Making ObamaCare a Power-Luster's Dream

As the 137 agencies and panels are set up and start issuing their many rulings on who will receive health care and who will not and at what cost, the total package of power manipulations of our lives by bureaucrats and politicians will become more clear.  But we have already seen states and certain health care operations acquire special treatment for political reasons in the maneuvers to get the votes to pass the unread, unconstitutional legislation in a most unseemly rush to exert the power of the Democrat Socialist Party.

Since that time, we have seen the Obama Department of Health and Human Services grant 1,372 waivers of a provision of ObamaCare.  These waivers are for one year of the medical expense limit requirements, which are higher than those many company or union health plans now offer.  They can be applied for annually through 2014.  These waivers have been granted to hundreds of union locals, despite the unions being the most vociferous of ObamaCare supporters when it was being considered in Congress.  Apparently many union locals changed their minds when they had a chance to actually read it afterward.  Or were the unions assured ahead of time that they would be granted such waivers as they wanted, seeing as how they were such munificent contributors to the election of the Democrat Socialists?  It is hard to know with this most open and transparent group of political operatives who were running the show in the 2010 Congress and the Obama gang.  Oh, did I say open and transparent?  Sorry that must have stuck in my mind from the election campaign that put these Democrat Socialists in control of our government and they thought of our lives.  I meant to say in this closed, deep-caved, murky regime of moles and voles.

These waivers now cover 3.1 million people.  The Daily Caller reports that:

Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.

That’s in addition to the 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services approved.

Now there are 435 Congressional districts and each has about the same number of Americans in the district.  If 204 waivers were granted equally among these districts, the distribution should average 0.47 per district.  But, somehow, surely just a statistical anomaly, the district of Nancy Pelosi, the ObamaCare prime mover through the House of Representatives, just happened to get 38 waivers or 81 times her district's equal share of waivers.  God must be loading the dice when he sees that the good people of Pelosi's district are so willing to delegate powers to the federal government that they elected this good, god-favored woman to Congress.  But I, not being much of a god-fearer, must note that this is a severe injustice in a nation of sovereign, equal individuals with full rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of their minds and bodies, and the pursuit of their personal happiness.  This is the hand of tyranny and it should be no more tolerated than when that hand was the actually lighter hand of King George III.  Under Democrat Socialist rule, there is no such thing as equal individual rights.  No, those are traded for status as either a crony to a powerful politician or the status of the Forgotten Man.  Most of us are forgotten.  I certainly am, unless I am on their enemies list.

One of the remarkable things about the companies getting waivers from Nancy Pelosi's district is that they were expensive, high-end restaurants, hotels, spas, night clubs, and car dealerships.  Apparently many other Congressional districts did not get so many waivers because they just do not have enough wealthy business establishments to compete with Pelosi's San Francisco crony mercantilism companies.  Unless maybe, just maybe, these businesses have special tutoring in how to take advantage of the overly complex and overly belligerent Washington power brokerage system that ordinary Americans will never figure out.  Of course, a call from the office of Nancy Pelosi to HHS head Kathleen Sebelius in her murky subterranean den probably does not hurt either.

Ed Hudgins -- Producers vs. Expropriators: America's Coming Civil War?

I like this essay by Edward Hudgins of The Atlas Society entitled Producers vs. Expropriators: America's Coming Civil War?  Please go and read it.

But, I also want to urge upon all of you the need to enlarge our argument with socialism even beyond the important Producers vs. Expropriators conflict.  Socialism does not recognize our right to be individuals who think for ourselves, choose our own values, and then act to live our lives in accordance with our own values and goals.  Socialists are not just expropriators of wealth and income, they are also dictators who force us to ignore our own minds and values and harness all of our actions to their dictated ideas, values, and goals.  There are many Americans of modest productivity, who may appear to be net beneficiaries of the expropriation of wealth and income, but who are very upset by the idea that someone else, such as a socialist elite, will force them to live their lives by values they have not chosen for themselves.  Many of the Tea Party protesters are people of modest productivity, but they simply want badly to have the right to manage their own lives according to their own values.  The guy who wants to work less and have lots of time for his family and for fishing is still an individual who often does not want Obama telling him he must buy health insurance acceptable to the government or send his daughter to a college the government finds acceptable for attendance by students with government student loans.

