The Discerning Texan

Everyone's "dealing with" global warming now. The G8 just devoted their summit to it. Time magazine has a big story this week headlined "The New Action Heroes." It's about Michael Bloomberg in New York and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, photographed together looking either like a couple of mob enforcers or a gay couple who've just been told the church was double-booked for a Jerry Falwell memorial. But, either way, this heroic pair are not like these do-nothings in Congress, mired in partisan bickering. They're men of action and they're getting things done.

What are they doing ? Why, Bloomberg was "opening a climate summit" and "talking about saving the planet." All of it, including the bits west of the Holland Tunnel. And Schwarzenegger was "talking about eliminating disease." All of them. "I look forward to curing all these terrible illnesses," he announced.

At one level, Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger have a point. Why wait for national or international action when a mayor or governor can just get on with it? But the assumptions underpinning Time's paean to the new action heroes all operate in one direction — in increased government regulation and restraint on individual judgment.

The argument for this is that the state has an interest in a healthy workforce: If you're poor and you get lung cancer, you'll be filling up hospital rooms at public expense. If that's true, then the state arguably has a greater interest in you continuing to smoke and dying young: the ever aging population of the western world will be the biggest single burden on state resources in the coming decades.

But in the broader picture it might be truer still to say that the individual, unlike the state, therefore has an interest in stopping and reversing the government annexation of health care — because that argument can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom — and, in the end, you may not get the government health care anyway.

Under Britain's National Health Service, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacement. Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, says that it's appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of "lifestyle choices." Today, it's smokers and the obese. But, if a gay guy has condom-less sex with multiple partners, why should his "lifestyle choices" get a pass? Health-care costs can be used to justify anything.

And, if becoming a charge of the state is the issue, then Governor Schwarzenegger is a complete squish on California's real health crisis. His state's emergency rooms have been reduced to Quebec-level waiting times because of the strains of providing free health care to the legions of the undocumented Americans. One third of the patients in Los Angeles County hospitals are illegal immigrants, and they've overwhelmed the system: dozens of emergency rooms in the state have closed this decade after degenerating into an unfunded de facto Mexican health-care network. If you're a legal resident of the State of California, your health system is worse than it was a decade ago and will be worse still in a decade's time. Fortunately, by then your action-hero governor will have cured "all these terrible illnesses" and there will be no need for California's last seven hospitals.

Why not? There are immigration laws on the books right now, aren't there? Why not try enforcing them? Every day, you can switch on the news and see some illegal immigrant complaining about this bill to a TV reporter — on camera and giving his name. "Living in the shadows" translates as "I'm ready for my close-up now." The same people who say that government is a mighty power for good that can extinguish every cigarette butt and detoxify every cheeseburger and even change the very climate of the planet back to some Edenic state so that the water that falleth from the heaventh will land as ice and snow, and polar bears on distant continents will frolic as they did in days of yore, the very same people say: Building a border fence? Enforcing deportation orders? Can't be done, old boy. You're dreaming. Cloud-cuckoo stuff. Pie-in-the-sky.

But refrigerated pie-in-the-sky with frozen whipped cream once we cool down the planet: that we can do.

Labels: Border Protection, Global Warming Hysteria, Illegal Immigration, Socialism, Socialized Medicine