This Really Works!

This is my 100^th blog – 2 per week for 50 weeks.  In each I have discussed the direction of the country by relating our problems to faulty behavior in the five key categories.  Recently I noticed a couple of articles reinforcing this belief.

On December 30, I wrote “Build a Fence” arguing that the approach to illegal immigration was not to spend a lot of money trying to wall it off, but to find ways to lower incentives for people to come to the US illegally.  In April I find an article about the drop in illegal immigration tied to a less vibrant economy and to stricter enforcement, two things that lower the incentive.  (There was no mention of having a better fence.)

On April 20, I wrote “Healthcare Cost” enumerating at least 8 reasons for the rise in costs and elaborating on two of them.  One was the variation in services among providers and pure, somewhat arbitrary pricing differences.  I argued that the system must be more akin to an automobile check up where you know what to expect and get a cost estimate as opposed to the current system of somewhat secretive negotiations between care providers and your insurance. The following week, the headline from AP was:  Medical sticker shocks: ‘No method to the madness’ telling how the system is broken and that there is no way to explain vastly different costs for the same basic medical procedure.

I am getting to these solutions not because of any particular genius on my part (though I’d like to think so), but because the model I am using works.  Behavior has consequences, and individual behavior accumulates, leading to societal consequences.  Look at what you don’t like about America and trace it back to faulty decisions and detrimental actions and habits of our society in the five dimensions:  discipline, understanding the economic cycle, critical thinking, perspective and responsibility.  If we want to find solutions we will look for them not from the government or other big institutions, but here in individual behavior and posted on these pages twice each week.  So tell your friends, tell your enemies, spread the word!