Joe Lieberman's recent threats to kill Health Care reform if it includes either a public option and opt-in Medicare haven't made him very popular on the internet or my email in-box.  It doesn't help that pretty much everyone left of center hates him already; he is Benjamin Linus as far as I'm concerned: not trusting him isn't enough, just having him around means he's probably going to ruin it for everyone.  The health care bill was already such a mess that I've avoided writing about it because it just depresses me, but now Tricky Joe steps in and kills two of the more interesting parts of the bill.  However, rather than simply bemoan Lieberman's existence, I thought I'd point out that this is a tailor made example of Dr. Kenneth Arrow's Impossibility Theorum.

Arrow won the Nobel Prize in Economics for, among other things, mathematically proving that it was impossible to devise a voting system that can correctly "convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide ranking while also meeting a certain set of criteria with three or more discrete options to choose from."  In other words, voting does not, and can not, perfectly express the will of the population if there are multiple options.  There are five criteria of an ideal voting system:

1. No Dictator: No one person can dictate societal will.

2. Universality: All voting preferences should be accounted for, completely ranked and deterministically defined so that the outcome does not change if it is presented again.

3. Independence of Irrelevant alternatives: The ranking of other issues should not affect the outcome of the defined subset.  A change in opinion on blue, should not affect green.

4. Positive association of individual and societal values: No individual should be able to hurt the outcome of an issue by ranking it higher.

5. Non-imposition: Every societal preference should be determined as the sum of individual preferences.

Dr. Arrow proved that these conditions were mutually exclusive in any system with at least three outcomes.  The proof - omitting all the math that, ya know, acutally proves it - was that at some point as the voters of a society changed their minds about a certain issue there would be a pivotal voter whose preference would actually determine the outcome of the society.  This voter in effect became the dictator.  As horrible as it is to believe, right now the dictator is Joe Lieberman.

Even worse, Joe is the sort of dictator that does not believe in any of the other premises of a fair vote.  For one, he believes that a procedural vote to bypass the filibuster is equivalent to a legislative vote, which violates non-imposition since the minority can overrule the majority.  Second, he knee-jerk opposes anything that liberals advocate, which means that liberals actually hurt the bill by advocating for it, violating the positive association of individual values.  He also changed his mind about the Medicare opt-in, so he doesn't do universality either. 

The whole bill is the exact opposite of the independence of irrelevant alternatives.  Instead, every part of the bill is linked together so that support for the public option, which is popular nationally, is contigent on abortion bans, mandates and subsidies.  Nothing is discussed in a vaccuum and even with a super majority the Democrats have to kow-tow to Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins and Ben Nelson.  They are all dictators, but Joe is the only one who is arbitrary with his power.  In 2012, if he even runs again, I foresee a coup.