Let’s ask some rhetorical questions.

1. If Code Pink got as exercised over torturing context as they did over torturing terrorists, would they protest against leftybloggers?
2. If liberal bloggers and media couldn’t express themselves in terms of framing the opposition, would they all go mute?
3. If liberal bloggers couldn’t argue from false premises – indeed, strawmen full of words and ideas that they jam forcibly (rhetorically) down their opponents’ throats, could they argue at all?
4. If the “loaded question without any evidence to lead one to the question” were a death-penalty offense, would the morgues overflow quickly with leftybloggers, or would they overflow very very quickly?

Apropos nothing [*], Eric Austen from “Outstate Report” writes in re a piece by Walter Scott Hudson that appeared in True North and, in so doing, hits all four of the above in a piece called “What Is This True North Contributor Suggesting? Denying Treatment To Those Unable To Pay?“.

For entertainment purposes, I’ll note (in red!) which of the four austen-tatious bits of rhetorical excess Austen is indulging in as we go through the article.  Keep score at home!

(Yep – the title itself counts as [1, 2, 3 and 4], a rare quad-fecta!)

All in all this post from contributor, Walter Scott Hudson, is standard conservative rhetoric about how bad Obamacare is and how awesome it is that one Appeals Court in the United States [3 – of course there’s “one” court; they dont’ travel or rule in packs!] struck down its individual mandate. Yet there is an instructive piece that everyone ought to read and digest because it speaks to the extremism that has become mainstream conservative thought:

If a conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and Eric Austen isn’t there to hear it, is the conservative still “extreme?”

Sure – but only when you accept Austen’s loaded, strawman-via-framing premises.

He quotes Hudson:

In other words, citizens must be forced to purchase health insurance to pay for services which hospitals are forced to provide. Force begets force.

Solving every problem – from developing a Java widget to repairing society – requires thought on two levels; “Policy” – the theories, principles and goals you set to solve the problem, and “mechanism”, the mechanics and blocking-and-tackling that actually implement the Policy.

As a matter of libertarian-conservative policy, forcing people and institutions to do things is bad.  The individual healthcare mandate has been spawning arguments for decades, long preceding Obama.

I know Walter Hudson. He’s a pretty libertarian guy, and it shows, as the quote continues:

This brings into question the whole notion of economic mandates. Clearly, despite the political class’s reverence for “compromise,” this is an either-or proposition. Either you believe people ought to be forced into economic transactions, or you don’t. The moment we accepted the premise that the needs of the sick and injured place some claim upon the property and labor of health care providers, we created the problem which the individual mandate is intended to solve.

Which refers to an iron-clad law of conservative policy; any government attempt to make something worth other than what people will naturally pay for it (in this case, free) has unintended (?) consequences.

Austen:

Is Hudson suggesting that we shouldn’t force hospitals to treat the sick and injured if they are unable to afford treatment? That’s certainly how it reads to me [1, 3, 4].

And it’s expecting a bit much to ask Austen to read anything a conservative writes in the spirit in which it’s intended.

He’s suggesting stating that the government’s attempt to force the availability of health care has the “unintended” consequence of making health care less affordable, and in turn “forcing” the government to coerce people into paying something other than they naturally would for health care -which, predictably, in turn, will cause other “unintended” consequences.

I’d also suspect Hudson knows there are better ways to treat the uninsured than compelling health care providers – some of them, anyway – to work for free.  And there, you’re getting into “mechanism”, which is another entire discussion.

Modern conservatives, mostly in an attempt to oppose anything this President does  [1, 2,3]…

Let’s stop to demand a little honesty from Austen, here; it’s not this President.  It’d be any President that sought to nationalize a sixth of the economy, whether it was John Kerry or Ralph Nader or Algore or Hillary Clinton.

I’m going to add a little emphasis to this next bit:

…have taken their economic “freedom” message to an extreme as evidenced by this post. They know[3] that without the individual mandate, bringing down health costs simply will not work in the free market UNLESS we make that market even more free and allow the denial of services to those who cannot afford them.

Rule of thumb: if you read any sentence that starts with an accusatory “they know that…”, demand to see evidence of clairvoyance.

Austen certainly can’t provide any.  Conservatives know that health care can be made affordable; it won’t be easy, and it’ll upset the applecarts of a few entitled classes along the way, but it can be done.  Aggressive use of self-managed care, health savings accounts, retail medicine, and de-emphasis on third-party money will bring down the cost; so will ditching some of the other – ta daaaa! – mandates that government has forced on providers (mandatory mental health coverage,

While it is certainly true that allowing the health industry to deny care to those unable to pay will bring down costs, I doubt very much that Americans would agree to such a society no matter how much “freedom” it brings[1].

No kidding!

But that’s not the society that Hudson – or any conservative – is asking people to agree to.

As a matter of principle – “policy” – we oppose mandates.  We do favor – indeed, require – some creative thinking on how to solve the health insurance problem.

And if the best the left can do is concoct sinister motivations from context-mangled hijackings of high-level policy statements, then perhaps it’s time we got our shot; we can’t do any worse than the crowd in Washington, Saint Paul and everywhere else.

[*] Yeah, you’re on to me.  It really was a propos Austen’s piece.  I’m a tricky one.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Health Care, Slander Files. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.