Commentary

Gosplan Healthcare?

by Fritz Wagner

This week the machinery of the US Congress will grind furiously and may extrude a healthcare sausage that is nothing less than a Soviet style economic and social disaster. With the very best of intentions it cannot work because central planning cannot work. It runs contrary to the ineluctable tendencies of human nature. The impossiblility of successful centrally managed healthcare was brought home to me when considering Thomas Sowell's recent The Intellectuals and Society (See Book Reviews). At the same time, a not at all recent book, dating from the last years of the cold war, considers the then-Soviet design and construction of nuclear submarines ( (I am an inveterate reader of books naval and if you are old enough, you can remember it was a very scary time!). When I read the following, I could not help but make the substitutions and insert hospitals, administrators, doctors, and patients:

For a student of Red Navy development, inter-service rivalry is an important cause of sharp and apparently unpredictable shifts in naval missions and in the naval building programme.

Opposing such shifts is the rigid Soviet planned economy, rigidly directed by Gosplan, the State Planning Committee. Economic planning is complex because individual industrial managers cannot themselves negotiate freely with their suppliers and with their customers; instead, everything must be decided centrally by Gosplan. Moreover, individual managers receive bonuses based on fulfilling their quota of the national Plan. They therefore have strong incentives  to avoid major production shifts from year to year, so that their own plants can operate on something approaching a steady level. Similarly, Gosplan itself is reluctant (indeed, virtually unable) to make major changes to its economic plan.

Both the managers and the Gosplan officials are political appointees, with ties higher up in the Soviet government, and therefore quite capable of exerting indirect pressure on the military to avoid unwanted changes (such as improvements) on its hardware. That is why the Soviets sometimes keep producing clearly obsolete systems, such as the MiG-25 high-altitude interceptor. The Soviets are well aware of this problem. Yuri Andropov announced plans to decentralise authority soon after he assumed power in 1982. The entrenched bureaucracy's strength shows in those plans' frustration; ultimately Andropov had to announce that, somehow, he was increasing local managers' authority and, at the same time, the power of Gosplan. (Norman Friedman. Submarine Design and Development. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press  1984, p 97.)

I haven't thought about "why communism failed" for many years. I fear some young people who have not lived through communism might also be historically illiterate and unable to imagine, much less evaluate, something beyond their own short personal experience, like the central administration of personal health needs in a society of some 300 million souls.

Will we be spared this comedy of horrors? Perhaps legislation will have to be subsequently introduced to conform human behavior (though not human nature) to the requirements of a new draconian health care Utopia. New crimes and stronger criminal penalties. Cash rewards for the reporting of "violators." Just like the old Soviet paradise.

But just perhaps there are still enough brave men of common sense remaining in Congress to stand fast.                      

March 10, 2010

 Taking a Chance on Love

by Fritz Wagner

In the Church calender, this past Monday was celebrated as the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. In his homily at that Mass, the celebrant mentioned the late philosopher Martin Buber as representing the viewpoint that "the problem with Christianity is St. Paul."  It got us thinking. And, not surprisingly, our thoughts turned to Eric Voegelin and specifically the shock that many Christians experienced after reading Voegelin's appraisal of St. Paul. This happened with the publication of Volume IV of Order and History, The Ecumenic Age, in 1974.

It's not the Money, Dummy! 

by Fritz Wagner

No. It's a second reality. Something terrible has happened and the US Government and the establishment media are pretending it hasn't happened. A lot of rice bowls are about to be broken, it is true, but more importantly, there is an immanent threat to the immanentists. They are in danger of being thrown into nothingness. The Emperor has no clothes and people might start to snicker and laugh.

Of course I am talking about global warming. Or rather man-made global warming. Apparently a whistle-blower put up on the internet hundreds of email messages from research scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a public university in Great Britain whose stored records had become subject to the recent British Freedom of Information Act. The institute’s director had apparently requested the systematic deletion of compromising emails.

A Visit to the Apple Store

by Fritz Wagner

I went into the Apple Store last Friday. My PC harddrive had gone silent, although it was still new and the warranty was fresh.  My wife had a new Hewlet Packard laptop with Vista installed (and Windows 7 promised) but her frustration level continued to rise so she had stopped trying to take charge of it.  My son has been a Mac user for 25 years and insisted the time had come for me to try it.  So I drove to the posh* shopping center and walked into the store with no words in the windows, only white silouhettes of apples with a bite missing. 

Inside, the place was a zoo.  A deliberately spartan room filled with long counters topped with computers.  The large staff wore color coded T-shirts: orange for concierge (the department store floorwalkers of the pre World War II years?), baby blue for "specialists," and  navy blue for "geniuses" (a "genius" is a technician).  I went up to a baby blue specialist and asked her if she could help me. She said she couldn't because she was working the cash register. I asked if she could take my money. She said yes. Then I said I wanted such and such with a warranty and word processing program here is my credit card.  I was out of there in ten minutes.  I was very glad to be out of there in ten minutes!

A little humble pie

by Fritz Wagner

How to lie with statistics is the name of a book that came out about fifty years ago.  We were undergraduates and we read it avidly.  For me it was the first crack in the façade of the modern effort to give meaning to society through numerical representation, but mostly we read it because it was fun to see how manipulators operate.

There are a couple of statistics about VoegelinView that I have become aware of and thought should be passed along.