Why Obamacare Cannot Possibly Work -- Ever (re-post)

President Obama says he wants to control health care costs, on the one hand, and to bring millions upon millions of new persons into the health care system, on the other.

Seen together, the president’s goals are contradictory and mutually exclusive.  Here’s why:  If you intend to introduce tens of millions of new health care consumers into the system, then the demand for health care products and services will rise dramatically.  When demand rises dramatically, prices rise dramatically as well.  If the president wants to achieve his first goal, that of reducing health care costs, then achieving his second goal will make it impossible.  What his left hand gives, his other left hand takes away.

But suppose he succeeds.  That is, suppose he succeeds not at both these goals, which is impossible, but at just one of them.  What happens when the government drives down prices, and what happens when demand for health care products and services rises dramatically?   

When the government tries to control health care costs, the consequence for health care providers like drug companies, medical instrument manufacturers, and doctors, is to drive some of them out of health care altogether.  That is, if Washington restricts the profits of health care providers, some of those providers will re-allocate their quite considerable investments in directions away from health care, to places where government interference does not hinder or limit their financial success.  They simply leave.  In the wake of the coming government-induced exodus from the tyranny of price controls, fewer health care providers can or will remain.  Fewer providers mean fewer products and fewer services.  In your very first economics lesson, you learned that when the supply of a thing goes down, its price goes up.

In other words, the president’s program to control health care costs will produce the opposite result.  I promise you, health care after the president’s reform goes into effect will not be cheaper than it is today.  Health care after his reform will be more expensive than ever, far more expensive.

The costs faced by a pharmaceutical company to develop new and effective drugs are staggering.  Laboratories and equipment are staggeringly expensive.  Outstanding scientists demand high salaries.  The path to FDA approval is arduous, time consuming, and fraught with uncertainty.  The advertisement and distribution of the drugs that win approval are more costly still.  The upshot of all that expensive research, certification, and advertisement is dicey at best, and massive sums of money can be -- and have been -- lost.

In order to pay for the development, approval, advertisement, and distribution of new drugs and the cures they might make possible, therefore, drug companies must make enormous amounts of money on existing drugs.  If they do not, the development of new drugs will be stymied and cannot well continue.  Thus, by holding down prescription costs, by prohibiting what it considers exorbitant drug company profits, the government is, therefore, also prohibiting future drug development and future cures -- perhaps the one that will save your life or the life of a loved one.  We will never know what things could have been accomplished and would have been accomplished in health care if the government puts a lid on prescription costs.  If Obama’s health care reform passes, more people will get sick, more people will stay sick, and more people will die.

Consider the doctors:  If the government puts a cap on what a doctor can make for, say, intestinal surgery, then the very talented and intelligent folks who otherwise would have worked very hard to become wealthy surgeons will figure out how to make a very good living in other ways, perhaps in architecture, nuclear technology, or international trade.  In the shadow of government-restricted prices (and therefore government-restricted incomes), fewer and fewer of them will decide to undergo the long, difficult, and exceedingly expensive path through college, through medical school, through residency, and through certification in order to become doctors who can expect to earn less for themselves and their families than they would have earned had they turned their talents elsewhere and followed an easier and less restricted path to greater wealth.  The same thing will happen with the pharmacists.  If the president’s program goes into effect, the result will be fewer doctors and pharmacists serving the millions and millions more patients the president wants to get into the system.  In other words, there will be long lines -- very long lines -- at the clinic, at the emergency room, and at the pharmacy.

The lesson of price controls is not new.  Simply think of the government-imposed control on gas prices in the 1970s and the chaos, shortages, long lines, and rationing that followed in its wake  -- only substitute health care for gas and clinics for gas stations.

Or, to take a lesson from countries like Canada and the UK (where government health care plans have been in place for many years), waiting lines are unconscionably long and some people actually die waiting for their turn in surgery because there aren’t enough surgeons and operating rooms to meet the needs.  To avoid that fate, Canadians often cross the border to get medical care at their own expense in the US, in cities like Detroit or Buffalo, where medical care is far more readily available than in Canada.  In other words, they come to the system the president is trying to reform, and they leave the sort of system he is trying to emulate.  If the president’s counter-productive plan goes into effect, even Canadians will die. 

My point, if it’s not obvious, is that, judging by the incentives it creates and the consequences it generates, this is a health care plan from Hell.

