A New Push to Play God from Washington
It’s interesting to me that last week both Thomas Sowell and I made similar comments about the government becoming “God” in the current health care debate. His comments made the evening news, and mine were published by a number of outlets. We must be on to something.
Actually, most of life relates to the concept of God. We can’t escape from it. When we act selfishly and do our own thing, we make ourselves God; When a secular worldview becomes ascendant in society, then government becomes God; But the best form of government is when we let God be God by structuring our institutions according to his principles and administering them through wise representatives.
For over two hundred years, America enjoyed the blessings of the latter and the freedoms it brings. As Thomas Sowell points out in this article, we are now “audaciously” moving toward option two with the Federal Government assuming the God-seat. It will be a hard taskmaster if we do not change course. RB.
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social commentator, and author of dozens of books. He is currently a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
By Thomas Sowell – August 24, 2009
The serious, and sometimes chilling, provisions of the medical care legislation that President Obama has been trying to rush through Congress are important enough for all of us to stop and think, even though his political strategy from the outset has been to prevent us from having time to stop and think about it.
What we also should stop to think about is the mindset behind this legislation, which is very consistent with the mindset behind other policies of this administration, whether the particular issue is bailing out General Motors, telling banks who to lend to or appointing “czars” to tell all sorts of people in many walks of life what they can and cannot do.
The idea that government officials can play God from Washington is not a new idea, but it is an idea that is being pushed with new audacity.
What they are trying to do is to create an America very unlike the America that has existed for centuries– the America that people have been attracted to by the millions from every part of the world, the America that many generations of Americans have fought and died for.
This is the America for which Michelle Obama expressed her resentment before it became politically expedient to keep quiet.
It is the America that Reverend Jeremiah Wright denounced in his sermons during the 20 years when Barack Obama was a parishioner, before political expediency required Obama to withdraw and distance himself.
The thing most associated with America– freedom– is precisely what must be destroyed if this is to be turned into a fundamentally different country to suit Obama’s vision of the country and of himself. But do not expect a savvy politician like Barack Obama to express what he is doing in terms of limiting our freedom.
He may not even think of it in those terms. He may think of it in terms of promoting “social justice” or making better decisions than ordinary people are capable of making for themselves, whether about medical care or housing or many other things. Throughout history, egalitarians have been among the most arrogant people.
Obama has surrounded himself with people who also think it is their job to make other people’s decisions for them. Not just Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, his health care advisor who complains of Americans’ “over-utilization” of medical care, but also Professor Cass Sunstein, who has written a whole book on how third parties should use government power to “nudge” people into making better decisions in general.
Then there are a whole array of Obama administration officials who take it as their job to pick winners and losers in the economy and tell companies how much they can and cannot pay their executives.
Just as magicians know that the secret of some of their tricks is to distract the audience, so politicians know that the secret of many political tricks is to distract the public with scapegoats.
No one is more of a political magician than Barack Obama. At the beginning of 2008, no one expected a shrewd and experienced politician like Hillary Clinton to be beaten for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States by someone completely new to the national political scene. But Obama worked his political magic, with the help of the media, which he still has.
Barack Obama’s escapes from his own past words, deeds and associations have been escapes worthy of Houdini.
Like other magicians, Obama has chosen his distractions well. The insurance industry is currently his favorite distraction as scapegoats, after he has tried to demonize doctors without much success.
Saints are no more common in the insurance industry than in politics or even among paragons of virtue like economists. So there will always be horror stories, even if these are less numerous or less horrible than what is likely to happen if Obamacare gets passed into law.
Obama even gets away with saying things like having a system to “keep insurance companies honest”– and many people may not see the painful irony in politicians trying to keep other people honest. Certainly most of the media are unlikely to point out this irony.
America to Politicians on Health Care: Keep the Change!
The message coming from grassroots America to the DC politicians in town halls across the country and is loud and clear:
We don’t want government-run health care. This is change we don’t believe in–so don’t vote for it, or you will do so at your own peril. I’m proud of the American people for rising up and speaking out on this issue over the past few months. Every opinion poll shows that everyday Americans believe we’re going a wrong direction –with the average margin on all health care polls being 54%-46% against the government getting involved. A new American revolution has begun that could bring great renewal and blessing to a nation that’s been torn between two opinions for at least a generation. Those two differing opinions, or worldviews, are ultimately what the health care debate is all about.
