Consider the Hamburger
Monday, January 25, 2010 at 2:32PM You can't escape the debate about health care in the United States. But, consider the hamburger.
What does it take to get a hamburger handed to you through the window in the drive-through lane?
Someone has to decide to be a rancher. The rancher buys or inherits property. If he's lucky his father taught him how to ranch, but he may have gone off to Texas A&M to get a degree anyway. He raises cattle. That involves feeding, protecting, nurturing and culling a lot of big obnoxious animals. He must hire ranch hands, veterinarians, and reproductive management services (and you thought cows just "did it"). He negotiates with packing houses, the USDA, and his neighbors who complain about the smell. Finally a certain select group of cattle go off to a processing facility to emerge as steaks and other miscellaneous parts. The rancher decides which and how many cattle go to whom based on his experience, with input from his accountant and admonishments from his banker.
A meat wholesaler processes those miscellaneous parts into ground beef. Based on contracts negotiated by his lawyer with the fast-food chain he delivers it by truck to the person running the grill. The USDA gets involved again.
But wait. What did those cattle eat before they were ready to be eaten? They ate grain and or hay which had to come from a farmer. The farmer decides what to grow and how much, going through many of the same agra-business challenges as the rancher. Ultimately he delivers hay and grain on a truck at the proper time and location in the proper amounts to keep the cows all chubbed up. (We're going to skip the part where the rancher sells the cattle manure back to the farmer — just hum "Circle of Life" to yourself in the background.)
But the farmer wasn't done. Before that pimply-faced high school kid can shove your lunch into that re-cycled paper bag, he needs lettuce and plastic encased doses of relish, ketchup and mustard. The farmer grows cucumbers, tomatoes and brassica juncea plants. A condiments manufacturer takes those veggies and mixes them with spices and vinegar.
Vinegar? Where does that come from? This time a vintner dedicates part of his grape production not to fine tasting wines but to creating a sour, acidic food preservative. Just as complicated, if not more, than the work of the rancher and the farmer.
And that's the high-level, simplistic version of how a hamburger gets to you. Shall we now consider how an electroencephalogram gets to you so the doctor can tell if you have brain cancer?
Let's not.
The hamburger gets to you because free people, taking risks, making choices and making profits along the way. do things that benefit their fellow man. And they didn't need the government to tell them to do it. In fact, the more the government interferes, beyond enforcing contracts, the harder it becomes to get that hamburger.
I wouldn't trust the government to be in charge of producing hamburgers. Do you really want to trust them with health care?