Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Socialism

  • Why Illness Has Become a Crime

    Recently, Arizona governor Jan Brewer received a lot of media attention when she proposed fines and other financial punishment for overweight citizens and smokers on Medicaid. Others targeted by such programs include diabetics who fail to follow instructions from their physicians on treatment of their diseases. Other states are headed in the same direction.

    I remember a few years ago a network news anchor reading a story on the cost of obesity and the controls that must be imposed on those who inflict our medical system by being overweight. With a tone of scathing moral superiority, he declared that “the rest of us will have to pay for it.” A few weeks later, a diagnosis of lung cancer unfortunately forced him permanently off the air after decades of smoking. But he had voiced one of the two key propaganda tools by which the government destroys our individual rights in health care.

    The first tool is guilt. Patients must be morally disarmed by convincing them — not of their own responsibility for their health — but of their guilt. You may not make your own decisions because you eat too much, or too many trans-fats, or too much salt or too many sodas. You recklessly smoke, or drink alcohol or coffee or use drugs. You don’t exercise enough or drive safely. Therefore you must accept your guilt and do what you are told.

    That is the opposite of taking individual responsibility and facing consequences.

    The second tool is to disable your judgment and your mind. Neither you nor your physicians are capable of making correct medical decisions. Only the government knows the effective treatment and hence the drugs and medical equipment to permit. Who are you to know what is best? Politicians, not physicians, have become the ultimate source of wisdom in health care.

    The clear implication of such decrees is that physicians must become enforcers who turn in their patients to the government for failure to follow medical instructions.

    It must be said that there is considerable financial pressure on the states due to soaring Medicaid costs. Obamacare will push tens of millions of additional people into Medicaid — with the states forced to match spending (one of the more deceptive accounting tricks used to disguise the total cost of the legislation.) But that does not excuse the unleashing of the health-care police on American citizens.

    Those who accept that they have a “right” to health care which the government forces others to provide will gradually discover that they lose all freedom to decide what treatment they will actually receive. They will have surrendered their judgment and moral self respect to politicians. They will have to accept government punishment for not buying insurance, punishment for smoking, punishment for eating too much, punishment for drinking and punishment for deciding how they want to live their own lives. Physicians who follow their own best judgment instead of government protocols will be financially punished.

    A government that pays for the health care of our bodies will decide that it owns our bodies. Illness will be judged a result of our criminally irresponsible negligence.

    The only remaining choice will be to restore freedom to the practice of American medicine.

  • The Government Boot on Your Doctor’s Neck

    We live in an age when the Secretary of the Interior and the White House Press Secretary proudly and publicly proclaim that they will keep their “boot on the neck” of an oil company. This new manifestation of “hope” and “change” is ominous at a time when the government is rapidly escalating its involvement and control of all aspects of American society. That is especially true in the health-care arena, but anyone with a neck should be concerned.

    If you have been wondering how the health-care legislation enacted this year will work out in practice, there has been a strong early indicator from Idaho. Eric Holder’s Justice Department has used the Antitrust Division’s civil action and criminal prosecution powers to force orthopedists to accept government reimbursement rates for their services. Accepting anything other than the government rate is considered a criminal conspiracy against market pricing.

    How is that? The Department of Justice declares that “government prices are market prices.” The Idaho Orthopedic Society is guilty of criminal conspiracy to fix prices if its members charge anything other than the price fixed by the government.

    By the way, these physicians have also been told that they must accept rates paid by Blue Cross and set by the Idaho Industrial Commission for workers’ compensation claims.

    In the Orwellian world of the Justice Department, if physicians decide on a price, they are engaged in a criminal conspiracy, and if the government forces a price on everyone, that is a “market price.” When the clear meaning of words is replaced with government fiat in this way, all limits on arbitrary government power and its use of force are destroyed.

    For two generations the American government has reimbursed physicians and hospitals for less than the cost of treatment for Medicare and Medicaid patients. In addition, physicians who treat Medicare patients are forbidden from charging them for any service not covered by Medicare. These inequities result in the shifting of costs to other patients and private insurance companies.

    While providers who decline to treat Medicare and Medicaid patients have not been charged with criminal penalties (so far), the threat to further reduce reimbursements serves as a powerful weapon for politicians to rake in funds. They effectively turn organizations like the American Medical Association into public employee unions focused on getting their share from the government.

    The ground was laid some time ago for this mistreatment of physicians. Last year, during the debate on health-care legislation, a New York Times editorial viciously attacked physicians because they “have been complicit in driving up health-care costs.” The editorial said that physicians are guilty of this because they “largely decide what medicine or surgical treatments are needed,” which makes many of them “unabashed profiteers.”

    What President Obama calls health care “reform” will, over the next few years, make it quite clear who will decide which medicine or surgical treatments you need. It will not be your physician.