On one side is the secular or humanist worldview which is promoting government health care. Why? Because when you reject the God-factor, the true basis of human rights, and our Creator’s defined roles for individuals and spheres of society, a God-substitute must take its place which is normally an enlarged state. The call for universal, government-run health care might take place under the guise of compassion and caring, but it’s ultimately about power–the government controlling the masses through assuming the ultimate Provider role that enlightened civilizations have always ascribed to the God of the Universe. This is the road to tyranny–as evidenced by every socialist revolution in history.
The American Revolution of 1776 represented the opposite revolution–an amazing configuration of the Judeo-Christian view of God and government in human society. According to biblical faith, it is God who is our Provider–and through personal faith, morals, character, ethics, community, creativity and industry, we can reap the blessings of his provision in every area of life. The early American concept of the God-given rights of men and limitations on human government, limiting its role to the proper sphere of protection of not provision for its citizens, was the Christian expression of political and economic ideas. That view created the greatest amount of freedom and prosperity in the history of the world. This is the surest path to liberty or human freedom.
But as Thomas Jefferson wisely stated during those days, “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” In the 20th century a rebellion against Christian values began to eat away at the foundations of the American family, work ethic, sexuality, and finally the role of government in society. The engine of this secular revolution was the government schools and universities which began to toss out all remnants of the faith and character that made America great. The secularists knew what Abraham Lincoln had predicted in the 19th century, that “the philosophy of the schools in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”
Which is where we stand today. For a generation, the teaching of the government schools has left out God, morals, freedom, limited government, the basis of human rights, etc. and replaced these sacred pillars with an all powerful-and-providing centralized government. They’ve even invented the “right” to health care–and it is the responsibility of the government to provide it through a single payer system.
But thanks be to God!–the American people are waking up and realizing that their very civilization is at stake in this boondoggle called national health care reform. For the past couple of months, the American people have been speaking out loudly in town halls, e-mails, letters to the editor, and various rallies around the nation that we Americans don’t want to go down the road to socialized medicine. Here are some of the many reasons for the outcry:
- Both the House and Senate bills under consideration are loaded with ambiguities and lack of details–yet the bills are being “rushed” through Congress. At the very least this is bad government process which will give us very dubious results. Read Chuck Norris’ recent commentary on this.
- The “government option” will, of necessity, lead to to many people leaving their private policies for the government plan which will decrease competition and choice–thus raising costs.
- The senior citizens of the nations–including 70,000 people who left the AARP in July over their disastrous flirting with the national health care plan–understand that the government take over of health insurance will be the end of Medicare as they’ve experienced it.
- The “crisis” under which the national health care balloon has been floated is way overblown. During these necessary months of debate we’ve learned that actually 80% of Americans are satisfied with their current health care plans and don’t want to see them changed.
- The number that have been used to justify the move to socialized medicine is that there are “47 million uninsured people out there that need insurance.” That number has now been thoroughly analyzed and soundly rejected. The reality is that nearly ten million of this number are illegal aliens, fifteen million are those who live above the median American income of $46,000 and simply choose to spend their money on other things, and another ten million are eligible for current government programs but don’t sign up for various reasons. That leaves under nine million citizens that can’t afford health coverage out of 304 million Americans–or 3%. Hardly a crisis–simply an opportunity to improve our help for the poorest among us.
- The arrogance of our current political leaders has stunned the electorate. Rep. Anthony Weiner D-NY told an August town hall meeting that he didn’t care what his people wanted–he knew what was best and would vote for government care. Now that’s representing the people! It appears that the current administration and Congress might just be the most arrogant collection of leaders that the US has seen since the Nixon administration (arrogance is non-partisan). After the August recess, the Senate is considering passing the “hell care bill”, against the will of their constituents, using a parliamentary procedure called “reconciliation” which avoids the normal sixty votes necessary to stop a filibuster. So much for representative government.
- A national health care plan will give the Federal Government control of an additional sixteen percent of the multi-trillion dollar US economy. The folks aren’t buying this power grab of their liberty. We don’t need another “Freddie Mac of Health Care” to bring down our medical system as they did to the housing and real estate industries.
- Everybody knows by looking around the world that socialized medicine or national health care options increase the cost of health care through government waste and lack of competition and lead to the greater rationing of goods and services. The UK and Canada are prime examples. We don’t want to repeat their mistakes.
- The people’s greatest concern right now is the burgeoning federal deficit–which is due to the dubious 787 billion stimulus package, the omnibus bill filled with thousands of earmarks, and the refusal of the current administration to use tax cuts to create jobs and economic recovery. The people know that nationalizing health care will add trillions of dollars in the coming years to an already precarious national debt load.