More broadly, the basic conflict is between individualist self-managers and brutal collectivist dictators, with most wealth producers on the individualist self-managers side, but many are also on the brutal collectivist dictators side.  The producers on the collectivist and value-imposing side are sometimes there due to guilt, sometimes to simply being prey to indoctrination, and sometimes because they see that as the way to protect the wealth against the socialists that they worked hard to build up.  Nonetheless, they have joined the enemy and we need to realize that some of our allies are not necessarily people who are highly productive of wealth and income.  They are simply self-managing individualists.

Postscript [15 April 2010, Southbury, CT]:  I first skimmed through Ed Hudgins essay when rushing to finish a ton of work including tax returns for business and personal purposes before heading to Connecticut to provide expert witness testimony in a court case.  I missed the fact that Ed has a short paragraph discussing some of the points I am making here.  Still, I believe these points need to be strongly emphasized.

The Sovereign Rights of the Individual

The sovereign rights of the individual are well summarized by The Declaration of Independence as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  But what then are these rights?  Some of them are given in the original Constitution and some more are given in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution.  But, the 9th Amendment of the Bill of Rights implies that there are more rights which are not enumerated.  What might some of these additional rights be?

In modern politics, it is common for the socialists to claim that a person has a right to adequate food, clothing, education, housing, and a good job.  This is nonsense, since any of these "rights" as they understand them mean that someone else is expected to provide these goods and services to the "right" claimer and that someone else is then enslaved to the right claimer to some degree.  No right can entail the enslavement of others or their involuntary labor or the taking of their income or property.  When one person claims their rights, those of others must not be thereby diminished.

It has, however, been often noted that the right to free speech means little if you are starving to death or freezing to death on a cold winter's night.  Food is a necessity of life, as is adequate clothing.  There is no question that education better prepares us for sustaining our lives and may provide us the information and some of the wisdom needed to pursue happiness with a decent chance of success.  Although we have no right to be provided with food, clothing, housing, education, and jobs, we very much have the right to pursue the attainment of each of these values.  No one has the right to act to prevent us from growing our own food or from trading for food with those who will join us voluntarily in such a trade.  No one has the right to prevent us from having a home, provided we provide ourselves with the land on which it sits and build it, or we trade with others voluntarily for the land and the house or the rent of some housing someone else wishes to rent us by mutual agreement.  It is in this sense that we each have the right to food, clothing, housing, education, and a job.  Others are never obliged to give these things to us, but they are obliged not to use force to keep us from them either through our own work directly or through our trading with others in a mutually voluntary trade.

To be perfectly clear, when we assert our freedom of speech, we do not require others to rent us an auditorium in which we can comfortably address a crowd who are comfortably seated.  We do not have the right to force a radio or television station owner to broadcast our speech.  But, others cannot shut us up if we speak in our own home or if we carry on a normal conversation while walking along a sidewalk.  Others are not obliged to provide us with a bullhorn or even a soap box, nor are they obliged to listen to us.  But, they can only stop us from speaking if we are on their property.  Generally, we are free to speak our minds wherever we can make an arrangement with the owner of the land or facility where we will speak.

There is no way in which we can be said to meaningfully have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if we have no right to perform productive labor, to think, to trade with others, to acquire property, and to act to secure our good health.  These actions are all necessary to us if we really have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It is these rights and other rights also necessarily subsumed by our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness which are secured to each of us by the critically important 9th Amendment, which unfortunately is hardly ever enforced.

Why were these critical rights not explicitly mentioned as protected in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?  I am sure it is because they were so well understood to be rights that they had not been seriously challenged in colonial times in America.  The quartering of troops in private homes during peacetime had been forced upon the colonists, so the Bill of Rights protected the right not to have to share one's home with troops involuntarily.  Implicit in this protection is the broader recognition that a man has a right to his property and he has a right to his home.

