Freedom in One Word

Now that Heath Care legislation has passed, the obvious question for opponents is this: Now What? My answer is best summed up with just one word:

Marijuana.

No, I don’t mean that you should go out and smoke away your anger and frustration. Instead, you should feel empowered. The best way to explain this is by telling the story of a disabled mother from Northern California.

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Obama gives sugar plums to the special interests

“Tonight,” President Obama intoned near midnight Sunday, after the House had passed two health care bills, "we pushed back on the undue influence of special interests. ... We proved that this government -- a government of the people and by the people -- still works for the people."

But even before the president spoke, the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America -- whose $26.1 million lobbying effort in 2009 was the most expensive by any industry lobby in history — hailed the health package as “important and historic.”

The second-biggest industry lobby in America, the American Medical Association, also cheered, as did the American Hospital Association, the No. 5 industry lobby. Throw in the goliath senior lobby AARP and Beltway powerhouse General Electric, and you realize Obama's underdog tale is all bark and no bite.

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Shame on Everyone for Obamacare

Healthcare Intervention: The Bigger Picture

The prospect and reality of Obamacare have woken up many people to the need to stop the socialization of medical care in America. It will produce here what it has produced everywhere: stagnation, overutilization, rationing, and the sacrifice of individual well-being in the name of collective justice.

This is the result not only of every experiment in socialized medicine but of every experiment in socialism generally. The reasons were spelled out by Mises in 1922. He explained that, without property and market prices, economic rationality disappears. The result is unworkable, chaotic, and impoverishing.

Medical socialism is but one variety of a larger problem. But it is one that is particularly devastating to people, because it affects their capacity for staying healthy and alive. By robbing individuals of their rights to exchange and choose, Mises wrote, state-run medical systems are comparable to those run by the army or by prisons, which are not centers of health but of disease and disaster.

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The Soviet Unionization of Health Care

Few of us relish paying for health care, but when we do, amazing things happen: Strangers listen to us and try to give us what we want. There’s a simple economic rule that what we pay for, we control. Insurers, hospitals, doctors, nurses, and drug companies listen to us when their livelihood depends on it. The more you take the individual customer/patient out of the equation, the more power we individuals lose.

The “health-care reform” currently touted by Beltway Democrats would take a system that insulates patients from the true cost of their health care — and insulate them more. It’s a scheme for spending even more of OPM (other people’s money). The Soviet Union ran the granddaddy of such schemes, even putting the cradle-to-grave “right to health” in its constitution. If we are smart, we will learn from the Soviets’ failed seventy-year experiment, which succeeded in putting people into early graves.

Take the individual out completely, as the defunct Soviet system did with all industries, and the individual becomes irrelevant. The Soviet government was the only purchaser that mattered and, consequently, the government, not consumers, told producers what to make. When the state tried setting quantity quotas for nails, factories produced lots of little, pin-like nails. When the state set quotas by weight, factories responded predictably and produced big, heavy nails.

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Conservatism Is Not What We Need

If you are going to listen to Washington politicians at all, it is always best to listen to the party that is currently out of power. After each election, it is the job of the losers to try to attack the winners in any way they can. Often, they inadvertently advocate genuine principles of liberty in the process.

During the 8-year nightmare that was the Bush administration, it was the Democrats that stumbled upon these principles in their efforts to regain the throne. It was they who pointed out that the government should not be spying on its own citizens, that the president was assuming un-delegated powers through executive order, and that it was neither morally justified nor prudent to invade a third world nation that had committed no acts of aggression against the United States and lacked any reasonable means to do so. Their hysterical mouthpiece, Keith Olbermann, even went so far as to cite a long-forgotten document, the U.S. Constitution.

Of course, it is now abundantly clear that these arguments were made simply out of expediency. With the Democrats in power, it is now the Republicans’ turn to “fight City Hall,” and they have rolled out their usual rhetoric about small government, free markets, and traditional family values. Moreover, they, too, have rolled out the U.S. Constitution and waived it around in opposition to the Democrats’ plans to “spread the wealth around.”

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The Personal Is the Political

Who makes the tradeoffs?

In the last couple of decades, one of the most popular political slogans on the left, especially among feminists, has been: “The personal is the political.” For feminists the phrase is invoked to point out that the personal choices women make — for example, whether to continue working full-time after having children — cannot be extracted from the larger political context in which they take place. The political environment profoundly affects personal choices, and personal choices thereby become political acts.

