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Jewish World Review
July 9, 2009
/ 17 Tamuz 5769
Saving liberty
By
Bob Tyrrell
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
A few weeks back, at the dawn of the Obama
administration, I was at dinner with a very bright woman of middle years who
calls herself an independent. She found the new president very engaging, but
she was alarmed by the music in the air: a government takeover of Detroit, a
$700 billion government bailout of the banks, a $787 billion stimulus bill,
a cap and trade bill that would add perhaps $800-$2,000 to every family's
tax bill, and a massive health care reform now estimated to cost $1 trillion
over the next decade. For the past 30 years, most of them good economic
years, the federal bite into our gross domestic product has been just less
than 20 percent. Calculating the cost of Obama's spending, it could be 28.1
percent this fiscal year, a peacetime record!
My dinner companion was alarmed. She was not simply alarmed by
the bills our president and his Democratic colleagues were ringing up on the
Hill. My friend, the independent, was alarmed by something much more
important: the cost to our freedoms. As I believe she put it, "The question
here is our liberty." Increasingly, thoughtful Americans understand the
Obama era in these terms. With the government suddenly looming so large in
the life of every American, it is time for us to consider what is a
singularly American possession: individual liberty. The Founding Fathers
created a government that was uniquely solicitous about individual liberty.
With the federal government so deeply involved in our health care, our
banking, our manufacturing and the many targets of its $787 billion stimulus
program, it is time to think about your liberty vis-a-vis the government
bureaucrats who are about to minister to you.
Ronald Reagan's modern conservative movement began thinking
about the loss of individual liberty to government encroachment a
half-century ago, thanks in part to the wake-up call from Friedrich Hayek,
delivered in his indispensable book "The Road to Serfdom." Hayek believed
government is a threat to freedom, enterprise and the rule of law. Later,
another vigilant advocate of personal liberty, Frank Meyer, came along and
became a major figure for American conservatives, propounding the
exhilarating argument that freedom is essential to mankind. Freedom, he
wrote, is the "essence of (man's) being," for without it, a citizen cannot
be moral, by which he meant cannot choose good over evil. Meyer believed
freedom is at our essence because God put it there. God gave us freedom to
choose — good over evil, art over schlock, a knee replacement over a Botox
treatment.
Personal liberty makes each American citizen a creature of
dignity. Obama overlooks this. Though in presenting Congress a $3.9 trillion
budget Feb. 24 he insisted that he's not for big government, he is. Consider
the vastness of the budget, its far-reaching domestic policies, and much of
his background as a community organizer. Clearly, he is a big-government
guy. No other American president has been so committed to big government.
Historically, most of our experiences with big government have
been unhappy. Big government is expensive, inefficient and, once corrupted,
very difficult to clean up. Moreover, once a government bureaucracy has made
its judgment on you, whom do you appeal to? With Obamacare, government will
decide when and whether you can get that knee replacement. From the clear
utterances of the president's health care advisers, namely, Ezekiel Emanuel
and David Blumenthal, that knee replacement will depend on such factors as
your age and your overall health. If you are too old or decrepit, government
will have a more economical place to spend its money. In other words, your
health will not be decided by what you want to pay for it, but by government
policy. That test you wanted for colon cancer might be denied. You might
just be too old. Such decisions are made by the nationalized British system
all the time.
Almost any service the government provides can be more
efficiently and effectively provided by private enterprise. The most
striking example is the inefficiency of the money-losing U.S. Postal
Service, which has been swept aside by the Internet and by such private
carriers as UPS and FedEx. Government is not even very effective in its
efforts at regulation. Consider the recent failures of Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac and at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
There is another unappreciated failing of government. It
politicizes everything that it touches, including the simplest human
relations. Agreements that ought to be arrived at voluntarily or through the
rule of law are arrived at by lobbyists or thanks to the political power of
your group — ethnic, economic or otherwise.
One of the little-noted projects of the government health care
reforms being considered on Capitol Hill today is the channeling of health
care money away from the elderly and toward community services and drug and
alcohol rehabilitation. Equal rights before the law is all well and good,
but it is political favor and political power that matter when big
government is making your decisions for you.
That is why so many Americans have opted for freedom from
government. We recognize that the free society is the most humane … and
the most productive.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Bob Tyrrell is editor in chief of The American Spectator. Comment by clicking here.
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