Sunday, April 11, 2010

Will Republicans Support Obama Care Lite?

According to W. James Antle, III, of the American Spectator :
[Senator John] Cornyn [of Texas] initially unfurled the "repeal and replace" banner, only to quickly make an exception for the "non-controversial stuff," such as the ban on preexisting conditions which is unfortunately exactly what necessitates the "controversial stuff" like the individual mandate.

Herein lies the premise for the entire article, that Republicans will support depriving the stockholders of their investment by permitting this attack on the property rights of insurance companies, essentially making them agents of government, and thereby taking a giant step down the road to a corporate fascist state, in order to preserve such socializing moves as banning preexisting conditions.

We will just have to see, but Antle has not grasped the economics of this issue, nor how a free market solution would solve the problem.

In a free market, individuals would purchase health insurance policies just as they purchase other forms of insurance; and they would have property rights in the policy. The major attraction of such a policy would be that it would cover future medical conditions. People would thus have an economic incentive to purchase such policies in their relative youth, as they do now, for whole life policies and other policies that provide resources for future catastrophes.

Thus the issue of "pre-existing" conditions would not arise in the first place. If you were so unwise as to fail to take advantage of such policies, well, yes, then you would have a problem, but most people can take care of themselves and we certainly wouldn't have the scale of problems we have now with employer-based insurance, which makes no rational sense at all, and only came about as a result of government intervention into the free market in the first place during WWII.

We keep trying to solve problems created by government intervention with more government intervention. Why would anyone think such a procedure could possibly work?

Obama care is just another government intervention proposed and now enacted to correct earlier problems created by government intervention.

The way you solve such problems is to eliminate government intervention.

This article by a "conservative" Republican writing for The American Spectator perfectly illustrates the reason why we need fundamental constitutional reform. We have so-called "conservative intellectuals" such as Antle, who simply do not understand capitalism or free-market economics, who have, apparently, never given serious or sustained thought to how a free society would actually work and resume the social functions that since the ascendancy of Progressivism have been taken over more and more by government, on the assumption that government can do things for people more effectively than they can do for themselves.

Obviously it can't. These so-called "conservatives" may, in fact, be conservative, but they are not libertarians, they do not support limited government, and their vision is not radical in any sense of the word. We need radical--meaning fundamental--reform of government. And there are some of us who will work toward that end, trying to push the TPM and the angry Republicans more toward fundamental reform. I don't think Americans will support Obama Care Lite, which is what, apparently, some of these "conservatives" are preparing themselves to support.

Americans should reject any such compromises and work instead toward real reform and the vision of a genuinely free society. To do this Americans need new intellectual, as well as political, leadership. This current crop of Republicans, so far, certainly hasn't provided the intellectual leadership, and that failure can only lead to a further and deeper slide into statism when they assume political power in November.

Americans need leadership willing to provide the intellectually-based vision of what a free society looks like and examples of how such a society founded on individual rights would actually work. They don't need "me-too" leaders with secondhand ideas and no clue how to lead us out of this wilderness of statism.