Category: Government & Politics

In promoting his ambitious reprise of Hillary Care, President Barack Obama addressed the concerns some Americans have expressed regarding the government panel responsible for deciding what treatment would be granted under government health care.

Obama pointed out that the market system has its own “panel of experts” in the insurance officials who approve payment, and that his “experts” are better. Obama was asked why people should be willing to abandon the market’s experts for government experts, exchanging the devil they know for the devil they don’t know.

According to Obama, the current system utilizes health care dispensers who are governed by the “profit motive,” while government health care dispensers under the government system are governed instead by how to “get the most bang for the health-care buck.”

Despite all the utopian haranguing, this is, it seems, a distinction without a difference.

That is, if market health insurers are seeking a “profit motive” in attempting to serve its customers while keeping costs as low as possible, this seems remarkably similar to Obama’s omniscient, beneficent panel attempting to keep government health care costs as low as possible.

The real difference in the two schemes is something Obama and universal care proponents don’t wish to acknowledge: that the “profit motive” inherently includes the profiteer’s realization that he must also please his customers, or those customers will find another insurer.

Getting “the most for the health-care buck” under Obama-care revolves around the government attempting to keep costs low (so that the ‘savings — read, ‘profit’, can be spent on bridges to nowhere). The government — in contrast with those ‘evil’ profiteers — does not need to concern itself with satisfying its customers, as our experience with the United States Postal Service should confirm.

Do we really want the same people who mangle our magazines and crush our FRAGILE boxes to determine when and how we should receive a proctology exam?

Is good health care a moral good? Sure. Is health insurance the only way to deliver good health care? No. Is government the better option? No. Government only does a few things well, and attempting to be a market player in the delivery of goods and services is not one of them.

>In an article entitled “$100 mill. pulled from Rainy Day Fund”, it is reported that the cash-strapped State of Alabama is delaying sending out tax refund checks because public education is in proration and there is an anticipated shortfall of funds.

WFSA anchorman Bob Howell described the situation aptly in suggesting that taxpayers aren’t getting their refunds yet because education is a higher priority.

Apparently, per the article, “By state law the education system has to be funded before refunds are sent out.”

Let’s review some facts:

· There is a “Rainy Day Fund” for education from which $100 million has been pulled.
· There is apparently much more left in the “Rainy Day Fund.”
· Tax refunds are the money that the State has OVER-COLLECTED from taxpayers.
· OVER-COLLECTED taxes do not belong to the State.

I don’t know about you, but I would suspect that the average taxpayer who is due a “refund” doesn’t have the luxury of a “Rainy Day Fund” from which to operate when money is tight.

By the way, a tax “refund” is no such thing. It is, actually, a “return” of money that never belonged to the State and shouldn’t have been taken out of the taxpayers’ pocket. But Orwellian language manipulation is at work when the document taxpayers send to the government to report how much money they made is referred to as a “tax return”, giving the impression that taxpayers are giving something back to the government, while the government’s return of the taxpayers’ money – which it never should have had – is deemed a “refund”. Go figure.

Conceivably, then, if someone in Alabama state government decides that education had not been properly funded, no taxpayer will receive his “refund.”

There are many indications that public education has taken on a level of importance in our society wholly incommensurate with its actual worth: bloated bureaucracy, teachers’ unions in lock-step with liberal apparatchiks, poor graduation rates, totalitarian control over content. But delayed “refunds” should reveal just how subservient society has become to public education.

Don’t misunderstand. I don’t advocate educational anarchy. But public education is supposed to be a servant of the people. Government is supposed to be a servant of the people. They are not supposed to collude together in thievery against the taxpayer.

In a previous post, I presented my perspective on how moral beliefs operate in a republican, federal system of government: If New Hampshire wants to recognize “gay marriage,” perhaps it should be able to. But Alabama, if it does not, should not be forced to go along with the nefarious nuptials simply because it, too, is one of these United States.

Some might respond that permitting New Hampshire to violate God’s law regarding marriage and sexuality is being disobedient, or giving in to decadent cultural forces.

But consider how federalism has operated with respect to abortion.

Many years ago the U.S. Supreme Court decided that abortion, in certain circumstances, should be legal. This interpretation of law is considered binding on all the States. (There is considerable weight to the legal opinion that such decisions violate the Constitution’s grant of power to the central government.)

Since that time, sentiment regarding abortion in the seat of central power, Washington D.C., has been intractable. Those who abhorred abortion and lamented the Supreme Court’s decision used the federalist system to their advantage, seeking instead to change public opinion in individual States. In the process, citizens in many States have modified their view of abortion, and their States have severely restricted its legality.

The result of this approach is that public opinion is now decidedly different than it was in 1973. Recent surveys suggest that the number of abortions is at an all-time low, and that for the first time in many years a majority of Americans oppose unrestricted abortion.

Homosexual advocates have been using the same tactic for years, and are seeing the benefits.
So, federalism is a two-edged sword for Christians: opponents of decency and morality can seek to change public opinion and law just as we can. Yet federalism is decidedly better than the alternative. If all such decisions were made in Washington, so that the installation of a new administration or new congressional class changed such fundamental issues for the entire nation every two or four years, change would be constant and radical. The federal system, by contrast, requires that wholesale change be both slow and difficult.

