Slate's Dr. Strangelove of economics, Steven Landburg
called out dKos last Tuesday, slamming
YucatanMan's diary of last month, which noted with horror that Baylor University had pulled the ventilator plug on a conscious and objecting terminally ill patient, Tirhas Habtegiris, because she could not pay her hospital bills. (A law signed by then-Governor Bush gave them the authority.) Landsburg's coup de grace was:
[T]here's a powerful human instinct to come to the rescue. Well, more precisely, there's a powerful human instinct to demand that someone else come to the rescue. (I'm guessing that in the wake of the Habtegiris case, nobody at the Daily Kos has taken to funding ventilator insurance for the poor.)
Landsburg had previously supported keeping Terri Schiavo alive against her advance and her husband's current wishes essentially on the grounds that her family would enjoy her continued life more than her husband would enjoy her death. More on the flip.
This diary is written simply to invite comment on Landsburg's article, since he did call us out after all. You'll want to start by reading YucatanMan's diary, followed by Landsburg's response. It's worth the time.
But before we get going, I'd like to remind everyone that not only is Dr. Landsburg a bully, he's also a coward. If his true concern is preventing the "waste" of social resources on health care spending, he has a much bigger available target than dKos: he could and should go after those on the Right who would force parents (and society) to absorb the expense of bearing, raising, and tending to unwanted children, by preventing their abortion at any stage from blastocyte to embryo to fetus. But that would require taking on powerful Republicans. I look forward to seeing that column of his.
My own thoughts are in the first response below.