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Except for Dick Cheney, David Brooks must be the only man who has read Charles Dickens and imagines himself as the workhouse manager rather than the starving boy asking for more food. He admires, too, Scrooge and his counting houses, not the Bob Cratchets who make them work. His refrain for the holidays is, "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?"
Consider David Brooks’ lament about our moral values. He frames the health care debate and the Senate’s upcoming vote on reform legislation with this question: Can you responsibly vote for this legislation to increase security today, if the cost is less economic "vitality" tomorrow?
Reform would make us a more decent society, but also a less vibrant one. It would ease the anxiety of millions at the cost of future growth. It would heal a wound in the social fabric while piling another expensive and untouchable promise on top of the many such promises we’ve already made. America would be a less youthful, ragged and unforgiving nation, and a more middle-aged, civilized and sedate one.
We all have to decide what we want at this moment in history, vitality or security. We can debate this or that provision, but where we come down will depend on that moral preference. Don’t get stupefied by technical details. This debate is about values.
The "moral choice" for Bobo is clear: future business vitality trumps individual vitality and family health. He gets there by neatly synthesizing Republican talking points and by reducing to passive abstraction millions of Americans denied medical treatment by our bizarre and unsustainable health insurance system. He then reassures Republicans that they will be "responsible stewards" of tomorrow when they say no to demands for greater "comfort" today. Because we just can’t afford it. Tell that to two thousand people lined up all night at a free clinic in hopes of seeing their first doctor or dentist in six years.
None of that cold reality for Mr. Brooks. He clings to his straw men and his Burkean demeanor. He waxes philosophically about political "sweet spots" and imaginary opportunities to create change at manageable costs. Sadly, he says, those hopes that "we all shared" conflict with how things work in the real world. To wit, "capital gravitates toward the young and productive" and that’s a tide we cannot and should not tell to stop flowing.
The comfortable, multi-millionaire, wingnut-welfared Mr. Brooks recommends that the rest of us forego getting our children, spouses and neighbors better medical care today because it might sap our "vitality" tomorrow. Is that the vitality of New Orleans’ 9th ward, Cleveland’s Shaker Heights, DC’s SE neighborhoods or the vitality of an insurance company CEO?
At its best, the reforms in this bill are already deferred until 2014. Using the Harvard study’s figures, nearly 200,000 of our family, friends and neighbors will be prematurely dead by then, owing to an avoidable lack of health care. That’s lost vitality I can relate to and with which we should concern ourselves.
Not so Mr. Brooks. He ignores insurance company monopoly excesses and how they’ve gamed regulators into allowing them to sell fraudulent products for high profits. He reduces his Thanksgiving week argument to a simplistic morality tale even an overworked CEO can remember. Succoring the medically needy, which is most of us at one time or another, weakens the spirit, it drains oil from the machinery of enterprise.
Mr. Brooks is not a beneficent philosopher or a storm-tossed politician trying to do good and pay for it. He is a Dickensian workhouse manager, telling his boys that they ought to be comforted by their hunger, because those who survive it will become better men. If that doesn’t quiet them down, there’s always Bill Sykes and his dog. If only there were a Dickensian ending for those boys, for us and for Mr. Brooks.
57 Comments
Indeed. Brooks is yet another example of Sinclair’s Law:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
I might add that he also said, quite rightly, that fascism is capitalism plus murder.
I probably say this every time, but that was one of Brooks’ stupidest articles. Yeah, health reform would throw out some of the crazy risks we take as a country, like going without health insurance. I’m not sure how anyone can mourn that.
Each one appears to be even stupider than the one before. I must confess, I rarely read Brooks any more… in order to keep my blood pressure (which is usually low to normal) from breaking away off the charts.
The only measure of “vibrancy” for the likes of Brooks is whether or not wealth continues concentrating at an accelerating rate.
For human beings, on the other hand, the measure is things like positive, political freedom, socioeconomic security, good education and jobs, a sense of social and cultural measure, lots of public space of all sorts, physical and metaphorical. Those are the things which bring intellectual, cultural, and spiritual vibrancy. That’s what makes the world go round, not gutter money-grubbing.