But it’s worse than that, far worse.  By introducing millions more folks into the system at the same time that his cost control measures are shrinking that system, the president’s plan will strain our remaining health care resources enormously, perhaps to the breaking point, laying an unbearable demand upon what survives of a health care supply system shrinking under the effects of government price control policy.  The result for millions of Americans needing medical care will be catastrophic.  In order to meet the burgeoning demands that an expanding clientele puts on a shrinking system, the government will institute rationing.

Put succinctly, price controls lead to shortages; shortages lead to higher prices and to long lines; long lines lead to rationing; rationing health care leads to suffering and death.

When family and friends suffer or die because they couldn’t get the health care they required, Americans will begin to regret the votes they cast in recent years, and they will struggle to return to the system that served them better -- if by then a return is still possible.

My dire tale of higher prices, shortages, long lines and rationing is understated.  I have purposely left the most expensive and most dangerous part of the President’s health care reform until the end.  To this point, I have focused primarily on health care providers and health care consumers.  I turn now to health care bureaucrats -- perhaps the most wasteful and dangerous element of the President’s entire misbegotten scheme.

Depending upon precisely what sorts of things one includes in the equation, health care is approximately one-seventh of the entire American economy.  To bring that much business under the watchful (but myopic) eye of government requires a simply enormous army of bureaucrats.  To them will fall the power of evaluation and analysis of every sort, and the power to enforce their decisions.  Almost nothing could be worse – unless you decide to put it all under the IRS.

The notion that government tax bureaucrats and career politicians are competent to determine (from a distance, at a desk, or in a committee with other bureaucrats) what drugs “ought” to be prescribed, what tests “ought” to be conducted, what procedures “ought” to be undergone, and what “ought” to be the proper cost of every consultation, operation, test, or procedure in every American locality from Anchorage to Key West is unmitigated hubris and foolishness beyond measure.  Those bureaucrats do not even know or understand how little their own jobs and services are worth; they absolutely cannot know the worth of the jobs of medical researchers and neuro-surgeons in varied localities across the nation, and what they “ought” to be paid for doing them.  Nor will they know what things “ought” to be done for (or by) patients they have never met and never will meet.

Precious few of the apparatchiks empowered by the government to make these decisions will be medically trained.  Indeed, there aren’t enough properly trained bureaucrats in the world to make this program work.  Almost none will have seen face-to-face even one of the persons whose lives and health they hold in their red tape entangled hands.  Indeed, they will not be dealing with persons at all, as they see it, but with “cases” – cases that must be dealt with according to the case book, the standard operating procedures compiled by other bureaucrats in other parts of government who spend their professional lives doing equally impossible jobs with equally deleterious effect.

Consider the bureaucrats.  Like all other persons, bureaucrats are creatures of incentive.  Those with careers in the medical bureaucracy will wish to succeed.  They will wish to rise ever higher in the bureaucracy, to be in charge of ever increasing portions of taxpayer money and to exercise more power than now they do.  In order to rise up the bureaucratic ladder, they must preside well over the affairs inside their bailiwick.  They must follow the rules.  They must keep their departmental budgets balanced.  While I am in favor of governments living within their means, the implications of doing so in health care are staggering.

It often happens that almost 90% of a person’s lifetime health care expenses occur in the last two or three years of life. When we get old, we get expensive. If the government is overseeing the program by which your health care costs get paid, and if that program is dangerously low on money, the bureaucrat in charge of your case, who knows that it’s cheaper to die than to live, who knows that his or her budget is nearly depleted, and who wants to look good to his or her superiors, will be sorely tempted to reason this way:  “At 76, old Joe has had a long life.  His country has been good to him for many years.  It’s time for Joe to pay the system back.  It’s time for Joe to cash in his chips.  That way, his own physical suffering is ended; my personal and professional burdens are eased; and others can move one step forward in the waiting line.  If old Joe dies, it’ll be better for everybody, including me and Joe.”

If you think I am making this up, I absolutely am not.  I have seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears directly from government bureaucrats themselves. 

When government bureaucrats invade health care, the inevitable result is something much like veterinary medicine:  If your dog is sick and you take it to the vet, the vet examines it and says, “Spot has a problem, and it will cost $300 to fix it.  What would you like to do?”  The vet says it to you, not Spot, because you are paying the bills.  If you don’t have the money to pay for the necessary procedures, it’s bad news for Spot.  Spot might die.  When the government is in charge of paying the health care bills, and the bureaucrat in charge of your case doesn’t have the money, you’re Spot.

