Thursday, June 22, 2017

Not A Debating Club

These days we mostly refer to "bothsidesing" as the need to come up with a supposedly Equal and Opposite Bad thing a Democrat did once in 1963 every time a Republican does something Bad. But a worse kind of bothsidesing is that Both Sides have serious lawmakers who just want what is best for the country but have ideological difference about how best to achieve that. So policy debates can be framed as "the free market" versus "big government."

But Republicans don't think poor people should have health care. They think people who get sick should die if they can't pay for treatment. Sure it's "the free market" (to some degree, nothing in our health care system is really "the free market"), but only in the sense that if you can't pay you don't get to buy the product. Fair enough for Maseratis, but in this case the product is "living."