The left sees “The personal is the political” is seen by the left as a kind of call to arms: Everything you do is political so you should think through the implications. In and of itself, that’s a point that libertarians can accept, though perhaps on a narrower set of issues.

However, for those of us in the freedom movement, that same phrase takes on a very different meaning in the context of the continued expansion of government in both health care and the environment. As government’s role grows, more and more decisions that we think of as personal are becoming political – with all the problems that brings. There are decisions that we want to be personal and not political, but when resources become socialized and goals become collective, the personal becomes the political in all kinds of unsavory ways. Let’s look at two quick examples.

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The real fat cat party

If Republicans are ‘the party of big business,’ why are the Democrats raking in big bucks from industry after industry?

One of the great frustrations of the libertarian-minded right is how Republicans got stuck being “the party of big business.”

The quotation marks around the term are at least somewhat necessary because, in many respects, it’s not true.

The notion that big business is “right wing” has always been more sloppy agitprop than serious analysis. It’s true that historically, big business is against socialism and communism — and understandably so. Socialism and communism were once close to synonymous with expropriation of wealth and the nationalization of industry. What businessman or industrialist wouldn’t be against that? But many of those same industrialists saw nothing wrong with cutting deals with statist regimes. For example, the Swope Plan, put forward by Gerard Swope, president of General Electric, laid out the infrastructure for much of the early New Deal.

Yet the debate is always framed as if the choice is between “government intervention” on the one hand and free-market capitalism on the other. From 30,000 feet, that division is fine with me. My objection is the glib and easy association of big business with the free-market guys (Milton Friedman was no champion of public-private partnerships and industrial policy).

This identification allows self-described progressive Democrats to run against big business when they are in fact in bed with the fat cats.

For instance, the standard line from the Democrats is that the plutocrats and corporate mustache-twirlers oppose healthcare reform because, in President Obama’s words, they “profit financially or politically from the status quo.” That sounds reasonable, and in some cases it is reasonable. But it makes it sound as if Obama is bravely battling “malefactors of great wealth.”

But that’s not really how it works, as Timothy Carney documents in his powerful new book, “Obamanomics.” In 2008, Obama raked in more donations from the health sector than John McCain and the rest of the Republican field combined. Drug makers gave Obama $3.58 for every dollar they gave McCain. Pfizer gave to Obama at a 4-1 rate, as did the hospital and nursing home industries. In 2008, the insurance industry gave more money to House Democrats than House Republicans. HMOs give to Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 60 to 40.

So far, the healthcare industry has mostly been trying to cut insider deals with the government, not fighting to defend the status quo. Discussions between Big Pharma and the White House have been more like pillow talk than a shouting match.

This pattern is hardly unique to healthcare. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, led by GE, includes many other Fortune 500 companies, including Goldman Sachs — the company that has profited mightily from Obama’s brand of hope and change. CAP is an aggressive supporter of the Democrats’ climate change scheme. Why? Because GE and company stand to make billions from carbon pricing, thanks largely to investments in technologies that cannot survive in a free market without massive subsidies from Uncle Sam. GE chief Jeffrey Immelt cheerleads big government as “an industry policy champion, a financier and a key partner.”

Going back to U.S. Steel and the railroads, the story of big business in America is often as not the story of fat cats rigging the system. And the story of progressivism is the same story. The New Deal codes were mostly written by big business to squeeze out smaller competitors. The progressives fought for these reforms on the grounds that it’s easier to steer a few giant oxen than a thousand cats.

But healthcare is the most troubling example of the trend. Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson notes that while everyone has been debating the government takeover of healthcare, what’s really transpired is healthcare’s takeover of government — thanks to what he calls the “medical industrial complex.” Already 1 in 4 federal outlays are for healthcare; government pays, directly or indirectly, for half of all healthcare costs; and the entire industry is heavily regulated. Obama’s answer to this state of affairs is more — much more — of the same, on the phantasmagorial grounds that it will cut costs.

My biggest objection is not to what isn’t true about the claim that the right is the handmaiden to big business, it’s to what is true. Too many Republicans think being pro-business is the same as being pro-market. They defend the status quo against bad reforms and think they’ve defended economic freedom. The status quo stinks. And the sooner Republicans learn that, the sooner they’ll deserve to win again.

Jonah Goldberg — Los Angeles Times

Congress’s Accelerating Dereliction of Duty

How seriously Congress has ever taken its responsibility to serve as a “check and balance” against the powers of the executive and judicial branches of the U.S. government is debatable, but it has certainly run pell-mell from those clearly delineated responsibilities in the past several decades: abdicating its sole power to declare war, enabling the rise of an imperial presidency throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries, and culminating in its almost unanimous passage of the unread USA-PATRIOT Act that granted the executive the near-total unitary power the Constitution’s framers hoped to guard against.

