Five uncomfortable truths

I'm not usually much of a fan of Thomas Friedman but his editorial this morning was one of his better efforts. "Who will tell the people?" he wants to know. They want to hear the truth, he believes. They want to know what it would take to make America great again. I doubt it, since any politician who tries is successfully beaten down by idiocy, over and over, everywhere, all the time. However, since he brought the subject up, here are five truths to tell the American people.

First, our medical system is atrociously inefficient. We spend more than any other industrialized country with nothing on balance to show for it. We have spectacular abilities in certain specialized areas and we lead in research, but we are crushing our manufacturing sector with costs that other nations do not have.

Second, we have too many lawyers and accountants. Other countries have fewer of these and more engineers. Our children enter the fields where the money is, and as long as we reward people for gaming the system more than engineers who contribute to productivity, we're going to misdirect our best minds.

Third, we use too much oil and we must reduce our use whatever it takes. The first thing it should take is increased cost. Simultaneously, in fact with the tax money that drives up the cost, we should engage in massive research to make our energy use more efficient in general, and less dependent on oil in particular. Drilling in Alaska isn't going to do anything but postpone the inevitable by a year.

Fourth, not all teachers are created equal. I have nothing but respect for people who teach first grade or art, but their skills are not as difficult to find in the market as those of a high school physics teacher. Teachers with real world experience are more valuable than those who have done nothing since college outside of classrooms. The NEA mantras on these subjects are debilitating to education.

Fifth, we can't win the war on drugs. Some people are going to abuse drugs. Not a lot, but some. Let 'em go. Offer free treatment to those who want to get off drug dependency, offer cheap drugs to the addicts so they will stop burglarizing homes to pay for their habits. This is an enormously expensive undertaking with almost nothing to show for it.

None of these positions are politically possible. Even the modest idea of HMOs has been torpedoed by Americans' wish to have no constraints on their use of the highest cost treatment conceivable. The lawyers represent an enormously powerful lobby and for some reason, their argument that they help the little guy is hard to counter. Higher gas prices mean short term discomfort, which nobody will support. The NEA has successfully equated support for teacher unionism with support for education. And no politician can be seen as "soft on drugs."

I'm certainly not the first to identify any of these issues. However, they come up against the sacred cows of both left and right. It's not that Americans don't hear the truth. They don't want to listen.