Tag Archives: Freedom

Health care reform and a free society

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I’m not sure I agree with the entire piece, but there is something undeniable in Jeffrey Kuhner’s piece Friday in the Washington Times:

[Obama's] proposal seeks to create a centrally planned medical economy that will erect a gigantic government bureaucracy based on massive taxes, subsidies and regulations. Mr. Obama is willing to sacrifice his partys political fortunes in November – and even his own re-election in 2012 – because he understands one fundamental fact: Nationalized health care is the heart of cradle-to-grave statism. No country that has ever embraced socialized medicine – Canada, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy – has ever been able to regain economic freedom.

Basically, his point here is that here’s a lot more than just health care for uninsured at stake here… our freedoms, our opportunities, our free market system is at stake.

Now, the incredible Irony here is that back in 2003, when Obama was a state senator and the issue of abortion came up… Obama’s view was that:

I voted uh, uh, no, on uh,the late term abortion ban not because I don’t recognize that these are not painful issues but because I trust women to make these decisions.  To the degree to which we presume as governments to make decisions in the most intimate, uh, basic, uh, decisions of uh, a individual’s life I think we are making a mistake.

So when it comes to abortion… Government has no role to play AT ALL in the choice of women in their medical decisions.  But when it comes to every other medical decision we face… Obama wants to make sure his breaurocracy, his funding, his rules, his limitations all apply to all of our uh basic, uh, intimate, personal decisions… which is all this health care bill ever was… a piece of legislation designed to force most Americans into giving up control over their health to a health-care system run by Obama.

And you wonder why people are angry.

via KUHNER: The United Socialist States of America – Washington Times.

Powerless because of the Law

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As a recent legal graduate and future attorney, I care deeply about not only what the law IS… but what the law should be.  In fact, this blog is devoted (in theory) to debate and commentary about how the Constitution (hence blog-stitution) should be interpreted–although it often gets bogged down in petty politics.

Many of us (myself included) tend to look at the law and see nothing more than a series of issues on which a position is to be had.  We look and see and hundreds of different solutions and changes that need to be made–and often find ourselves in a relentless, uphill battle.  Philip Howard, in Today’s Wall Street Journal, challenges this piece-meal approach.  Instead of focusing on the specifics, Howard asks us to take a step back and address the fundamentals–the most important of which is the need for what I would call “positive freedoms” (although this may not be the most appropriate term).  I am very impressed by Howard’s ability to write… the jury is still out (so to speak) on the merit of his arguments.

Other countries shared, at least in part, our political freedoms, but America had something different — a belief in the power of each individual.

[But] Americans don’t feel free to reach inside themselves and make a difference. The growth of litigation and regulation has injected a paralyzing uncertainty into everyday choices…

The idea of freedom as personal power got pushed aside in recent decades by a new idea of freedom — where the focus is on the rights of whoever might disagree…

The flaw, and the cure, lie in our conception of freedom. We think of freedom as political freedom… [F]reedom should also include the power of personal conviction and the authority to use your common sense…

Modern law pulls the rug out from under all those human powers and substitutes instead a debilitating self-consciousness. Teachers lose their authority… doctors go through the day thinking about how they will defend themselves if a sick person sues…

When advancing the cause of freedom, law today is all proscription and no protection. There are no boundaries, just a moving mudbank comprised of accumulating bureaucracy and whatever claims people unilaterally choose to assert. People wade through law all day long. Any disagreement in the workplace, any accident, any incidental touching of a child, any sick person who gets sicker, any bad grade in school — you name it. Law has poured into daily life.

The solution is not just to start paring back all the law — that would take 10 lifetimes, like trying to prune the jungle. We need to abandon the idea that freedom is a legal maze, where each daily choice is like picking the right answer on a multiple-choice test. We need to set a new goal for law — to define an open area of free choice…

Reviving the can-do spirit that made America great requires a legal overhaul of historic dimension. We must scrape away decades of accumulated legal sediment and replace it with coherent legal goals and authority mechanisms, designed to affirmatively protect individual freedom in daily choices. “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, “and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical . . . .” The goal is not to change our public goals. The goal is make it possible for free citizens to achieve them.

I suggest you read the piece in its entirety.