    As the government becomes the exclusive authority over the cost of health care, it will inevitably become the exclusive authority over the treatments permitted in health care. Physicians or anyone else who stand in the way will become “enemies of the people.”

    There are times when political rhetoric must not be ignored. There are some things that must not be allowed to just go by. Rhetoric can become government action. When a member of the cabinet or of the White House staff threatens to keep their “boot” on anyone’s neck, when physicians are made criminals because they do not accept a government payment that does not cover their costs, “boot” is not a metaphor but the Justice Department on our necks.

  • Government Spending Didn’t End the Great Depression

    Given that our country is mired in a severe recession, the history of the Great Depression — especially the history of how we got out of it — is rightly regarded as relevant to fixing today’s problems.

    Some popular accounts would have us believe that the Great Depression ended via a) FDR’s New Deal and/or b) World War II. Translation: it was ended via a) a veritable government takeover of the economy, including massive wealth transfers to pay for make-work projects and/or b) an extremely costly war, both in money and in lives. Keynesian economists (and the politicians they influence) have used this supposed history to justify claims that more government spending, no matter what form, is the key to economic recovery.

    But economic historian Burton Folsom and his wife, Anita Folsom, have written a forceful Wall Street Journal piece debunking the popular mythology of the Great Depression.

    Here are some excerpts:

    Let’s start with the New Deal. Its various alphabet-soup agencies — the WPA, AAA, NRA and even the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) — failed to create sustainable jobs. In May 1939, American unemployment still exceeded 20 percent. European countries, according to a League of Nations survey, averaged only about 12 percent in 1938. The New Deal, by forcing taxes up and discouraging entrepreneurs from investing, probably did more harm than good.

    What about World War II? We need to understand that the near-full employment during the conflict was temporary. Ten million to twelve million soldiers overseas and another ten to fifteen million people making tanks, bullets and war materiel do not a lasting recovery make. The country essentially traded temporary jobs for a skyrocketing national debt. Many of those jobs had little or no value after the war.

    What was the solution? In large part, for the government to substantially reduce its intervention, especially through taxes and wealth transfers. After the war, Folsom writes,

    Congress reduced taxes. Income tax rates were cut across the board. FDR’s top marginal rate, 94 percent on all income over $200,000, was cut to 86.5 percent. The lowest rate was cut to 19 percent from 23 percent, and with a change in the amount of income exempt from taxation an estimated twelve million Americans were eliminated from the tax rolls entirely. Corporate tax rates were trimmed and FDR’s “excess profits” tax was repealed, which meant that top marginal corporate tax rates effectively went to 38 percent from 90 percent after 1945.

    […]

    By the late 1940s, a revived economy was generating more annual federal revenue than the United States had received during the war years, when tax rates were higher. Price controls from the war were also eliminated by the end of 1946. The United States began running budget surpluses.

    A lesson of this is that government spending is not economically necessary to end a downturn or depression; it is economic poison. In today’s economic context, the antidote is first and foremost a massive reduction in government spending (tax cuts are desirable, but only once our deficit is cut) which must include a phasing out of the welfare and regulatory programs that so much of government spending pays for.

    This story first appeared on Voices for Reason, April 20, 2010.

  • Profits Are for People

    Those who advocate for government controls in medicine cry, “People, not profits.” They say profits are unacceptable in medicine because our health is so important. But it is precisely because our health is so important that profits must be vigorously defended. If quality health care disappears for Americans, it will have been killed by the perverse morality of those who want to destroy profits and replace them with government force. All free enterprise is considered an enemy of the people because it is based on the pursuit of individual happiness.

    If profits disappear from medicine, they will eventually be forced out of all aspects of the economy. For example, the President of the American Jewish World Service recently wrote in The New York Times to advocate for government control of world food production and distribution: “Food is a human right, yet we allow those in power to treat it as a commodity to be bought and sold by profiteers, interested in a quick buck.” Our model for abundant food must therefore be North Korea or Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture. This has always resulted in mass starvation, but power elites feel morally superior because they have eliminated profits.

    Such horrors are possible because the political and journalistic “conventional wisdom” is that profits are evil for everyone (except, of course, for law firms, lobbyists and Hollywood producers). Unprofitable firms are condemned and bailed out. Profitable firms are just condemned.

    Acceptance of an anti-profit morality will have the same devastating effects on medical care as it has on the diet of North Koreans. Life-saving new drugs and medical equipment will be forbidden if anyone is allowed a return on investments in them. Allowing patients to die while on waiting lists becomes morally superior to making a profit by saving a life. After all, wanting to save your own life or health is the ultimate “selfish” act.

