Why Must ‘We Pay Either Way?’

An key argument peddled in defense of ObamaCare goes something like this:

Trump reiterated that he'd like to keep two of the law's most popular provisions: letting children up to the age of 26 stay on their parents' insurance, and forbidding insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions, like cancer or diabetes.

The challenge is the second one. Not even Trump wants to return to the dark days when insurers refused to cover breast cancer survivors, or charged them sky-high premiums they couldn't afford. But most experts say it's impossible to keep this protection if you repeal the rest of Obamacare - the individual mandate that orders everyone to buy insurance, and the subsidies that help low-income, healthy people join the rolls.

Think about what will happen. If people aren't required to buy insurance, but know they can get it if they fall ill, many of them will save money by buying coverage only after they get sick. That would deprive insurers of premiums they need to cover their costs, forcing them to increase premiums dramatically. That, in turn, would prompt even more healthy people to quit buying insurance, a trend experts call the "death spiral

Or:

His proposal to turn Medicaid into block grants would only shift the burden of paying for the very poorest citizens to the states.

Or:

It's not clear that would even save money in the end. Because people without insurance would land in emergency rooms, where both the law and the dictates of human decency require hospitals to provide. Those hospitals then get help from the state through a program known as "charity care."

Those quotes are not made up. They are from a New Jersey Star-Ledger editorial from November 2016, before Trump took office. In Trumpcare': Kicking 22 million off health insurance?, The Star-Ledger sums it up: “In other words, we pay either way.”

I left these comments, edited for clarity:

And why is that? Because “either way,” the government forces “we” to pay. Welcome to the welfare state—the slow bleed toward totalitarian socialism. Statists have saddled us with so many wealth redistribution schemes that no one can escape being forced to pay for others’ needs. Western socialists discovered long ago that the communist path to socialism wouldn’t work in the West. So they adopted the backdoor approach—fascism. Fascism is socialism without government ownership. As the infamous leader of Germany’s National Socialist Workers Party explained about 8 decades ago:

“Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good…This is Socialism- not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over all, regardless of whether they are owners or workers…Our Socialism goes far deeper…[the people] have entered a new relation…What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.” [From Herman Rauschning’s The Voice of Destruction, as quoted in The Ominous Parallels, by Leonard Peikoff, page 231-232.]

If “we pay either way,” we are on our way to being fully trapped “firmly within a discipline we cannot escape.” We’re already part way there, and with each new welfare state expansion—ObamaCare created a whole new class of parasites—we’re told we can’t repeal it because “we pay either way.” Trapped.

That’s why, in order to repeal and replace ObamaCare, we must challenge the very concept of the regulatory welfare state and the forced redistribution of wealth that it rests on. To do that, we need to protect each individual’s right to decide for himself who, when, how, and in what capacity to help others. Government has no legitimate role in charity.

Abolishing the welfare state can’t be done overnight. It must be done slowly but systematically to give people time to adjust back to freedom and individual rights and the self-responsibility that goes with it. A good place to start is with the repeal of the pre-existing conditions mandate, the heart of ObamaCare. To do that, we must remove the biggest cause of pre-existing conditions, the third-party-payer system, and replace it with individual ownership of insurance like life, auto, and homeowners. We must also repeal all of the insurance mandates, which drive up the cost for everyone and bars insurers from selling new policies that exclude, charge more for, or include delayed coverage for pre-existing conditions. These regulations leave people with pre-existing conditions with no insurance for anything because of a single condition. There are plenty of other free market reforms needed, like insurance riders that specifically cover pre-existing conditions, enabling people who lose or change insurance carriers to get new coverage without losing coverage for their pre-existing condition.

This is just a sample of the reforms we need. Health insurance is morally a matter between consumers, providers, and insurers that government coercion shouldn’t interfere with. People should be free to shop for the coverage that best suits their needs and wallets from competing insurers, rather than be forced into overpriced government-mandated policies. But that won’t even happen. Trump has already said he will keep the pre-existing mandate. He is a center-left, big spending welfare state liberal, after all. We’ll end up with TrumpCare, which will essentially be ObamaCare without Obama with a dash more healthcare freedom scattered here or there. Trump will not reverse the statist trend, and we will continue down the path toward a government-imposed discipline we cannot escape. I don’t know what the Left is so worried about.

