Peter Griffin, Enemy of the State

Hugo Chavez has carried out a multi-pronged attack on the liberties of the Venezuelan people ever since he became “president.” This attack includes (but is not limited to) the nationalization of large swaths of the economy, confiscation of private property, price controls, currency controls and various other restrictions on trade, socialist indoctrination in schools, a court packing scheme, and a relentless effort to silence any and all opposition.

Earlier this year, the Venezuelan government revoked the licenses of 34 broadcasters that had been critical of the Chavez administration. Another 240 radio stations and 45 television channels are also on thin ice with the Venezuelan government for alleged violations of the Telecommunications Law, and could well be next on Chavez’s hit list. The suppression of opposition voices in Venezuela has been so blatant that even the United Nations, an organization which never met a dictator it didn’t like, felt obliged to express some misgivings.

“I am deeply concerned over the reduction in the number of outlets through which citizens can exercise their right to receive information from diverse sources,” said UNESCO’s Director-General Koichiro Matsuura. “The people of Venezuela have the right to benefit from a diversity of perspectives in reports and analyses of events that concern them.”

President Chavez remained unfazed by the obscure UN bureaucrat’s blistering remarks, however, and the Venezuelan government’s long-standing policy of media intimidation continues apace. In fact, it now seems to be taking on a new dimension. Whereas in the past Chavez limited his abuse of power to those media outlets that dared criticize government policies, his administration is now threatening to impose fines on television stations simply for broadcasting shows that certain government officials just don’t like.

What kind of program could be so offensive, so subversive, so bourgeois and counter-revolutionary that it could call down the wrath of the Venezuelan high command? Family Guy. That’s right - Family Guy. Evidently the zany antics and shenanigans of Peter Griffin and his family are so antithetical to Chavez’s “21st Century Socialism” that they must be expunged from the airwaves of Caracas. According to the Associated Press, Venezuelan Justice Minister (insert your own joke here) Tareck El Aissami was outraged by a recent episode in which the show's characters started a campaign to legalize marijuana, and he has indicated that any stations that continue to air the offensive (to him, at least) program will be fined.

I understand that pointing out the loss of liberty in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez is a lot like pointing out that the sun rose in the east this morning, but some stories are just too good to pass up. As the AP article mentions, one of the proposed changes to the Telecommunications Law is a requirement that all stations carry Chavez’s speeches. To that end, kicking Family Guy off the air may just be a necessary first step to free up the additional time slots el Presidente needs. Given how much Hugo Chavez enjoys hearing himself talk, the requirement to carry all of his speeches could easily fill up the entire day’s programming. Soon television in Caracas will be like radio in North Korea – all dictators, all the time.

I used to watch Family Guy quite a bit, but I stopped because it seemed to take them forever to get any new episodes on the air. But the fact that the Venezuelan dictatorship hates the show may just be reason enough for me to start watching it again.

The Desert Island Test

“No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.”

Facebook users will no doubt recognize the above quote, which was recently posted as a “wave” by some supporters of socialized medicine. Evidently they just wanted everyone to know how deeply they care about the plight of the less fortunate who, for whatever reason, cannot afford health insurance. I have no doubt that all those who posted the aforementioned status update to their Facebook page also contacted their favorite health-related charity that very same day to make a sizable donation. Otherwise the more cynical among us might have thought that their public display of concern for the downtrodden was really nothing but a shallow demand for the government to spend everyone else’s money.

Granted, scanning my friends’ Facebook pages is not exactly a scientific survey, but it does at least offer an opportunity to see what some of the people in my network are thinking. As health care seems to be the one and only issue being discussed in the media these days, it is naturally a hot topic on social networking sites as well. In addition to the pro-government medicine wave, there are also various Facebook polls concerning health insurance, such as the one that asks, “Should health care be considered a basic human right?” At the time of this writing, the results were 72% Yes, 28% No.

As sad a commentary as those results are, the poll question itself reveals how poorly most people understand fundamental concepts. Rights, in the classical liberal tradition upon which the US government was founded, derive from our nature as human beings. The Facebook poll question, however, asks whether health care should be a right or not – the implication being that what is or is not a right is subject to change at any given time, like the menu down at the corner deli.