(The appearances of “crises” such as occurred in the Depression, the current economic situation, and the Swine flu “pandemic” are frequently used to circumvent the federalist preference for slow and deliberate change.)

Alexis de Toqueville recognized the ingenuity of the U.S. system of government in that each branch of the central government served as a check against the unrestrained power of the other. In addition, the States serve to check the rampant power of the central government. The Federalist Papers sees the need for checks as stemming in the fallen nature of man. If all men were angels (holy and righteous), the Papers argues, we would not need any checks on government.

At present, the kingdom of Christ rules in the hearts of men, not in the halls of Congress. Until the Lord returns to fully consummate the inaugurated kingdom, federalism is perhaps the best we can do.

>Well, things would be strange, indeed. One would expect that the Mad Hatter would rush in at any moment, Alice would take a pill and grow into a giant, and the Queen of Hearts would recite her all-too-familiar mantra, “Off with his head.”

And headless I should be, if I were to merely enter a beauty contest, much less be crowned something or other.

I thought I would escape comment on Carrie Prejean – Miss California, and runner-up in the Miss USA pageant – but with ongoing revelations of the “windy day” photos from earlier in her career, the story just keeps on going, like a risqué Energizer Bunny®.

Most everyone should be familiar by now with the question that the contestant judge – Perez Hilton – asked Prejean about “gay marriage.” Another state had decided to permit it, so what did she think? Prejean indicated that she was pleased that our civic arrangements permit people choose to engage in such rites, but that her rearing taught her that God desired marriage to be between one woman and one man. Prejean did fairly well, I thought, for a 21-year-old. (How has she responded since then to the fawning Christian community and the ‘windy day’ photos? Not so much.)

So, I wondered what I would have said to such a question. At the age of 21, I probably would have said something coarse and completely unbiblical. So, I rejected what would have been the indiscretions of my youth and wondered what I would have said now.

Put aside, if possible, the image you might be having of a 41-year-old male beauty contestant, “drummer extraordinaire” or not.

You must know that I am an ardent traditionalist, in the sense that I believe God designed and gave to us the marriage relationship, and that any given marriage should be between one man and one woman. Given recent scientific developments and medical advances (see Al Mohler’s article about gender confusion), I should probably say that marriage should be between one-who-has-always-been-a-man and one-who-has-always-been-a-woman, not in the man-trapped-in-a-woman’s-body sense, but in the Garden of Eden sense, fig leaves and all.

I am, also, an ardent federalist, not in the sense that all power should be concentrated in a central government (as in ‘the Feds’), but in the 10th Amendment sense that these United States retain power not explicitly granted by the Constitution to the government in Washington, D.C. (see, e.g., the Federalist Society and the Tenth Amendment Center). Local groups of citizens (the States) are better able to reflect their moral consensus than bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. If, for example, my fellow citizens in Alabama decided to permit ‘gay marriage,’ and if I felt strongly enough about it, I should be able to move to Arizona, where they don’t. The beauty of the U.S. system is that not all States are required to do and believe the same things.

(Some years back a couple of law school friends and I were discussing a federal judge’s ruling that Alabama must remove the Ten Commandments display from the State Courthouse. They simply accepted – as undisputed historical truth – that the central government could order a State what to do with its own property. When I suggested that the Alabama governor ignore the order, they were incredulous. This attitude that the central government is sovereign over all issues is part of the cause for many of our problems today.)

So, my response to Perez Hilton’s question might have gone something like this:

“The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whom I serve in the Lord Jesus Christ, gave mankind the institution of marriage as a gift to enjoy and as the means by which we populate the earth, and he instructed us that it is to be between one man and one woman. However, the United States is not the kingdom of Christ, and the citizens of the several States should be free to determine this issue as their respective faiths and consciences dictate.

“My hope would be that as God draws men to himself, prompting them to repent of sin and turn to righteousness in Christ, that my fellow citizens would determine this issue in a way that glorifies God.”

Come to think of it, if I gave this answer, Perez Hilton might have said nasty things about me, too, and someone would have inevitably dredged up some “windy day” photos of me.

>In the past week the US Supreme Court has issued rulings in two controversial and closely-followed cases by the narrowest of margins: five votes to four. In the first, the Court told the State of Louisiana that it could not impose the death penalty on those convicted of raping children. In the second, it told the District of Columbia that it could not ban firearms.

Is there anyone in the United States who agrees with both of them?

Most who would support the rights of law-abiding DC citizens to own guns (and honor the Second Amendment) would also support the right of a state to execute criminals (and honor the Fifth Amendment). Most who oppose the death penalty in general, and as it is applied to rapists in particular, would also support gun control. Thus those who were dismayed by the death penalty case found themselves rejoicing in the gun rights case, and vice versa.

The very fact that so many Supreme Court cases are being decided by one vote is an indication not that the best legal minds in the US disagree about the law, but that we are permitting the Court to decide issues best left to the States and to Congress. In essence, one vote has determined whether citizens may continue to exercise a right that has been enjoyed for 230 years, and one vote has determined that 4.5 million Cajuns may not put to death a criminal that they have democratically decided deserves that punishment.

The Framers and the Constitution they devised were not nearly as schizophrenic as the Court has become in passing on them.

It is decisions like these — groups of inconsistent decisions — that lead one to the conclusion that the Court is no longer the Judicial Branch, but has become the third house of Congress.