Editorial

Most discussions of health care are like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

What is the biggest complaint about the current medical care situation? “It costs too much.” Yet one looks in vain for anything in the pending legislation that will lower those costs.

One of the biggest reasons for higher medical costs is that somebody else is paying those costs, whether an insurance company or the government. What is the politicians’ answer? To have more costs paid by insurance companies and the government.

During bad times, the blame game is the biggest game in Washington. Wall Street “greed” or “predatory” lenders seem to be favorite targets to blame for our current economic woes.

When government policy is mentioned at all in handing out blame, it is usually blamed for not imposing enough regulation on the private sector. But there is still the question whether any of these explanations can stand up under scrutiny.

Playing Freedom Cheap

If eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, incessant distractions are the way that politicians take away our freedoms, in order to enhance their own power and longevity in office. Dire alarms and heady crusades are among the many distractions of our attention from the ever increasing ways that government finds to take away more of our money and more of our freedom.
Magicians have long known that distracting an audience is the key to creating the illusion of magic. It is also the key to political magic.

If there is ever a contest to pick which word has done the most damage to people’s thinking, and to actions to carry out that thinking, my nomination would be the word “fair.” It is a word thrown around by far more people than have ever bothered to even try to define it.

This mushy vagueness may be a big handicap in logic but it is a big advantage in politics. All sorts of people, with very different notions about what is or is not fair, can be mobilized behind this nice-sounding word, in utter disregard of the fact that they mean very different things when they use that word.

There was a recent flap because three different members of the Obama administration, on three different Sunday television talk shows, gave three widely differing estimates of how many jobs the president has created.

That should not have been surprising, except as a sign of political sloppiness in not getting their stories together beforehand.

A cursory reading of the Gospel accounts reveals that one of Jesus’ primary methods of communicating truth was through His use of parables.

A “parable” is a short simple story designed to communicate a spiritual truth. The Greek word parable literally means “a laying by the side of” or “a casting alongside,” thus “a comparison or likeness.” In a parable something is placed alongside of something else, in order that the one may throw light upon the other (Nelson’s Illustrated Bible Dictionary 1995).