As libertarians and a few others understand, however, something is either a right or it is not. “Should” doesn’t enter into the equation. In a recent episode of his online show “Freedom Watch,” Judge Andrew Napolitano stated (correctly) that “health care is not a right, it is a good.” Many people (at least 72% of Facebook respondents, anyway) would obviously take issue with Judge Napolitano’s position, but I suspect the disagreement is primarily a semantic one. Perhaps we should define our terms – especially fundamental terms like “rights” - before getting bogged down in the details of any particular proposal. Only then will we be able to make some progress in the national health care debate.

In the modern vernacular, the term “right” seems to mean “anything I might like to have.” Health care is (or for those of you on Facebook, should be) a right because everyone wants it, or needs it, or thinks it’s really nifty. The same goes for education, a minimum wage, a three-bedroom house with a view, or whatever else people want to throw on the government wish list at any given time.

The fallacy underlying this popular definition of rights shouldn’t be too hard to disprove. And when it comes to the issue of universal health care, it would behoove the liberty-minded individual to do so as quickly as possible. If the popular definition goes unchallenged, the proponents of socialized medicine will inevitably claim that health care is a basic human right, and will consider that to be the end of the argument – their “get out of the debate free card,” if you will. As the concept of rights in the traditional American sense is now so poorly understood, you may have to work a bit to educate those who haven’t been exposed to the foundational principles of our fair republic. Nevertheless, it’s an important task that should help clarify the issues at stake. What follows are a couple of strategies that may help illustrate the difference between the legitimate rights of the Lockean tradition and the illegitimate positive rights that seem to dominate the discussion these days. No doubt the reader knows of other approaches that are equally effective.

When confronted with the claim that X, Y, or Z is a “right,” the first question we should ask is, “Does everyone have the same rights, or do different people have different rights?” If we can agree that all people have the same rights, then we can probably move forward with the discussion. If our opponents claim that some people have more rights than others, then we should probably just back away slowly and not make any sudden moves until we have reached a minimum safe distance. Life’s too short to argue with pinheads.

Assuming we do agree that all people have the same rights, then it follows that rights must be universal. That is, they must apply equally to all people, at all places, at all times. This is merely a restatement of the already agreed-upon proposition. One way to determine whether something meets the universality constraint is to use the “desert island” test.

Let’s imagine that I’ve been shipwrecked on a desert island. After I wash up on shore, do I have a right to my life? Yes. Do I have a right to whatever property I have with me, or am able to create using the resources available to me on the island? Yes. Would I have these rights no matter when I got stranded on the desert island, be it the year 1609, 2009, or 3709? Yes. Would I have these rights without regard to my race, color, national origin, religion or creed, gender, sexual orientation, age, or disability? Yes. So it seems that these rights – life and property – satisfy the universality constraint. They apply equally to everyone, at all places, at all times.

Now let’s continue the test. If I’m stranded on a desert island, do I have a right to health care? If no one is around to provide health care to me, then how can I have a right to it? Would I have the right, as some claim, to health care regardless of when I wash up on shore? Would I have the right, for example, to a CAT scan if I were shipwrecked in the year 1609? Clearly, health care fails the universality criteria for basic human rights. It cannot apply equally to all people, at all places, at all times.

Another way to conceptualize the distinction is to describe a right as something for which one would be morally justified in using force to obtain. I have the right to use force against someone who is trying to kill me because I have a right to my own life. I do not have a right to anyone else’s life, and therefore I would not be morally justified in using force against those who do not attempt to harm me first. Hopefully most people would agree to that proposition without the aid of any long, drawn-out logical proofs.

Let’s imagine that Joe is trying to kill Frank for no other reason than the voices in his head told him to. In this example, Frank would be justified in shooting Joe if need be because Frank has the right to his own life.

Now let’s say that Joe is not trying to kill Frank. Instead, Joe is sitting at home, minding his own business. If Frank falls ill, would he be morally justified in shooting Joe if Joe doesn’t pay for Frank’s medical treatment? Most sane people would say no. Nevertheless, if the proponents of socialized medicine who claim that health care is a basic human right wish to be logically consistent, they would have to say that Frank would be within his rights to use force against Joe in this case. To my knowledge, few proponents of Obamacare have been quite so forthright.

