Quote of the Day

“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”

~ Robert Heinlein

A 50,000-Foot View of Government’s Role in Health Care

Economist Gerald Prante of the Tax Foundation takes a sky-high look at health care reform:

There are many areas of society where the outcome of the free market does not maximize social well-being. In other words, markets do fail. So in these areas, there is the potential for government to improve social well-being. This leads us to two questions: (1) In what areas is the free market failing to maximize social well-being? and then (2) Are the expected benefits of a given government policy designed to combat the market failure greater than the expected costs?

This is the framework with which we should be analyzing all government policies, including the proposed policies in the area of health care.

Obviously, a purely free market in health care would not maximize social well-being relative to a utopian situation in which a purely benevolent government with adequate information corrected the market failures. The problem though is that government policymakers are likely not going to propose the best policy solution on top of the fact that government administration is not costless. So we are always faced with questions of second bests on health care policy (like almost all government policies).

Just because somebody says a free market in health care doesn’t produce as good an outcome as the free market in say potato chips due to the various market failures in health care (e.g. moral hazards, adverse selection, lack of competition in health care, distributional concerns, public health, etc.) doesn’t mean that government doing “something” in response is automatically going to make society better off. That “something” must be better than the imperfect free market alternative, or else we need to head back to the drawing board.

There is another side to this, however. Even IF (and this is a big “if”) the government could produce a better outcome than the free market, there is still a great possibility that such government action would be incompatible with individual rights. Most government intervention in the economy violates individual property rights by distributing income from those who earned it to those who did not.

Freedom of Conscience

Most Americans will, at least, pay lip service to the Freedom of Religion. It is the first right guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and very few Americans would openly oppose it. But many U.S. citizens either do not apply it consistently to their political beliefs or they construe it far too narrowly. The first case is easy to find examples for – the most glaring being conservatives with their opposition to gay marriage and their use of religion-based pro-life arguments. The second type of inconsistency (construing freedom of religion too narrowly) is, in my opinion, not as recognized but just as fatal.

Terms such as “freedom of religion” and “separation of church and state” are somewhat outdated. They come from a time when religion and morality were seen to be inseparable. The terms we should be using – to more accurately describe the application of individual rights to the moral, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of our lives – are “freedom of conscience” and “separation of morality and state”. For the former, I must thank Eric Rassbach, who recently went to court to defend his client’s right to sacrifice goats. He also penned an excellent WSJ op-ed on the topic.

Some people just give me a funny look and say nothing. Others say, “Goat sacrifice?,” laugh nervously, and look for the nearest exit. Only the most forthright ask me directly: Why in the world would I go to court to defend my client José Merced’s religious practice of killing goats in his home in the Dallas suburbs? I then explain, often to dubious ears, that Mr. Merced is a priest of the Santería religion and must sacrifice goats in order to ordain new priests. Without goat sacrifice, his religion would die out. Sometimes my questioners nod in agreement, sometimes they don’t.

The simple fact is that freedom of religion doesn’t mean much if it protects only those beliefs that the government, or the general populace, decides it likes. It is first and foremost unpopular beliefs that need the protections afforded by the First Amendment and international human rights treaties like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

No student of history could disagree. A constant in world history has been the marriage of despotism and the suppression of conscience. Pharaoh forbade the Jews to worship God in their own way. Socrates was executed for supposedly not believing in Athens’ gods. The Romans called Christians “atheists” and threw them to the lions for failing to worship Caesar. Heretics of one sort or the other–including agnostics and atheists–were executed during Europe’s religious wars. Hitler killed Jews as well as ministers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who rejected his crimes against humanity. Stalin persecuted Jews, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and many others. Mao closed almost every house of worship in China.

From the very beginning, the United States has taken freedom of conscience far more seriously than many other countries, making it the first principle in our Bill of Rights, coming before even freedom of speech. But the United States has had its fair share of government suppression of religion, from the hanging of Quaker ministers in Puritan Massachusetts, to the anti-Catholic laws of the 19th Century. And many modern Americans–from both the right and the left–would choose a coerced moral conformity over the individual conscience. Religious freedom will remain at risk, even in the United States, for as long as one group of people is tempted to employ state power to suppress another group’s peaceful attempts to act on conscience [emphasis mine] .

