Bret Stephen’s truth about education? Education is not, as too many of us would like to have it, the solution to whatever be the problem. There is certainly no evidence that good schools make for a better world, or that just by attending school kids become good citizens. There is ample evidence on the contrary that schools, in particular the failed and failing schools of the inner cities, of which there are myriads, may be making the world worse.

The truth? Stop looking to education for what it can’t do. Look to it, at best, for what it should be doing, imparting skills and knowledge. With some we do this very well, in particular with those who attend our elite colleges and universities.

With others, with far too many, we do this very poorly. All our school reform efforts ought to be directed entirely at making whatever changes are necessary to enable larger numbers of kids to acquire new skills and knowledge. We ought not to be looking to the education of our kids to solve our adult problems.

Here is how Bret Stephens in today’s Wall Street Journal, A Perfect Nobel Pick, The committee didn’t recognize Truman, after all, puts it:

The “Goodists” are the people who believe all conflict stems from avoidable misunderstanding. Who think that the world’s evils spring from technologies, systems, complexes and everything else except from the hearts of men, where love abides. Who mistake wishes for possibilities. Who put a higher premium on their own moral intentions than on the efficacy of their actions. Who champion education as the solution, whatever the problem.

And William Easterly’s truth about health care? A right to health care cannot be, in spite of all the rhetoric to the contrary, a fundamental right, like those of freedom of movement, speech, association, equal protection under the law etc.

Why not? Because there is no reasonable end point to that right. When, for example, has one received all the care that could possibly improve one’s physical and mental systems? There will always be another test one might undergo, another new treatment one might try, another medical opinion one might seek.

At some point the right to health care has to be ended because the cost of providing the care will have exceeded our ability to pay for it. Either there will be those who will be left out entirely, as now in the case of the uninsured or those with “pre-existing conditions,” or treatments will be strictly rationed, in accordance with what acceptable criteria?

When only some speech is allowed we might do well to avoid the expression a right to free speech.  Because what we really mean is a right to say certain things, and not others. That’s not so much a right as a permission from those who make the rules.

Similarly when the right to health care means only a right to certain generic drugs, physical exams, one or two xrays a year etc., or some more realistic combination, we would do better not to talk about a right, but rather, as in the case of limited free speech, of the treatments that are currently permitted by those in power, these at best being at least those we can pay for.

Here is how William Easterly puts it, in the Financial times of October 12, Human Rights are the Wrong Basis for Healthcare. The BOLD is mine:

The pragmatic approach – directing public resources to where they have the most health benefits for a given cost – historically achieved far more than the moral approach. In the US and other rich countries, a “right to health” is a claim on funds that has no natural limit, since any of us could get healthier with more care. We should learn from the international experience that this “right” skews public resources towards the most politically effective advocates, who will seldom be the neediest.

These lectures were (and still are) delivered at one of ten different University locations in the United States and England by mostly Western but well-known and respected world-wide thinkers and scholars, on every imaginable subject drawn either from the humanities and/or the sciences, or both together.

Why mention this? Because the widely varying beliefs among Americans, not to mention the peoples of the world, about exactly what are the human values that are most important and should be the most protected by the nations’ governments, including our own, are too often opposed to one another, and much too often clash frighteningly with one another.

A case in point is the current debate, or rather clash, over health care. What should be our government’s responsibility in this regard? This straightforward and disarmingly simple question arouses the raw nerve stemming from underlying value differences among us.

In particular, between those who say that health care should not be the government’s responsibility and those who say that government’s primary responsibility is to help those who cannot help themselves.

But again, why the mention of the Tanner lectures? Because we have a president who approaches a social problem much as those who approach the subjects of their lectures. And like them he speaks, much as he spoke the other day to the joint session of Congress, from a solid grounding in knowledge of the subject, including its history, and moves us along with him to reasonable conclusions.

In contrast we have a Congress, those listeners at the joint session the other night, made up by and large of only partially educated men and women, made up of those who speak much more from their fears and prejudices than from a much ignored and neglected faculty of reason, having learned that demagoguery is still the most effective way of being reelected to office.

No more than their constituents are they interested in analyzing the nature of a problem and then adopting the most reasonable solution. Their dislike of their president may stem even more from their dislike of his use of reason than the color of his skin.

The members of Congress for the most part probably  didn’t even hear the President’s concluding words. For here with childlike simplicity of expression he brought the whole debate about health care down to the perennial question of the proper role of government in our lives.

This should be the talk of the nation. But instead we’re talking about Joe Wilson who could no more understand the substance of President’s words than he could follow the subject matter of a Tanner Lecture. A clash of beings as large as any in the world today. The country, for all its admirable exceptionalness.can’t seem to rid itself of the Joe Wilsons seated among its elected officials.

Here are the President’s words (without the “God Bless” which has no part in a Tanner lecture):

That large-heartedness, that concern and regard for the plight of others is not a partisan feeling. It’s not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character.

