WASHINGTON -- A few weeks back, at the dawn of the Obama
Administration, I was at dinner with a very bright woman of
middle years who called herself an independent. She found the new
president very engaging, but she was alarmed by the music in the
air: a government takeover of Detroit, a $700 billion government
bailout of the banks, a $787 billion stimulus bill, a cap and
trade bill that will add perhaps $800-$2,000 to every family's
tax bill, a massive healthcare reform now estimated to cost $1
trillion over the next decade. For the past thirty years, most of
them good economic years, the federal bite into our GDP has been
just under 20%. Calculating the cost of Obama's spending it will
be 28.1% this fiscal year, a peacetime record!
My dinner companion was alarmed. She was not simply alarmed by
the bills our president and his Democratic colleagues were
ringing up on the Hill. My friend, the independent, was alarmed
by something much more important, the cost to our freedoms. As I
believe she put it, "the question here is our liberty."
Increasingly, thoughtful Americans understand the Obama era in
these terms. With the government suddenly looming so large in the
life of every American, it is time for us to consider what is a
singularly American possession, individual liberty. The Founding
Fathers created a government that was uniquely solicitous about
individual liberty. With the federal government so deeply
involved in our healthcare, our banking, our manufacturing, and
the many targets of its $787 billion stimulus program, it is time
to think about your liberty vis-a-vis the government bureaucrats
who are about to minister to you.
Ronald Reagan's modern conservative movement began thinking about
the loss of individual liberty to government encroachment half a
century ago thanks in part to the wake up call from Friedrich
Hayek, delivered in his indispensable book The Road to
Serfdom. Hayek believed government was a threat to freedom,
enterprise, and the rule of law. Later another vigilant advocate
of personal liberty, Frank Meyer, came along and became a major
figure for American conservatives, propounding the exhilarating
argument that freedom is essential to mankind. Freedom, he wrote,
is the "essence of [man's] being," for without it a citizen
cannot be moral, by which he meant cannot choose good over evil.
Meyer believed freedom was at our essence because God put it
there. God gave us freedom to choose, good over evil, art over
schlock, a knee replacement over a Botox treatment.
Personal liberty makes each American citizen a creature of
dignity. Obama overlooks this. Though in presenting Congress a
$3.9 trillion budget on February 24 he insisted that "I'm not"
for big government, he is. Consider the vastness of the budget,
its far-reaching domestic policies, and much of his background as
a community organizer. Clearly he is a big government guy. No
other American president has been so committed to big government.
Historically most of our experiences with big government have
been unhappy. Big government is expensive, inefficient, and once
corrupted very difficult to clean up. Moreover, once a government
bureaucracy has made its judgment on you, whom do you appeal to?
With Obamacare, government will decide when and if you can get
that knee replacement. From the clear utterances of the
president's healthcare advisers, namely, Drs. Ezekiel Emanuel and
David Blumenthal, that knee replacement will depend on such
factors as your age and your overall health. If you are too old
or decrepit, government will have a more economical place to
spend its money. In other words, your health will not be decided
by what you want to pay for it but by government policy. That
test you wanted for colon cancer might be denied. You might just
be too old. Such decisions are made by the nationalized British
system all the time.
Almost any service the government provides can be more
efficiently and effectively provided by private enterprise. The
most striking example is the inefficiency of the money-losing
U.S. Postal Service that has been swept aside by the internet and
by such private carriers as UPS and FedEx. Government is not even
very effective in its efforts at regulation. Consider the recent
failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and at the Securities and
Exchange Commission.
There is another unappreciated failing of government. It
politicizes everything that it touches, including the simplest
human relations. Agreements that ought to be arrived at
voluntarily or through the rule of law are arrived at by
lobbyists or thanks to the political power of your group --
ethnic, economic, or otherwise.
One of the little noted projects of the government healthcare
reforms being considered on Capitol Hill today is the channeling
of healthcare money away from the elderly and toward community
services and drug or alcohol rehabilitation. Equal rights before
the law is all well and good, but it is political favor and
political power that matter when big government is making your
decisions for you.
That is why so many Americans have opted for freedom from
government. We recognize that the free society is the most
humane…and the most productive.
topics:
Personal Freedom, Liberalism, Government Growth, Deficits