The current health-care “reform” legislation thus represents but the latest of Congress’s abusing its power to enact legislation while retaining none of the responsibility or accountability for overseeing the subsequent use of the power it delegates thereby. The House version of the legislation grants a politically appointed committee (the majority appointed by the president) total discretion to design and implement all aspects of our future health care: who will be covered, for what care, at what cost; who will pay; what regulations will prevail. The Senate version proposes to pay for the legislation through achieving huge imaginary savings from Medicare, and delegates to another politically appointed committee the power to recommend “annual Medicare payment rates as well as other reforms” [emphasis added]—and whose decisions would be approved and disapproved at the sole discretion of the president. In sum, total control over the very lives and deaths of every American is being deputed to unaccountable committees vested with extraordinary powers.

Having now violated every principle of the doctrine of nondelegation, Congress can either be fired en masse or its actions repudiated by the Supreme Court. I’m taking no bets on either.

Mary L. G. Theroux — The Independent Institute

The Most Violent Woman in America

Americans are used to hearing stories about violent men. The nightly news regularly carries reports of murder, armed robbery, kidnapping, assault, child molestation and sexual assault. Once in a great while, such reports are about a woman who is involved in such a crime, and even then she is often an accomplice to a man. According to the FBI’s Crime in the United States 2004 Uniform Crime Report, women committed 7.1% of the murders that year. On average, women “account for 14% of violent offenders,” according to the Department of Justice.

When one thinks about violent crimes, what image comes to mind? Is the person committing the crime using his own hand or body, whether to fire a weapon, stab with a knife, beat someone with a blunt object, or force himself sexually on a defenseless woman? The criminal who has multiple victims, like the infamous serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, or mass murderer Timothy McVeigh, are sensationalized through movies and documentaries. But in terms of the number of victims, personally committed crimes pale in comparison to those ordered or promoted by heads of state, like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Saddam Hussein.

However, violence sanctioned by the head or ruling party of a government may only involve bloodshed and physical pain if one resists. As long as the people under subjugation comply with the leaders’ wishes, violence seldom has to be inflicted. The threat of violence is usually sufficient to encourage almost complete obedience. While the threat is omnipresent, most people rarely stop to think about it. If the people of a country become so used to following the orders of the few at the top, only a small number may realize that control manifests itself through threats of actual violence. Once the government passes a law, no matter how arcane or silly, the masses feel obliged to obey. Such obedience, of course, is always backed up by the threat of violence and that threat must be made real against at least some of the violators. That is, violators must have their property seized (by violence if they resist), or their persons jailed (by violence if they resist). In fact, if a violator of the supposed crime resists sufficiently, he or she will be killed. This is true regardless of whether the “crime” involved any harm or threat of harm to anyone. Consider all the so-called crimes in the U.S. , such as not paying taxes, prostitution, drug use, or insider trading, to name just a few. These amount to the following: a government, i.e. a bunch of human beings, often given power through a democratic process, decide that if certain rules are violated, a crime is committed even though everyone knows that it involves no physical harm to anyone and threatens no one’s property.

Recently, the House of Representatives, under the guidance of Nancy Pelosi, The Speaker of the House, passed a health care bill. One provision of this bill requires that Americans meeting certain conditions must purchase health insurance for themselves. The penalty for failure is jail or a fine, or both. It goes without stating so directly in the bill that anyone found guilty of this so-called crime and who resists, will be killed if necessary. The sequence could unfold like this: Person X meets the conditions requiring him or her to purchase health insurance as stated in the law (if the bill becomes law); person X refuses to buy insurance; person X is charged with a crime; person X is found guilty in a courtroom; person X tries to flee by using his physical might and directs violence at AND ONLY AT his would-be captors. Finally, person X is killed by his would-be captors, ultimately because he (a) refused to buy health insurance and (b) refused to give up his freedom. This is the bill that Pelosi smiled about as it passed 220 to 215. Ms. Pelosi, along with those who voted for the bill, is knowingly threatening the kind of violence that would ensue for any person X described above. She is the most influential female in the United States Congress and made every effort to get this bill passed. In terms of the sheer number of people who will be forced through threat of violence to adhere to this (should it become) law to avoid the fate of any person X above, Ms. Pelosi is the most violent woman in America.

Peter McCandless — Strike The Root