Pay ANY price…

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I wanted to bring your attention to an article by Joseph Leiberman in the Wall Street Journal. It is illuminating because it gives an historical context by which to view the modern democrat party and explains why this change has occurred.

This was the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, who pledged that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.“

And this was the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy, who promised in his inaugural address that the United States would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of freedom.“

This belief in the American cause and its people has slowly been replaced, on the left, with a hatred for these very principles. The Left did not see the Soviets were not evil… they were victims of American provocation…

Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the communist world, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor – a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and “inordinate fear of communism” represented the real threat to world peace.

It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America’s fault.

But before I reprint the article in its entirety, head over to WSJ.com and read it for yourself.

I must admit; it feels a bit odd to find myself finding such common ground with former Democratic presidents. Does this make me some kind of Neo-Democrat… or does this say more about the lengths the Democratic party has moved left?… I would tend to think it’s the latter.

The Absurdity of Authoritarian Perpetuality*

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Yesterday, I was enjoying my usual lazy morning routine: sipping Starbucks coffee with some ghirardelli chocolate on the side while reading the Wall Street Journal (there is almost nothing I enjoy more). That simple pleasure was rudely interrupted by a shocking quote in the middle of an article discussing Angela Merkel’s problems articulating a consistent foreign policy.  See if you can spot the portion that so affected me (hint: I italicized it)

Angela Merkel is tougherning her country’s approach to authoritarian regimes in China, Russia and Iran, but the switch hasn’t delivered the kinds of policy changes that might help reign them in.

Her views, including strong backing for Israel and suspicion of Iran, have moved Germany closer to the U.S. on some of the West’s most important foreign-policy challenges.

“Quiet diplomacy doesn’t work if you’re not prepared to stand up for your beliefs in public,” says Eckart von Klaeden, foreign -affirs spokesman for Ms. Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats. He wrote the party’s new Asia strategy, which said Germany should assert its democratic values more strongly.

That view worries many German foreign-policy specialists… “The idea that Western democracies can write the rules for successful autocracies is fanciful,” says Eberhand Sandschneider, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations.

After almost choking on my semi-dissolved chocolate square, I continued to read the remainder of the article–causing what had once been a perfect morning to become a worse-than-average sick day.

What, If I may ask, is WRONG about Germany–or any other democracy for that matter–”asserting” it’s values? What kind of sick, fatalistic, insecure, impolitic person thinks that the qualities of freedom, tolerance, justice, are values to be concealed, withheld from the gambit of topics available to be discussed in the international arena? Why should the West be mute on the very idea responsible for it’s greatness? Did he really just say this?

Furthermore, the concept that a fundamental quality of an autocracy is its un-questionable Perpetuality (*if I may coin a phrase*) is at best an ignorant opinion, at worst a dangerously revisionist version of history. Phrased differently, where is it written that autocracies are destined to continuous inevitability? The simple answer is that this is pure BS.

History is not lacking in examples of formerly-totalitarian regimes that have either become democratic (or are beginning to move in that direction. Here are just a few exmples off the top of my head (in no particular order):

  • East Germany (Post WWII)
  • South Korea (with U.S. help)
  • Italy (cerca 1948)
  • France (post-revolution)
  • Britian
  • Japan (Post WWII under the Marshall plan)
  • China (to a degree)
  • Spain
  • Venesuela (with the latest political defeat of Chavez)
  • India
  • Niger
  • Kenya
  • (If I have forgotten any major ones, please add to the comments)

As these examples make clear, it is Mr. Sandschneider’s distorted history (and distorted understanding of human nature) that is “fanciful” — not Ms. Merkel’s foreign policy.

And to make a broader point; this kind of reasoning happens all too often in both Democrat and Republican circles (and, to be fair, in Libertarian circles as well). The concept that “those people” , “over there” do not want freedom or cannot handle freedom should we give it to them is dangerously nationalistic and perhaps even anti-ethnic to a degree. Can anyone having fully known oneself, having tasted of the freedoms Democracy provides then assume that people living under oppression WANT to remain in such a state? Is this assumption not based on the idea that these unfortunate souls are not as “enlightened” as we are in the West, that they are the product of a backwards culture and therefore doomed to stupidity? If this is not the case, then please explain how one can conclude differently.

To underestimate the human desire for freedom is to be ignorant of ones-self. Let us not fall victim to this distorted way of thinking.