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Putting Health in Perspective

Yuval Levin

The conservation of health ... is without doubt the primary good and the foundation of all other goods of this life.

—René Descartes (1637)

If government’s purpose isn’t to improve the health and longevity of its citizens, I don’t know what its purpose is.

—Michael Bloomberg (2012)

On its surface, the political life of the United States cannot help but strike us as impossibly complicated. At any given time, we confront an astonishingly diverse array of public policy problems. Each of these “issues,” as we have come to call them, seems almost impenetrably convoluted in itself and largely disconnected from all of the others. Who could simultaneously understand the intricacies of our tax code, the inefficiencies of our entitlement system, the inadequacies of our transportation system, the moral challenges presented by the abortion or marriage debates, and the ins and outs of the dozens of other prominent public questions demanding our attention all the time? And if we are not competent to think about all of these problems in detail, how can we expect to govern ourselves?
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