What can we learn from the Aurora, Colorado tragedy?

This post originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a year-end post about Baseball, in which I discussed the passing of a wonderful former star for the Chicago Cubs during my youth—Ron Santo.  I would like to spend this mid-summer post gloating about his recent induction into the Hall of Fame (and I will touch on that briefly at the end of this post), but life got in the way.  Unfortunately, like so many Americans this past weekend, I was reminded of the arbitrariness of life and of the randomness with which violence can destroy lives.

Yes, I am talking about the shootings in Aurora, Colorado—and yes, I know, everybody and their cousin’s uncle has commented on this tragedy.  But, for a moment, I want to focus on the relevance to this tragedy of some things I’ve been writing about for a long time.

While so many people at times like this wring their hands about the easy availability of guns, or the lack of long-term care available for the mentally ill, and try to urge quick legislative fixes to the these senseless tragedies—they simply assuage their own guilt while missing the point completely.  Those factors are nothing more than enablers of what is going on—neither causes, nor even symptoms, of what is wrong.  I think what is wrong is deeper than either of those issues, and is larger than anything petty politics or simple legislation can address—the core of this problem really goes to the soul of a generation in this country (my generation, the “Baby Boomers”).  To let me explain, please indulge me for a moment with a few digressions.  But, before I digress, I want you to keep in mind the first definition of society in the American Heritage Dictionary:  “the totality of social relationships among humans.” [emphasis added]

Probably the greatest speech Ronald Reagan ever gave was made during the fall of his first year as Governor of California.  In September, 1967, Reagan returned to his alma mater, Eureka College, to give an address to dedicate the opening of a new  library on campus (The Value of Understanding the Past). During that speech Reagan made the following prophetic statements on the eve of all the turmoil that would rock this country during 1968:

We have to re-examine our individual goals and aims.  What do we want for ourselves and our children? Is it enough to have material things? Aren’t liberty and morality and integrity and high principles and a sense of responsibility more important?  The world’s truly great thinkers have not pointed us toward materialism; they have dealt with the great truths and with the high questions of right and wrong, of morality and of integrity.  They have dealt with the question of man, not the acquisition of things. And when civilizations have disregarded their findings, when they have turned to the things of the flesh, they have disappeared….

… But we must learn from yesterday to have a better tomorrow.  We are beset by problems in a complex world; we are confused by those who tell us only new and untried ways offer hope. The answers to all the problems of mankind will be found in this building by those who have the desire to find them and perception enough to recognize them….One of mankind’s problems is that we keep repeating the same errors. For every generation some place, two plus two has added up to three, or in another place, five – four seems to elude some of us. This has happened in my generation and I predict, without smugness, it will happen to yours….

A few of those dusty books with those “answers to all the problems of mankind,” still sit in a library somewhere.  They include, but are not limited to, the New Testament, the poetry of the 17th Century Anglican priest, John Donne, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and President Washington’s Farewell Address, which state (in order):

Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us….  … For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.  For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this:  ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another! (St. Paul (Saul of Tarsus), The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, around 54 or 55 A.D. (the New King James Version).

…all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language…God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another….  No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main….  Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” (John Donne, Devotions, Meditation XVII:  Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die (1624)).

…no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles…;…and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other. (Virginia Declaration of Rights, paragraphs 15 and 16, June, 1776).

Cultivate peace and harmony with all.  Religion and morality enjoin this conduct. … It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period a great nation to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.  (President Washington’s Farewell Address, September 17, 1796).

All of these old quotes point to a lesson and a challenge—yes, we’ve been given freedom, but we’ve also been challenged to use that freedom to create relationships with our neighbors, and to care for those neighbors to build communities and a society, and, in the end, to protect our freedom.  In essence, that liberty we were given may have provided us with independence from governments or dictators or Pharisees; but to sustain that gift, we were challenged to develop an enduring interdependence of family and neighborhood—a fundamental interdependence to sustain relationships of free people, and, therefore, to sustain a society designed to preserve and protect the gifts of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  It was an interdependence based on the commitment to each other of “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”  It was that challenge that our Settlers and Founders accepted, and it was that challenge that prompted us to improve ourselves throughout our history.

Somewhere, though, in all the turmoil and search for “truth” that engulfed the Baby Boom generation as we came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, we began to abandon the quest for interdependence and to substitute it with the embrace of autonomy—and then we called this new autonomy “liberty” and passed this fundamental misunderstanding of our society to our children.  We coveted our freedom to come, go and do as we pleased, while we came to abhor our neighborhoods as “Peyton Place.”  Privacy became the watchword, and fences became our shield from participating in something larger than ourselves.

As the decades have come and gone, and our hair has thinned and grayed, this new approach to freedom has allowed many of us who were raised with strong self-esteem to prosper alone—as islands onto ourselves.  But, as the Wall Street Journal noted almost two decades ago, this approach left many of our neighbors without the relationships and guardrails they needed to succeed in life (No Guardrails: August 1968 and the death of self-restraint).