Related Reading:

Rebuttal to Dianne Douthat: Pro-Medicaid is Not Pro-life

From RomneyCare Without Romney to ObamaCare Without Obama?

In ObamaCare Repeal Debate, Who is the Real ‘Taker’

Replacing ObamaCare Should Mean Replacing Government Planning With Individual Planning

To Deny the Consequences of ObamaCare, Deny the Principles

The Left's False Alternative on Health Care

As ObamaCare Failures Pile Up, Get Ready for the Mother-of-All Healthcare Battles

Republicans ‘Slammed’ for Saving ObamaCare

The Road To Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Pre-existing Conditions—Yaron Brook and Don Watkins

The Road to Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Preexisting Conditions - Part 2

The Road to Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Preexisting Conditions - Part 3

How the Freedom to Contract Protects Insurability, Dr. Paul Hsieh for The Objective Standard

NJ Gov. Candidate Wants to Bring 'Medicare-for-all' into Healthcare Debate. Good. Let's Bury It

Rebuttal to Dianne Douthat: Pro-Medicaid is Not Pro-life

An advocate of ObamaCare and Medicaid attempted to attach the label “pro-life” to support for those programs. In a letter published on July 29, 2017 in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, Dianne Douthat wrote “If you’re pro-life, here’s something you should know.” That opening statement is followed by a litany of Medicaid beneficiaries, as if any good end somehow justifies whatever means happened to be employed. The letter concludes:

Without Medicaid, millions of American lives — including infants, children, the elderly, veterans and addicts — will be in danger. How is it possible that the [Republican] party that says it’s prolife is also looking to dismantle a program that sustains life?

It’s time for our senators who proclaim they are pro-life to prove it. It’s time to put people before politics, and before tax cuts, and improve, not dismantle, the ACA and Medicaid coverage. If you’re pro-life, take action— contact your senators today. [sic] [NOTE: A version of this letter appeared in Wayne Patch under the title If you're Pro -Life.]

First of all, let’s get honest: The Republican Party is not looking to dismantle Medicaid (unfortunately). Far from it. It plans to increase Medicaid spending, but at a slower rate than current law, with its built-in automatic increases. According to CNN Money, the now defunct Republicans’ Senate scheme would have increased Medicaid spending by 18% over the next ten years. The GOP plan is only a cut “in budget parlance,” as the New York Times put it with a straight face. Medicaid apologists whine that the slower growth would result in fewer people being covered by the program. True. An ever-growing Medicaid budget will inevitably suck more people into dependence, which of course welfare statists welcome. But, coupled with free market reforms, Medicaid reduction would mean more people would find private insurance cheaper and more affordable, should they choose to buy it. This, not an ever-expanding parasite class, should be the goal.

As to the more important issue, Douthat’s got it backwards. The true test of a “pro-life” person is, “does she leave people free to self-govern according to their own judgement—including the freedom to say ‘no’ to another’s charitable crusades?” Pro-life answers yes. Douthat answers no, and thus fails this test. Medicaid fails this test. Douthat and Medicaid are not pro-life.

Medicaid starts with armed government aggression against productive people, via the taking of the earnings of the productive people through taxes to fund Medicaid. Is this what Douthat means by “put people before politics?” Are taxpayers not people?

Is stripping these individuals of their right to decide if, when, whom, and in what capacity to help others—and instead forcing them to fund whom politicians think should be “helped”—what Douthat means by “put people before politics?”

Is forcing doctors, the people we depend upon to provide the medical service, into the position of having to turn away patients or treat people at a loss because of prices dictated by politically-appointed government bureaucrats what Douthat means by “put people before politics?” Are doctors not people?

Decades of government interference into medicine and health insurance, including through programs like Medicaid, has driven the cost up so high that one in four people can’t afford it without Medicaid. Is this what Douthat means by “put people before politics?”