The God of the Philosophers

          When a philosopher tells me that an uncaused cause made the world, I encounter several theological problems.  First is the concept the world-whole, which views the world as “a thing,” not as “all things.”  When all things came into existence, it was not “a thing” that was made, but “all things” that were made.   By so speaking and arguing, the philosopher is seeking a singular cause to a singular thing, which might not be the case at all, either with all things or with their making(s).  The Biblical account of creation is not a singular making, but a series of makings that is progressive and in stages -- the makings of several things, not one.  The philosopher’s alleged making of “one thing” (world) is different from the series of makings of Biblical creation.  Further, the “one thing” thus made is finite and to explain the origin of a finite effect requires only a finite cause, which is not the God of the Bible.  Second, when the philosopher mentions “making,” the making alluded to here is a making within a causal nexus, the sort of making with which our cause/effect analysis has normal connection.  Normally, when we talk about making, we talk about making out of pre-existing matter, as when a sculptor makes a statue out of pre-existing granite, employing a hammer and a chisel to do so, or as when a contractor builds a house out of wood, glass, shaped metal, rubber, etc.  When we speak about cause and effect of this sort, we are not speaking about Biblical creation, which does not entail pre-existent matter.  While our cause/effect reasonings and explanations always entail some material cause, Biblical creation does not.  Cause/effect, as we normally employ it, is irrelevant to Biblical creation which is a creating, not a making, and to which our cause/effect explanations (as normally employed, and as the philosopher employs them here) are something very different.  Creation out of nothing is not what we normally mean when we invoke cause and effect, which stand at the root of the philosopher’s argument.  To get philosophically to God creating the world, we must have a cause/effect sequence without a material cause, but we do not.  Our explanations yield no such results, nor can they.  Third, the “cause” thus allegedly reached is not the God of the Bible -- the infinite, articulate, multi-Personal Elohim Who, in His unsearchable plurality-in-unity, spoke the universe into existence.  All we get, if we get anything at all, is a mere finite, inarticulate, impersonal cause.  In short, with the philosophical conclusion that an uncaused cause made the world, I object to the philosopher’s use of the words “cause,” “made,” and “world,” none of which seem properly commensurate with Biblical doctrine and usage.

           To paraphrase Emil Brunner, any god reached by reason is a mere reason-god, which is always an idol.   Unlike the God of the Bible, Aristotle’s god does not speak, love, or feel.  It cannot become flesh, is not multi-Personal, and did not exist before the world.  To Aristotle, remember, the world is eternal.

The Harvard Delusion

           Beware the political and philosophical buffoons who masquerade as statesmen, and who fool the ignorant masses into believing them with trite phrases no more profound than “hope” and “change.”  Beware of those whom Roy Campbell, in his poetic satire “The Botanocracy” described as

         “Statesmen-philosophers with earnest souls,

            Whose lofty theories embrace the Poles

            Yet only prove their minds are full of Holes.”

         Real statesmen are not philosophers or metaphysicians.  Rather, they are persons of wisdom, educated at the feet of our ancestors.   As Charles Kingsley explained in his essay “Ancient Civilizations,” the wise do not feed on the shame of our forebears, but on their honor and glory, on great times, noble epochs, noble movements, noble deeds, and noble folk, which mental feast Kingsley also points out, is the political implementation of St. Paul’s wise injunction for us to think about whatever things are just, pure, true, lovely, and of good report (Phil. 4:8).

         Those are not the channels in which most modern political minds now move.  If Alinsky, Marx, Keynes, or the latest New York Times poll are your mentors, you are a fool.  So are those who vote for you.  When you, your voters, and your schemes are finally shipwrecked on the rocks of reality, undeception follows, at least for a moment, until human nature and the noetic effects of sin again re-assert themselves and we unlearn the lessons of history and replace them with fantasies spun out nothing more substantial than the arrogance of the so-called experts and the attendant practical hubris and self-deception that they alone can do what all others failed to do:  namely, to escape the rule of reality.  For them, somehow (we know not how) bad ideas will not yield bad consequences.

         I call it the Harvard delusion. 

        

Fragments: An Anti-Regime Potpourri

(1.) The Obama administration has practiced no self-restraint when it comes to commandeering the auto industry, trying to control and limit our exercise of second amendment rights, trampling boldly and broadly on our first amendment rights, and hijacking health care.  This administration has no trouble at all extending its reach into broad areas of human life that the Constitution sequesters from it.  But it simply cannot find the will to do the things the Constitution requires, like securing the borders.  Indeed, it will sue the states that, desperate for the border control the federal government refuses to provide, try to provide it for themselves.