And the loss of these guardrails has had deadly consequences for society.  We’ve left people alone over the decades who needed friendship and neighbors.  In the process, we’ve gotten people whose torments and troubles become magnified in their loneliness and autonomy, and who then lash out in violence—at a doctor in Florida, at fellow students in Colorado and Virginia, at citizens meeting with their Congresswoman in Tucson, in a movie theater in Colorado, and on and on.  What has happened is the antithesis of what is supposed to happen in the context of a caring, neighborly love; of what is supposed to happen in the context of an interdependence that our forefathers believed was essential to maintain a society of free people.  That interdependence can not be substituted by a government program or bureaucrat.  It is an individual responsibility—neighbor to neighbor.  Without it, people fester alone in their own indulgences—and when coupled with an absence of self-discipline, the consequences are often violent and destructive.

In the meantime, have those of us who “prospered alone” really succeeded?  Look at the headlines of the weeks preceding the shootings in Colorado, and you’ll see breaches of trust by those who supposedly were the success stories:  the CEO of a commodities trading firm who misused his clients’ accounts for 20 years in order to avoid personal failure; an entire city council of a town in California that caused the town to declare bankruptcy, in part, because those leaders improperly accounted for public funds for more than a decade; and a revered football coach and officers of a public university who cared more about their image than the safety of children in their community.

What the editors of the Wall Street Journal tried to articulate almost two decades ago is still true.  In every age and in every society, people erected “guardrails”, or traditions or customs to live by.  The best of those customs tend to discipline–or teach–members of the society about right and wrong behavior and keep such behavior within an accepted civil norm so that society can function.  A society that recognizes no norms for civility, and no difference between right and wrong behaviors, quickly devolves into chaos.  Moreover, a society that won’t instill those customs and traditions through caring interaction between neighbors soon becomes dysfunctional.  Just as you can’t remodel a house merely by tearing the walls to the studs without replacing them, you can’t simply change the traditions and customs for a society by erasing or ignoring them–you need to replace them with traditions or customs that fit the framework of the original structure, and then work to instill those customs and traditions, or you loosen the bonds of civility and society.

Those traditions and customs must be grounded on principles and virtues consistent with maintaining an interdependent society of free people:  traditions and customs that promote “justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and … forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.”  This can’t be done by delegating our obligations as free people to someone else or government—government doesn’t love your neighbor, people do.  Nor can it be accomplished by adopting new “first principles” that are foreign to our civilization, our beliefs, and our history.  Maybe, if we rekindle these “first principles” hiding in all those dusty old books with proper customs and traditions, we will reduce the future risk of events like the Colorado shootings, and we will re-establish the commitment to honor and self-discipline that keeps us from giving in to avarice.  Isn’t it worth a try?

All of this gets me back to Ron Santo.  Santo was a “hero” from my youth.  He arguably was the best third-baseman in the National League during the 1960s and early 1970s.  He played on the great Cub infield of the late 1960s, which, in 1969, placed all four infielders (Ernie Banks, Glen Beckert, Don Kessinger, and Santo), and the catcher (Randy Hundley), on the National League All-Star squad, with Santo starting at Third.  He was an All-Star 9 of his 14 National League Seasons.  For a generation of kids who grew up in the Chicago area, he was the heart-and-soul of a team that included Hall of Famers Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Ferguson Jenkins, and Leo Durocher.

But, most importantly, he continued to give to the community for the remainder of his life.  Santo stayed in Chicago after retirement and became the radio voice for the Cubs for two decades before his death.  While he fought the ravages of diabetes and lost both legs to the disease, he kept his charm and his sense of humor, and he worked with young boys in the community to teach them to be men.  He didn’t wallow in his troubles and lash out at society; nor did he prey on the young boys who worked with him.  Instead, he became an inspiration to a whole new generation of young boys—as a well as a continued inspiration to us older boys.

What we need in order to avoid the isolation that creates events like the Colorado shootings—and all of the avarice that pervades the halls of private and public power—is not more laws.  We need a lot more Ron Santos—in our families, our neighborhoods, and our private and public institutions.  And we need to do the hard work of rebuilding traditions and customs that produce and sustain the Ron Santos among us.

It’s just that simple—and that hard.

But, again … isn’t it worth a try?

We Can Not Allow Class Warfare To Work Again!

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

Thomas Sowell notes in this article, Trashing Achievements, a very corrosive form of class warfare has emerged in this campaign from desperate Democratic candidates from the courthouse to the White House. For instance, Sowell recounts this recent statement from the Democratic Senate candidate in Massachusetts,

To cheering audiences, Professor Warren says, “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You build a factory out there, good for you, but I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate.”