Douthat is right that the problem is people versus politics. But she’s got it exactly backwards. The problem isn’t people. It’s politics. Millions of people sweat out over their health coverage, as Republicans seek to place minor restrains on these out-of-control programs, and Democrats can do no better than to mercilessly demonize the other party. The fact that so many people’s health coverage is at the mercy of goings-on in Washington is precisely because the politicization of medicine has put politics over people—people’s money and rights.

Douthat provides a litany of beneficiaries but not a word about the victims of Medicaid, which includes many of Medicaid’s alleged “beneficiaries”—people priced out of the market by government interference or forced onto ObamaCare after ObamaCare outlawed their existing policies. Not a word about the dreadful consequences of continuing on the path of ever-expanding, unrestricted growth of American welfare statism, not just Medicaid but all of the other “helpful” programs. But Douthat’s “good” intentions don't justify the corrupt means. As Thomas Aquinas taught, a good intention can never redeem a bad action. Pro-life means the right to life. The right to life is more than treating humans like caged animals, meeting their basic needs but no more. It’s about being in control of one’s own life, and the freedom to act on one’s own judgement in pursuit of the values one judges to be necessary to achieve good, flourishing life—that is, happiness—without having to seek permission and without coercive interference. Douthat doesn’t respect these fundamental, individual human rights. and so she can no more claim the label “pro-life” than Republicans who deny a woman’s right to reproductive freedom under the same empty slogan. Only proponents of liberty can give real meaning to the term “pro-life.”

Douthat claims that these programs “sustain life.” But that’s not true. Productive individuals, free to earn and keep money, wealth, and property in a free market of voluntary trade, sustain life. Need alone cannot satisfy human need. Only productive, purposeful action can satisfy human needs. That’s why putting need above productiveness (and the freedom productiveness depends upon) is anti-, not pro-, life. Parasites on and exploiters of the productive are a drag on, not sustainers, of life. Every new program drains wealth from the pockets of the private sector, pushing more and more people into the “needy” camp, leading to calls for yet another and then another new welfare program to “help” these folks—folks forced into the needy camp by similar prior programs. And each of these existing programs trigger regular calls to expand them, as ObamaCare did with Medicaid. The assault on the productive intensifies in a never-ending cycle. That’s why socialism always leads to increasing economic paralysis, spreading poverty, and ultimately collapse into widespread destitution. When productiveness is sacrificed to need, the ultimate result is shrinking productiveness and widening need, with the final result being unfilled needs. Private charity programs rest on productiveness, and are sustainable and valuable when completely voluntary and private. Government-imposed programs like Medicaid and its ilk are the opposite. They are malignant social cancers because based on force rather than voluntarism. Force is ant-life.

If you really want to “put people before politics,” get politicians out of regulating medicine. Stop them from putting the healthcare security of increasing millions of Americans at the mercy of forcing higher taxes and regulations on their fellow citizens. Stop them from forcing some people to pay for other people’s healthcare, in effect making some the slaves to the needs of others. It’s morally corrupt at its core. Need before justice is inhumane. “a good intention can never redeem a bad action.” Eliminate Medicaid, Medicare, SCHIP, and all the rest of the “helpful” social programs politicians created; eliminate controls an health insurers, doctors, and the rest of the medical profession; and leave doctors, insurers, and healthcare consumers and patients free to contract with each other voluntarily to mutual advantage, neither forcing anyone to buy services they don’t want nor being forced to pay for others against their will nor empowering anyone to force others to pay for hers.

We need free market healthcare. People before politics: for real.

Related Reading:

The "Violence" of the Dems' Health Care Reform

Hillary Vs. Trump: Where’s the Opposition to Welfare State Violence?

