The Sickness

The most tragic sins a country commits are those that involve failures of both one's self-interest and one's love for his fellow children of God. In other words, things that are both stupid and selfish. Some things are just stupid, and some things are just selfish, but when they combine....

With the issue of health care, the self-interest or economic component and the moral component point in the same direction. A tax-funded mandatory health plan for all Americans would give everybody health care and lower the cost per person. Period. Yet and still, it is not done.

Right now, the United States pays by far more per person for health care than any other nation. So, we must have the best quality care, right? No, we have 1/6 of our people uninsured and our nation ranks 38th in the world in terms of quality of care. We rank behind Morocco.

So we pay the highest bill in the world to give 5/6 of our people the 38th best health care on Earth. Stupid? Clearly. Selfish? Yes.

So our first conclusion must be that the system needs radical change, unless we think the above numbers are acceptable, which hardly comports with a chest-thumping or even a humble iteration of pride in this country.

Let's think about car insurance. All drivers (essentially every adult in the nation) are required by law to buy insurance. Whenever any American citizen is inside an automobile, he or she is in a vehicle insured against accidents. Should our very bodies not enjoy the same luxury? You'll fix my oil pump but not my broken leg?

Personally, I have problems with a government mandate to purchase anything from a for-profit company, but that caveat aside, let's consider what this requirement results in.

The result of every driver being insured can be interpreted in two ways. The first way, which is both stupid and selfish, is to say, "why should I, a great driver, be paying for all these idiots who are crashing into each other?" This is a very valid point, and should be recognized as such. But it it also very short sighted.

Taking this approach is akin to urging President Obama to somehow intervene in Iran; it might make us feel righteous, but it accomplishes nothing in the short term and guarantees instability in the long term.

The other way to interpret the auto-insurance mandate is to say, "an insurance pool this large creates an economy of scale which makes the product cheaper for everyone. And even if I never crash into anyone, I know that all my fellow citizens have the security of insurance so that if one of them crashes into ME, I won't be screwed."

And maybe, just maybe, I take pride and joy in the fact that my fellow citizens are protected.

So, what if we applied this logic to health care? We apply it to "defense". Rhode Island has never been invaded by North Korea, but Rhode Islanders pay their part to arm and defend South Korea so as to deter North Korea. Quite a stretch. But we do it.

We apply this logic to schools. I have no children, but I pay my share to fund my neighborhood schools. We apply this logic to fire departments. My house has never caught on fire. Yet and still, I pay my share.

So why don't we apply this logic to health care? Because it will cost too much, we are told. As noted above, we already pay per person more than any other country. So, there's that. Also, aren't some thing worth a trillion dollars?

The Iraq War has cost a trilli so far. In microeconomics, "opportunity cost" represents the loss of the next best thing. So, if I spend 30 minutes blogging, the opportunity cost of that would be the 30 minutes that I could have spent riding my bike or doing something else.

So what if we hadn't invaded Iraq? What would have been the "next best thing"? What was the opportunity cost? Health care for every American?

I'm no communist. I harbor more revulsion for Lenin, Stalin, and Mao than bin Laden and Darth Vader combined times twenty. But I am something of a National Socialist, or a Nazi, if you want to be technical.

The premise of National Socialism was that one's community was important enough to override economic dogma and adopt socialism under certain specific conditions. And before Hitler morphed into the devil, he used this ideology to provide quite a bit for his nation.

I think my nation deserves socialism in certain specific islands. If we adopt National Socialism when we want to pay to kill Iraqis, what does it say about our nation if we refuse to do the same in the interest of curing Americans? Selfish. And Stupid.

Persian Legacy

First of all, doesn't Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini look like a cross between Sean Connery and someone from Lord of the Rings?

Secondly, quick explanation on the name. Ayatollah is a title, like doctor or bishop. Ruhollah is his first name. Khomeini is his last name, which also tells us where he was born. Khomeini means "from Khomein". The current Supreme Leader of Iran is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. So, since the revolution there have been two supreme leaders, Khomeini (ho-MA-nee) and now Khamenei (ha-men-AY).

The post-election protests in Iran have been fascinating to follow on so many levels. It is the rarest of things: it actually deserves the hype. Even if the protests end today, the implications from what we've seen so far are revolutionary in the truest nature of the word.

The last time massive street protests and emerging technological innovations merged to undermine an autocratic government was 30 years ago in...Iran.

Iran is a fascinating place. The only continuous civilizations which can compare in terms of longevity are China, India, and Egypt. Iranian civilization has been in place for about 3,000 years, and has been Muslim for roughly half that time.

But Iran (Persia is a way cooler and more accurate name) was the first land converted to Islam that was neither ethnically Arab nor Arabic speaking (Persian and Farsi, respectively). Iran has always been distinct from the Arab world to its West the Indian subcontinent to its East.

So Persia is its own distinct place. And 30 years ago it instituted its own distinct form of government. In Farsi it is called the "Vilayet-e Faqih" which means something like the "governance of the prudent". What this means in practice is that religious figures have veto power over every decision the elected government makes. It also has veto power over who many run for office.