This argument is wrong for many reasons, including:

• It assumes that your successful neighbors don’t pay taxes—but they do. And, what’s more, no matter where you slice it—the top 1%, 2%, 5% or 10%—the earners at these levels pay most of the taxes collected at every level of government in this country.

• It assumes that the group Professor Warren calls “the rest of us” pays all the taxes that pay for the schools and the infrastructure in this country—but they don’t. While virtually everyone who has a job pays into Social Security and Medicare, those programs don’t pay for the education and the infrastructure that Professor Warren is talking about. As for the federal income taxes that do contribute to pay for those programs, almost one half of the country’s population is exempted from paying those taxes.

• It assumes that the problem with government budgets is that we aren’t raising enough revenue to pay for education and infrastructure, but those programs are not driving the increase in the public debt. What is driving the widening gap between tax revenue and public spending are the growing costs of social entitlements, public-sector pensions, layers of unnecessary bureaucrats, mounds of new regulations, and fraud and waste in the procurement process.

• Finally, and most importantly, it assumes that government in our society always came first, and that all we have accomplished is a result of government giving us benefits. But any “benefit” bestowed by government had to come from taxes, and those taxes had to come from citizens or their businesses, and those citizens and businesses had to accumulate property and income to pay for those taxes. In the end, it is the source of private property and income—jobs and business, from the farm to the town square to the factory—that came first to pay for government.

In fact, Professor Warren’s argument turns the history of this country on its head. The national government did not even appear in the United States until the colonists were here for almost 150 years—living and working on farms and in small communities. In fact, from the 1630s to the 1750s, the European governments with colonies here largely left the colonists to govern themselves. It is the productive farmers and businessmen who owned property who paid the first taxes from their earnings to pay for the schools and the canals and the roads. They continued to pay the taxes to enlarge the infrastructure during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, and they were the ones who shouldered the burden of 70%-90% marginal tax rates for decades after the New Deal programs were enacted. And it still takes the production of private income from the efforts of the private job creators to pay for all those schools and roads that Professor Warren talks about.

Government didn’t come first in America. Productive, entrepreneurial citizens always have come first in this country.

The left’s class warfare rhetoric shows what is at stake in this election. If the Democrats don’t understand our country’s history, and don’t understand the consequences of the tax and spending policies they have enacted, they can’t be trusted to fix the problems that face this country. If they do understand our history and these consequences, then they are lying to the American people to stay in office—and we must not allow them to succeed.

Not this time, and not ever again.

It is time to move beyond this corrosive class rhetoric if we are ever going to stabilize and modernize our country to meet the challenges of the 21^st Century in a way that preserves and strengthens the inalienable rights we’ve been given.

It is time for a change in White House and the U.S. Senate.

It is time for all good citizens “to come to the aid of their countrymen” and make this change in the November Election.

So, we now know it’s a tax—its time to abolish it!

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

Over the last few weeks (most of which I spent on a family vacation outside the country), I read the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions from the 2011-12 term and tried to write this post several times. However, none of the drafts seemed to convey what I felt needed to be said. I think with the passage of time and more thought, I can now say what I’ve wanted to say.

I was very disappointed by the ruling upholding “Obamacare”. However, as we conservatives near the end of our primaries and begin to approach the last lap of the campaign toward the November finish line, I believe the U.S. Supreme Court gave us a great gift this term—though, admittedly not the one we wanted—if we will now seize that gift, and then use it to defeat Obama and send Romney and the Republicans to Washington.

The Court reminded everyone in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC that there are real limits to the delegated powers of the federal government contained both in the body of the original text of the Constitution, and in the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. In fact, Justices Roberts’ and Kennedys’ opinions in Sebelius, in which the limits of the Commerce Clause and Spending Clause powers were clarified by a majority of the Justices, contain some of the strongest re-iterations of, and re-commitments to the Founders’ original design of Federalism to be found in any opinions from the Court in the last 100 years. Amazingly, even two of the Court’s most liberal justices (Breyer and Kagan) agreed with the limitations of the Spending Clause, and that those limitations had been violated by Congress. Moreover, the Court struck a strong balance in Arizona v. United States between the delegated powers over foreign affairs and naturalization held by the federal government and the general sovereign powers retained by the states.
Even the bizarre ruling by Justice Roberts and the four liberal justices to uphold the individual mandate (and, therefore, most of the law) was, in an odd way, a gift—maybe the most important gift of all. As he found the mandate to really be a tax, Justice Roberts had to acknowledge (expressly and implicitly) truths that Americans should know deep in their DNA, but we sometimes forget:

• when we create any government, that government has to be funded by taxes so the power to tax is given to government;
• the power to tax is the most coercive, and potentially despotic power that government holds;
• the power to tax delegated to the federal government has expanded since 1789 by constitutional amendment to include direct taxes on individuals, and it has been used to implement many coercive policies over the last 100 years; and
• the only real constraint on the exercise of the power to tax is political, not legal—that is the only effective constraint is the one exercised by the people through their right to vote and to petition their government.