Our Pick-Pocket Nation

Pre-Medicaid ‘System’ Points to the Moral Alternative to Medicaid: A Free Market Safety Net

America Before the Entitlement State—Yaron Brook and Don Watkin

A "Liberal" Newspaper Acknowledges the Welfare State Dilemma

Moral Health Care vs. Universal Health Care, by Lin Zinser and Paul Hsieh for The Objective Standard

Florio’s Misleading Take on Insurance and Pre-Existing Conditions

Recently, former New Jersey governor James Florio critiqued a key element in the Republican AHCa plan to revise ObamaCare. The GOP would replace ObamaCare’s individual and pre-existing condition mandates with a separate state-level insurance pool for people with pre-existing conditions. Republicans say that, by separating the small percentage of pre-existing conditions from the rest of the insurance market, general insurance rates will fall substantially.

But Florio observes that NJ has already tried this so-called “assigned risk” pool in its auto insurance market, and argues that the approach failed and was eventually done away with.

That’s all debatable. But what caught my eye was the following statement from his article, which is titled Gov. Florio: GOP's high-risk insurance pools makes same mistake as 'bad driver' scheme:

The deficiency in these devices is that they are not insurance. The concept of insurance is the sharing and spreading of risk. The high-risk pool is about insurers avoiding risk -- the off-loading of risk onto someone else.

In the current case, it would be taxpayers.

I think it’s very important to understand what insurance is and is not. Socialized medicine-oriented statists always attempt to frame an issue in socialist/collectivist terms. In my view, that’s what Florio is doing here in his critique of Republicans. Florio also endorses so-called “essential benefits” mandates, which is a way of redistributing wealth through “sharing and spreading of risk.”

I offered my view in these comments:

This is highly misleading.

First of all, risk-sharing is not the essential purpose. I don’t buy car or homeowners insurance to subsidize others. I buy it for personal financial protection. The primary purpose of insurance is as a financial tool for protecting against unforeseen, catastrophic future expenses. Insurance enables a consumer to arrange for such payments in the event one happens. That’s what my premiums pay for—not a chance to dump the cost of my risk on others. Insurance, properly understood, is a personal financial planning tool, not a gimmick to escape from the personal moral obligation to be responsible for one’s own health care. For insurance to work, insurers must be free to objectively assess risk and charge each customer accordingly, in a competitive environment (which, thanks to legal restrictions, we don’t now have).

Insurance is not for the purpose of redistributing wealth. Florio says assigned risk pools “offload” risk to taxpayers. But ObamaCare does the same thing, in different form. It “offloads risk” on all others through artificially higher premiums on health insurance, as well as through taxpayer subsidies to insurance companies, to subsidize “pre-existing conditions” and other mandates that enable some people to escape higher premiums based on the higher risk they pose or the choices they make.

If the GOP plan is wrong, so is ObamaCare. So is any scheme that is essentially forced wealth redistribution. Whether we’re talking about the ACA and the AHCA, which uses “private” companies, or single payer, which bypasses the private sector, we’re not talking about real insurance. We’re talking about forced “sharing and spreading of risk,” a fancy word for forced redistribution of wealth—which is legalized theft and thus fundamentally immoral and contrary to the proper purpose of government, which is to protect individual rights, including rights to spend our own money as we judge best.

It’s funny that Florio should accuse Republicans of getting people "priced out of the market” in the same breath that he endorses government-mandated “essential services, like maternal care” being forced on insurers and consumers. It is such mandates that substantially drives up the general cost of health insurance—thus making insurance unaffordable for many more people. Neither the federal nor state governments have any moral right to dictate health insurance policy provisions, aside from laws that forbid fraud, breach-of-contract, and the like. Thanks to decades of government interference, we’ve arrived at the ultimate absurdity—”unaffordable” health insurance, at 18%+ of GDP, and at a substantial cost to our freedom and individual rights in healthcare!

Related Reading:

Replacing ObamaCare Should Mean Replacing Government Planning With Individual Planning

The Road To Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Pre-existing Conditions—Yaron Brook and Don Watkins

The Road to Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Preexisting Conditions - Part 2

The Road to Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Preexisting Conditions - Part 3

How the Freedom to Contract Protects Insurability, Dr. Paul Hsieh for The Objective Standard

Real vs. Our Pseudo Health Insurance

Government, Not Industry, is the Predator in Health Insurance

The New Jersey Star-Ledger followed up NJ Representative Tom MacArthur’s ruckus town hall meeting by ridiculing MacArthur for comparing the fears about the GOP taking away the guarantee of pre-existing condition coverage with the earlier fears about “Death Panels” under ObamaCare.