By any human measure, the feudalism Brooks reveres is the garotte that strangles all vibrant life.
As for Dickensian stories, I look more to A Tale of Two Cities when I think of what would constitute a just ending for these criminals.
I was just going to say that there’s nothing more “middle-aged, civilized and sedate” than saying “screw everyone else, I want my tax cuts.”
And then it hit me: He used “civilized” in a list of BAD attributes?
Heh. By Brooks’s standards, Afghanistan should have the highest GDP per capita of any country in the world.
Where were the Republic “responsible stewards” during the first six years of Decider Bush’s reign?
sorry to be O/T so sooon but this local news is just pathetic.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/os-sarah-palin-book-tour-20091124,0,904888.story
John Kenneth Galbraith said it best:
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
…and his son didn’t read John Kenneth Galbraith A Short History of Financial Euphoria (1994)!
Mr. Brooks: Healthy people are less vibrant?
yet he’s clearly wrong;
that bold flys in the face of historic record, you ease the anxiety of millions, you create a health middle class and you insure future growth
the man has it backwards
Thank you for writing this! I just finished reading it and am fighting the urge to vomit.
He pretends to be such an intellectual and student of science and society yet appears to have never noted there must be a reason the most successful species in terms of endurance are those that care for the vulnerable, young and old.
I have always viewed this as more “Are we a Rice Krispies kind of a nation or a Fruit Loops one?” I think we have lost our snap, crackle, and pop, and have indeed become a nation led by and pontificated to by loopy fruits.
“Except for Dick Cheney, David Brooks must be the only man who has read Charles Dickens and imagines himself as the workhouse manager rather than the starving boy asking for more food”
Actually, the entire fiscal right does. A few years ago (actually, right before 9/11), the WSJ published a celebratory Christmas editorial that was widely praised in conservative circles. In it, it attacked liberals by comparing them to the hapless Cratchet and lauded Scrooge for creating the capital needed to propel the British Empire to global supremacy and which would eventually provide the foundations for the emergency of what was a then incipient American Empire. The message was basically that Tiny Tim had to be sacrificed for the greater good. Only through Scrooge’s selfishness and ruthlessness could Western civilization (under white Anglo-leadership, of course) develop the technology needed to cure future generations of Tiny Tims and deliver Tiny Tim’s countrymen to greatness.
It was a rather arrogant piece, all in all. This mercileses racial and ideological triumphalism is what the right is all about. Their model “civilization” is pretty much run like the secret government agency in La Femme Nikita or an Ayn Rand novel where the strong have guns and cudgels.
I thought Bill Sykes was the guy with the dog, not Mr. Bumble.
Sykes was Nancy’s murderer, the dog abuser.
Right, but Mr. Bumble was in charge of the workhouse.
where is the vitality in the decline of middle-class wealth and the handing it to the upper class?
the history of the last 40 years in America is a record of increasing disparity between rich and everyone else.
the 8 years of Bushco was a history of enormous tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of the future. No one said a word on the right or in the center and damn few on the so-called left.
BOBO led the charge for putting the war, the tax cuts and part d on the credit card. NO ONE SAID what about the grandchildren.
The truth is that HCR reduces the deficit but does it by taxing the most well off. David Brooks, pay your fair share.
David Brooks, take a trip to LA and see the health care festivals. David Brooks, have your cancer treated there.
here is one metric out of many:
household income. Adjusted for inflation, median household income in 2008 fell to $50,303, which was 4% below its 2000 level and continued a downward trend that had been accelerating for some time. That’s “a striking statistic,” said Stiglitz, because the GDP per capita for the same period climbed from $33,700 in 2000 to $38,100 in 2008 (adjusted for inflation).
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/14443847
“where is the vitality in the decline of middle-class wealth and the handing it to the upper class”
it doesn’t. But Republicans aren’t that good at math or sensitivity. Ideological fanatics drunk on the ambrosia of their own racial arrogance. If you gave them two photos – one of destitute white blonds and one of prosperous brown people, and asked them to choose between the two the more intelligent and successful, they’d automatically pick the one with the (to their eye, prettier) white people, and ignore the obvious clues that the opposite was, in fact, the case. It’s just the way they are…. Republicans on one hand, and the reality based community on the other.