None of the enumerated powers of Congress give it any power to infringe upon the individual's right to their property without just compensation.  There is no power to prevent anyone from pursuing their chosen line of work.  There is no provision allowing the government to interfere with any citizen's education.  There is no power that allows Congress to interfere with the trades and arrangements any citizen might make for his health care.  None of these rights can be infringed by a Congress exercising its enumerated powers and no more. 

Yet all of these fundamental rights are routinely infringed by our unconstrained Congress and our similarly unrestrained state governments.  Sadly, many of our most fundamental individual rights are violated daily by the very governments which were instituted by sovereign individuals only for the purpose of securing our inalienable individual rights.  These governments are now generally illegitimate, since they are acting contrary to the purpose for which they exist and by which they are to be judged.

The Strange Anti-Individualist Mentality

There are heroes who walk among men. These men are those who want to and are capable of managing their own lives. They have the desire and the ability to think independently and rationally and the courage to choose their own values and to act to achieve them. They are optimistic enough to expect that they can realize happiness on this earth. These heroes feel worthy of happiness.

Then, there are the ever-popular anti-heroes. These are the people who want someone else to take on the responsibility of providing them with rules for living their lives. They want to know that if they follow the rules, others will be forced to provide their basic necessities for living to them. They are more interested in everyone having as little as everyone else than they are in lifting the average quality of life in society. These are the people who dread having to think for themselves. They dread having to choose their own values and having to figure out how to achieve those values in their own lives. These anti-heroes do not feel worthy of their own happiness. When they do feel a moment of happiness, they feel guilty for having had that moment of happiness. Generally, they are not very happy people, since it is impossible to be happy and to feel guilty about being happy. These people are then very reasonably not inclined to expect happiness on earth and they are therefore generally pessimists.

There have always been men who were willing to provide the rules and the authority to direct the lives of the many anti-heroes. When life was very tough and primitive, that very fact probably convinced a larger fraction of mankind that they were incapable of taking charge of their own lives and this led to a great demand for leadership who would substitute rules for the lacking effort of many to manage their own lives. The rules were always a combination of those of religion and those of the leaders who led people in wars and who provided police powers within a geographical region. This system of substituting rules for personal self-direction led to thousands of years of painfully slow development for civilizations and squelched the personal initiative that allowed the self-directed man to make technological and artistic innovations. Rulers, whether tribal leaders or kings, were seldom willing to encourage the independent thinker, since such thinkers rarely took all of the rulers rules seriously. It was also easier to rule if change occurred as slowly as possible. Stability was sought, not the dynamic upheavals which come with new innovations.

The development of a larger merchant and professional class of men occurred over time. These men were doers and problem solvers, who the kings and other leaders of Europe came to need in order to live luxuriously themselves, to fight their wars well with the slowly developing technology, and to finance their palaces and their wars. Of course, the nobility disdained such men, but they found them essential nonetheless, so long as they were tightly controlled. It was among these men that the philosophical developments of the Age of Enlightenment came to recognize more and more that each man had the capability to think for himself, if he chose to do so. They recognized that each man had the right to his own person, to the direction of his life, and to pursue happiness and the creation of wealth. The many religious wars of Europe also helped to convince them that man should be allowed freedom of conscience and should not be forced to conform to a particular religion or belief.

But, these men were still largely Europeans with a long tradition in rule-following. It was the Americans who in the United States made the greatest innovations in government by making a republican form of government designed to preserve, protect, and defend the right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The government consistent with this purpose was a very limited government which left men on their own to manage their own lives. This limited government allowed men for the first time to really enjoy freedom of conscience and the freedoms necessary to develop ideas and then to create the organizations and wealth privately to put their ideas to work. For the first time, men were secure in their freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the freedom of assembly with others to share and develop ideas. With adequate avenues for information, the creative thought and energies of Americans became a phenomena for the ages. More and more men were heroes. It was seen by many that man was capable of living his own life and able to achieve his happiness. Many men felt worthy of the happiness they did achieve.

