Pain

Bill Whittle has a piece at NRO on pain.

He describes his experience with a kidney stone, and while he's at it, how the evil heartless corporations can't be all bad – they invented and tested stuff like Demerol and Dilaudid.

He ponders the experience of John McCain, tortured for years in Vietnam, with no thought given to sterile procedure or hygeine, and knowing the footsteps outside the door did not signal an attempt to relieve his pain.

The financial crisis is going to cause pain, too. Spending a trillion dollars on a bailout is going to hurt. But it will hurt a lot less than many of the alternatives, and it won't confine the hurt to people who deserve to be hurt.

So how do we inflict some badly-needed pain on people who need to feel it, without hurting the rest of the good and honest folks who pay their bills responsibility? Well, there are three simple rules that we must follow. Unfortunately, no one knows what those three rules are. So here we are. I’m as flummoxed as the rest of you.

I will say this, though: half way through the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had a plan to buy the slaves. He would give the south a chance to end the war early by compensating them — with Northern cash — for the market value of the slaves that they held. It was a monstrous sum, but he thought it was necessary. So he wrote: “Certainly it is not so easy to pay something as to pay nothing; but it is easier to pay a large sum than it is to pay a larger one. And it is easier to pay any sum when we are able, than it is to pay before we are able.”

My own irresponsibility got me looking at 50 years of age without health insurance. I’m going to owe that hospital about two grand for this adventure. If you think I won’t miss that two grand, then you have over-estimated the financial value of internet punditry. But it’s my obligation; it’s my debt. I owe it and I’ll pay it, and I’ll try to remain focused on the fact that it could have been much, much worse. It was only that pain that got me to change my ways.

Is that too much to ask of this mess? That from whatever pain we have to endure, we can perhaps learn enough from it so that we don’t go through this again?