At his town hall meeting, MacArthur said:

"I think it speaks to the people's fear, but it reminds me a bit, people were saying President Obama wanted to set up death panels, wanted old people to die," he said. "You look back now and you realize how insane people got with their fear and their anger."

In Memo to Tom MacArthur: You are the source of fear, not death panels, the Star-Ledger said:

The maestro of the Obamacare repeal now says that he was referring to common "scare-tactics" used to "drum up fear," but nothing is more alarming than miscuing the national reaction to the resurrection of this fetid corpse known as the American Health Care Act.

MacArthur doesn't seem to remember: Sarah Palin and her acolytes used "death panel" to spread a lie - refuted in every advanced culture - that government involvement in health care means rationing and death.

The fear he witnessed Wednesday night is based on the fact that federal involvement in health care is a necessity, because it ensures that nobody is left out or exploited by a predatory industry - just the opposite of a death panel, you might say. [emphasis added]

It’s that last paragraph that got my attention. So, I left these comments:

This is exactly backward. It is the government that has a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. Only the government, through its unique law-making powers, can force you to comply with its edicts under threat of throwing you in a cage. It is only the government that, through its power to take your money at gunpoint—its taxing powers—can force us into an employer-based system of health insurance, so if you lose your job you lose your insurance—thus getting a lot of people stuck with a “pre-existing condition” through no fault of their own. It is only the government that can force up our insurance premiums through “essential benefit” mandates that we otherwise wouldn’t buy. It is the government that forcibly bans insurance companies from competing, to the detriment of consumers. It is the government that forcibly forbids health insurance companies from performing the essential task at the heart of the purpose of insurance—to fairly price policies according to an objective assessment of risk. Only a government can force you to buy health insurance only government central planners approve of. Only a government can forcibly take money from some people to subsidize others it deems “left out.”

Industry cannot do any of that. It cannot force anyone to buy its product. A private company can only make offers. Consumers are free to accept the offer, attempt to negotiate better terms, or reject it and go to a competitor (if the market is free from government interference). Consumers are free to say to a private company what they are not free to say to the government—“NO.”

The fact is, the current health insurance industry is not a real insurance industry. The government has gone way beyond its only morally proper function of using its legal monopoly on the use of force to protect individual rights through, for example, policing the insurance markets against fraud, breach of contract, and the like. After decades of increasing government controls, all imposed at the point of a gun, seemingly “private” health “insurance” has essentially become an arm of socialistic government coercion and forced redistribution. Through myriad interventions engineered by politicians who never concern themselves with unintended consequences or the rights of their constituents to make their own choices based on the own judgement according to their own personal circumstances and interests, the government has caused all of the problems we now demand government fix. American health insurance is a victim of predation, all right—a predatory government.

Federal involvement in health care is not only not a necessity—it is destructive of real health insurance that people can actually use to fulfil their personal moral responsibility of paying and managing their own way on healthcare. The problems of government interference in healthcare go beyond private health insurance. But on the ACA vs.AHCA debate, my view is that we must step back and acknowledge that government control of health insurance has had its chance and it has failed. It’s time to return power to the people—the power of freedom and individual rights that only free market reforms can achieve. Unfortunately, the GOP’s AHCA tinkers, but it really is only a form of ObamaCare without Obama.  

Related Reading:

Is ObamaCare Socialist? No, . . . and Yes: But Who Cares?

Replacing ObamaCare Should Mean Replacing Government Planning With Individual Planning

THE OBAMACARE ALTERNATIVE OBAMA DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT—Rituparna Basu

Government Intervention, not the Health Insurance Industry, "Ruined the System"Moral

Health Care vs. Universal Health Care, by Lin Zinser and Paul Hsieh

Republicans ‘Slammed’ for Saving ObamaCare

This Spring, House Republicans have been facing loud and largely organized protests at their town hall meetings over their healthcare legislation to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare. The leading complaint concerns ObamaCare’s pre-existing conditions mandate, which bars insurers from refusing customers with pre-existing conditions, or charging more for such policies.