Which brings us back to Mr. Merced. Last week the federal Court of Appeals in New Orleans put itself on the side of freedom of conscience, ruling for Mr. Merced and telling the city he lives in–Euless, Texas–to let him start sacrificing goats again. The Court did not decide whether Mr. Merced’s beliefs were right or wrong, orthodox or unorthodox. It simply held that as long as he is not endangering public health or safety, the government had to leave those beliefs up to him and his gods.

It is a small victory for religious freedom in this country, not just for Mr. Merced, but for everyone who believes the human conscience is a precious gift to be protected. Of course, Christians, Jews, Muslims, or others may want to convince Mr. Merced that his beliefs are in error, and the same religious liberty will protect their right to try to persuade him. That’s the point: Persuasion, not state coercion, is the way all of us should engage our fellow citizens as they seek to obey the “still small voice” of conscience.

So ask not why I defend goat sacrifice. Ask me how you can too.

The most important point made by Mr. Rassbach is that we must broadly define the First Amendment. Many in this country (liberals, in particular) believe in the absurd concept of the “common good”. I won’t attempt to argue against it here, for the purposes of this post we’ll assume that it is, in fact, moral for society to pursue the “common good”.  Does this then give the government (or a majority of citizens) to enforce this morality of the “common good” on a minority? Absolutely not. Just as Christians or Muslims cannot, in accordance with the natural rights of man, coerce their fellow man to follow their religious dictates (even if the Christians or Muslims comprise a majority), society cannot coerce individuals to sacrifice themselves for the collective. Freedom is a black/white issue. There is no area of gray. True, some oppressive governments are more severe in attacking freedom than others, but that is only a difference in degree, not principle. A benevolent dictator is still a dictator. And a violation of an individual’s rights for the sake of the “common good” is still a violation of that individual’s rights.

Conservative Contradictions

Peter Berkowitz writing in the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review:

Both the quest for purity and the quest for unity [among conservatives] are misguided. This is because modern conservatism in general and certainly American conservatism in particular is a paradoxical orientation. The central paradox pervades the writing of Edmund Burke. Rightly recognized as having informally and unofficially but powerfully launched modern conservatism in 1790 with his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke cherished two fundamental goods, liberty and tradition, that do not obviously cohere and sometimes obviously conflict. Constitutional government in America intensifies the paradox. Insofar as American conservatism involves the conservation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—and how could it not?—it puts a revolutionary doctrine and a founding document, forged by men in the heat of the political moment and constructed with numerous painful compromises, at the heart of the conservative mission.

I think this phenomenon is, in large part, a symptom of the problem that many conservatives – though claiming to advocate individual liberty – have not rejected certain collectivist principles. Many still argue for free market capitalism on practical grounds (i.e. it produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people). Conservatives must return to a principled stance in defense of the individual rights, for the sake of the individual (no practical arguments for the “common good” needed). Only when conservatives once again stand on principle, can the various factions of the conservative movement be reconciled and their policy conflicts resolved.

Said the Pot to the Kettle

The DNC has launched a new TV ad chastising Republicans for their “mob” behavior at town hall meetings. The irony is overwhelming. Liberals are the champions of the “common good”, the “collective”, “democracy” – in other words, the left champions rule by the majority, rule by the mob, rule by force. For collectivists to disparagingly label any group a “mob” is laughable. Gateway Pundit has the ad here, along with some very ironic words from (then) Senator Obama.

A Society of Cannibals

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal writes an informative op-ed on “Health Reform’s Hidden Victims” – I highly recommend reading it. Given the facts he presents, I don’t see how anyone can advocate a health system like the one President Obama proposes — unless that person accepts forcing some people to sacrifice for the “common good”. To anyone who holds the “common” good over the good of the individual, I would ask one question: if we, as a society, are willing to sacrifice even one individual for the sake of the rest, what separates us from a tribe of cannibals?