In the end it is that last power—the rights of the people to alter or abolish their government through their votes and through their direct petitions to their elected officials—retained by individual citizens, which we always have exercised to control taxation. All Justice Roberts’ opinion did was to remove the final decision as to the Democrat’s abuse of the taxation power from the courts and return it where it belongs—to the people to punish and change. In doing so, he pitched that ball right into our wheelhouse; all we have to do now is control the swing of our bat and make contact.

From the original Boston Tea Party, to the Coolidge and Kennedy tax reductions, to Howard Jarvis’ Proposition 13, to Kemp-Roth and the Reagan Revolution, and now to the Tea Party Movement, we have met the challenge of excessive taxation and defeated it. We must be vigilant and do so again with our votes this fall. In the meantime, we must support those state politicians, including Governor Perry of Texas and Governor Scott of Florida, who are using the clarification of the limits of the Spending Clause to fight the expansion of the federal strings of Medicaid into their states; and petition other state governments to do the same.

So, we now know our mission for the fall election (if any of us out there still were confused)—to abolish Democrats’ abuses of the tax and spending authority by abolishing both the Obama administration the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate. As we’ve now been reminded, we still have the power to correct these abuses, let’s exercise it.

The Fist of the Obama Administration Must Not be Re-Elected

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

My father liked to tinker with writing simple poetry—the type of “greeting card” poetry that can be very touching or funny, or simply lame.  I recently have been reminded of the following part of a funny poem he wrote for me when I graduated from law school, which he entitled “Lawyer to Client”:

You say you hit the other guy,
Broke his nose and blackened his eye,
Split his lip and damaged his face.
I think you’ve got an excellent case.

The man is daft and obviously
Was in a place he never should be.
With devious means and grievous twist
He put his face in front of your fist. …

As I’ve followed the debate over the “Obama mandate” for insurance coverage that narrows the conscience exception that had protected religious institutions for many years, I feel as though we conservatives have once again put our face in front of the left’s fist on this issue.  Normally, I would advocate just licking our wounds and changing the subject back to the economic issues facing the country.  But, the problem is that what underlies the thinking of the left on this issue is what also is strangling the long-term neck of our economy.

Before we go further with that point, we first need to understand how our face found its way into the left’s fist. Back in January (it seems like years ago), during one of the many GOP debates over the last few months, George Stephanopoulos asked the candidates about their view of a half-century old Supreme Court ruling that constitutionally prohibited states from banning the sale or use of contraceptives.  Virtually everyone on the stage, and in the auditorium, was shocked by the question because it seemed to come out of left field.  The candidates all answered in one way or another that the issue was irrelevant and no one is advocating banning contraceptives, and Stephanopoulos looked really silly and petty as he continued to press for an answer from the candidates—but the key is that he continued to press for an answer.  Why?  It made no sense—at the time.

Then, not long after that debate, Secretary Sebelius announced that the Obama Administration would mandate that all employers would have to provide contraceptive coverage as part of their insurance plans, including religiously-affiliated hospitals, schools, and charities.  The “conscience exception” that had previously exempted such institutions from such mandates was to be narrowed to just the direct employees of the houses of worship of such religious institutions.

The negative reaction was stunning and swift, but it was not about women’s health or access to contraceptives—which must have further surprised the likes of Stephanopoulos and Sebelius.  Instead, it was about the use of the governmental fist in violation of the First Amendment to force churches to act at variance with their beliefs, or get fined—the type of direct assault on religious liberty that the U.S. Supreme Court had just told the Obama Administration it could not do as the court struck down another attempted regulatory invasion into the operation of a religious school. Hoping to find a compromise, people of goodwill from all over the political spectrum called on the Obama Administration to reconsider and re-embrace the full conscience exception that both political parties previously had honored, and that had provided a federal safe-harbor from mandates at the state level, while exploring other constitutional ways to maximize women’s access to medical treatments and prescriptions.  Instead of such a compromise, Obama announced a unilateral “compromise” with himself, which—of course—was no compromise at all.  It, instead, was a new fiat that was even more extraordinary for its hubris—mandating that insurers pay for, but not charge for, providing contraceptives to employees of religiously-affiliated hospitals, schools and charities.  Incredible!

