Larry PortTrying to raise kids and live responsibly amid an onslaught of nonsense.

Today Congress votes on a health care bill I don’t quite understand but seems to be a big deal.  What I do understand is there are proponents for it and detractors against it, and they all seem very passionate, and say all sorts of things I don’t believe.

My position?  As a friend of mine who immigrated to America said wisely:  ”Either way, we have it good in this country.”

From a software engineer’s perspective, if I tried to code up a program as large as this health care bill and then tried to predict its run-time behavior, I’d be foolish.  It’s not a perfect analogy, but the healthcare legislation activates a lot of economic and social machinery which may or may not have the major side-effects people are predicting.  So if it passes, let’s wait and see.

The bigger picture is that going back to the beginning of our country, people were and continue to be very divided about the role of government and the services it offers.  In my view, the people who think there should be no government or taxes should go try living in Congo for a while, and the people who think government should do everything should read “Atlas Shrugged” and then spend a semester abroad in Cuba.

But with government services on the mind, I’d like to ask the question, and this is NOT meant to be an analogy for government-run health care, what if libraries or the postal service were never invented?  What if people wanted to introduce these ideas and have government pay for them?  Where would people stand?

Bob Greene, Author and CNN Contributor, made an interesting point about the Postal Service.  Imagine there was no such thing as the U.S. Postal Service and someone comes up with this pitch:

“There’s a service available to you. A federally designated courier will come to your home every day but Sunday, and pick up whatever you would like to have hand-delivered to someone else in the country, no matter how far away. The courier and his colleagues will then take your envelope to that person in a matter of days. You don’t need to leave your house for this service, and neither does the person on the other end.”

“You might ask: How much does this service cost?  If you were told that the answer is 44 cents, you might think you were getting a pretty good deal.”

Or what about libraries?  Imagine selling cash-strapped municipalities on this idea:

“So we’ll build a series of buildings:  one big main one and a bunch of smaller, satellite ones.  Then, we purchase all the books we can afford, put funny-looking plastic on them to protect them, and arrange them all with an intricate classification system.”

“Maybe we could even standardize the classification system with other towns if they built the same buildings.  Then we’ll catalog all the books we have, and anyone who lives in the city can rent our books.  We could even have special buildings and books exclusively for kids!”

“We can even build a system to track who has what book rented and let other people know when the book is supposed to come back in.  We could also subscribe to dozens of magazines and newspapers and let people come in and read them.  We’ll buy a bunch of chairs and desks so people can spend time reading.  And we’ll get a bunch of computers for people to use.  And we’ll archive all sorts of periodicals so people can look up old information.”

“Oh, and we won’t charge anyone anything to use it. Unless they turn their books in late. Then we’ll nail ‘em for a dime a day.”