This strikes me as strange, since the GOP from Trump on down have pledged to keep that mandate. Yet Republican congressmen often can’t get a word in edgewise. In MacArthur slammed at town hall for reviving Obamacare repeal, Jonathan D. Salant (NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) reports:

The first questioner at Rep. Tom MacArthur's town hall meeting here Wednesday wanted to know about those who have pre-existing conditions.

"What will happen to them?" asked C. Andre Daniels, mayor of Westampton Township. "That's what everybody wants an answer to."

Yet,

For the first part of the town hall, which lasted close to five hours, the audience didn't wait for MacArthur to finish a sentence before shouting at him.

I left these comments:

Don’t these loud-mouthed fools know that MacArthur, Trump, and most of the Republican Party is on their side? Quibbling over details aside, they all believe in the pre-existing condition mandate.

And that’s the problem. The pre-existing condition mandate is the legalization of insurance theft. It says you can get healthcare services you never paid for through a prior insurance contract, and force others to pay through inflated insurance premiums and/or subsidies to insurance companies. This is fundamentally unfair and immoral. Yet the GOP favors it, right along with Democrats. The GOP simply wants to rearrange the means of forced subsidization.

The GOP’s pledge to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with substantial free market reforms has been largely abandoned. Such reforms would, to begin with, eliminate the myriad of government policies that are primarily responsible for forcing people into pre-existing condition problems through no fault of their own. Nobody in their right moral minds believes that a person who voluntarily goes uninsured is entitled to insurance coverage after the fact. But a person shouldn't be forced into that situation by government. The reason pre-existing conditions are such a big political problem is because of massive political interference in health insurance—interferences like employer-tied health insurance and state and federal “essential” benefit mandates.

But the bottom line is that it is simply unfair to force up everybody’s health insurance premiums—or outlaw their policies altogether—to bail out people facing higher premiums because of personal pre-existing conditions, which amounts to punishing people because they do not have pre-existing conditions. Each of us as individuals is responsible for planning ahead for our healthcare needs—planning made much more difficult by government policies that drive up costs and restrict our freedom to choose and to protect ourselves from pre-existing conditions in the first place.

For decades the government has been progressively restricting the freedom of insurers and consumers to voluntarily contract—so here we are. My view is that the government has had its chance at controlling our health insurance and it has failed. We now need to restore individual freedom and the natural human incentives inherent in a free market—a market where government officials stop dictating and stick to policing against fraud, breach-of-contract, and enforcing equal protection of the rule of law—to drive down costs, raise quality, and allow innovative insurance solutions. While the Republicans plan for pre-existing conditions is arguably modestly better than ObamaCare, what the GOP is essentially proposing is ObamaCare without Obama. What’s not for these loud-mouthed phonies to like?

Related Reading:

"Pre-Existing Conditions", and the Solution

The Road To Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Pre-existing Conditions—Yaron Brook and Don Watkins

The Road to Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Preexisting Conditions - Part 2

The Road to Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Preexisting Conditions - Part 3

Giving Sebelius a Small Piece of My Mind

This Is Why Government Shouldn’t Be Involved in Health Care—Jeffrey A. Tucker for FEE

How the Freedom to Contract Protects Insurability, Dr. Paul Hsieh for The Objective Standard

Constitutional Republicanism: A Counter-Argument to Barbara Rank’s Ode to Democracy

In an Iowa town hall meeting defending his vote in favor of the Republican’s American Health Care Act, which would repeal or alter parts of ObamaCare, Congressman Rod Blum attempted to explain his vote before a screaming, jeering, disrespectful crowd. The Washington Post reported on this episode in A congressman said making a man get maternity insurance was ‘crazy.’ A woman’s reply went viral.

