Hanson and Tamny---Two Outstanding Conservative Columns This Week

IN HIS CURRENT PIECE IN FORBES, John Tamny explains counterintuitively  when it comes to containing healthcare costs the way down is first up.  In other words, it has to become more expensive before it can get dirt-cheap.

If you don't believe it, read this outstanding piece and  you most likely will. Too bad our elite political class and its chattering  media enablers can't quite get their heads around this concept:

In every market of every kind, goods and services start out as luxuries---expensive and obscure---on the way to eventually becoming cheap and commonplace thanks to entrepreneurial incentives. Sadly with healthcare both parties strive to make it cheap, which means it will never be.

ALSO, going along with Tamny's piece, Victor Hanson's asks rhetorically in NRO this week if America is suffering from a lack of mastery over its wealth in Decline or Decadence? An excerpt:

If our students are burdened with oppressive loans, why do so many university rec centers look like five-star spas? Student cell phones and cars are indistinguishable from those of the faculty.

The underclass suffers more from obesity than malnutrition; our national epidemic is not unaffordable protein, but rather a surfeit of even cheaper sweets.

Flash mobbers target electronics stores for more junk, not bulk food warehouses in order to eat. America’s children do not suffer from lack of access to the Internet, but from wasting hours on video games and less-than-instructional websites. We have too many, not too few, television channels.

The problem is not that government workers are underpaid or scarce, but that so many of them seem to think mind readers, clowns, and prostitutes come with the job.

An average American with an average cell phone has more information at his fingertips than did a Goldman Sachs grandee 20 years ago. Over the last half-century, bizarre new words have entered the American vocabulary — triple-dipping, Botox, liposuction, jet set, COLA (cost of living adjustment), three-day weekend, Medi-something compounds (Medicare, Medicaid, Medi-Cal) — that do not reflect a deprived citizenry. In 1980, a knee or hip replacement was experimental surgery for the 1 percent; now it is a Medicare entitlement.

American poverty is not measured by absolute global standards of available food, shelter, and medical care, or by comparisons with prior generations, but by one American now having less stuff than another.

Sometimes the answers are simple. But we don't want even a moment's discomfort in our entitled society, so we opt to continue the quick fix and nothing changes. That is, until we fall off a cliff and can no longer keep living as we now are as a country.