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.

American Thinker: The Keynesian Fraud

Morgenthau's statement is the equivalent of Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner stating that "everything we have done has done no good." When the architect and manager of the program admits it failed, on what basis can honest historians claim that it was successful?

If only current political appointees could be as honest as Morgenthau. But the Keynesian myth is too important and must survive at all costs. It is a source of government power and an inspiration for more government spending. It is a source of many economists' income and prestige. Keynesian economics is the bedrock supporting the entire myth of expansive government. If it is debunked, then so is the twentieth-century conception of government.

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong ... somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to boot!
- Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Treasury Secretary, May 1939

American Thinker: The Keynesian Fraud

‘You Cut Spending’ - Reason Magazine

Check out this interview with former governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, who pitches the limited government message.  But can he walk the talk?

In 2010 Johnson is hoping to gain notoriety for a different, though related, reason. At a time of deep and convulsive popular discontent with the economy and the politicians attempting to manage it, Johnson has launched a profile-raising 501(c)4 nonprofit organization called the Our America Initiative, pushing limited-government solutions to economic, environmental, social, and international issues. If in the process he happens to tap into the growing Tea Party sentiment and palpable Republican hunger for new leadership, well, Johnson won’t complain. As Politico reported in December 2009, the former governor “is doing little to knock down the idea that he may be looking toward a 2012 presidential run.” While ending the drug war remains a central concern (Johnson was a featured speaker at the Marijuana Policy Project’s annual dinner in January), the tanned triathlete is hoping to deliver the kind of broad-based critique of big government that proved such an unlikely success in 2008 for the less telegenic Ron Paul.

‘You Cut Spending’ - Reason Magazine

The American Spectator : Are the Republicans Up to It?

If the Republicans gain ground in the next election, are they up to the task of reforming entitlements in the face of massive baby-boomer retirements?

The American Spectator : Are the Republicans Up to It?

Cahill rips governor on health care plans - BostonHerald.com

Cahill alleged the governor has “spent like we’re in a booming economy at a time when we’re experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

“If President Obama and the Democrats repeat the mistakes of the health insurance mandate on a national level, they will bankrupt this country within four years,” Cahill said. “It is time for the President and the Democratic leadership to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new plan that does not threaten to wipe out the American economy.”

Cahill's remarks illustrate perfectly how not to attack socialized medicine. You don't concede the moral argument to the socialists and pitch the extreme cost. If everyone has a "moral right" to health care, as Cahill argues, cost is simply not a relevant consideration. If Republicans make the same mistake, our freedom shall indeed be lost.

Cahill rips governor on health care plans - BostonHerald.com

Palin, Brown & Elite Condescension

The UK Times Online says Sarah Palin and Scott Brown Set the United States Frothing, and the reporter, Christine Lamb, reports the story honestly.

But the "frothing" mostly represents our left-wing media's hysterical reaction to anyone anywhere who does not share the views of those who are the educational product of our self-styled elite universities.

Elitists also savaged Harry Truman, felt overwhelming contempt for Dwight Eisenhower, loved the failed presidencies of John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, hated Ronald Reagan, perhaps the most successful and accomplished president in modern times, and never ceased to admire Clinton's "brilliance" and academic credentials as a "Rhodes Scholar."

College professors do not make particularly good presidents, and the high and mighty typically have not fared well as president either.  John Quincy Adams lost to Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson only won election in a three-way race and then his party was overwhelmingly defeated by the Republicans in 1920 with another man of the people, Warren Harding, one of our better presidents, despite the academic hostility to his presidency.

This same self-styled elite swoons over Barack Obama because he is, in the words of our VP, "such a clean, articulate [Negro]" who, according to the Senate Majority Leader, "knows how to speak [Negro] dialect when he has to."  The Democrats never can get very far away from race, either with intended praise, as demonstrated in these remarks, or in condemnation, as the party of slavery and Jim Crow, fighting civil rights for blacks tooth and nail from the founding of the Republic through the 1960s.

Sarah Palin, and to some extent Scott Brown, demonstrate an understandable reaction to the elite's dripping condescension, intellectual arrogance, and demonstrated political and economic incompetence.

Their rise in the media has less to do with their particular merits than it does to the needs of a "24/7" news cycle, and the American people's disinclination to view themselves as the moronic rubes Obama sees as "clinging to their guns and their religion."

Obama and company appear to see all Americans (at least the ones who do not worship him) as no different than the very small slice of the electorate who thinks men walked with dinosaurs.

There is even a larger slice of the electorate that believes former President George W. Bush secretly launched the 9/11 attack on the NY Trade Center.  Barack Obama even appointed one of these brilliant academic stars, a communist by the name of Van Jones, as a "Green Jobs Czar" in his administration until the "rubes" made such a fuss that Jones resigned officially (he still works unofficially as part of the Obama Administration).

Our current president, quite apart from whether you agree with his statist political philosophy, suffers from some major problems of his own making.  Even our elites are beginning to realize that when this president gives a speech, such as his recent state of the union, he becomes delusional and incoherent.  What is one to make of the call for less borrowing and lowered spending by a president who, in the same speech, calls for programs that require significantly greater spending and an astronomical increase in borrowing?

Obama's chickens are just beginning to come home to roost and even the little child in the nursery rhyme can see clearly this Emperor has no clothes.

The Left's Disintegration

Scott Brown's election to the Senate--breaking the Democrats' 60-vote super-majority--provides incontrovertible electoral proof that Americans see in the current Obama Administration a threat to their liberty, whether in the form of socializing the medical profession, the Administration's apparent disinclination to defend Americans domestically against terrorist attack, or its revolting obsequiousness to foreign dictatorships.