One can’t attach logic or facts to this kind of thinking. It’s all about imagery and emotions and themes and wants and desires and fears.
Just for your info– being destitute does NOT equal lack of intelligence.
And being successful does not equal intelligence. Bush is a prime example of that.
I think you rather fundamentally misread what I was saying there.
Brooks says:
Of course, real economic growth is caused by an increase in the production of goods and services. Insurance companies don’t do that, except perhaps in a statistical sense. The “service” they provide is in standing between you and your doctors and acting as gatekeepers. Insurance companies are parasites upon society.
“Reform would make us a more decent society, but also a less vibrant one. It would ease the anxiety of millions at the cost of future growth.”
This is all based on the assumption that you either get a ‘decent’ society or a ‘vibrant’ one, but can never have both. I think Herr Bobo needs to take a look at places such as Sweden, Finland, etc., which have both decent societies AND have good economies (and in the case of Sweden, did a better job of dealing with the banks when they failed). This is corporatist blather. One of the primary reasons we are in the economic mess that we are is that our government over the past 25 years has not only allowed but encouraged the rich to become richer at the expense of everyone else; encouraged corporate interests to extract the maximum profit..from everyone else; encouraged, if you will a dog-eat-dog/merciless/I’ve got mine-screw you society. And look where THAT has gotten us.
Completely agree with all your points.
IMO, they’re just wrong. The society that would emerge from the literal application of their ideology – God forbid that they ever got the chance to implement their ideology without restraint – is neither vibrant nor civilized. It’s a homogenous, autarchic, inward-turned failed state, or at least it’s a bankrupt and defeated one. In fact, I think they’d find that it’s a state that would bear a strong resemblance to North Korea, with a Randian twist – a land of heroic sacrifice, complete disregard for humanity, permanent competition and personal insecurity, and an overdeveloped sense of racial and cultural supremacy. It isn’t just their model is inhumane. It’s also just plain wrong. The ideology of the Übermensch isn’t one they or anyone else would really like to live in, if they only ran the numbers on it. Unfortunately, they don’t either math or reality very well.
And the U.S. economy won’t grow faster under Brooks’s scheme anyhow.
Bobo has done some good writing, and seems to be among the foremost pundits keeping an ear to the ground with respect to the implications of recent brain research and their implications for public policy. But here, he goes right off the rails:
Bobo needs to spend a couple of hours reading some background about **basic** cell biology.
Vitality comes from the healthy function of cells, and the myriad ways in which they communicate with one another. That involves nutrition, exercise, and a host of other factors – including emotionally healthy interactions.
‘Security’ does not come from stress, anxiety, desperation, nor exhaustion.
Exhausted, destitute, anxious people do not have enough ‘vitality’ to create safe communities.
Bobo sets up deeply flawed, false choice here, although I don’t think it is from misreading Dickens.
Maybe a few hours reading about cell function would help him think more clearly…?
Thx, EOH.
There is a holy verse on the right that Republics always make choices that benefit everyone and Democrats always make choices that harm everyone. I believe it is from the Book of St. Reagan.
Aha! Then BoBo would be willing to pay a 75% surtax to support the war in Afghanistan that he so dearly loves.
It sure is. And we know what you value, BoBo.
America would be a less youthful, ragged and unforgiving nation, and a more middle-aged, civilized and sedate one
No. That’s just wrong. Because of healthcare reform our society will become depleted? Purposeless? He’s always been fruit loopey, but he has surely jumped right into the box now. Not a single day goes by that one isn’t met with some extraordinarily outrageous statement from one of these fiends.
Freeing up small business to become more profitable should kill off vitality in America?…Republican mind fuck.
O/T…Prez sends 25,000 more troops to Afgans, rogue Al Crazy and Taliwhackers procure atomic bomb from Pakistan and emulsify the new troops.