There are many things in this life that are necessary for mankind to survive and flourish, and health care is certainly one of them – along with food and water, clothing, shelter, and countless other goods and services. People have the right to desire whatever they want (an Aston Martin, cable TV, sunshine and puppy dogs), but this does not grant them a right to the thing itself, no matter how much they may want or even need it. To suggest that we have a right to the goods and services that others must provide us is to claim that we can legitimately impose contractual obligations on those other people with or without their consent. There’s a term for that kind of forced labor, and as far as I know, slavery is still considered très déclassé.

As important as this semantic discussion of rights may be, I don’t imagine for a second that it will halt the drive toward universal health care in this country, even if we are successful in restoring the true meaning of the term. Most people just want what they want, and they’re not going to let some egg-headed notions of rights and ethics stand in the way. But at least it would help to strip away the false virtue that proponents of socialized health care have used to cloud the debate. Perhaps then more people would see Obamacare for what it really is – gun-run medicine.

If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day…


(Desert island photograph from here).

It's Hard To Be Humble

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.”

Perhaps libertarianism would be more popular if it weren’t such a humbling philosophy. One of the key insights of libertarian thought, particularly as it relates to economics, is that the collective wisdom of the market is always superior to the grand designs of a small group of people, no matter how competent or well-intentioned they may be. Many free-market thinkers such as Leonard Read (I, Pencil) and Ludwig Von Mises (Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth) have expanded upon this concept, but F.A. Hayek (The Fatal Conceit) may have put it best when he said, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

None of these writers ever claimed that the market was perfect. They did, however, show how the market’s price mechanism transmits vital information throughout the economy far more efficiently than any government planners ever could. In addition, they demonstrated how the market’s system of profit and loss rewards desirable behavior and punishes undesirable behavior far more effectively than the comparatively weak feedback mechanism of voting that supposedly constrains representative governments.

This concept, as important as it is, doesn’t seem to translate very well into the political arena. Voters expect politicians to have a central plan to run every aspect of human existence, and politicians never fail to come up with one. It’s a shame that so few people have read Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society. If more people understood the ramifications of his work, we wouldn’t have to suffer through agonizing speeches like the one President Obama gave before Congress last week.

In a speech of about 5,600 words (none of which happened to be “Constitution”), President Obama attempted to make the case that, under his wise and benevolent rule, the federal government could provide health insurance more efficiently, more affordably, and more universally than the market can. In addition, he claimed that the changes he has in store for the health insurance industry will have no ill effects whatsoever for the 90% of Americans who already have insurance.

Not everyone in the audience was convinced. At one point during the speech, Republican Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted out, “You lie!” I won’t go as far in this post as Representative Wilson did in maligning President Obama’s intentions (I already did that in a previous post). For now, let’s simply accept at face value that the President’s deep and abiding faith in the inherent efficiency and virtue of the federal government truly leads him to believe his own propaganda about universal health care. In that case he’s not technically lying - he’s just horribly, horribly wrong.

Exhibiting the “fatal conceit” described by Hayek, President Obama made a number of statements that were meant to assuage the concerns some have about a federal takeover of health insurance. In making these claims, Obama described the changes his plans would impose on the industry, but studiously avoided mentioning how the market would react to those changes.

Let’s examine each of the elements highlighted by President Obama in his speech. His first claim was that, “…if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.”

As I mentioned in a previous post, President Obama is technically correct when he states that none of the various bills floating around Congress at the moment contain a requirement for Americans to change their existing coverage. He is patently wrong, however, when he implies that this will not be the inevitable result of his policy. The changes being proposed will drive up costs and crowd out private insurance. Employers will respond to the increases in premiums and will soon drop health insurance from their benefit plans altogether, which will force most people into the government option just as surely as if the bill had required it from the start.

Continuing, Obama claimed that “What this plan will do is make the insurance you have work better for you. Under this plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition.”