(2.) The number of those no longer in the work force has grown by more than 8 million under Obama.  Those millions hoped for change, but the change they got wasn't the change they hoped for.  Those 8 million aren't counted in the unemployment percentage, so even if their number grew to 18.5 million, government unemployment numbers might still actually improve, at which time the gov't would declare its pathetic record a rousing success, and the benighted American voters would reward the economic wrecking crew by sending them back into office.

(3.) At the moment, because of the staggering ignorance of the American voter, America is becoming Detroit.  Our electorate seems incapable of continued self-government.  I say this so that you will know what your public schools too often produce:  Relativistic sheep incapable of sustained logical, historical or economic analysis.  So let me put it plainly --  save your country:  home school.  If you are a Democrat, you don’t need to home school.  All you need to do is send Suzy and Johnny off each morning to the local socialist indoctrination facility where the teachers, the principal, and the NEA will produce millions of mind-benumbed little lefties for you.

      

(4.) Confiscatory tax rates and other anti-business government policies stifle investment and, therefore, job production.  So, after Obama changes his policies, businesses will gladly invest the (literally) trillions of dollars they now prudently are holding in reserve.  But BHO won't do that.  He's too busy trying to put the coal industry out of business and investing in green energy offerings that keep dying.  He is anti-big business, and he's getting what he wants -- less and less big business.  And if, despite the currently bad investment environment, a number of courageous, insightful, and hard-working entrepreneurs still succeed growing a thriving business, he'll tell them that they didn't build that.

       He's bad for America in more ways than anyone can count.  Period.

Where Have all the Epics Gone, Long Time Passing?

       I often ask my students why the 20th century, and now the 21^st, produced no great epic poems.  I have yet to receive an answer, any answer.  After 30 years of such questioning, I suspect I never will.

       So here, in pedagogical desperation, I do what I seldom do:  I give them the answer they never gave me.  It is not my own; it comes from Russell Kirk, as does so much that explains what’s wrong with the world.

       Great literature, Kirk insists in his “English Letters in an Age of Boredom,” habitually hovers around four enduring themes:  religion, heroism, love, and human variety.

       But, he says, (1) a society, like ours, which has lost its religious convictions and its piety, denies itself the first theme.  (2) A society that denigrates true greatness denies itself the second.  Think about them what you wish, girl-smitten vampires are not heroes.  (3) A society that takes love for nothing more than carnal gratification denies itself the third.  (4) A society that conceives of humans as little more than accidental, soulless, interchangeable, cogs in a mechanistic nexus denies itself the fourth.  “The springs of the imagination thus are dried up,” Kirk pronounces truly, tragically, and finally.  In that springless desert, not even satire can flourish or long exist, for with the loss of the great themes and imagination comes the loss even of mockery.

       There, in one paragraph, is why great literature died in our hands.  We stopped believing the right things.  We stopped asking the right questions.  In our hands, the perennial issues and the perennial questions to which they gave rise all died.  We have the opposite of a Midas touch.  What we handle turns not to gold, or even to garbage, but to ghosts.

       You can expect nothing else from the culture of death.

       No cure for it can be found, save the Word of Life, which we meticulously have banned from the public square, the academy, the laboratory, and the arena.

       Wyndham Lewis, it turns out, despite his pessimism and complaints, was too optimistic.  He thought human reason might save us.  He never asked what, or Who, might save reason.

       Lewis forgot that while we human creatures are capable of reason, because of our selfish desires and unruly appetites, we are rarely ever reasonable.  Thinking is hard work; thinking rationally harder still.  We are not at all well suited, by birth or by habit, either to hard work or to thinking, much less to both.

       Kirk could have gone on, could have continued his litany of epic killers.  Had he done so, he might have included impatience, the sort bred from years spent planted squarely before a television set, years during which we acquired the habits and rhythms of sitcoms and soap operas – thereby inexorably acquiring a taste only for problems that can be raised and solved in 30 minutes minus commercials, problems like a torn prom dress or backing your dad’s car into a tree.  For us, if it can’t be handled in 22 minutes, it’s too long and too difficult.  Reduced to those shrunken dimensions, Milton’s epic panoply (or Dante’s) becomes a mere screenplay, a script, replete with artificial laugh lines, clichés, and crudities, wherein inane anatomical utterances replace eloquence and wherein scatological shock replaces beauty, truth, and goodness, things far more difficult to conceive, write, produce, and to communicate than garish, slapstick stunts and juvenile vulgarity.  For shrunken sensibilities like ours, the word “epic” means two hours of TV watching for three nights in row.  On any or all of those three nights, thinking is optional, hardly required.

