Yesterday the Federal Government grew considerably larger as 2,700 pages of new laws, taxes, and regulations were passed by the United States Congress. What many Americans fail to appreciate is that at the same time, you as citizens became considerably smaller. The United States Congress – the only place where one can have an approval rating of 19%, still get your annual salary increase, and have a 97.9% chance of keeping your job. As citizens of a nation there are two mandatory authoritative influences in our lives. One is ourselves, and the other is the government. (We can enter into other relationships that give authority to other entities, like a loan for a house gives some authority to the bank, but those are voluntary and we can choose not to enter into those relationships.) The government relationship and the authority it has is a consequence of our living in this nation, like it or not. So the question becomes, how much authority should the government have and how much should I as the individual have? Our founding fathers recognized that there were certain things that we as individuals would not be effective at doing ourselves and delegated that authority from the citizens to the government – national defense being a good example. The founders were careful to list, as enumerated powers, those things that the government could do in the U.S. Constitution. The 10th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was intended to serve as a protection of the peoples rights. It states that all powers and authorities that are not specifically granted to the Federal Government in the Constitution are reserved for the states and the people. This means that if the Constitution doesn’t specifically state that the Federal Government can do something, then it cannot do it.

Let’s explore an illustration. Let’s say we are like a shopper going to the grocery store. There are lots of choices to make at the grocery store. Upon entering we are given two shopping carts. One that we can fill up, and another that is already filled with all sorts of items. We must checkout with both carts. Who filled the second cart? Uncle Sam. He took about 40% of your money and filled it for you, isn’t that nice? Maybe. You go around and fill your cart with the items you need. While doing this you start looking through the cart Uncle Sam filled. There are diapers in there, but they are for a boy, not a girl like you have, so you will have to buy diapers anyway. There are frozen pizzas which is nice you wont have to buy that, but there are also frozen peas, yuck. You notice bread in the second cart, that’s nice, but Uncle Sam bought the one that is $8 a loaf, not the $2 a loaf bread you would prefer. There is a bunch of stuff down in the bottom of the cart that you can’t see and your not allowed to look through it all. It doesn’t matter anyway, you have to buy it regardless of the contents. The good news is, in four years you can vote for a different Uncle Sam that will fill your cart, hopefully more to your liking. Maybe you will get those Cheerios you wanted instead of the Frosted Flakes your current Uncle Sam put in the cart for you. Unfortunately for you, Kellogg’s gave your current Uncle Sam a lot of money to (i.e. campaign contributions, bribes, call them what you like) get that Frosted Flakes in there. And your future Uncle Sam gets his money from Post with the expectation that Raisin Brand will make it in the cart. You see where this is going.

I am not saying that it’s bad that Uncle Sam has a cart, which he gets to fill and for which you have to pay. As long as there is a government, he will have a cart. The question in my mind is how big is his cart, and should it be that big? With every new law, the size of Uncle Sam’s cart gets bigger and yours gets smaller. Your cart gets smaller for a few reasons. Every choice he gets to make is one less choice you get to make. The bigger his cart gets, the more of your money he has to take to fill it. If he crams a bunch of store brand cheddar cheese in his cart you will be less inclined to buy that Tillamook cheddar cheese you prefer. Also, because of regulation you might not be able to pick your favorite brand, the entire cheese section might be designated Uncle Sam shopping only (the FDA does this all the time with medicine that never makes it to market and you can't buy if it did.) The problem isn’t that Uncle Sam has a cart, it’s that his cart has gotten way too big and ours way too small.

The government isn’t choice, it’s force. The government doesn't innovate, control spending, increase quality, or reduce costs, just look at the Postal Service, Medicare, or Social Security. This experiment of government control has been done over and over again throughout Europe and it doesn't make things better. Competition in the free market is the only thing that does, with, of course, proper government oversight to ensure abuses are not taking place. The founding fathers would be shocked at the amount of government control we have allowed in America. There is one reason that America has prospered like no other nation in the history of the world, strict limits on government power. This allows the individual citizen to reach his or her fullest potential – it is as simple as that.

To explore this idea more, start here.

Watching this fight over health care / insurance reform has made me sad. I feel like I am watching my house burn down, while the Democrats who have the water hose are maddeningly watering the lawn to put out the fire, while the Republicans are struggling to get the hose away from them. Unfortunately, I have low confidence that once the Replublicans get the hose they would indeed save the house. I wouldn't be supprised if they started spraying the fence.

A friend asked me the other night why I don't think poor people should have the same health care as rich people.

First, I think the question implies a false premise, which is that we can create a system that would in fact give poor people the same health care that rich people have. That is false. Rich people, and I would venture to say that in this case this is the majority of Americans, get fantastic health care because they can pay for the best and because the free market is incented to provide the best to make profits, i.e. a free-market system. True there are many flaws in the landscape of the free market in the health care world – in many ways it is not as free of a market as say retail goods are but let’s set that aside for a moment.