One woman, retired educator Barbara Rank, didn’t participate in the shouting. Instead, she thoughtfully composed a rebuttal letter, which was published in Iowa’s Telegraph Herald under the title Why should I pay indeed?. Someone subsequently posted the letter on line, where it was viewed by tens of thousands of people. Rank wrote:

Congressman Rod Blum in a Dubuque town hall (Monday) night asked, “Why should a 62-year-old man have to pay for maternity care?”

I ask, why should I pay for a bridge I don’t cross, a sidewalk I don’t walk on, a library book I don’t read?

Why should I pay for a flower I won’t smell, a park I don’t visit, or art I can’t appreciate?

Why should I pay the salaries of politicians I didn’t vote for, a tax cut that doesn’t affect me, or a loophole I can’t take advantage of?

It’s called democracy, a civil society, the greater good. That’s what we pay for.

Why, indeed? Why should anyone be forced to pay for bridges, sidewalks, libraries, flowers, parks, or art—or any material economic benefit one cares to add to that list—against her will? The only moral answer is, she shouldn’t. (We’ll leave aside, for now, the issue of taxes and politicians’ salaries.)

Yes, “It’s called democracy”—and Rank’s is one of the the clearest and most devastating indictments of democracy one can encounter. Political power is the power of the gun. That power can be used for the protection of liberty, or to destroy it. Democracy is the latter. Rank is right, though she doesn’t realize it. Democracy is a “cold” civil war of predatory pressure groups and electoral factions fighting for the political power—control of the government’s guns, the legislative process—to extract by force benefits and favors paid for by other factions; each faction, in turn, defining its latest scheme for “free” stuff as “the greater good.”

Rank’s viral letter begs the political philosophy question, What is America?

There is nothing civil about democracy. Democracy denies the rights of the individual, the most vulnerable in any society, to live according to her own judgement. But what greater good can there be than the liberty, inalienable rights, and dignity of the individual, living under a government that protects, equally for all and at all times, those rights? That, in fact, was the original American system—not a democracy, but a constitutional republic based on individual rights and limited, right-protecting government. Fully and consistently applied, all bridges, sidewalks, libraries, flowers, parks, art, et al, are privately owned and funded, and governed under the rule of law established according to the principles of constitutional republican government.

Democracy contradicts America. As the Chinese Communist Mao ZeDong understood, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." The American Founders well understood that as well. But the goal of the Founders and the goal of the Maoists were opposite, with opposite results. The Founders sought to establish a free constitutional republic with ironclad limits on societal and government power based on the principle of individual rights—the moral principle that subordinates society to the moral law that each individual owns his own life, and cannot be anyone’s slave. Mao established a Marxist democratic republic of unlimited, totalitarian government power, under which the individual is subordinate to society, which can do with her as it wants. Once we accept the principle that the government’s guns are the tool of predatory factions rather than a tool to protect the individual against the predatory factions, we arrive at the result achieved by Mao, ”All things grow out of the barrel of a gun.” Then we have arrived at the point of universal predation and mutual suspicion and resentment, as every election poses a threat to each other's’ lives, freedom, and property. With each election, who knows what we will be forced into in the name of “the greater good.”

In an 1864 address, Abe Lincoln sought to clarify the meaning of liberty in the American context. As Niles Anderegg observes:

Lincoln goes on to give us two basic definitions of liberty.  He notes that “with some, the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself and the product of his labor” while with others liberty is where men are free to “do as they please with other men and the product of other men’s labor.”  He goes on to point out that these two definitions are incompatible.  

Lincoln was applying the parable of “the Wolf and the Sheep”—first citing the sheep’s version of liberty, and second the wolf’s. Lincoln came down squarely on the side of the sheep. Democracy is, essentially, two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. It is the wolve’s version of “liberty” that democracy stands for. It is the wolf’s version of liberty that Rank is promoting. It is not the sheep's version.

Let Rank’s letter serve as a warning to all those who wish to advocate for a free society, and who seek to roll back statism in America: You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say “you must pay for my library” in the same breath that you ask “Why should I have to pay for your maternity care?” Rank shows why it’s impossible to answer her viral response to Blum’s question unless we are ready to challenge her core fundamentalist democracy principles. Ayn Rand was right. The only ultimate way to save America from totalitarian socialism, democratic or otherwise, is to hold up the only opposite ideal, clearly and without reservation—a fully consistent constitutional republic of individual rights and its political/social expression, laissez-faire capitalism.