Insurance is a way to hedge against future uncertainty. There is no way to hedge against a risk that has already occurred. The effect of prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions will be to insulate people from the risks of not carrying insurance, which will incentivize them to eschew health insurance altogether until after they become sick. Since insurance companies must receive more in premiums than they pay out in claims in order to stay in business, the pre-existing condition requirement will serve only to crowd out private insurers in favor of the government alternative. The only way around this inevitable outcome is the individual mandate, which threatens “free” citizens with fines and imprisonment if they choose not to buy health insurance. The individual mandate is part of the Obama plan as well. The mandate may serve to minimize the damage caused by the plan’s pre-existing condition constraint, but it has no place in a free society.

President Obama also stated that, “As soon as I sign this bill, it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it the most.”

I thought this was an odd selling point for a government-run plan. According to the Lockean theory of natural rights upon which the US federal government was based, the purpose of government is to protect individuals from acts of aggression by other individuals. Fraud is an act of aggression, and there are already plenty of laws on the books to deal with it. If, as President Obama wishes us to believe, insurance companies are routinely violating the terms of their contracts as soon as their customers get sick, then surely the government is failing in its primary role as the enforcer of those agreements. This leads one to wonder why the government, which is so demonstrably incompetent in fulfilling its primary mission, should be granted additional power to manage health insurance.

The President then went on to assure us that, “They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime. We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of- pocket expenses, because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they get sick.”

There are both ethical and pragmatic problems with this feature of Obamacare (and with all its other features as well). Ethically, why shouldn’t people be allowed to negotiate the terms of a contract as they see fit? If I promise to pay you X dollars – but not a penny more – in the event of illness or injury, and you accept the terms of that agreement, why should we be prevented from making that deal? Pragmatically, how can I be expected to make a profit out of such an arrangement if the government imposes limitless liability on me for each and every one of my customers? Obviously I cannot run a business this way, and will eventually be forced out of the industry altogether.

One of the President’s last key points was, that “…insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies.”

There’s a reason that oil changes and tire rotations are not covered under your auto insurance. These are foreseeable costs of car ownership, and including them under insurance plans would not only run counter to the purpose of insurance, but would also drive up the cost of that insurance. Covering routine check-ups under a health insurance plan will likelwise drive up the costs associated with that plan as individuals are encouraged to over-consume those services. Preventing insurance companies from offsetting those increased costs through higher premiums will simply push marginal players from the market, reducing the supply of private health insurance and further reinforcing the crowding-out effect of public investment in the industry.

None of these obvious and predictable consequences will in any way dissuade those in Washington from continuing down the destructive path they’re on. And why should they? Although President Obama stated on “60 Minutes” that he has “every reason to get [health care] right,” nothing could be further from the truth. The number of Americans who can identify the impacts of allegedly unintended consequences of government policy on market functions amounts to little more than a rounding error. Barack Obama will be out of office long before the disastrous effects of his policies are felt in the health care field. And when they are, the American people will lay the blame for their dissatisfaction not with President Obama and the political class that foisted this monstrosity upon us, but rather on the so-called “free market” that has been so handcuffed by government regulation that it can no longer function at all. When that happens, yet another opportunistic politician will step in with some grand plan to fix the problems caused by all the other opportunistic politicians who came before him. At no point will he advocate that the government step aside and simply allow the market to function. That would require a Hayekian understanding of one’s own limitations, which is something very few politicians seem to possess.

It’s hard to be humble, after all.

The Public Option

My little girl started first grade last week at the public school here in our neighborhood. We sent her to a private pre-school for the two years prior to kindergarten in the hope that we would be able to keep her in private school for the duration of her academic career. As everyone knows, though, private school is expensive and unfortunately for us the cost soon proved prohibitive, especially now that we have two kids to educate.

It wasn’t always like this, however. Once upon a time private schools were affordable for just about everyone. Indeed, private education was the norm in the colonial and early post-revolutionary periods in the United States. Though there were certainly exceptions to the rule, generally speaking early American education followed a broadly free-market approach. This model led to a wide variety of specialized schools, such as religious institutions, college preparatory academies, charity schools, and private tutors. In the period following the American Revolution until the 1830s, academies were the standard form of education in the United States. These were usually corporations that were financed through private endowments and private tuition.