- The mammoth 1000 page bills floating through the halls of Congress are loaded with both labor and insurance company perks, will lead to tax-payers footing the bill for abortions (against their will and conscience), and contain provisions that–thank you, Sarah Palin!–look very much like “death panels” to most of us. It was interesting to see the liberal press ridicule the former VP nominee on this one while at the same time the Senate quietly pulled out the sections dealing with “end-of-life counseling.” If this wasn’t about pulling the plug on Grandma, why the deletions?
Many diverse voices are making sense and generating momentum for rejecting national health care in America. The best article I’ve read in the past month was featured in the Seattle Times written by Dave Herbold, the retired COO of Microsoft and Scott Powell, the director of capital markets for Clarus Capital. You can read this excellent article here. It concludes with these words:
“More bureaucracy, greater dependence, higher taxes, more debt, fewer choices, lower quality. Get real. Fool us once with the stimulus plan, shame on us. Fool us twice, shame on our political leaders. This is less about reform and more about collectivist political power to redistribute wealth, expand federal government control, weaken individual and states’ rights, and create a permanent power base through entitlements and dependency.”
“It is time to take the first step in restoring the primacy of personal choice and responsibility. It is time to say “no” to Washington elites and “yes” to the people who deserve real reform based on a competitive system with incentives to contain costs while assuring choice, quality, and flexibility.”
Amen and amen.
So what is needed to improve health care in the best health care system in the entire world? Here are a few positive suggestions that have emerged during the debate:
1. Pass extensive tort reform currently affecting up to 16% of all medical costs. Doctors need to be set free from fear-based practice so that they can truly “do no harm.”
2. Allow health plans to go national like car insurance and other services. This will greatly increase competition and lower costs for all.
3. Do away with the politically-driven state mandatesthat drive up the costs of local insurance policies. In the state of Washington there are nearly fifty medical insurance mandates that stifle choice, competition, and the cost of various medical policies. One size doesn’t fit all. You don’t need the same coverage in your twenties that you do in your eighties.
4. Adopt the best practices of private business such as utilized by Whole Foods in the business sector or Group Health in the medical portion of society.
5. Encourage personal, portable Medical Savings Accounts through a variety of tax incentives.
6. Take responsibility for your own health and that of your family through good eating habits and lifestyle choices.
And continue to prayerfully and respectfully speak out until government-run health care is a thoroughly discredited topic of a wise and free people.
After the August recess, there will be an attempt to jam this legislation down the throats of the American public in both the house of Representatives and the US Senate. So, before your representatives return to Washington D.C., make sure they understand that you want them to read your lips on the subject of national health care.
If they don’t, make sure they read your votes in 2010 and 2012.
Dick Morris’ Political Prophecy
Dick Morris served in the Clinton administration and was the political strategist behind Clinton’s widely successful “triangulation” strategy. I do not always agree with him, but in terms of political instincts I value his wisdom and perspective. This article, written in January of this year, is a sobering look at the coming four years in American political and economic history. It’s quite troublesome and appears almost prophetic to me–not in a literal sense, but a thoughtful prediction. I share it with you because some of it has already become true, and the current healthcare debate is the linchpin for “changing America.” I agree with many of Morris’ concerns and want all of us to rise up in prayer and action. Let’s shape this one by our faith in God and undying love of liberty. RB.
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on January 20, 2009
2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives. Just as the stars were aligned for Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan, they are aligned for Obama. Simply put, we enter his administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden — a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.
Obama will accomplish his agenda of “reform” under the rubric of “recovery.” Using the electoral mandate bestowed on a Democratic Congress by restless voters and the economic power given his administration by terrified Americans, he will change our country fundamentally in the name of lifting the depression. His stimulus packages won’t do much to shorten the downturn — although they will make it less painful — but they will do a great deal to change our nation.
In implementing his agenda, Barack Obama will emulate the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Not the liberal mythology of the New Deal, but the actuality of what it accomplished.) When FDR took office, he was enormously successful in averting a total collapse of the banking system and the economy. But his New Deal measures only succeeded in lowering the unemployment rate from 23 percent in 1933, when he took office, to 13 percent in the summer of 1937. It never went lower. And his policies of over-regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession. Unemployment in 1938 rose to 17 percent and, in 1940, on the verge of the war-driven recovery, stood at 15 percent. (These data and the real story of Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s missteps, uncolored by ideology, are available in The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, copyright 2007.)