Observe that Rank never answers Congressman Blum’s question, “Why should a 62-year-old man have to pay for maternity care?” She simply rationalizes, “because I have to pay for all of that other stuff.” But where does it end? The same argument can be used to justify any grab of other people’s money for whatever we’re told is “the greater good.” As we can see with ObamaCare’s mandates, piled as they are on top of all of the other state-level mandates, it will never end. Under this thing called democracy, there is nothing any of us can’t be forced into, because democracy—ballot-box rule—is an open-ended principle. Where do you draw the line?

Far from leading to a civil society, democracy leads to a proliferation of predatory factions, as well as factions seeking to protect themselves from the predators, resulting not in social harmony but an increasingly divided and polarized citizenry where the ballot box permeates and threatens every aspect of our lives. I offer, as evidence, the intolerant behavior of the crowd at Blum’s townhall. I offer, as evidence, a sample of the comments; “calling out ignorant so-called public servants like Rod Blum of Iowa”—this smear, for merely advocating a bit of freedom of choice. I offer, as evidence, the treatment of New Jersey Republican Rep. Tom MacArthur at a similar town hall. Civil society, anyone? No, democracy in action. Democracy is mob rule—cold ballot-box civil war that sooner or later turns hot. It can be no other way—not when you accept the principle that mere numerical superiority trumps justice. Disrespect and force are built into the DNA of democracy.

We can’t do anything about "public" parks and roads, and all of the other stuff that Rank doesn’t use but is forced to pay for, at this time. That’s part of a wider battle. We can do something about the injustice of forcing 62 year old men to buy maternity insurance—or forcing women to buy prostate cancer insurance. No, Ms. Rank, two wrongs—or 10 or 100 wrongs—don’t make a right, no matter how many wolves you have in your pack. The subject on the table is health insurance. We can start righting the wrongs, and we can start with health insurance. benefit mandates are wrong. Individual consumers and insurers have a moral right to voluntarily contract to mutual benefit without government interference. They should have the legal right. It's called freedom.

In the Washington Post article, Rank is quoted as saying, “The conclusion is something I always end up saying. Every argument I've ever had with somebody, friends or relative: Don't you want to live in a civil society? Government is the structure of the country we live in. It's not as bad as people make it out to be.”

But is predatory democracy civil? Is “the structure of the country” based on predation of all against all, or peaceful, live-and-let-live coexistence? Is the government a protector of individual rights, under which each is treated equally under the law? Or is the government a tool of the wolves? Rank is an educator, who retorts “Come on. Didn't we learn this in fifth-grade social studies?” If democracy is what America’s children are learning, shame on us. What we should have learned, and what Rank and our schools should be teaching, is that America is not a nation of wolfpacks—a democracy. America is a nation of free individuals—a constitutional republic—a nation of individual, not pack, rights; of justice, not “social justice”; of the primacy of individual liberty, not the supremacy of the wolfpack’s “greater good.”

Judging by the “likes” in the comment threads, most people agree with Rank. Not good, because nothing less than the future of a free America is at stake. Democracy unconstrained by the principle of individual rights is a manifestation of totalitarianism. We’re still a considerable distance from that logical eventuality. But until and unless we recognize the predatory nature of democracy, or “democratic socialism,” it will end not in the harmony that only mutual respect for each other’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness can achieve. It will end in economic and societal collapse into dictatorship and ruin, as all socialist efforts must. That’s the road Rank endorses, whether she knows it or not; will acknowledge it or not. So much for civil society. So much for the greater good.

Related Reading:

Iraqi Democracy vs. Freedom

Excerpts 6- On Democracy

Mesmerized by Elections, the NJ Star-Ledger Forgot that Tyranny is Tyranny

Democracy is Democracy

Rights and Democracy

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur

The American Left Is Talking Itself Into Violence—John Daniel Davidson for The Federalist