The brief answer to the question that would be more accurate is this. Of course I, like everyone, wish that all people had the best health care, and health insurance. I also wish that everyone had a fabulous house, car, food, friends, etc. However, I do not believe it is possible to provide everyone with all these wonderful things without sacrificing something else I hold more valuable, liberty. I believe that Liberty trumps Equality. I believe that the reason this country is great is not because we strive for economic equality but economic liberty. I believe that the government should not be the provider of goods and services; I believe that to be the role of individuals and free enterprise. I believe the government’s role is as regulator to ensure that the relationship between providers of goods and services and the consumers of goods and services does not become exploitive and abusive. To entrust one entity, i.e. the government with both roles of provider and regulator is a very bad idea. I believe Big Government is more dangerous than Big Business. I have no faith that the government who faces no penalties for not controlling quality, fraud, or budgets and have shown absolutely no historical record of doing so would by some miracle do so now. I do not believe they are being honest when, for example, they say that they will cut Medicare by hundreds of billions of dollars to help fund this new or expanded entitlement when they have passed similar mandates upon themselves before wherein they have decreed a Medicare budget cut and never once actually made the cut even though it meant budget and cost overruns in other programs.

I believe that many solutions proposed by politicians are most often poor for many reasons including: politicians are usually under educated in the problem area, they are fed highly biased information from lobbyists, also politicians are motivated not by a desire to provide the best product/service to the consumer in a cost effective manner – but to get re-elected and secure campaign financing. An example would be the idea of preventing insurance companies from denying those with pre-existing conditions. Sounds wonderful at first glance, it’s a terrible idea because no one would get insurance until they got sick, they would be a fool not to (imagine if you could get car insurance after the accident and they would have to pay for the repairs). The only way to fix this dilemma is with a national mandate to force everyone to buy health insurance. Unfortunately this is unconstitutional; the government doesn’t have the power to force everyone to purchase an item simply because they are alive, no matter how well meaning. The rights of the government are enumerated in the constitution and those who believe in un-enumerated rights are opening the door to a world of massive government control. Some say how they can mandate car insurance but not health insurance. Car insurance is based on regulation of an interstate commerce privilege of car ownership (covered under the interstate commerce clause). You can regulate privileges, you cannot regulate rights (with the exceptions of in the case of protecting the rights of others). Some argue that healthcare or health insurance is a right. This is absurd. They clearly do not understand the difference between a right and a privilege.

What people don’t appreciate today is that as government gets bigger the individual gets smaller. Every time the government makes a new rule they have taken a decision away from the individual. The more you restrict people’s agency the more you restrict their ability to learn and grow. No other nation has had Liberty (i.e. Agency) as so core to its being as America has, and as governments and entitlement programs grow we change more into a culture like Europe that does not value Liberty of the individual as core to its identity. Equality and fairness under the law is important, equality and fairness economically is a utopian dream that in order to obtain the liberties of the individual must be sacrificed in part or whole depending on how far the dream is to be pursued.

I, like almost everyone, agree that the current system is broken and needs fixing. The status quo is not acceptable. However, our nation needs documents that are built upon principals like our founding documents, our founding fathers formed the entire federal government with a handful of documents – 2,200 of health care pages that only lawyers can understand tells me they are creating a structure more like the Internal Revenue Tax Code. A document that in my opinion is not a document that enhances liberty and agency, but rather enlarges the government and empowers the faceless bureaucrat. Documents like this reduce, restrict, and strangle the individual rather than celebrating and empowering him.

Everyone is chanting, “STOP insurance companies from denying people with pre-existing conditions!” Here is a classic example of Stage One Thinking that is so common these days. We get an idea that sounds nice and start preaching it as the answer and never take the time to think through, what happens next? Well, if you are healthy and no insurance company can deny you coverage once you get sick, when are you going to get insurance? Obviously, you will get insurance when you get sick and need it. No one will get insurance when they are healthy, why would they. If you could get car insurance after your accident and the insurance would have to cover the cost of the repairs, what sane person would get car insurance before the crash? No one.

Some say the answer to that problem is a “National Mandate.” The government mandates that everyone must buy health insurance. There are problems with as well. The two main problems are first, it’s unconstitutional. The government does not have the authority to FORCE me to buy a product simply because I am alive. Wait, they make me buy car insurance how is that different? That is different because they are attaching that mandate to the privilege of driving a car on government provided streets. If you don’t want to drive a car then you don’t have to get insurance. With healthcare they are dictating that I must purchase something simply because I exist. That is unconstitutional, they have a lot of power, but not that much power. The second problem with this idea is that the government would have to ‘approve’ certain plans to indicate if they satisfy the mandate. If I want a plan that has a higher deductible, or doesn’t cover child immunizations, I don’t get that choice if the government says the plans have to be structured a specific way. And they will have to set minimum plan guidance.

The answer is to allow the free market to create a vast array of plans that individuals can chose from, some BMW plans and some Chevy plans. Get the employer based group discount systems out of the equation because they distort the market for the individual. If there is a wide assortment of insurance plan to pick from, and many are less expensive plans that only cover catastrophic health issues then most people will buy insurance. Those that don’t get insurance and there always will be some, will still go to the hospital and get help and we garnish their wages until they repay, but this I believe would be a small minority.