Packis plead innocence so we are left with no retribution.
Sound like a Republican wet dream?
Doesn’t he realize that one in every 1000 persons without health insurance dies every year as a result of lack of insurance.
How vibrant is that guys future?
Why should he care about them? It’s not likely they were Republics.
You can’t argue with Brooks. He is not about logic or evidence. He is here to sell a talking point. His job is to make that talking point sound plausible. That’s all. Strawmen, false analogies, twisted logic, and plain old-fashioned lies are his stock in trade. Mockery and ridicule are the only proper responses. Anything else gives Brooks a stature he does not deserve.
You know, there are days when I rise to the bait. And there are days like this one where I read Brooks-think and simply collapse back into my chair, eyes closed, forefinger pressed between eyebrows that are knitted together in complete whatthefuckery wonderment.
Compassionate moral imperatives vs. feathering millionaire nests. Oh, wait a miute . . . I need to think . . . .
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
one forgets that as deplorable as Scrooge’s philosophy was, at least it was made at the time of real economic growth, wealth creation and the early dawn of an emerging mdidle class. When American rethugs articulate the same philosophy today, they’re embracing Scroogian philosophy without that growth and with a dying middle class. The logical end-state for them would not be the British welfare state but rather Mad Max – a failed state and the breakdown of civilization.
Mr. Blub, you would do better not to venture into regions of economic and social history in which you are evidently unqualified. Just stick to your regular right-wing talking points. I am speaking here as someone vastly qualified and much published in professional journals on the particular ‘facts’ you allude to.
Thanks Ebeneezer. I’ll bear that in mind.
From Brooks’ musings. I am verklempt. Talk among yourselves.
Monsters.
Brooks ‘values’ are his worship of Moloch the baby-eating Market.
He and Tom Friedman are the NY Times’ nihilism brothers.
They are monsters.
Brooks is a fool. Before that, he was only a hack.
Brooks is peddling watered-down Ayn Rand crapola. I am not going to be surprised if he does the Full Monty at some point and comes out for eugenics, since the dirty little secret of right wing thought is people get what they are born to get.
And David Brooks conveniently leaves out that all the changes that were made to the bill that end up making the system more expensive were done to appease the GOP that will not vote for it no matter what and those corrupt Dem Senators taking millions from the insurance industry. It no longer will tie to medicare rates, it will not allow anyone into the system that already has employee insurance — in other words, the bill is gamed once again to INSURE the insurance industry profits and wasteful medical spending.
How the Dems fall for this everytime is beyond me. The GOP and media will pound on the Dems no matter what they do so why not just do what needs to be done. That wet noodle of a Senator I have — Durbin — is once again ready to give the deal away. What an arse.
Yeah it would be the right thing to do, and the cheaper thing to do, but it might be less profitable and beneficial for me personally. Also, as a fat impotent viagra popping late middle agge douchebag, I love to fantacize that I am stiil somehow vigorous and “vital” and since my last trophy wife ran off with a much younger man, i cannot even make a put on of doing that sexually. I repel women, who , i know, are torn between my earning ability and my loathsome and decaying appearance and my miserable personality.
OMG. Is it moral for insurance companies to profit off of someone dying?
What values are you talking about?? Placing a higher value on the dollar than on helping someone get healthcare?
Somebody better check for a battery port on Brooks.
Change health care reform to domestic spying or foreign wars or fewer “terrorist” trials, and our Mr. Brooks would be adamant that we need greater security than any amount of vitality. Just saying.
Sadly, lots of people still read Brooks. And he occupies very expensive pundit real estate.
If health care can be compared to cars (which are a commodity, unlike health), most people would rather buy a safe and reliable one than a fast and option-packed one.
This bill is so compromised already. Now they’re talking about triggers. Maybe if we just handed the public option over to Goldman Sachs to run… (snark/)
That Bobo would take exactly the opposite tack when it comes to illegal domestic spying, torture and military expenditure – that we should purchase more security at any cost in the vitality of our civil rights or military preparedness – demonstrates his hypocrisy and his empty logic. His attempt to shroud his propaganda in Grecian virtue and Protestant prudence over pleasure exposes his brutality, however warm and comfy the cardigan sweater it comes wrapped in.