    More opportunities for profits will bring down the cost of health care. Unlike government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, free-market enterprises, in their need for profits, ultimately reduce fraud and waste. As Wal-Mart and its competitors have shown by reducing drug prices and providing affordable walk-in clinics, better and more affordable health care rests on it being profitable. Competition — when the government does not forbid it — promotes better and more responsive care of patients, and the need for profits encourages savings.

    Can the government do better? The Department of Motor Vehicles and the United States Postal Service are not examples that suggest government will provide more comforting health services.

    A Gallup poll on ethics in November 2009 indicated that Americans trust members of Congress less than they trust car sales people. A CNN poll this year indicated that 86 percent of Americans think that government is broken. While Americans might think health care is broken — although many like their own care — do they think a broken government can fix health care?

    A front-page story in USA Today in December 2009 reported that fast-food chains have better food safety standards than school lunchrooms. Restaurants more vigorously test for and cook out bacteria and pathogens in beef and chicken than do public schools. Of course, school lunchrooms do not need to make a profit. Can government really be expected to do a better job with health care?

    Profits are an important American value without which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are impossible. Forbidding profit in medical care replaces life with death, liberty with force, and the pursuit of happiness with self-sacrifice. Let’s not kill health care and our freedom at the same time.

  • Will the Looted Just Shrug?

    The statist reaction to Republican senator Jim Bunning’s temporary block of a welfare bill shows what the welfare state has done to the American people.

    Everyone knows that federal spending is out of control. The feds are spending $1.4 trillion more than what they’re collecting in taxes. And that’s just for this year.

    Where are they getting the difference? They’re borrowing it, adding to the massive and ever-growing debt of the federal government. How is that debt going to be paid off? By American taxpayers. Your individual, average share as of right now is about $40,000. It’s growing every day because the feds are running up your credit card, which has no limit.

    So, Bunning blocks a welfare bill on the ground that the federal government shouldn’t be borrowing any more money. If it can’t afford to be providing the welfare, Bunning said, then it shouldn’t be spending more money.

    The statist crowd went ballistic. The attacks were the standard ones whenever anyone objects to any welfare state scheme: “He’s selfish, self-centered, and greedy. He hates the poor and loves the rich. He’s just grandstanding. The bill is only a small percentage of total spending and so it doesn’t make any difference in the larger scheme of things.”

    But the statist reaction to Bunning’s move goes much deeper than that and is a perfect reflection of what the socialistic welfare state has done to the American people. Having been born and raised under the welfare state, American recipients of welfare largess, including those on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, education grants, mortgage guarantees, and bailout and stimulus monies, honestly believe that they are entitled to continue receiving it for as long as they “need” the money.

    That’s why they call much of this junk an “entitlement.” What the entitlement crowd is saying is: “I am entitled to your money because I want it and I need it. If you object, my statist associates and I will go on the attack against you and expose you for being a vicious, no-good, selfish hater of the poor and lover of the rich.”

    This is what the welfare state has done to America. It has produced a real war among the American people — between those who produce and own their wealth and those who are trying to get their hands on other people’s money through the force of the state. The nineteenth century French legislator Frederic Bastiat put it well when he indicated that under the welfare state, the government becomes a great fiction by which some people try to live at the expense of other people.

    Almost as bad has been what the welfare state has done to the mindsets of the American people. It has made so many Americans dependent on the government, not just financially but also emotionally and psychologically. People are on the dole have convinced themselves that they could never survive without their dole. And they absolutely freak out whenever someone talks about ending their dole. Even worse, they look upon the government as their daddy or, even worse, as a beloved deity.

    What is happening, not only here in the United States but in Greece, Portugal, Spain, England, and other welfare state countries, is that there isn’t enough wealth among the taxpayers to plunder to fund the massive, ever-growing number of people on the dole.

    Meanwhile, panicky over the potential crack up of the welfare state, liberals are blaming the economic woes on “freedom, deregulation, greed, the bankers, and free enterprise,” and they’re proposing their standard statist solution — more socialism and Keynesianism. They’re saying that the feds should just keep spending, spending, and spending, no matter how much they have to borrow or inflate to do so. The notion is that more spending will put unemployed people back to work, whose taxes can then fund the voracious and ever-growing wants of the parasitic sector of society.

    But as we libertarians have been saying for decades, ultimately the welfare state house of cards is going to crack apart, just as it did in Cuba and the Soviet Union. God has created a consistent universe, one in which immoral means will beget bad ends. The crack up has obviously already begun in such heavy-duty welfare state countries as Greece, Portugal, Spain, and England, where the base of wealth to plunder and loot is more limited than it is in the United States.

    But even here in the United States there is a limit to how much socialism the private sector can bear. And don’t forget: there is always the possibility that those who are being plundered and looted might just decide to go on strike, refusing to produce any more wealth and just “shrugging.”

    This story first appeared on Hornberger’s Blog, The Future of Freedom Foundation, March 4, 2010.