RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Cohn argues that the prophets who transformed oppression and disorientation into a murderous quest against one whole category of people were the true precursors of the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century. Communists no less than Nazis, he observed, have been obsessed by the vision of a prodigious “final, decisive struggle” in which a “chosen people” will destroy a world tyranny and thereby inaugurate a new epoch in world history. “As in the Nazi apocalypse the Aryan race was to purify the earth by annihilating the Jewish race, so in the Communist apocalypse the bourgeoisie was to be exterminated by the proletariat … a secularised version of a phantasy that is many centuries old.” Cohn finds little difficulty in tracing a disconcerting resemblance between the sermons of the medieval prophets and the speeches of their twentieth-century successors.”

……When the likes of Noam Chomsky set the agenda, anyone who imagines the ‘progressive’ Left of today’s intellectual class is morally worthier or intellectually loftier than the lunatic prophets of medieval Europe needs to think again.

And if we are going to take a moral position on this—and I think we should—we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.
—Noam Chomsky, discussing the slaughter of landlords in Vietnam, Forum on Vietnam War, New York, December 1967

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A reader asked if Quadrant was going to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the radical student movement of the Sixties that culminated in the mass demonstrations in Paris of May 1968. Believing that, like the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution in October 2017, there was nothing to celebrate, I didn’t give the suggestion much thought at the time. Rather than anything positive, the political and cultural legacies of May 1968 are almost all negative: anti-Americanism, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, anti-humanism, anti-religion, anti-male feminism. In their place, the best the era could advocate was adolescent hedonism: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. At its worst were the views of radicals like Noam Chomsky above, who could conjure up a “moral position” to support the killing of all the landlords in Vietnam. Most of the influences that have so diminished Western culture in the last fifty years derive from the 1960s.

On reflection, however, I recalled that, even as I and most of my generation of 1960s undergraduates eagerly absorbed the fashionable mind-sets of the day, some of us also read a small number of books that warned us there was little new under the Sixties sun, and most of its social experiments had been tried many times before and always ended in disaster.

Is there no limit to the demands of political correctness, the burden of hypothetical solutions to imaginary problems, and the detachment from empirical reality that can be imposed on a society? Here, a list of questions whose answers would be obvious were they not being obscured.

Why do we facilitate the largescale ongoing immigration of refugees from failed states with no assessment of the outcomes? In particular, it would seem worth trying to better understand the effect of a common factor for almost all of the failed states, which is the nature of the culture they share and how this may be affecting the successful assimilation of these immigrants.

Why is there such a political obsession in Australia with climate change and carbon emissions when no recent extremes of climate are outside the bounds of earlier natural variability, when the claimed warming trend is less than the margin of error in measurement and when this is the only developed economy in which the level of natural uptake exceeds the emissions. As Australia is a net carbon sink, why are we not then receiving credits from other nations who are large net emitters?

Why is there a massive drive for wind and solar power when they require three to four times more installed generating capacity than they deliver and, at current levels, are providing only about 10% of baseload demand at already exorbitant cost with increasingly difficult load management problems? Especially, when the full baseload capacity of conventional power is still required to provide backup for the highly erratic alternative power and it must then be running inefficiently in standby mode much of the time

Why the phobia about nuclear power when we have the largest reserves in the world, ideal conditions for it and, with current technology, can enjoy the cheapest, most reliable, safest and cleanest power of all? Better still, we also have vast areas of the most remote, geologically stable and driest places to store any waste.

Why do we ban the clearing of native vegetation and increasingly hamstring our farmers and graziers with myriad environmental costs, restrictions and demands? We used to have an abundance of some of the least expensive high-quality food in the world. Now we have some of the most expensive with increasing dependence on imports.

Do our eco-saviours have no awareness that ecology is above all holistic and that what we do not get in one place only shifts the effect to somewhere else?

Why is it that Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea et al. are always having to impose gross violations of human rights and subject their populations to severe deprivations for some higher purpose which remains permanently in the future? Might there not in fact be some fundamental fallacy in collectivist philosophy that renders freedom, prosperity and equality permanently unattainable?

Why is it that so many of those who profess such great concern over threats to the environment greet any evidence that something may not be as bad as they fear with anger and rejection, never with hopeful interest? Might it be that their real commitment is not to nature but, to displaying their virtue and pleasuring themselves with a delicious sense of self-righteousness?

Mr. Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, was a U.S. senator from 2005-15. He is a Manhattan Institute fellow.

Here’s a simple idea to help lower health-care costs: publish prices. A bipartisan group of state lawmakers in Colorado is pushing a bill to do precisely that. The Comprehensive Health Care Billing Transparency Act would allow Coloradans to see the true price of any health service they use—exams, procedures, prescriptions—before they undertake treatment.

If passed, the legislation would mandate that hospitals and other facilities disclose the base fees they charge for specific services “before applying any discounts, rebates, or other charge adjustment mechanisms.” Every bill sent to a patient would need to include an itemized list, which would allow patients to see if a service had been marked up. By making such information available upfront, the legislation would reintroduce competition to Colorado’s opaque health-care markets.

The bill is the brainchild of Denver businessman David Silverstein, who made news last year when he suggested that consumers stop paying their medical bills until providers show how they arrived at the prices being charged. Mr. Silverstein is the founder of BrokenHealthcare.org, a nonprofit that hopes other states will follow Colorado’s lead in legislating greater health-care transparency.

As profound a change as the Colorado bill represents, all it really would do is let consumers deal with health care the way they do any other product or service. Think about it: When you want to buy a car, you shop around, comparing the quality and price of competing models and the offerings at different dealerships. The same is true for practically everything else Americans buy: refrigerators, houses, office supplies, washing machines, computers, and on and on.