But I want to be the most brilliant person in the universe!

I'm feeling tremendously better, though not so much better that I'm quite ready to go to work. Still, I don't feel justified in taking another day off. So, like the dwarves, it's off to work I go. I even walked the dog this morning, which was so nice, as it smelled wonderful out and the early dawn was calm and beautiful. Still, I came here hoping to have something stunning to say and what can I say that competes with the community college Dean who says the following?

When the 'goes without saying' stuff gets challenged, people are often dumbstruck. It hasn't occurred to them that challenges were realistically possible, so they haven't bothered thinking through arguments. I think that much of the vitriol in our politics comes from different conceptions of what goes without saying. Take health care. To a conservative, it's simply obvious that the 'moral hazard' of insurance raises costs, since it insulates consumers from the true cost of what they're buying. Therefore, if you want to reduce health care costs, you have to make people more sensitive to those costs by making them pay more. Besides, it goes without saying that the government screws everything up, anyway. To a liberal, it's obvious beyond argument that the American system covers fewer people (by percentage), at higher cost, than any other system in the world; any theory that fails to acknowledge that simple fact of life is not to be taken seriously. Besides, it goes without saying that the market is based on voluntary exchange, and nobody volunteers to get sick. Therefore, the market model is inapplicable, and anyone who says different is either heartless or a moron.

The whole thing is more about academic politics, but I think this broader insight is brilliant and important.