       That shrunken sensibility stands behind what I hear too often from my students.  For example, while discussing Beowulf in an English literature survey course, and the fact that while sometimes you slay the monster, in the end the monster slays you, I asked Jen, a most delightful sorority girl, what monsters she faced.  She said:  “Every day, when I get up, I don’t know what clothes to wear.”

       Somewhere in the 20^th century, the scope of battle shrunk; the monsters withered; and so, apparently, did we.

My Best Moments

       Even in my best moments, I sin.

       When I praise God, I do it mostly for things He has given me.  My praise is not so much rooted in his character but in his giving me what I want.  In such instances, my real god is not God Himself, but my own ease and pleasure.  He gets my praise for catering to me, which reduces Him to little more or else than a means to my ends, a mechanism, a utensil, an instrument.

       At the beginning of his Institutes, Calvin righty insisted that real wisdom consists of two things, knowledge of God and knowledge of myself.  In my sinful prayers they both emerge.  I learn that, at my best, I am wicked.  I learn too of God’s infinite descent and mercy, which graciously accepts praise even on that fetid basis.      

What Jesus Really Promised about the Church and Truth (John 16: 12, 13)

            According to Roman Catholic interpreters, the verses noted above mean that the Holy Spirit will lead the apostles and their successors into much more truth than Jesus has yet given them. That undisclosed truth they could not bear, or could not profitably receive.  The sort of truth intended here, they say, includes doctrines not yet fully developed, like those concerning Mary -- doctrines that articulate her perpetual virginity, her immaculate conception, and her bodily ascension into Heaven.  They also include doctrines more fully articulated later by the church in its ecumenical councils, like the doctrine of the Trinity and those centered on the incarnation.

            Additionally, according to the Roman Catholics with whom I have debated, (and for the rest of this paragraph I employ their own words) apostolic succession is clearly indicated in these verses because (a) the doctrines noted above were not fully articulated during the apostles' lives, and, more importantly, because (b) those doctrines had not been challenged, and therefore did not need to be defended by the apostles, which is what "you cannot bear it now" (v. 12) means.  Therefore, being led by the Spirit into "all truth" is a promise and a privilege intended by Jesus not simply for his apostles, but also for their successors when those truths are revealed later.  Most of the information to be imparted in the future would not have been relevant to the apostles, whose theology was unassailable while they were alive.  In their absence, the Holy Spirit will lead their successors into "all truth" (v. 13).  This passage, therefore, is a guarantor both of apostolic succession and of the RCC's supernaturally endued reliability in matters of faith and morals because the Holy Spirit Himself is utterly reliable. 

            On the contrary, it seems to me that in this passage Jesus intends nothing of the sort asserted by my Catholic colleagues in their interpretation, as a careful examination of the passage in which these verses occur will demonstrate.

            In verse 1, Jesus tells his disciples that the rather chilling things He has told them so far (15:18ff) were told them so that they might not stumble when the difficulties He mentioned actually begin.  He is forewarning them so that they might be better prepared for their coming troubles.  Those coming troubles include persecution by their fellow Jewish countrymen, who will think that by harassing the Christians they are doing God's work (v. 2; Cf. Acts 8: 1ff.).  By forewarning his followers, Jesus is giving them information they could look back upon later with profit (v.4).

            His own task, He tells them, is to return to the One who had sent Him, a fact that left them deeply sorrowful (vv. 5, 6).  In order to assuage that sorrow, Jesus explains to them that his departure, far from being a deprivation, is indeed a great benefit because it makes possible the coming of the Comforter (v. 7), whose own task is twofold -- one task in reference to the world at large, and one task in reference to the apostles themselves.  Regarding the world, the Comforter will reprove (that is, convict, convince, or persuade) it about sin, righteousness, and judgment (vv. 8-11).  Regarding the apostles, Jesus has many more things to tell them, but because of their weaknesses and burdens, He delays his telling (v. 12), which will be carried out in His absence by the Holy Spirit (v. 13), Who will lead them into all the truth that Jesus wants to tell them now but that they could not bear at the moment, truth pertaining to their coming troubles, as the context makes clear.  They are to face great sorrow, the details of which are not yet given to them, except this:  While the world cheers the apostles will weep and wail, much like a woman in labor (vv. 20, 21).  But when it is over, they are destined for great and enduring joy (v. 22). 

