Liberty Litmus Tests
There have been two moments of extreme clarity in my lifetime; watershed events that changed the fundamental assumptions upon which our worldview rests.
The first date of extreme clarity is September 11, 2001. No thinking person could possibly look at issues of national security and foreign relations the same way before and after the attacks on our soil.
The second date of extreme clarity is September 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers failed. No thinking person could possibly look at issues of economic and monetary policy the same way before and after the world’s financial system melted down.
Which is not to say that any specific set of before & after beliefs proves a functioning mind; rather that the litmus test for any opinion in the areas of economics and international affairs is that it recognizes the abrupt alteration of reality visited upon us with such cruel clarity on those two dates.
It doesn’t matter how one’s thinking changed; what matters is that it did. Only an empty head, a walking e-prom, could remain unfazed by those two national traumas. Regurgitating slogans memorized in one’s formative years is not thinking, liberal protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. Parrots repeat words, too.
Any brain worth bathing in nutrients had to be recalibrated when the veil was lifted and we realized that the American invincibility – both military and financial – we had taken for granted for decades was not inevitable. In my case, a reliably conservative/libertarian bearing was redirected to a new heading – hard libertarian.
The common thread between my two personal epiphanies is the rejection of supply-side liberty; the notion that we can push ideas and beliefs onto others who do not want to embrace them. Liberty’s supply-siders view it in purely political terms, something that can be legislated into existence. They have so polluted its meaning with compromise and perversion of purpose that it has become just another commodity packaged and sold by marketers, pundits, and consultants.
Whether it was the pushing of partisan notions of democracy and capitalism onto an unwilling world in the first instance, or the pushing of bi-partisan notions of a managed crony-corporatist debt economy at home in the second, those two late-summer moments of extreme clarity were the end of “push” for me. A century of legislated progressivism had ended badly – as a courageous few predicted, a dedicated minority feared, and an apathetic majority noticed too late.
Liberty is the absence of government – it is a void, a treasured emptiness. You cannot push air into a vacuum, it must fill itself. Liberty is like that; it is all pull, and each of us decides for ourselves how we will fill up our own vessel. Freedom brings diversity and spontaneous order, the essential elements of a healthy society where people live honestly together.
My generalized distrust of government as an instrument of positive change shifted radically on 9/11 and its aftermath to a conviction that government, in its current form and scope, is in fact the agent of ruin, the prime mover of our demise. Limiting government turned from an abstract philosophical catch-phrase to a moral imperative.
In its attempt to impose order, government suffocates diversity and innovation, and its only answer to each of its mistakes is to make them again, only bigger and faster. Once considered the exclusive domain of wing-nuts and paranoids, an openly hostile attitude towards government became fashionable again in the wake of 9/11 and 9/15. That’s a good thing; the operating principle that we shouldn’t trust Obama any farther than we can throw Bush is the proper modern-day application of the Founder’s Intent.
And government incompetence, too-long tolerated with an eye-roll and smiling head-shake as the necessary overhead cost for living under the rule of law, is now seen clearly as a direct threat to our survival as a free people. The financial meltdown in the fall of 2008 simply broadened the recognition of government’s capacity for destruction via incompetence into the financial realm.
Each crisis spawned its own poster kid that embodies exactly what is wrong with government – TSA and Dodd-Frank, respectively. Totally ineffective, ridiculously expensive, and brazenly stupid, each of those two monstrosities punishes the innocent while failing to deter the guilty. It is government’s signature move – responding late to a problem of its own making with something even more problematic designed to fool the foolish into believing that nothing is something if too many blue shirts stand around doing it.
Last week, without fanfare, this century’s third moment of extreme clarity arrived, when CBO admitted that the cost of President Obama’s national health care plan was understated by half when it was sold to the American people in 2009. Half.
The President promised us that if we let him Chavez the world’s greatest medical care, he would bend the “cost curve.” His plan would reduce the deficit, remember? And lower our premiums, remember? And our plans could all stay the same, remember? He told us he wouldn’t sign a bill unless it came in under a trillion dollars and covered everyone, remember?
So for a purported $900 billion, he got his signature legislation and we surrendered medical liberty.
Those of us who scoffed at his number were called racists and misogynists, among other things. Those of us who warned that political agendas would dictate coverage and that employers would drop insurance were ridiculed. One caring liberal said she was praying for my grandchildren to come into the world with birth defects and for my wife to contract cancer, so grave was my offense in questioning the Great O.
We haven’t even started the exchanges yet, and already President Obama’s $900 billion not-to-exceed has turned into $1.7 trillion and leaves 2 million uncovered; private insurance premiums have skyrocketed, 30% of employers plan to drop insurance, one thousand waivers have been granted to Democrat donors, contraception is an entitlement, and abortion is back front and center, Stupak amendment be damned. I’m not going to say “I told you so”; but it’s not because I’m not that kind of guy – I am that kind of guy.
No, I’m going to wait until they fess up to the $3 trillion it is really going to cost, and admit that 40 million workers will be forced off employer coverage, and deem facelifts medically necessary. That’s when I am going to say “I told you so.” And fear not, liberals – I have nothing but love in my heart for you; I hope your grandchildren are all born healthy and that you live long and happy lives with your spouses. No, really – I do.
In the meantime, I am just going to ask you a new litmus test question: what do you think of President Obama’s Health Care Reform? Any opinion worth listening to will start with the acknowledgement that we got played – big time.
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