But in the name of a largely unsuccessful effort to end the Depression, Roosevelt passed crucial and permanent reforms that have dominated our lives ever since, including Social Security, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, unionization under the Wagner Act, the federal minimum wage and a host of other fundamental changes.
Obama’s record will be similar, although less wise and more destructive. He will begin by passing every program for which liberals have lusted for decades, from alternative-energy sources to school renovations, infrastructure repairs and technology enhancements. These are all good programs, but they normally would be stretched out for years. But freed of any constraint on the deficit — indeed, empowered by a mandate to raise it as high as possible — Obama will do them all rather quickly.
But it is not his spending that will transform our political system, it is his tax and welfare policies. In the name of short-term stimulus, he will give every American family (who makes less than $200,000) a welfare check of $1,000 euphemistically called a refundable tax credit. And he will so sharply cut taxes on the middle class and the poor that the number of Americans who pay no federal income tax will rise from the current one-third of all households to more than half. In the process, he will create a permanent electoral majority that does not pay taxes, but counts on ever-expanding welfare checks from the government. The dependency on the dole, formerly limited in pre-Clinton days to 14 million women and children on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, will now grow to a clear majority of the American population.
Will he raise taxes? Why should he? With a congressional mandate to run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. Reagan cut taxes and increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending. Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that conservatives cannot cut taxes. And, when the economy is restored, he will raise taxes with impunity, since the only people who will have to pay them would be rich Republicans.
In the name of stabilizing the banking system, Obama will nationalize it. Using Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to write generous checks to needy financial institutions, his administration will demand preferred stock in exchange. Preferred stock gets dividends before common stockholders do. With the massive debt these companies will owe to the government, they will only be able to afford dividends for preferred stockholders — the government, not private investors. So who will buy common stock? And the government will demand that its bills be paid before any profits that might materialize are reinvested in the financial institution, so how will the value of the stocks ever grow? Devoid of private investors, these institutions will fall ever more under government control.
Obama will begin the process by limiting executive compensation. Then he will urge restructuring and lowering of home mortgages in danger of default (as the feds have already done with Citibank).
Then will come guidance on the loans to make and government instructions on the types of enterprises to favor. God grant that some Blagojevich type is not in charge of the program, using his power to line his pockets. The United States will find itself with an economic system comparable to that of Japan, where the all-powerful bureaucracy at MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) manages the economy, often making mistakes like giving mainframe computers priority over the development of laptops.
But it is the health care system that will experience the most dramatic and traumatic of changes. The current debate between erecting a Medicare-like governmental single payer or channeling coverage through private insurance misses the essential point. Without a lot more doctors, nurses, clinics, equipment and hospital beds, health resources will be strained to the breaking point. The people and equipment that now serve 250 million Americans and largely neglect all but the emergency needs of the other 50 million will now have to serve everyone. And, as government imposes ever more Draconian price controls and income limits on doctors, the supply of practitioners and equipment will decline as the demand escalates. Price increases will be out of the question, so the government will impose health care rationing, denying the older and sicker among us the care they need and even barring them from paying for it themselves. (Rationing based on income and price will be seen as immoral.)
And Obama will move to change permanently the partisan balance in America. He will move quickly to legalize all those who have been in America for five years, albeit illegally, and to smooth their paths to citizenship and voting. He will weaken border controls in an attempt to hike the Latino vote as high as he can in order to make red states like Texas into blue states like California. By the time he is finished, Latinos and African-Americans will cast a combined 30 percent of the vote. If they go by top-heavy margins for the Democrats, as they did in 2008, it will assure Democratic domination (until they move up the economic ladder and become good Republicans).
And he will enact the check-off card system for determining labor union representation, repealing the secret ballot in union elections. The result will be to raise the proportion of the labor force in unions up to the high teens from the current level of about 12 percent.
Finally, he will use the expansive powers of the Federal Communications Commission to impose “local” control and ownership of radio stations and to impose the “fairness doctrine” on talk radio. The effect will be to drive talk radio to the Internet, fundamentally change its economics, and retard its growth for years hence.
But none of these changes will cure the depression. It will end when the private sector works through the high debt levels that triggered the collapse in the first place. And, then, the large stimulus package deficits will likely lead to rapid inflation, probably necessitating a second recession to cure it.
So Obama’s name will be mud by 2012 and probably by 2010 as well. And the Republican Party will make big gains and regain much of its lost power.
But it will be too late to reverse the socialism of much of the economy, the demographic change in the electorate, the rationing of health care by the government, the surge of unionization and the crippling of talk radio.