Winning the Argument Isn’t Enough

Thomas Sowell observed that the best solution won't be perfect or even a complete solution, it will be the tradeoff that sucks the least.

I had a long and interesting conversation with my mentor Sunday morning. He’s a decade older than me, lives in Portsmouth, NH and has had a different life than I have had, but we are alike in so many ways, it is frightening how two people from totally different backgrounds can believe, value, and live the same certain principles.

I value his perspective, especially when it challenges mine.

He told me he worries about us being put on the road to Soviet style communism because some of the left’s issues contain some percentage of legitimacy and rather than taking those concerns seriously, we on the right reflexively dismiss them wholesale simply because the ways they express and propose solving them are usually 99% unconstitutional and 100% unworkable.

I injected the point that I think it is common that maybe10% of what the left says frames a legitimate problem and the other 90% is emotional filler designed to rile people up.

Something about our back and forth struck a chord with me and my mind has been constantly masticating the issues he raised since we had the conversation.

I think his reasoning is sound.

Simple logic and experience show us that it is much easier to stir people up with emotional vignettes and just hope feelings overcome reason (because they often do).

This process is all over the internet right now about ICE detention. You can’t open your social media feeds without seeing someone posting that some “constituent” of a politician who has lived in the US for thirty years, has three American born children in the schools there, is a great father and husband, volunteers at the local food pantry, works second shift at the local diaper factory, and goes to church every Sunday and has never been convicted of a serious crime, and yet the ICE Gestapo has detained him for deportation.

A ten second internet search then reveals his first deportation order was 29 years ago, he left and re-entered illegally a few months later, was detained again and given a court date, issued a temporary work permit that subsequently ended when his asylum petition was dismissed, a second deportation order was issued and after that, he disappeared for the next 20 years but was finally picked up due to a traffic incident and had ten baggies of crack in his work van.

The fact is it is much easier to hide the issue behind a blackout curtain of emotions than it is to make a logical argument by sitting down and discussing a policy point by point, teasing out the stuff that has a chance to work and the stuff that is just nuts and will never work.

This is the difference between going to see a standup comic or sitting down with your financial advisor or accountant to go over next year’s tax strategy. I know which one I would rather do. One is fun, the other one is…well, let’s just say it is the opposite of fun.

Maybe we need to examine systems and processes from around the world that might work within our constitutional scheme and replace the mess we have here.

Healthcare is one of them. Obamacare increased costs, rationing and reduced quality of care and yet Democrats want Medicare for All. I can tell you from personally experiencing two “universal health care” systems, the one in Canada and the one in the UK that if you have a nosebleed or a toothache, you are going to be fine, but if you have a cancerous brain tumor and need a MRI, it might take you a year to get a scan – assuming you live that long (the last situation actually happened to the wife of a good friend and coworker of mine in Vancouver. He had to take his wife across the border to get the MRI she needed).

Japan’s healthcare regime was mentioned as a potential model, but (and there is always a but), while it performs exceptionally well at delivering broad access to high-quality care while keeping national spending relatively low and it demonstrates that universal coverage and cost control can coexist with good health outcomes, it is not a perfect model. Some of its success depends on cultural, demographic, and societal factors that do not transfer easily to larger, more diverse countries. A rapidly aging population, low birth rate, and shrinking workforce are placing increasing strain on a system that was designed when Japan was much younger, so they are going to have to reform it again.

And we need to clearly understand, as Thomas Sowell perfectly stated, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. While the best solution is not going to be perfect and it is always going to be the one that sucks the least, Sowell’s observation points toward a neglected conservative obligation: identify the real problem, reject the emotional theatrics, and offer constitutional solutions before collectivism offers unconstitutional ones.

My mentor’s premise is that we need to cut through the emotion, state the actual root issue, and offer something that deals with it rather than staid polemics about how wonderful our Constitution is, how we just need to stay the course, and everything will be OK because the system will self-correct.

I think he is right, and such an examination won’t be without pain for our side either.

Let me give you an example with a subject that the left treats as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Elon Musk.

Elon was once a darling of the left. Tesla and Musk’s green energy company, SolarCity were going to save the planet – until he supported Republicans. Now, especially since his net worth went over a trillion, he is the devil incarnate.

As usual, the issue the left chooses to run with ain’t the issue. They want you to ignore all the valued stuff Elon’s companies bring to the table and just be mad (an emotion, by the way) at him because his vision made him the richest human on the planet.

The left comes right out and says that trillionaires should not exist and to stop it, the government should take everything he has down to a specified level because, and I quote, “nobody needs that much money.”

To which I immediately jumped in with my classic free enterprise/free market speech, stating that people should have the freedom in America to reach whatever height they can attain and it is nobody’s business how much anyone makes or deciding how much money they “need” – and like 99% of everybody on our side, noted that “trillion” number represents his net worth( in other words, his wealth), not what he has in cash, so to get access to his wealth, they are going to have to tax unrealized gains, something that I believe is morally wrong and opens the gate to a path I don’t think we need to walk down (and yes, I believe property taxes levied on anything other than a sale are wrong, too).

While our point is true, it lacks relevancy for the left because they went for emotional impact and purposefully avoid the real problem (one which I agree is a problem). I can’t argue against George Soros or any other leftist billionaire funding political candidates, movements or trying to influence the public if I ignore what Elon’s money allows him to do for my side.

It is time we recognize that our “system” of laws has been gamed for so long, it is so screwed up and perverted, it can’t self-correct. Before any bill is signed into law, armies of politicians and lawyers are already at work figuring out workarounds for their clients and convincing judges and enforcement agents not to enforce the law when it becomes law.

We are so far astray of original intent (or scope of government) that I’m not sure how we could ever correct anything without direct intervention from the people. It’s almost like someone ran the last copy of the Constitution through a crosscut shredder and half of us believe it will miraculously reassemble itself.

We are going to have to provide actual solutions that put us back behind constitutional boundaries. That might well mean an Article V convention or more Amendments, but it must be done via constitutionally prescribed processes.

If we don’t, we shouldn’t be surprised when something new fills the void, even if that “something new” is something old that has failed every time it has been tried.