Brain Lemon

Dear liberal friends,

According to news reports, health care is on its way to passage.  Or, at least, to a successful cloture motion, potentially on Christmas Eve.  All of this would seem to be a great victory for liberals.  But I must ask, honestly, at what cost?  Is it worth your integrity and your soul to get legislation passed?

All along this process, the primary method to promote health care has been bald-faced lies and deception.  Any person over the age of 5 knows this.  You can’t SAVE money by insuring millions more people.  You can’t do cost control without rationing.  You can’t lower premiums by adding new mandates and requiring insurers to issue policies to all comers, even those who wait until they are already sick.  You can’t introduce a “public option” with infinite funds and not have it crowd out private care.  You can’t add new penalties and taxes and not hurt the economy, not to mention breaking Obama’s promise to not raise taxes on the middle and lower classes.  All of these things, and more, are knowing, willing falsehoods.

Add to this the disgraceful willingness of legislators to bribe, threaten, and smear in order to get the magic 60 votes.  It was already well-known that Mary Landrieu (D-LA) was “encouraged” by the so-called “Louisiana Purchase,” the adding of hundreds of millions in funding specifically targeted for New Orleans.  Now it is clear that Ben Nelson (D-NE) was bought off in one of the most blatant and shameful instances of political payoffs, a most likely unconstitutional exception of Nebraska to get special Medicare funding.  Who knows what else happened in the top-secret, closed-door meetings of exclusively Democrats held to cobble this thing together.

And all of this maneuvering, cheating, and dirtiness to pass a massive, complex piece of social and economic legislation making over one-sixth of the US economy on a politically-motivated timetable.  All of this to get a massive new entitlement out the door, in order to satisfy the president’s domestic agenda, regardless of whether it is good law, good policy, or even coherent.  All of this because the White House stated, without any logical backing, that Congress needed to “pass something” rather than nothing, no matter what it looked like.  Even liberals know this is not good law – it will most likely exacerbate problems, and create entire new ones.  It is the first time in history something like this has been passed against widespread public disapproval, without a single ounce of bipartisanship.  And while surely that second part is part political calculation, the fact that Republicans were excluded from every part of this and that even “moderates” like Snowe were repulsed says a lot about this process.

So I ask this of my liberal friends:  is this the “change you believed in”?  Is this a new era of bipartisan, open, accountable government?  Or is this the same old political games, ratcheted up to entirely new levels?  Is this the way that progressives govern?  Are you bothered at all by the behavior of your leaders?  If you still have your soul, then I’d say you must be.  If not, you have truly become the living, breathing epitome of what is wrong with our country.

Sincerely,

Brian

One of my basic beliefs is that people’s ideas come from somewhere.  Now, that might sound like stating the obvious.  But what I mean to say is, that a given person’s feelings are always a product of a number of factors, including their education, their upbringing, and their life experiences.  At the core of modern ideologies lie some basic assumptions about the nature of man and his relationship with the state.  I will expound upon this much more in the future, but for now I want to briefly discuss one element that seems at the heart of the current health care debate – the idea of fairness.

Now, as someone who was always told growing up that “life isn’t fair,” I have been fairly inculcated with the basic belief that things in life don’t always work out in the most “equitable” way.  To take an easy example, it is clear that some people are born into well-off families, and others born into poor single-parent homes.  The point is, things don’t work out so that everyone has the same opportunities.  This is simply a fact of life – there is nothing we can do to make life more fair.

To somewhat oversimplify things, the modern dichotomy between left and right lies on the basic reaction to the dilemma of life’s unfairness.  A right-leaning person believes that unfairness is just part of life and we should do what we can to eliminate barriers and obstacles to moving up.  A left-leaning person, on the other hand, views unfairness as a problem that can be solved, and thus favors a large, activist government to do so.  Neither side is “wrong” in the moral sense.  It is just that one side accepts reality, while the other believes they can change things.

Now from my point of view, as someone who is largely a libertarian, I see unfairness as a natural result of different choices in life.  For example, it is not unfair that between two equally gifted people, one may succeed and the other may fail.  Furthermore, where there does exist some inequality, such as the fact that some are good at sports and others not, it is better to accept that than to try to change it.  My belief is that the methods used to change it often do much more harm than good.  In the sports analogy, you could make things more “fair” by lowering the hoop for me and breaking one of LeBron James’ legs.  But while that would be more equal, no one would say we’re better off.

To use a current example, in the health care debate, much time is spent arguing that premiums should be the same for everyone, and that everyone should have access to the best care.  While that would be more “fair” by liberal definitions, what it really means is that the healthy would have much higher premiums in order to balance out those who get insurance only when they’re sick.  Assuring everyone the best care means that costs will skyrocket, and doctors will be overloaded.  In the end, then, nearly everyone ends up worse off.  Is fairness worth hurting so many?

Of course not.  One must then conclude that constantly endeavoring to enact fairness is not the best idea.  We can understand this in sports.  We can even understand it in other types of insurance – why should a responsible driver in a safe car who lives in rural country pay the same as a reckless driver in a sports car who lives in the city?  Why should someone who lives in a small condo pay the same for homeowner’s insurance as someone in a mansion?  In all of these examples we understand that life circumstances and choices matter.  Why not in health care?  Why should a healthy 25-year-old pay the same as a 75-year-old with chronic diseases?  I’m not saying it’s nice, and we should try and help the older person, but how does it help things to make the younger pay more just to make things more “fair”?

As I said, I’ll go into this further.  It’s one of my core things to try and understand why people believe what they do, and then learn to counter the things I disagree with.  That is my hope for this website – to offer respectful, logical debate to what may seem to be conventional wisdom.  I hope you enjoy reading my efforts!

A new development in Washington should raise the ire of anyone who cares about honesty, accountability, and the rule of law.  Yes, that is a rather broad category these days, but I am talking about one thing in particular – the current mindset that it is entirely appropriate to use TARP funds as a sort of revolving credit card.  This behavior violates the law as written, and furthermore serves to spit in the face of the American people.

When TARP was first developed, it was presented as an emergency measure to save the financial system.  We were told that we needed this (at the time) obscene amount of money in order to save banks and keep the whole thing from crashing down.  Once this was averted, we were promised, we would gain some return on the money, possibly even making a profit (though I doubt anyone bought the last part).  In short, this was supposed to be a short-term expense that would be returned when the system had stabilized, and would go back into taxpayer coffers to reduce the deficit.

Instead, the Obama administration has decided that it is appropriate to spend this “temporary” money on whatever it wants to.  TARP funds have already been used for purposes other than those that were promised.  And now the Obama folks want to take that even further, and use the funds for another so-called “stimulus” that, given their track record, is likely to be a package of payoffs, pork, and waste.  Even if it WERE to go to job creation, these funds were not meant for that purpose.  That was supposed to have been the point of the “first stimulus” (really the second including the one in 2008).  Of course we all know it wasn’t.  But the point is, TARP is not allowed to be used for this.

It seems then that the Obama administration has two options – to flagrantly violate the law as written and use the TARP funds as it pleases, or to get Congress to change the law in a way very unlike how it was sold to the American people, thus pulling off a massive bait-and-switch.  In either case, the trust of the American people – that this extraordinary expenditure was to save the economy, and that it was only temporary – will be breached massively.  Sadly, we’ve grown accustomed to this type of behavior, but that does not mean it should be tolerated.  We need to stop letting Congress spit in our face and lie to us, selling us one story and then turning around and doing the opposite.  It is high time to cease our acceptance of this type of disingenuous behavior.