Fascism And The Leakage Of Liberty

Maybe only God can save the American ideal, now. We can try to be participants. Some “moderate” Democrats in The Senate were holding out on the health care bill, but it looks like they’ve satisfied/paid off those Senators so that they’ve called a vote in The Senate in the early morning, which they think they can pass. If so, that bill will have to be reconciled with The House bill, and the result be passed in both houses. Quickly accomplishing that is by no means certain. But, I thought it was quite a question as to whether they’d be able to herd the Democrats in The Senate in the first place.

Democrats can have qualms about spending or taxing in a recession or abortion in the case of Senator Nelson. But we probably should take their word for it when they say they’d really like to pass health care reform, but for…whatever. As of now, they appear to have satisfied their “whatevers” sufficiently for them to be able to fulfill their desire to vote for health care reform. The bottom-line is this: it’s definitive of being a Democrat that you think government can interfere with privacy and liberty to legally constrain free markets and make society better. Heck, a lot of Republicans believe that. Certainly and confessionally in the case of health care, most of them say they should constrain private insurance to forbid denial of coverage for “preexisting conditions.” That means that we aren’t talking about “insurance” at all. Insurance companies can only hope to pay the inevitably soaring cost of the new legal constraints, was in the government’s (unconstitutional) mandate that everyone who will be provided coverage, must buy a health insurance product. Obviously it’s unconstitutional: it’s fascism.

But, Insurance is something that you buy that you don’t need right now, and hopefully won’t, but you buy “insurance” just in case you do. Getting health insurance with a preexisting condition is like buying fire insurance when there’s a fire in one room, or buying auto insurance after an accident, or life insurance when you get cancer. I don’t believe any of this nonsense. Perhaps these days, that makes me a (horrors) “non-mainstream” Republican. I don’t believe the federal government has either the constitutional right or the practical ability to effectively restrict private markets. What I’m saying is that The Constitution affords no such power and that such an effort is practically misguided. It won’t work as planned, but will only alter human behavior and distort and damage the market. It’s practical fantasy and real damage. That’s standard Democrat practice. Republicans talk about the “unintended consequence of legislation. Thomas Sowell speaks of “Stage II” thinking, which Democrats don’t do. They act on a snapshot morality, with little regard to how their actions will change the live organism of real society, which of course it always will.

For example yesterday, ND’s Senator Kent Conrad and others cited the CBO projection that the bill will actually reduce the projected deficit. Wanna bet? The CBO projections has to assume everything that is unreasonably assumed in the bill. The deficit might be reduced if that Medicare cut isn’t realized that won’t be. If it is, there will be a dramatic rationing of care, which they have denied. But there will be, anyway. How else will cost be restrained other than by restricting payment for care? And if that cut isn’t realized, reducing the deficit goes right out the window. And, the hundreds of billions of “DocFix” money to compensate for Medicare underpayment is simply moved to another piece of legislation. Besides, as I was saying, the legal changes will change the behavior of the people, the delivery of care, and the actual profit of those who will pay the tax increases. Which means the “expected” (I don’t expect it) amount of tax collected won’t be realized. So, where will the money come from? Tadaaa: from the already bankrupt and in crippling debt, general fund. Oh, they’ll need more presses to print even more than the already unprecedented amount of funny money, reducing the value of yours. Our fiscal and monetary course is already unsustainable. With this law, we can drive the country off a cliff, faster.

Historically, economists have understood the pliable behavior of humans since Adam Smith and the minimal common-sense thinker always did. I’m not talking about today’s economists who project behavior and results in numbers that comply with their personal social theory. I’m talking about common-sense understanding of human nature. In America, our largest state and state economy has practiced legislative social design unconstrained by the realities of human sentiment and behavior. As a result, California is fiscally bankrupt. Are they going to change their ways? Heck no! This isn’t about practicality. It’s about ideology. California is going to wait for the federal government, one way or another, to bail them out. And as we now have a federal government with a corresponding ideology, I’m sure that one way or another, they will. And the rest of the country will pay for California’s indulgence, which will make Ben Nelson’s deal with Harry Reid for us all to pay Nebraska’s additional Medicaid costs, look paltry. This federal government is going exactly the same way as California, which is bleeding residents who want to productively invest their resources, both in capital and labor, as they are unable to do, now. The supposed solution is for the federal government to rope in all taxpayers and their work, so that there is nowhere to go.

But, in a world where the concept of democracy has spanned the oceans, is there no haven for the lover of liberty? America was a bold and novel experiment over 230 years ago, and while liberty has since waned, America has remained a relatively free and comfortable place to invest one’s efforts. But today, with the speed and extent of changes in America and the speed and ease of worldwide travel, that is less the case all the time. Liberty will soon need find its sanctuary elsewhere. Here, it’s in steep decline. Either it will suffer collapse or America will sink to a different sort of place.

Ought people be taken care of when care is needed? Of course they should and generally they do. The reports of deaths from lack of insurance are oversold. Bring out the doctors and hospitals that are denying care to the dying. Is America really full of such beasts? Anyway, the civility of a society is measured from the bottom up, not the top down. Decent people take care of their families, their civic organizations, their neighbors, their communities, etc. Civil responsibilities move in that direction. The decency of a people is not measured by the action of a government over three hundred and fifty million people and over three and a half million square miles. The nation that was once the refuge of free spirits is becoming the labor camp of captive souls.