But, the pessimists, the followers, the anti-heroes of self-doubt and self-loathing remained among men, even among Americans. For some reason, wherever men are more crowded together, they seem to turn more sour and lose that knowledge that man must act individually to control the environment in which he lives. The Northeast, the Pacific coast, and the major cities of the Midwest, all turned more and more to socialism. The day of the king leader was gone, but the day of the socialist Messiah has come. Socialism with its myriad rules and its vacuous promises that everyone else will provide for each of us, so that none of us is burdened with managing his own life, has taken the place of the king as rule-maker and authority.

The socialist is an individual who longs to submerse his individuality into a group. As an individual he does not feel worthy. His personal identity has never been discovered and has certainly never been developed. This is the person who worries terribly about how he appears to others, because he has no strong anchor in his own personal assessment of himself. He always feels unworthy of happiness and guilty for any shred of happiness he has achieved. If only he could belong to some group and give up his happiness to that group or another, he could escape his feelings of unworthiness and guilt. If only some group or combination of groups would tell him what to do and then tell him he has done the right thing. If only he could lose his individuality!

So, the socialist, like many of those of religious belief and like many of the impoverished followers of kings, is an anti-individualist. He is a man who fundamentally feels incapable of living his own life and unworthy of any success he may actually have in living it. Unfortunately, for these people, the great lesson of the 20th Century was that socialism comes with serious problems. Because it squelches the individual with his own thoughts, his own values and goals, and his own initiative to action, the creation of wealth stagnates and then the wealth of mankind shrivels. The people become more and more impoverished and dispirited. They turn to drink and any other available distraction from the bleakness of their lives, both spiritually and materialistically.

In socialism they sought an equality of material goods, but in the process they always lose the even more important spiritual values which in a free market induce them to produce those material goods and generally to seek out paths to happiness by investing in their own knowledge and in sharing values voluntarily with others. The involuntary sharing of the socialist system, deprives the sharing of values of all of its value. Socialist systems always become totally focused upon material goods in a way no free market system can ever be. In the free market system, personal values and goals are the motivator for thought and action. The system allows for a great diversity of values, with all men able to live harmoniously, provided only that they agree not to initiate the use of force. In the socialist system these values and goals simply make one a renegade and they must be squelched with the brutal use of force. This is indeed what happened time after time in the 20th Century when all sorts of variants on socialist systems were tried. Among these were fascism, it Nazi variant, and several forms of communism.

Since socialism was widely seen to have failed, many of the anti-individualists came more clearly to realize that they are anti-man. They loathe themselves, so of course, they loathe mankind. Now those who loathe mankind can turn to a man-hating god, or at least to a god that thinks men are sheep. They can also turn the earth or nature into a god. If they do the latter, they come to think of man as an adulterer of nature and the earth. Man is the defiler of the natural beauty and some intrinsic good represented by the earth and nature. This is a very effective outlet for the self-loathing. It is also a rationale for chaining those men who seek to create wealth and to make mankind more comfortable and secure by controlling nature and by altering the environment for the pleasure of man. The anti-individualist resents the individualist mightily. He hates to be reminded that some men are capable of living their own lives and that some men seek out, choose, and develop their own values.

The popular perception that socialism had failed at the end of the 20th Century caused the unworthy feeling man to seek out environmentalism and catastrophic man-made global warming alarmism as substitutes. These served his purposes very well. Then, along came a Messianic socialist leader of the old school who had added environmentalism and catastrophic anthropogenic global warming to his repertoire and many a socialist who has taken refuge in anti-man environmentalism, is now also returning to his socialist roots. Among other discredited theories, Keynesianism has made a comeback. Labor union bullying, the nationalization of the healthcare industry, mandate-chained energy industries, heavy-handed controls of the evil banking industry, further entrenchment of the communist government school system, and much more of the old-time socialist agenda is back in a big way. This is the best of times for the determinedly anti-individualist anti-hero.

Except for one little problem. It must be awful to feel incapable of managing your own life. It must be terrible to feel unworthy of happiness. It must be the ultimate boredom not to be able to think for yourself. How I pity these socialists, rabid environmentalists, and man-hating anthropogenic catastrophic global warming alarmists. They suffer such a lack of spiritual values.