Our ability to stand in other people’s shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together, that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play. And an acknowledgement that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.

This has always been the history of our progress.

In 1935, when over half of our seniors could not support themselves and millions had seen their savings wiped away, there were those who argued that Social Security would lead to socialism. But the men and women of Congress stood fast, and we are all the better for it.

In 1965, when some argued that Medicare represented a government takeover of health care, members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, did not back down.

They joined together so that all of us could enter our golden years with some basic peace of mind.

You see, our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem. They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom.

But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited.

And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter — that at that point we don’t merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

That was true then. It remains true today.

I understand how difficult this health care debate has been. I know that many in this country are deeply skeptical that government is looking out for them. I understand that the politically safe move would be to kick the can further down the road, to defer reform one more year, or one more election, or one more term.

But that is not what this moment calls for.

That’s not what we came here to do. We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it. I still believe we can act even when it’s hard.

… I still believe that we can act when it’s hard. I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility and gridlock with progress. I still believe we can do great things and that here and now we will meet history’s test, because that’s who we are. That is our calling. That is our character.Barack

He says  there is no right, but he doesn’t have an argument. The best he can do is, “Where does the right to health care come from? Did it exist in, say, 250 B.C., or in A.D. 1750? If it did, how was it that our ancestors, who were no less intelligent than we, failed completely to notice it?”

I too question whether there is a right to health care. I don’t think there is one, anymore than there is a right to anything. Rights were not there to begin with. We make them up, we don’t discover them. They are not like Newton’s laws or Darwin’s evolutionary principles.

People decide while living together, as we have in the Western world over centuries, that so-called “natural rights,” are only ways of our living together that are important to us, such as freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and assembly etc., and that we ought as much as possible respect and preserve these sorts of things (or rights).

But how does one get from a “natural right” like this, from the right to free speech, to what I would call a “reasoned” right to health care? One doesn’t, I don’t think. There is no road between the two.

President Franklin Roosevelt’s so-called Second Bill or Rights, which includes rights to food, shelter, and jobs, as well as health care, comes rather from his reasoning on the failure of too many to provide these things for themselves.

For we just don’t like to see the streets filled with the hungry and the homeless, and being relatively affluent ourselves we naturally (?) want to provide for them, share with them our relative wealth. And for most of our history, and in fact right up until the present time in most of the world, we have done so, not by means of government programs but by our charitable actions.

But then, at some point, probably at the time of the Great Depression in our own history, charitable actions were no longer sufficient to provide for the homeless and jobless among us. We decided that those of us who had more ought to be obliged, through taxation, to share with those who had less.

Perhaps it was at that time that someone among us even went so far to say that those who had less, and even more so those without, had a right to that “more.”

Perhaps that was the beginning of entitlements. Under FDR, there was Social Security, not really an entitlement as we did pay for it ourselves over the course of our working lives.

Social Security was so successful that later, under President Lyndon Johnson, it was expanded to include real entitlements, the most costly being the “right” to health care for the old and the poor, called respectively Medicare and Medicaid.

These were entitlements in that the beneficiaries didn’t have to pay the full cost themselves over the course of their working lives. And the expansion of rights, the increased care provided, is still going on in spite of our seeming inability to fund it adequately.

First Social Security, and then entitlements, or welfare payments of various kinds, have largely replaced, or at least shoved to the side the significance of charitable acts. Why? for two reasons. One, there’s not enough charitable acts to go around. And two, charity is considered, in the eyes of the beneficiary, demeaning.

It needn’t have been that way, anymore than caring for our young is demeaning to the young.

But more important the well-being of our old people should never have been placed ahead of our obligation to provide for our young — the very thing which is happening at the present time when our entitlement obligations to the elderly poor prevent us from caring adequately for the disadvantaged and also impoverished young people.

The mistake we made was not to help our oldest and poorest citizens, but to let what we were doing for them become an entitlement, a payment which was our obligation and  their right. Government charity should have always included duties and responsibilities on the part of the recipients. Welfare, but you will have to work. No free right.

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and perhaps whatever revised health care insurance program comes out of the present discussions going on in the Congress, have become huge financial obligations upon all of us who have the ability to pay, and will be especially huge obligations on our children in the years to come. It’s not at all clear now that either we or our children can meet these obligations without growing our already trillion dollar deficits.

We’re at the point now where universal free health care, not unlike universal free public schooling, is assumed to be everyone’s right. The story of how we got there still needs to be told. During the last presidential election the major candidates certainly assumed this right, and President Obama is now acting on that assumption.

What is particularly troubling is that expanded rights seem to have brought about diminished responsibilities, almost pushed them out of the picture.  An unmarried teen age mother, a jobless young man and father will readily talk up their rights to health care and much else, but not readily or willingly will they recognize and accept their responsibilities.