Why was the second fiat incredible?  Let’s look closer at Obama’s magnanimous act of self-compromise for a moment:

• it ignores the fact that, in order to take advantage of the historical safe-harbor provided by the federal conscience exception, many religious institutions became self-insured, and those plans cover both the employees of the churches as well as the affiliated entities;

• it ignores one of the most basic facts of economics—there is no free lunch.  Regardless as to whether we are talking about free-market or government-planned economies, goods and services (including contraceptives, and the doctor visit and prescription needed to obtain the contraceptives) cost money; and, in this instance, those costs will be paid either directly by the employer or self-insurer, by all the insureds of the insurance company (including the religious institutions and their employees) through higher premiums, or by taxpayers through higher taxes or more public debt;

• it continues to ignore that these religiously-affiliated institutions only exist in order to fulfill the mission of the church in the community, so that they are an important part of the practice of religious faith  by the ministry of the church, regardless of whether the church employs or serves persons of other faiths (or of no faith) in the performance of such practices; and

• in making all these mistakes, it shows that Obama refuses to acknowledge and abide by the limitations on governmental power, and the exercise of that power, that our Founder’s enshrined in our Constitution, including the preservation of a separate church and the importance of its separate institutional role in our society.

So, the Obama fist came in a second swing toward the face of those of us who still believe in those limitations on government power, and in religious liberty.  But this time, like on so many other occasions over the last two generations, it is our face that was now alleged to be the aggressor, rather than the victim.  Those on the left who initially had called for Obama to re-consider his decision miraculously found this new fiat to be a welcome compromise, and then fell back in line as the lemmings that they are.  And, of course, their fellow travelers in the media lauded the magnanimity and wisdom of Obama’s act of self-compromise, and fell in line, too.  Then, returning full circle to the Stephanopoulos question, they found further criticism of the second swing of Obama’s fist to be a new assault on women’s health by the face of conservatives—an assault so grave that it could not be tolerated.  Unfortunately, some of our candidates and pundits played into this narrative, by allowing themselves to be drawn into debates about specific religious views of contraception, rather than keeping their focus on the fundamental flaws with Obama’s aggressive mandate.  As a result, in the latest twist in this story, the U.S. Senate could not muster the votes to return federal policy to the full conscience exception, and the left walked away from the debate claiming their fist had been assaulted by our face.

I want to be clear about some things.  I am not a Catholic, though I have great respect for the Catholic Church. I am a father of three girls, and I’m a grandfather.  I care very much about the health of my wife and daughters, and their access to the care they believe they need.  Finally, I see no societal, economic or political benefit to, or wisdom in, re-visiting the legal issue of medical privacy related to the sale and use of contraceptives, which was decided a half-century ago.  Contraception should not be, and really never was the issue in this political debate—we must remember that point as we move forward from here.

Now, back to my the point I started to make.  The shear arrogance of a political leader of this nation who would so cavalierly ignore basic economic principles, ignore basic constitutional rights, and ignore the basic limitations of governmental power that allow us to practice our constitutional rights, in order to advance an agenda to regulate by fiat an industry that represents at least 17% of our economy, and, in the process, create a new entitlement scheme, has not earned our trust and must not be re-elected.  We will never recover our economic vitality as a nation, let alone our full individual freedoms and responsibilities, if we re-elect this arrogance and give it four more years at the helm of our country.

To those of you who are involved in GOP campaigns this year, I remind you of the seriousness of the mission we have this fall, and ask you to keep your focus on that mission and what the real issues are.  Don’t get sidetracked into the left’s narrative—don’t stick your face into the left’s fist.  Simply fight back based on our narrative of liberty, personal responsibility, limited government and economic opportunity.  As Reagan once told us a generation ago, “there is no substitute for victory.”

Our Health Care Dilemma

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

In today’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., provides this interesting analysis (Conservatives and the Mandate) of the root problem with our health care system. Distilled to its essence, the problem with Obamacare (and Romneycare, and Schwarzeneggercare), it that they perpetuate and worsen an already existing distortion of the market for health care. Ladies and Gentlemen, I hate to tell you this, but there has been no free market for health care in a very long time, and we will have to accept a lot more personal responsibility in our lives if we want to re-establish a free market in that industry.

Since the end of World War II, when unions negotiated for insurance coverage in lieu of wage increases, the provision of health care in this country increasingly has come to be managed by middlemen: private for-profit insurance companies; private non-profit insurance companies; federal and state government agencies; and local public hospital systems. Moreover, most privately-employed full time workers have another middleman, their employer, involved in the process of selecting the insurance coverage, negotiating its price, and collecting and paying the premiums. Most doctor-patient relationships, including the cost and scope of care, are initiated and managed, directly or indirectly, by one of these middlemen. Relatively few individuals (if any) today “choose” their doctors and can negotiate the cost and scope of their care.

In the meantime, the premiums paid by employers and employees are no longer dictated by the actuarial pricing of the risk of illness, disease or injury, because coverage is so broad that it covers basic medical services for which there is no fortuitous risk involved. This means that increasingly the cost we pay for coverage has little or no relation to the individual needs of each person, but rather is based on the cost of sustaining the insurance coverage for everyone enrolled in a specific plan, or for everyone covered by a carrier or government program.