            Nothing at all in this passage is either spoken or implied by Jesus about apostolic succession or about Roman Catholic infallibility in matters of faith and morals.  Only the most egregious and self-serving eisegesis insists otherwise.

            Jesus is not assuring His apostles (1) that all that they and their unmentioned successors will believe in the future pertaining to faith and morals is going to be true, or (2) that all the things they and their unmentioned successors believe in the future will be the result of the Spirit's leading, or (3) that all they and their unmentioned successors believe in the future will glorify Christ, something that characterizes things truly revealed by the Spirit (v. 14).   Instead, when the apostles comprehend some currently unbearable truth about their coming travail -- truth that glorifies Christ -- it will be because the Holy Spirit has led them to it.  All such truth comes from the Spirit, and, hence, from Christ Himself.  The "all" (v. 13) that describes the truth they are yet to receive is not universally inclusive, but is truth of a specific sort, truth pertaining to their coming troubles, truth that glorifies Christ after He has departed.  Jesus is not promising them and their unmentioned successors that they will learn literally "all" truth about faith and morals, much less that they will learn literally "all" truth whatever.  He says no such thing.  They are not here promised the truth about exactly how many grains of sand lie on all the beaches in the Caribbean, or about how to clone dinosaurs for breakfast food, or how to master cold fusion.  Nor is He saying that all they and their unmentioned successors teach in the future on faith and morals will be true.  He has in mind truth of a particular sort and for a particular purpose, to which He has been alluding continuously all the way back into the previous chapter, truth about the apostles' coming ordeals, truth that they were in no condition to receive at that moment.

            The text does not say, for example, that all that Peter or his alleged successors teach on matters of faith and morals will be true and will be given to him or to them by the Spirit.  Such things are simply not in view in this passage.  Nor does it say that Peter and the apostles will even have successors, much less anything about the reliability of their future teachings.

            If John 16:13 meant that after the Spirit was given to the apostles they would teach all truth and only truth, then Jesus would be flatly mistaken because after receiving the Spirit Peter, for example, sometimes lived and taught in ways that denied the very gospel itself -- clearly a serious fall from "all truth" on the chief apostle's part.  Sometimes Peter did not believe, teach, or act according to the truth, much less all of it, and was not being led by the Spirit into unbearable truths when he did so.  Following him can -- and did -- lead Christians away from the truth and away from the gospel.  

            Nor do these verses designate the RCC as the infallible arbiter of future theological disputes, such as occurred later in the various ecumenical councils.  That reading of the text is baseless, tendentious, and anachronistic.

            God Himself, not the RCC, will resolve all discrepancies -- theological and otherwise -- though it seems as if He has left their full and final resolution until the end of time.  Short of that, the issues that sometimes vex us probably will not be resolved.  I do not identify God's resolution of those discrepancies with the decisions made about them by the RCC.  Nor does this passage in John.

            To make my point from a different direction: The truth that comes from the Holy Spirit is truth that glorifies Christ (v. 14), not truth that glorifies one group of those that follow Him over all others.  Therefore, I doubt that the self-glorifying claims of the RCC on this point are the truths that Jesus has here in view.

            Nevertheless, Roman Catholics with whom I have discussed this passage assert that apostolic succession and infallibility are, to quote them, "clearly indicated."  But I deny that something is "clearly indicated" that is neither mentioned nor even hinted at, especially if that something is allegedly three or four centuries in the future, as are the ecumenical councils to which my Catholic friends say Jesus is alluding.  If such infallibility truly were "clearly indicated" here, that clear indication would be something more specific, like the mention of Bethlehem as the birthplace of the messiah in Micah (5: 2) centuries before the fact, or like a virgin conceiving a child, as is perhaps predicted in Isaiah (7: 14).  But even that unclear and debatable prediction in Isaiah is exceedingly more "clearly indicated" than the things that Catholics claim to find in these verses.  Indeed, if ecumenical councils and their decisions are present here in John 16, along with apostolic succession and doctrinal and moral infallibility, that fact is not clear at all.  Furthermore, I strongly deny the Catholic assertion that the notion of "unbearableness" in verse 12 means anything like "irrelevant to the apostles," as if Jesus were cryptically referring to Marian and Trinitarian issues that had not yet emerged.