We are threatened by this Administration on so many fronts our heads are literally spinning.  We are like the little dutch boy putting our fingers in the dike, but the number of holes has now so greatly exceeded the number of fingers we feel overwhelmed.

But not defeated.

The current outrage is the level of spending this Administration is proposing, the level of taxation it is demanding, and the level of borrowing it is committing our children and our grand-children to paying off.  As the president recently commented, "we propose to spend our way out of this recession."

That these levels of spending, taxation, and borrowing are precisely what will further deepen the recession and expand it into a full-fledged depression on the scale of the Great Depression of the 1930s is an argument that is only just beginning to be articulated by Republicans and the Tea Party Movement (TPM).

Consider some facts on the ground.

Perhaps none of these issues would gain much electoral traction were it not for the essential fact that unemployment is at historically very high levels.  In itself, this fact wouldn't mean much were it not also true that the Obama Administration's irresponsible policies of more spending, more taxes, and more borrowing guarantee there will be no economic expansion of the private sector so long as these policies remain in effect.

In reality, we have unemployment nationally close to 20%, if we include everyone without a job who wants a job.  People are far more educated today than they were in the 1930s and are far less likely to be persuaded that throttling the private sector and expanding government is the way to encourage prosperity.

But these policies, far from encouraging prosperity, must have precisely the opposite effect, as they did in the 1930s, and we have already set the stage for a catastrophe that will make 2009 look good.

In 2010, we shall have the beginning of a new round of foreclosures, this time from those 2005 mortgages whose interest rates are due to be reset this year.

Many of these mortgages were of the sort where payments did not even cover the interest charge.  Given that property today is worth but half what it was worth in 2005, in such states as Florida or Nevada, these properties are all, as the saying goes, far "under water."

More foreclosed properties further depress existing prices, making Americans poorer.  As government steps in to "rescue" these mortgages, it must borrow more money, raise taxes, and spend more, further depressing private economic activity.  We haven't even discussed the coming foreclosures in commercial real estate as economic activity slows further.

There must come a point where foreigners refuse to buy more American treasury notes, and we are already nearing the point where current tax receipts go mostly to pay for the interest on the debt, rather than to pay any of it down.

The Obama Administration would argue, of course, that the economy will recover, and that our current situation is short-term and temporary.  But their policies, unfortunately, guarantee there will be no recovery of the private economy and that the situation will only get worse.  Already this Administration makes the telling admission that American will have high unemployment for as far into the future as it can see.  At least here, the Administration is honest.

So long as the private economy does not produce through taxable profit the revenue the government needs, the only alternative left is to inflate the currency, which is just another form of taxation, but a form that does more to destroy an economy than any other tax.

There is a reason why Americans are buying gold.

As the consequences of these policies become more and more evident, the American electorate will take charge of the situation in the only way our Constitution provides.  The 2010 election promises to be the most historic and revolutionary off-year election in the history of the republic.  It is clear to me, and I've been predicting this from the moment Congress passed the so-called "stimulus package" in early 2009, the Republicans, as the party out of power, will sweep both houses of Congress in a landslide, because I knew that the theory this legislation was founded on was simply wrong, and that unemployment would increase, not decrease.

Unfortunately, we shall still have to contend with a socialist president who will simply dig in his heels and prevent remedial legislation.  It is unfortunate, because the country will have to suffer at least two more years of his failed presidency; on the other hand, the Republicans will be able to pass remedial legislation, which Obama will veto, but that will present the country with a track record.  Going into the presidential elections of 2012, the Republican nominee will be positioned well to argue but that for Obama's obstructionism and failed policies, the country would be moving forward rather than mired in high unemployment, punishing regulations, confiscatory taxation, and unlimited spending.

To adjust our course the ship of state will require an extraordinary set of circumstances where Congress will actually be expected by the people to cut spending, for by 2012, we shall be in such bad economic shape with this president, catastrophic circumstances--debt, spending, and taxes--will force the hand.

The next three years will be terrible years for this country economically, millions of peope will suffer unnecessarily, yet at the end I think Americans will have finally rejected the false allure of socialism and we shall also see the death of the Democratic Party as we know it today.

I hope we shall also see the rebirth of limited government, as created by the original United States Constitution.  For that to happen we shall need some Constitutional amendments that repeal the income tax, restore the right of free contract, redefine and limit the "commerce clause", prohibit Congress from delegating its powers to bureaucracies and, perhaps, consider some new ideas about restructuring at least the House of Representatives by restoring the original ratio of 30,000 voters per Congressional district.

We would greatly increase the number of Congressional House seats which would make it impractical to meet physically in one place, at least in the current House chamber.  But we are now connected through digital networks and there is no reason, in principle, why the House of Representatives could not meet in a virtual Congress, where House staffs would be greatly diffused.  It would, of course, be far more difficult to pass complicated legislation, but that is the point.  The federal government should not be doing most of what it is currently doing. 

The long-term advantages of such a reform would be considerable and may even appeal to many on the Left, for attempts to influence any one Congressman would be futile.  With 202.7 million eligible voters in the United States, we'd then have, to restore the original Constitutional ratios, 6,757 members of the House of Representatives.  It would be very difficult for lobbyists to get special favors from Congress if they had to persuade 3,379 of them rather than a mere 218.  House members would be much closer to the people they represent and the result would be a federal government whose expansion would be far more difficult to accomplish and the people's liberties kept far more secure.

Whatever the value of these proposals, it should be clear that merely changing the gang of politicians in Washington will, at best, provide a temporary respite from the steadily expanding power of the federal government over all aspects of our lives.

We must argue for major constitutional changes to restructure the government if we are to reinvigorate the original design of our Constitution, and create more limited government, where people can once again be free to pursue happiness, secure their liberty, defend their very lives.