Soon after the election last year in the Wall Street Journal, Gerald Seib wrote about the opportunity presented by the financial crisis for Barack Obama. Perhaps he was simply reacting to Rahm Emanuel’s statement that, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Seib summed up that perspective on crisis by saying that:
The thing about a crisis is that it creates a sense of urgency. Actions that once appeared optional suddenly seem essential.
That really captures the essence of a crisis mentality. Unfortunately it only looks at the silver lining while ignoring the cloud in front of it. The assumption is that we all can see the dangers of the crisis cloud. Unfortunately the only part of the crisis cloud that most people see is the front side – the possibility with any crisis that we will fail. The problem is that right in front of the silver lining he spoke of there is the hidden backside of the crisis cloud which we conveniently forget.
Because of the sense of urgency that tends to accompany a crisis we not only begin to view once optional courses of action as essential, in many cases we go beyond that and begin to view once forbidden courses of action as excusable.
Here are a few examples of the forbidden becoming excusable:
- After 9/11 we were all too willing to give up our expectations to some basic privacy as we rushed to pass the Patriot Act.
- When the economy became obviously distressed last year we allowed the government to bail out massive private banking institutions.
- As the economy continued to flounder we let the government take over two of our three largest car makers and run roughshod over those who previously had stakes in those companies.
Driven to Distraction
In our rush to respond to the crisis we also run a very real risk of failing to account for some important factors. Such is the case as we take a crisis mentality into our efforts to reform health care in the U.S. For one thing, we feel a sense of urgency to cage this dragon of rising costs and because of that rush to action the people of the nation – and especially the members of Congress – have become so distracted with health insurance reform that they fail to recognize that having health insurance is not the same as having access to affordable health care. Second, those who are opposing the administration on health care have become so distracted by the specter of a public option that they are saying (and probably thinking) virtually nothing about the inclusion of an individual mandate in every single reform proposal under consideration. Michael Cannon at the CATO Institute suggests that the leaders of Congress are actually counting on that distraction to get what they want.
Perhaps part of that silence is a result of the fact that much of the vocal opposition is being pushed by the health insurance industry which stands to benefit from that provision (offsetting the other crippling effects that the health care bills would have on their industry). Such a mandate would once have been obviously unfathomable but now we are seriously considering it because of our health care crisis.
If government were supposed to try to protect us from ourselves (which they have tried to do and which is why they argue that the individual mandate is necessary) then they might as well go all the way and make the consumption of soft-drinks illegal (since they are not beneficial to our health) or require that individuals may not incur debt for anything except for shelter and transportation (since anything else is unnecessary for a decent life).
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