Borderline Personality Politics

ShrinkWrapped writes on the increasing resemblance of our politics to that of a patient with Borderline Personality Disorder:

... The explicit failure to add one and one and get two perfuses our societal discourse. We demand energy independence and CO2 neutral, green power, which does not yet exist and can not be scaled in the foreseeable future. Those most vocal about the need for minimizing our Carbon footprints are often the most profligate in their use of energy. At the same time the experience of the last 100 years should tell us that the best way to clean up the environment is to increase the level of wealth. There is a clear arc of development that stars with cheap energy, wealth creation, and the formation of a threshold level of Middle Class which then demands that attention be paid to the environment and can afford to pay the cost of safe guarding the environment. For that great majority of Americans who have no historical memory, the air and water is many times cleaner today than in the 1960s when the environmental movement began as a mass movement. China today, while still an authoritarian country, is already in the early stages of the transition. As the Chinese become wealthier (in part because they have had access to inexpensive energy) they initially sought development at the expense of the environment but are now beginning to make the turn toward more environmental consciousness. Such a turn is inevitable and can only be truncated if we decide to impoverish us all by refusing to develop our own energy and imposing additional costs while empowering our enemies as a bonus.

Just as there is no ability to add one and one in regards to energy, the Health Care debate (what there is of it) suffers from the same shortcoming. There is simply no way we can extend health care insurance coverage to everyone (including illegal aliens), while ignoring personal responsibility for one's health, and maintain high quality care for all without massive increases in costs. There are not enough rich people to pay for everyone's health care and the outcome must be to cause us all to become poorer, which will cause all of the worst case scenarios that have already occurred in other nations that have tried to institute universal (free) health care. We will have less Doctors, less good Doctors (as the best find other ways to make a living that is freer of bureaucratic interference and third party fee setting), more expenses, and rationing. This is as sure as one plus one equals two, yet our political elite refuses to do the math and our MSM apparently cannot even recognize numbers anymore. ...

Read it here. An interesting read.