December 2019: Memories of Jane and musings on choices

Dad does his best Armani ad impression with two-year old Jane in my lap.

Sometimes the most casual, spontaneous of photos turn out to be the most memorable. With a camera in an iPhone, you can take professional-level photos (sometimes after some editing). Today, I had a request from Fr. Hank for a picture from eight years ago. As I sat in my car, I googled "Lorenzi Hilton kidney," found the photo, downloaded it, edited it, and sent it off, all done in about sixty seconds on the ride home from shopping from a wide array of choices at the mall. Which leads to another story.

In class, I regularly showed Barry Schwartz's "Paradox of choice" TED talk, one of the most viewed TED talks ever. It is really a silly, misleading talk, and it is easy to pick apart the errors of logic, fact and rhetoric. But as we picked out furniture today for our new house, I appreciated the problem of having a large number of choices. The problem today -- one that Schwartz basically ignores -- is that while there are lots of choices available for just about anything today, be it salad dressing, a college or a place to retire, having a 'choice' is meaningless if you don't have the resources to actually make a choice. Deciding is the easy part; paying for the choice is the hard part.

Today, many people claim that they don't need choices, they just want free stuff. This is what politics basically comes down to today. People don't want choice in colleges; they want free college. They give up their choice of a doctor or a medical insurance plan, as long as the choice they are assigned is free. Much the same could be said for other 'rights' people claim today. N=Basically, I have a right to just about anything I want -- for free -- and it is the responsibility of the government (other taxpayers, really) to provide it for free.

Wouldn't it better were the government to give each citizen in this country a health insurance voucher, and let them buy the plan/coverage that suits them, not the one imposed by Obamacare? That would finally provide universal healthcare insurance and true choice -- of doctor, plan, hospital -- because they'd have the resources to purchase the plan. No employer-provided plans or policies. Rather, a market for plans that suit you.

And, by the way, isn't Jane a real cutie in this picture?