So this whole debate over who really won the election is a bit beside the point; since the ayatollahs cleared every candidate, there were, by definition, no real reform candidates running. What has happened here is that the people seem to have leaped far beyond this minutiae and called into question the very legitimacy of the governmental structure itself.

The last time this happened in Iran was 30 years ago. Back then, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets and STAYED on the streets, even after many hundreds of them were shot dead. And ultimately, that was all it took. When crowds refuse to disperse, the number of soldiers willing to fire upon them suffers from the law of diminishing returns.

But there was a piece of cutting edge technology that helped the protestors in 1979. Audio cassette tapes of the Ayatollah Khomeini encouraging the revolution. Small, cheap, easy, portable, these tapes played a huge role in coordinating and motivating people.

Audio tapes now, of course, are fantastically obsolete, but the Persian public is not. The government has shut down all foreign sources of news, but cell phones, digital cameras, and the internet are creating one of the most democratic spectacles the world has ever witnessed, whether it understands this or not.

When else in history has an expulsion of foreign journalists made a negligible impact on a government's ability to handle a rebellion from a PR standpoint? The people are not only putting their lives on the line, they are taking ownership of their own story, which has never really been possible until now.

There is now no filter between the Persian people and the world. Not even CNN, which has been reduced, or should I say elevated, to simply reading facebook postings from Persia as a way of reporting the news. This is a remarkably democratic moment.

There is danger, of couse, and I personally doubt that any serious change will result from this. And lest we hope for a revolution, let us remember what happened 30 years ago.

Just as in the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution was won by moderates who were subsequently murdered and replaced by thugs. Successful revolutions must succeed without brutalizing its participants.

Whether or not that happens, I do know this: the ayatollahs will think twice before firing into these crowds. In any previous time, they would not. Now, they must. Because the people have the ability to tell their story to the world. And that should make us all feel freer and safer than people like us have ever been.

The Pyramid Scheme

There's a lot we can learn about genius from the pyramids. All societies have applied the pyramid concept in one form or another. The United States has been disproportionately successful relative to other nations because it has applied its concept of the pyramid more effectively and broadly than have its competitors. That edge is eroding quickly.

Most elites throughout history have conceived of themselves as being the capstone of society's pyramid, with the vast majority of masonry beneath them, the "commoners" or the "plebs", or however else one might have it, who serve no function other than to support the capstone.

Central to this belief, which dominated the entire world until 1776 and the huge majority of it until 2000 or so, was the surety that no commoner could ascend to the capstone. We can see this conviction manifested to various degrees from the divine right of kings to the underfunding of urban schools.

The flaw in this system is that all progress, all innovation, all civilization must necessarily emanate from the capstone, and the capstone alone. 99% of the pyramid was excluded from any meaningful station. From time to time, people born into the capstone applied their genius effectively, but more often than not the capstone was content with simply being on top. The geniuses and entrepreneurs and prophets from the "lower" 99% were never allowed to contribute to the capstone.

Then America came along and implemented the (at first very narrowly applied) proposition that the capstone should be constructed organically from the best elements of the lower 99%; that there was no "natural" capstone in and of itself. As America progressively overcame exclusionary bigotries, it drew upon ever-larger reservoirs of potential and genius from the lower 99%. And American power expanded accordingly.

Other societies have now caught on, of course, and the American premise has been adopted worldwide. This is good news. But now we must focus on the corollary of the pyramid scheme; if the base is not continually nurtured, the capstone will draw on a shrinking base of talent and will eventually wither into a state of stasis and paranoia.

"Standing on the shoulders of giants" is a phrase I've always enjoyed, coined by Rene Descartes. This quote led to the naming of the Descartes mountains on the moon, where Apollo 16 landed in 1972. The concept of the shoulders of giants is always at play; our task as a society is to keep creating giants whose shoulders will support out progeny.

For example, any scientist who makes a breakthrough in physics, for example, is standing on the shoulders of giants because he or she is simply adding a capstone to the pyramid of knowledge constructed by his or her predecessors. The reason science has advanced so rapidly recently is that the knowledge of the giants has been available to an enormous pool of commoners, a pool whose size alone will guarantee the emergence of more giants.

For the pyramid to continue to aspire to new heights, the manna of every new capstone must trickle down to the entire base, so that the largest pool possible sends its giants up the pyramid to add yet another level to the capstone. But what happens when the discoveries made at the capstone, the new knowledge, does not trickle down to the base of the pyramid? This is what is happening in America today.

In America today, a large portion of the base of the pyramid does not receive the knowledge trickling from the top. If a third of our children do not receive an adequate education, how many giants have we chopped off at the knees?

America has been the world's richest nation since 1880, and it will continue to be so until at least 2080. But what is happening to the American pyramid does not bode well. For wealth alone does not accurately portray a society's health. Distribution of that wealth is far more telling.

This is not a Marxist argument; it is an architectural one. If the base of the pyramid is cracking, what does it matter how smooth or how high the capstone is? For any society to succeed in the long run, it must have a secure pyramid, with a capstone accessible to all and a healthy base. Our country today and in the foreseeable future resembles less the pyramids than it does the Washington monument.