As Barry Poulson wrote in Education and the Family During the Industrial Revolution, “Private education was widely demanded in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Great Britain and America. The private supply of education was highly responsive to that demand, with the consequence that large numbers of children from all classes of society received several years of education.” During this same period, literacy rates increased from 75% to 97% in the north, and from 50% to 81% in the south.

Beginning in the early 19th century, however, something changed. Statists of various stripes began looking to Europe, particularly Prussia, where government control of education was all the rage. In 1817, a group in Boston petitioned for a system of government schools and the gradual abolition of private schools. They claimed this was necessary to ensure the education of those children who had fallen through the cracks of the private education system. 96% of all Boston children were enrolled in a private school of some sort, but the remaining 4% supposedly justified a government takeover of the entire system.

The initial calls for complete government control of education failed, so its proponents changed tactics. Instead of an outright takeover of the private schools, supporters of state-run education pushed for more gradual changes. By focusing on the four percent of children who weren’t attending school, and ignoring the ninety-six percent of children who were, the “reformers” were able to increase the number of taxpayer-funded schools. In the modern vernacular, we might say that they were calling for a “public option” in education to “compete” with the private sector.

Advocates of government education, such as Horace Mann, continued to expand state control to include everything from primary school through university. In the period following the Civil War, taxpayer-funded schools had become the norm. This was indeed a sea change from the laissez-faire approach of the early years of the Republic, but such was the hope and change attitude of the times, and public statements from important public officials reflected the new collectivist mindset. As John Davis Pierce, Michigan’s first Superintendent of Public Instruction, stated, “If children, as is generally conceded, belong to the republic, then it is obviously the duty of the state to see to it that they are properly trained, instructed, educated.” [Italics mine.]

Predictably, the public option advocated by Mann, Pierce, and others crowded out the private provision of education that had been the standard for so long. Today the only remaining private institutions, for the most part, are those that cater to the high-end market in education. This is not surprising, as most of the people in the low and middle ranges of the market cannot afford to pay for the same service twice – once from their taxes, and again in the form of private tuition. Their demand has been wholly absorbed by the public schools, and private schools cannot possibly compete with the subsidized public option.

In fact, private education has been so thoroughly crowded out by the public option that very few people today can even conceptualize that the free market could provide affordable education options at all socio-economic levels. No matter how many historical examples you give, no matter how many case studies of private education in third-world nations you cite, no matter how many for-profit educational institutions you point to, most people simply will not accept the idea that education can be separated from government.

I suspect the early supporters of public education often made claims like, “If you like your private school, you’ll be able to keep it.” Today we hear the same thing from President Obama regarding his plans for our health insurance. He assures us that his efforts to increase government control over the health care and health insurance industries will have absolutely no effect on the overwhelming majority of people who have health insurance plans they like. He just wants a public “option” to “compete” with private insurance providers (the funding for his public option will not be optional so much as it will be mandatory, however).

And, just like the advocates of public education in the 19th century, Obama and his supporters point to the “46 million uninsured” as a justification for increasing government involvement in the health insurance industry, which has no problem providing coverage for the other 260 million people in the US. Granted, the 46 million number includes 18 million people who make over $50,000 a year, 14 million people who are already eligible for other government health insurance programs, and 10 million illegal immigrants whom Obama claims won’t be covered in his plan to cover all 46 million people, but if we were to factor out all those elements, we’d be left with a much less scary number.

And just to be fair to the President, I searched the 1400-page House bill thoroughly and he is correct that the phrase “eliminate private insurers” is nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, the crowding out effect is as predictable in health insurance as it should have been in education. Once Congress passes the bill, the days of affordable private insurance are numbered – at least for those who can’t afford to pay twice for it. And you can bet that President Obama and the members of Congress have the means to opt out of public health insurance in the same way that they routinely opt out of public education.

The rest of us, however, will find that a public option will leave us with far fewer options. And within a generation or two the crowding-out effect will be so complete that no one will even be able to imagine how a free market could possibly provide affordable, high-quality health care.

(Source for history of early American education: Matthew J. Brouillette, The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, School Choice in Michigan: A Primer for Freedom in Education.)