More than ever, Americans need to distrust Government
Thursday, March 25th, 2010Anyone who places trust in government misplaces that trust. The best job any government can do is protecting their nation from external enemies. Those who are concerned that given power government would misuse it to abuse the rights of the governed do not have that concern without reason.
In Logic, the “Slippery Slope” Argument is considered a fallacy. In Politics, it is to be expected that given an inch, miles will be taken.
So, with Health-care, I cannot help but think of movies such as Logan’s Run and Brazil.
What the Nation needed was reform and what it has received instead compounds the problem greatly. Government running Health-care is antithetical to reform itself. Bureaucracy breeds inefficiency and higher cost. Certainly one can claim that leaving ones health care in the hands of a business full of bureaucracy is not a great thing, but at least the business has something Government cannot claim to improve service: it cannot survive without making a profit. In order to make a profit, it has to provide services customers want. The fewer competitors a business has, the less pressure it has to provide goods and services desired by customers at a competitive price. Government, as I have mentioned before, is a monopoly. Monopolies do not have competitors or, if there are a few, they are so weak that they cannot reasonably compete. Combine bureaucracy with monopolies and you have a wasteful system that lacks any real accountability.
Regulation of industry hampers competition by creating barriers of entry. If government runs health-care, you can be assured that private insurers will be unable to compete. While a government’s resources are not unlimited it is able to forcibly take money in the form of taxes, fines, fees, and penalties to generate money, subsidizing their programs. Barring a very productive population or the conquest of other nations, government eventually dries it’s resources up when sponging off of the population.
“I think they’ve made the biggest financial mess that any government’s ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they’re now trying to control everything by other means. They’re progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people. Look at the trouble now we’re having with choice of schools. Of course parents want a say in the kind of education their children have.” – Margaret Thatcher 1976 TV interview
It is a fundamental truth. The more you take to give to others; the more you “spread the wealth”, the less money you eventually have. You end up with less money because the taking of it disincentivizes people and leads to less production. After all, why should someone work hard to earn money of which most is taken away and given to someone who works less or in a commonly doable job? If as a college graduate your net paycheck is only a few hundred dollars more a month than the non-graduate flipping burgers as MickeyDees, what point was there in putting forward the effort to excel?
Americans cannot trust government to look out for their interests. Americans cannot be free and sucklings of Government at the same time. Freedom and Large Government are antithetical to each other.