In turn, the decisions of the middlemen dictate how much health care is provided, to whom it is provided, when it is provided and where it is provided. These decisions affect the decisions of doctors in the treatment of patients, and distort the allocation of medical resources in every community.

The only major benefit of the private insurance market to the overall free-market economy is that the premium funds are re-invested in the private economy. But, if you think you are paying premiums to buy a free-market relationship with your doctor, you’re simply wrong.

What Obamacare and its state counterparts do is not a fix to these problems, so that the same quality and amount of medical care is accessible to everyone, and that you regain control of your doctor-patient relationship. Instead, these programs further institutionalize the role and power of middlemen, and raise their decisions from contractual dictates to legal mandates. Meanwhile, the program is designed, over time, to reduce the incentive to purchase private insurance, which eventually will reduce the primary economic benefit of such a product—the re-investment of premiums into the private economy. Eventually, Obamacare will lead to a pure transfer payment entitlement funded with tax dollars and public debt.

The only way to fix this mess in the long term is to restructure the health care industry into a free-market system where most of the economic and medical decisions are kept at the level of the doctor-patient relationship, and the middlemen’s role is greatly reduced. This can be done by creating three delivery systems:

• A private insurance system that only provides coverage for major medical issues—major illnesses, diseases or injuries—and that requires high deductibles or health savings accounts, and personal responsibility, for the payment of all other health care;
• Local hospital and clinic systems paid for with local tax dollars, and administered by local governments, for the indigent (and the continuation of a similar federal program for veterans); and
• A means-tested voucher system to fund the payment of private insurance premiums for insurance coverage for the elderly, paid for from the Medicare tax.

Although these changes sound like common-sense, conservative approaches to fixing the system, I have been amazed by the reaction of many conservatives to these ideas when you discuss them privately. Over the years, as I’ve tried to discuss our current predicament and these types of policy changes with people around the dinner table or in relaxed conversations, their eyes glaze over. More importantly, I have discovered another phenomenon during such discussions: many spouses and single parents, who control family finances and handle the doctor appointments (and, in my anecdotal experience from these conversations, these spouses and single parents are women, regardless of whether both spouses in a marriage work outside the home), hate the idea of losing the simplicity derived from the involvement of middlemen, and they especially hate the idea of losing the convenience of co-pays. They may complain about a specific bad experience with an insurance company over a coverage issue; but the idea of a return of more control over medical decisions and payments to families, and the resulting increase in personal responsibility over such transactions, is simply an anathema to many of these spouses.

Now add to this pre-disposition against assuming more responsibility over the doctor-patient relationship, the recent flap over Obama’s mandate for church-related hospital and charities to provide services and prescriptions, or insurance coverage for such services and prescriptions, which violate the tenets of the religious institutions that manage such hospitals and charities, and you see that this issue is more politically volatile and complex than we conservatives often think. Yes, conservatives and many independents viscerally recoil at the notion of government having and exercising the power to mandate us to do anything, and especially when such power is used to interfere with the decisions and doctrines of a church (and most believe that such government action is unconstitutional). On the other hand, even many conservatives are much more ambivalent about middlemen in their medical decisions, including government, when they are forced to consider the alternative. So, when these people hear that access to contraceptives could be denied to some women, and that the alternative to mandates that are designed to require such access is responsibility they don’t want, their reaction to the issue is not predictably supportive of the religious liberty of the church.

Where does all of this lead to? As I’ve said so often that I’m beginning to feel like a broken record, it leads to the hardest question we Americans have to face this fall, and for many years to come: are we willing to take back the personal responsibilities that the maintenance of liberty and a society of free people requires? If not, then electing Republicans to Washington this fall will not matter in the long-run, because the trajectory of public policy will continue in a leftward direction toward a European system with the trade-offs between social programs and national defense that Europeans have made, and with the acceptance of increasing public and private debts to finance such a system—until it inevitably collapses, internally or externally.

If electing Republicans this fall is to mean real change, we will have to look in the mirror and accept the personal responsibilities such changes will demand of us.

Trust and Consequences

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

As I have listened to all of the campaigning, media coverage and breaking news stories over the last few weeks, I have been reminded of a conversation I had with a friend of mine late last year.

This friend is a committed Democrat, and we have enjoyed lively debates over the years about virtually everything. In this last conversation, we were both expressing our exasperation over some of the positions and mistakes of our respective parties, and the ups and downs of the Presidential race. When I restated my long held view that our country won’t be able to fix many of its problems unless we return responsibility to people and local communities, my friend said something that crystallized many of our differences: “Ed, I don’t trust people to do the right thing like you do.” Toward the end of the conversation, as we were discussing certain social issues about which we disagree, I asked my friend whether he was concerned at all by the unintended consequences that changes in social customs and mores create, and he flatly said, “No. We can address any problems later, but I am for change that broadens people’s ‘rights,’ and it is just mean-spirited not to broaden them.”

