would not pay for health care………. what? We even have Republican leadership accusing President Obama of wanting to reduce Medicare payments. So Republicans now favor greater entitlement spending than Democrats??? What is going on here?

No, seriously. How can government have an obligation to continue funding health care for an old person on death's door, but not for a kid whose parents are too poor to afford doctors visits, or for a construction worker who can’t afford insurance to pay for his heart surgery, or for a 12-year old whose mom couldn’t afford an $80 dental checkup for a tooth abscess and died of a resulting brain infection?

Evidently, influential critics of health care reform aren’t actually concerned over “rationing.” If they were, they would be obliged to support the President in providing choice to those currently rationed out of the health care system by their inability to pay—or to offer a competing plan to provide for the sick. Rather, it’s their ideological opposition to the very idea that there is a right to health care standing in the way. In which case they should just say it—admit that they believe that it’s okay for society to let its sick die in the streets. And eliminate Medicare while they’re at it.

Because while there are better and worse ways to implement universal health care, there is no philosophical middle ground—either you believe that society has an obligation to care for its sick regardless of ability to pay, or you believe that decent society can leave its sick to die in the streets. Take your pick.

There is another possibility. I imagine that few elected officials, Republican or Democrat, actually believe that a decent society can leave its destitute to die in the street. In which case, obstruction by elected officials represents a willingness to sacrifice not only their own moral views, but also the lives of people who will die because they lack health care, for short-term political gain.

I think I know which is more likely the case. I’m just not sure which one is worse.

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