Here’s a link to a good article about some specific problems which have developed in the Medicare system, resulting in fraud: The Systemic Nature of Medicare Fraud.
Some of us are crooks for sure. Why do those crooks all of a sudden have the power to bankrupt our society and destroy our middle-class prosperity?
Years ago, I had a conversation with a former Assistant Director of the FBI. He told me, nearly 25 years ago, that the United States had once been a country of citizens with good moral habits and behaviors. Little in the way of policing was needed for the average citizen but only for those truly inclined to crime and that police work was done after crimes were committed.
Police generally didn’t snoop though they perhaps didn’t have to snoop about the most important matters since a good part of the American population, and many others around the world, lived in stable small communities where people knew each other and — as I recall even from the 1960s and early 1970s — kept watch on each other’s children and houses. The policemen in town knew which young men were inclined to draw a knife or throw a punch in anger, which women didn’t respect the property rights of others, which children and parents needed a talk every so often to remind them of the future of someone who goes bad. And, of course, everyone knew where and how the town’s bankers lived and could be suspicious about sudden displays of wealth which might indicate embezzlement. They knew if the town’s grocer with a liking for games of chance was suddenly desperate for money. Money wasn’t just siphoned away by the mechanisms of an abstracted banking system and the town’s potential exploiters didn’t live mysterious lives in rich men’s towns several stops up the railroad line.
Our country worked not because we had amazingly efficient police forces and technologically advanced regulators but rather because most citizens — including policemen and bank regulators — were doing their modestly defined jobs and had good reason to go about their business mostly trusting their neighbors and bankers and lawyers and co-workers and so forth. And they had good reason to believe they would know if someone went bad or ran into problems which might lead them to desperate acts.
Things got away from us. We were so successful in many ways that we developed rich and complex banking systems and manufacturing systems that we didn’t understand well and didn’t know how to control. Most Americans were oblivious until recently that problems were developing though historians and others have been warning for several generations that our societies and our technological capabilities were growing and developing faster than our abilities to understand and control them.
I’ll throw out a suggestion which comes from my grandfather who was a small town police chief from about 1936 to about 1954. He died when I was young so I never really knew him but I’ve been told that, back in the 1930s, he predicted that the rate of violent crimes would rise greatly in the United States in the ensuing generation. I doubt it was his only reason for such a fear but my grandfather did believe the rise of the FBI and other police agencies in the centralized governments would take away the freedom of regional leaders to make arrangements with criminals such as the combat-zones where rational criminals were allowed to control gambling and sex-trade activities in return for policing those zones themselves and in return for protecting visitors to those zones from undue harm.
I’ve been trying to deal with this general issue of a world grown too rich and complex for us and published two relevant essays in December of 2011: Overwhelming our moral characters and Predators, Producers, Sheep, and the Love of Liberty. In the second of those essays, I wrote:
[Lord] Acton had a vast and deep knowledge of history and seemingly of human nature and, like me, considered governments to be something greater, perhaps far greater, than necessary evils. He was right and so am I. The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate government but rather to realize the political life as a natural part of human life. We have to be modest in the short-run, not letting the ambitions of even the better sort of men, certainly not the ambitions of men with the moral character of gangsters, to impose upon us political systems which are inherently bad or even systems for which we aren’t yet prepared. From one angle, we can say we shouldn’t let political systems or the underlying political communities grow too large or too complex until we’re prepared for that greater system and the greater community. Eventually, says some muse of history, we’ll learn how to govern something as large and complex and powerful as the United States. But we won’t learn it in the positivistic way of the Enlightenment intellectuals, including the Founding Fathers of the United States. We’ll learn it when several relatively large and complex human political communities come together to share many of their political duties and responsibilities, come together to form a greater political community. This greater political community will be associated with a body of knowledge, including speculations in the tradition of Plato’s Republic and Voegelin’s Order and History but also including the most concrete of practices and the entirety of that body of knowledge won’t really be known even to the best political thinkers at the time it develops. In fact, it’s probable a greater understanding of the nature of this political beast will mature only by the time the human race has moved on to a different, richer, and more complex state of being.
There has been a general decay of human nature, in its individual and its communal aspects, into a disordered state in the modern world. This doesn’t mean that we’re evil as isolated creatures though some of us are. It does mean we don’t know how to live individual lives of moral integrity and we don’t know how to form proper communities, including political communities.
What can we say about the political community which runs Social Security and Medicare, a few relatively large and criminal wars, a greater number of small criminal actions in any given year, a dysfunctional space-exploration program, a number of troubled transportation systems, vast networks of schools which aren’t, and assorted other disasters? It isn’t a community. It’s an incoherent gathering of disparate regions seeking to gain advantage at the others’ expense and of unassimilable groups seeking to gain still more advantage at the expense of other groups, many of them sharing a number of individual member. Such a political disaster can’t run any complex system in a manner hinting of either moral integrity or practical efficiency and effectiveness.
As I’ve said before, it’s time to let the United States break up into smaller countries which may or may not become republics and may or may not come together to form a more rational and more sustainable confederation. Some of those countries might well have the desire and the capabilities to organize various sorts of welfare systems for its citizens. Let God’s story work the way it will and we must learn how to move with the story rather than trying to impose our dreams upon reality.
In the meantime, any human crooks stealing from the public till should be prosecuted and jailed as individuals, any corporate crooks should be broken up, but that won’t fix much and won’t fix it for long. In a land of moral disorder and political incoherence, the crooks will find their way into that public till again. We could empty the till or leave only a few pennies in it, that is, go to an anarcho-capitalist system or something of the sort. I’ve vote to devolve into the sorts of communities which can meet human needs rather than to stop trying to meet those needs.