Now, it’s not like I had never heard comments like those before—any conservative who is old enough to read and write has heard statements like them too many times to count. But, for some reason, my friend’s statements have been ringing in my ears lately as I’ve tried to make sense of all that is transpiring around us, and of what needs to be done over the next few months as we head into the November election. If we conservatives are going to win the national elections this fall, we need to convince the American people that implementing our vision will fix the problems we face, not just rearrange those problems and defer their resolution to another day. My friend’s statements helped me re-look at what unifies our conservative vision.

What ties our conservative policies and ideas together is that they depend for their success upon a basic trust of our neighbors—a mutual trust that we will make more right choices than wrong choices privately and publicly, and that together we can rely on our mutual trust to rebuild our families, our communities and our economy.

This trust drives us to oppose centralization of responsibility in Washington and state capitols, to oppose the ridicule and diminishment of churches and organizations whose work helps to form our character as individuals and as a people, to oppose grand schemes that depend on mandates and entitlements to solve our problems, and to oppose a growth of government that is purchased with debt borrowed from our competitors and enemies. Meanwhile, this trust inspires us to promote the protection and exercise of our basic civil rights, to find answers to our problems in the opportunities constantly created by free markets and free trade, to require governments to live within their means and abide by their constitutional limits, and to engage with our neighbors in the lives of our communities to guide inevitable social changes in a way that prepares our children for the future while preserving for them the unique society we inherited.

But our trust is tempered by our inherited memory that decisions and actions have consequences, and that some of those consequences are often both unintended and destructive. Such memory leads us to oppose change for the sake of change, or to oppose change that may make us feel better about ourselves today without regard to what we may do to our children’s tomorrow. That memory leads us to oppose changes that confuse rights with privileges, that confuse liberty with autonomy, that confuse the exercise of wisdom and conscience with censorship or discrimination, that confuse opportunity with mandates and regulations, and that confuse growth of government with the growth of freedom and wealth.

However, such memory also challenges us to engage in the process of change when it is necessary or inevitable. That engagement requires us to guide such change so that it results in preserving and strengthening our unique society for future generations, rather than to disengage from the process and allow changes to unfold that destroy the fundamental principles of our society over time.

All of this is easier to describe than to live by—it always has been. That is why it is easier to be a political progressive or liberal in our society than it is to be a conservative. It is this gap between talk and action that has led many people to tune-out conservatives when we start talking about returning responsibility to the people, or when we discuss the potential for negative consequences from certain changes that, at least superficially, sound good, fair and just.

Indeed, this predicament frames our challenge this year: we must describe our vision of a society that is grounded in mutual trust, and that channels that trust to guide inevitable change confidently and prudently; and we must persuade our neighbors that we will live by the best of this vision, if elected.

We Must “Choose Wisely”

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

But choose wisely, for while the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

I was reminded of this line, delivered in the soft, time-wearied voice of the Medieval knight from the third Indiana Jones movie, as I was reflecting on the remarkable string of events over the last two weeks—events that are changing and defining the nature of the 2012 election.

At the start of this period Romney looked as if he was going to walk away with the GOP nomination, and that the election would become a referendum on Obama’s economic policies. The emerging shape of the battle was reflected by two new and inconsistent reports coming from Washington. On the one hand, the CBO issued a report that should have scared the dickens out of everyone and made the case for a Republican sweep. It showed that the economy had lost more than 2 million jobs in just one month, and that the projected growth and unemployment figures would be anemic through 2013. On the other hand, the administration produced “seasonally adjusted” job numbers that magically showed a growth in jobs, and a drop in unemployment, which defied reality and made a mockery of government statistics, but which the chattering classes took as positive news and as gospel for the wisdom of Obama’s policies.

But, then the ground under our feet shifted, as foreign policy and social issues diverted everyone’s attention away from the economic debate. Every news report focused on the growing civil war in Syria, and our confrontation of Russia and China at the UN. Panetta and Obama sent mixed signals over Israel and Iran, and their words (and Israel’s intentions) became a focus of news reporting throughout the week. Progressives embroiled the Komen charity and the Catholic Church in controversies over abortion, contraceptives, and the First Amendment. Then, that never-ending source of liberal lunacy, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, gave us a double-whammy of cultural chaos:

• it reinstated the California Supreme Court’s construction of the California Constitution that changed and expanded the definition of “marriage” under California law to include same-sex couples; and,
• to do so, it determined that the people of California could not amend their own Constitution to re-instate a 3,000 year-old status quo that did not violate the federal constitution, because, once the California Supreme Court had decided to expand rights or privileges to a new class of people, the people could not change that decision.