Note too how Brooks gins up a faux consensus to support his lightly argued claim that the HCR bill will fail to control costs.
Why is it that it is a given when David Brooks, regarding our present debate concerning healthcare, asserts:
Why indeed? What evidence, other than abject fealty toward GOP sophistry, is there that we must necessarily trade healthcare reform for future prosperity? Aside from mindless acceptance of threadbare GOP rhetoric, there is no evidence to support such a contention.
On the contrary, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that if we do not reform healthcare by expanding coverage and lowering costs that it could potentially destroy our economy and plunge us into an economic crisis that would dwarf the one from which we are presently emerging.
As it stands, roughly 70% of home foreclosures are due to medical emergencies. If costs continue to rise at the unchecked rates of the recent past, the ranks of the uninsured will skyrocket, passing on these associated costs to those who still have insurance. How is this scenario beneficial to business of any size?
Brooks is a shill for the insurance and pharma lobbies that want us to believe that everything is just fine and we should not worry ourselves one little bit. Our national house is ablaze and collapsing around us as we debate and Brooks maintains that it would be rash and precipitous to call the fire department when their really is no definitive proof that their indeed actually is a fire. He reasons that it will cost future generations much if we seek help now. He blithely ignores the usurious costs that most Americans are facing today. Because he lacks any factual citations to buttress his premise, he engages in the all too familiar GOP tactic of fear mongering to try and frighten us from fixing what is hopelessly broken.
Mr. Brooks, as one who has had to fight with insurance companies over pre-existing conditions which did not exist, I am pulling the alarm. We need help and we need it right now, not at some distant point in the future.
This is not an argument about values Mr.Brooks, it’s an argument about whether or not it’s time to grow up as a nation.
Thanks for the commentary. As soon as I read the column, I checked out FDL to look for a good analysis, and, behold, there it was!
This was a horrible column, and once more, devoted to facile and false myths promoting a conservative agenda.
First off, Brooks starts the column as if he were talking about the economic choices we face, and then conflates those with the choices presented to us by the current half-baked and corrupt health reform legislation. Does he understand the difference between the two?
Let us liberate ourselves by considering the choices presented by economic realities, which are far wider than happier than those of the status quo versus the stinked up Congressional bills
The sheer ignorance of it is amazing. I do not see how pumping unneeded billions into health care, spending a larger proportion of GDP and getting worse health outcomes than almost every other high income country makes the US vibrant or helps our economic growth.
I do not see how people stuck in jobs, afraid to move or start up a small business because they are not sure that they can get health care coverage makes us vibrant, or helps growth.
I do not see how a middle age person disabled because of untreated chronic disease like hypertension or diabetes makes us vibrant or helps growth.
This column was a mass of confusion and lies from the very first word to the very last.
Disgusting. I hope that I will not be considered shrill if I state flatly that these people have the blood of many many men, women, children and elderly on their hands. They should be ashamed of themselves for writing this kind of misleading propaganda.
Earlofhuntington, that first sentence is among the best that has ever appeared on these pages.
I always appreciate Mr. Brooks’ dishonest wordplay. He can reduce a policy choice about insuring and giving health care to tens of millions of men, women and children to a punch line or an obscure code, like the “vitality”.
Financially prudent Republican legislators, notably absent during Mr. Bush’s drunken spending and tax cutting for the wealthy, should beware, Brooks says. They have a Hobson’s choice between his straw men. Choose guns and be deemed “responsible” and “serious”. Choose butter and you dessicate our futures and make a hundred strong men into little brown welfare abusers. In BrooksWorld, the butter is always rancid and the guns are always sweet, like Jon Stewart’s pretend .38 special.
As dishonest and distracting as are Brooks’s arguments, they are a sure sign of the programs Republicans will throw at any Democratic within reach. We ignore them at our peril, because ignored, they become the baseline for public discussion rather than being tossed out with the newspaper-wrapped fish and potato peelings.