This is, as usual with me, kind of a sideways look at the issues that people have been bringing up lately, mostly in liberal forums and among liberal friends' facebook posts. The issues might seem only tangentially related, but, when I look at them together, I find an interesting set of connections. These issues are illegal immigration (specifically, open borders), and single-payer health care.
What connected the two for me was a series of articles (isn't it funny how each day seems to have a 'theme', in which articles show up in multiple disparate feeds and sources?) about the struggle that much of Western Europe is having with their health care systems, and the effect that an increased flow of refugees has had upon them. In parts of Sweden, overcrowding and a lack of funding has actually led health care groups to start giving rural families lessons on how to deliver a baby by themselves.
Now, Western Europe is learning a lesson that I learned in childhood. I did not grow up in a wealthy family. Actually, I grew up in a family that bounced back and forth between working poor and lower-middle class. At some times, we were actually quite poor by U.S. standards. We never lacked food, shelter, clothing, or medical care, however, and we actually had a fair number of nice toys. How did we do it? My mother prioritized, and she passed down that skill to us. In fact, I learned to prioritize, myself, as a child, for the toys that I wanted. I knew for a fact that I could not have all of the toys I wanted. I taught myself to think about what I wanted, check the prices, consider our family situation, and place all of my energies towards begging specifically for the subset of toys where "they can afford it" crossed with "I want it most". I found that, if I did that, I would pretty reliably wind up with what I wanted most on my birthday and Christmas, and I could build up my toybox over time on these principles. This served me well when I started earning my own money.
What happens when we look at the issues of immigration and single-payer together? Actually, I was able to come up with a chart that gave me an interesting view of the political philosophies and their response to these two issues. It is doubly interesting when I view these two issues as mutually exclusive in that we simply cannot, as a country and a society, afford both of them.
Conservatives oppose both open borders and single-payer health care. Why choose between two burdens upon the society?
Libertarians (large-L on purpose, as libertarians differ widely and overlap with conservatives) are in favor of open borders, but oppose single-payer health care. This is generally on principle, though some have tried to explain how it would still work when reality is applied.
Moderates want to kind of half-do both things; open up immigration further without inadvertently letting in the gang members and human traffickers, and have government-paid/government-involved health care without making it an actual universal social welfare program. As is usual for treading the very line of a fence without falling to either side, it's a very delicate balancing point with a very narrow margin for error.
Liberals want to do both, Western Europe be hanged (unless they're using it as an example that is, at this point, largely imaginary).
Now here's the interesting part. From what I've seen and read, there's a new (tiny) faction to consider, the one that actually deserves the badly misapplied label "Alt Right". And their stance is distinct from the rest. They seem to approve single-payer, but oppose open borders; in fact, they seem to oppose all immigration and all citizenship by people who are not white. Ironically, the system they desire is like the one that is breaking down in Sweden. Conservatives have oft celebrated the fact that our system works best in our country because of the great diversity of peoples and cultures; the Alt Right would sacrifice diversity in favor of socialism, while the Liberals seem determined against all notions of reality to force both to happen.