Therefore, in one stroke the 9th Circuit stoked the fires of the culture wars and shredded the concept that the people, not the judiciary, are the ultimate source of power and authority in this country. Given these developments, and the predictable rise of Santorum in the polls in three states where, like Iowa, social conservatives make up a large portion of GOP activists, is it any wonder that Santorum, whose career has focused on these foreign policy and social issues, has risen from the ashes to upend the GOP race once again?

Before you get whiplash from all of this, let’s go back to the quote at the start of this post. We must remember that the story of America has been a story of choices made—some wise, and some not-so wise. And it now appears that recent developments are creating a new, epic choice for us to make this November. The choice will not be over the looming debt that is crushing individuals and governments alike, or what our position should be as to when or how Israel may attack Iran, or the wisdom of the Komen foundation’s changing decisions about funding Planned Parenthood, or the availability of contraceptives, or the future of religious freedom, or even the future definition of “marriage”. No, the choice is larger than all of these issues, though they each will be pieces that will fit together to ultimately form the puzzle picture in the end.

If you’ve followed any of my prior posts on Big Jolly Politics, you know I have a specific view of our history. Our Settlers—those dissident Protestants who began leaving England and the Netherlands in the 17th Century to come and start a new life on this continent, saw a “fork in the road” of human history and made a choice to go down what Robert Frost would call “the road less traveled.” They chose to come to America and begin an experiment not tried in human history—to live as free men and women in shared communities—rather than stay in Europe and continue on the age-old path of living under the thumbs of kings and bishops. Our experimental path was to preserve and promote man’s free will (the blessing of liberty) and to promote the exercise of that will to “pursue happiness” (“pursue a life well spent”, “love thy neighbor”) in local communities organized into states joined into a federal union. The paradox, as Franklin would allude to, was, whether we could “keep it” merely by depending on the preservation of a “Christian” character among our citizens.

Over the centuries, we became a people who were taught to look at our past as having been created from fundamental promises—a contract—that incorporated man’s greatest ideals. We were taught that even though the promises weren’t always properly or evenly enforced, our challenge was to fix those flaws to sustain the experiment. And we were taught that the experiment embodied in that contract was fragile, because it could always be derailed by undermining the character of the citizenry; meaning it could be derailed by one or more of four impulses:

• the impulse of man to believe in himself, and in nature, rather than God;
• the impulse of man to fight and die for false Gods;
• the impulse of some men to re-enslave the will of other men to keep the enslaved from pursuing their own impulses (good or bad); and
• the impulse of otherwise good people toward complacency and autonomy.

I believe our best leaders over the centuries recognized these enemies and rallied us against them. Since 1776, we have faced and defeated each of these enemies at one time or another. If we should ever lose this fight for the preservation of our experiment, or choose to no longer fight for our experiment when any of these impulses emerge, I believe the consequence will be both a political and a spiritual backslide, and the ensuing “darkness” will last a long, long time.

When we look around us we see evidence of that our experiment in self-government is backsliding, and I am not ready to choose to stop fighting the impulses that have brought us to this point. At some point between the election of FDR and the assassination of JFK, a core group in this country saw our nation, not as an imperfect experiment embodied in a contract to be enforced, but as historically illegitimate. These people worked quietly for decades to convince the last two generations of Americans to look at our past as having been illegitimate from the start; and to see America’s basic contract as so wrong that it needed to be reformed and replaced with a new contract that mirrored the social contract that had emerged within Europe since Bismark. To accomplish this task, they preyed on the four impulses that were always the enemy of our experiment, and have tried to rip-up the old contract. In its place, they have tried to re-assert a model of government by and for the elite that our Settlers rejected, and which has condemned a vast number of our neighbors to under-education and under-employment, and to an artificially low standard of living during a time of great wealth creation, while they have increasingly enjoyed unrivaled materialism and an autonomy from their responsibilities as citizens. Their efforts have torn deep holes in the fabric of our culture and society, and the policies they’ve implemented to create a new contract have nearly bankrupted our governments and our citizens.

What the developments over the last two weeks show is that the election this November presents another historical “fork in the road” for America—another time to choose. It presents a choice between—

• continuing the backslide to a form of society our Settlers rejected, and that thrives off a vast system of materialism, dependency and victimhood among so many of us that it has put our society on the road to societal bankruptcy; and

• re-committing our society to that experiment embodied in the original contract we inherited—a society of free men and women who believe that if our ideal promises are properly preserved and enforced, we can address all of the challenges that face us without bankrupting the system for our children.

We have a choice to make at this fork—we can’t take both paths from here, and the path we choose this year will determine the course of our history for generations to come. I for one, choose the path of the promise our ancestors made to preserve, protect and promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to all our citizens, and of the commitment to share and enforce that promise and its benefits with all Americans; rather than the path of autonomous materialism and victimhood, and the ultimate dependency on elites, to which the other path will condemn the future.

I hope you will join me and “choose wisely” as this year unfolds toward the November election, for the stakes couldn’t be much higher.