Tell Me A Story

Thomas Sowell remembers the childhood fable about the dog with a bone who looks in a pool of water and "sees" another dog with a bone. Jealously coveting a second bone the dog barks and drops his bone into the pool. Sowell reminds us that this is a fable about losing what you already have for the sake of a mirage. Fables For Adults

While I was told a story in my childhood to help me understand something about the real world, today adults are being told things to reduce them to childish thinking.

The most childish of all the things being said in the august setting of a joint session of Congress last week was that millions of people can be added to the government's health insurance plan without increasing the federal deficit at all.If the President of the United States could do that, it is hard to imagine what he would do as an encore. Walking on water would be an anticlimax.

What is equally childish is the notion that the great majority of Americans who have medical insurance, and who say they are satisfied with it, should be panicked and stampeded into supporting vast increases in the arbitrary power of Washington bureaucrats to take medical decisions out of the hands of their doctors-- all ostensibly because a minority of Americans do not have medical insurance.

Intellectually & culturally speaking, the fix is already in. Our public discourse encorages the sort of fantasizing - the art of the possible - that lies at the heart of liberalism's appeal. Anyone who raises practical objections is instantly branded a racist, a know-nothing, an ignoramous. Sowell's PhD, years of research & teaching, and his 2 dozen books are not enough in a world where sentimental fools like Bob Herbert have the approval of the mainstream while Sowell languishes in the "conservative author" ghetto, which Doesn't Count in the eyes of the nation's intellectual gatekeepers.

The only thing saving us from ruin is that most adults know in their gut that the promises of progressive health care reform are fantasies. But, there is little outlet for such misgivings because virtually the whole of the nation's elite is determined to pass this sort of top-down reform. 2010 can't come soon enough. In fact, it may already be too late.