Stephen Landry's Blog

A Baroque Spanish Mass for Sunday morning:

Matías García Benayas (active 1690-1737), Missa Defensor Almae Hispaniae

Sunday Pipes from Mitigating Chaos

The Scott brothers play the organs of Ottobeuren Abbey in Germany

Nowhere is the risk of socialist harm to the young clearer than in healthcare—the very issue on which so many progressive voters are demanding radical reforms. That’s because we are currently in a boom of medical and pharmaceutical innovation, and when radical innovation is emerging, capitalist economies outperform socialist ones by even more than usual. This was true for the information technology revolutions of the 1980s, when America outpaced the Soviet Union, and it is proving true today as healthcare becomes more about innovation, AI, and information technology.

Government-run systems often (not always) do a perfectly fine job setting a broken arm or administering a long-standing, well-known medication. They do much less well when it comes to developing, financing, and delivering a new immunological approach to fighting cancer, personalized to your individual genome at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In our rapidly arriving biomedical future, innovation capacity will matter above all else. And though they may not see it today, the people with the most life ahead of them will reap nearly all of the benefits of a dynamic system, or suffer the consequences of a paralytic one.

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And where are American youth in this battle of ideas and systems? So many of them are embracing the progressive left and its promises for single-payer healthcare. They favor price controls, governmental controls, and heavy regulation. They tend to be skeptical about the promise of artificial intelligence to lower costs as well. An underemployed young person might naturally prefer a low-cost system that lets him pay no premium other than a sliver of his tax bill, and no co-pay at the time of treatment. But the money he would save over a lifetime in such a system is nothing compared with the value he’d reap from the numerous, improved treatments that our dynamic healthcare market will have produced by the time he’s a prime consumer.

From The Hammock Papers

Monteverdi, Beatus vir, SV 268

From the Vespers of 1640

Nicely performed by Vox Luminis