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More on Killing the Bailout

Robert Tracinski has a great article on the current bailout bill at RealClearPolitics.com.

And, here’s another good article, here, on the roots of the crisis, by Michael Flynn at Reason.com.

I heard a sound byte of Paulson the other day addressing Congress about how the problems of our system were created by everyone, how we all played a role in messing things up so now it’s too late to do the right thing—now we just need a quick, pragmatic and, yes, flawed fix.

Paulson is right that the system is indeed flawed. But there is a point where you have to say enough is enough. You can’t keep supporting socialist laws and expansion of government powers over enterprise for pragmatic reasons. You can’t keep up the dangerous game of deficit spending with impunity. Reality will catch up to you.

If we keep down this road toward a welfare state, we will end up with hyperinflation and diminished economic freedom, i.e. we will end up working entirely for the State in return for handouts. We will lose innovation and ingenuity and economic growth; we will create a class of welfare recipients who see government as a provider of goods rather than a protector of rights.

I am already hearing (and seeing) very able-bodied adults “give up,” that is, quit their jobs to get in line for government handouts because they can’t afford to pay the skyrocketing costs of medical care. It is now easier to be totally broke and take Medicaid or other government aid than to work to pay off exorbitant medical bills. (As a cancer survivor, I know this firsthand.)

Yes, the system is a mess, and we are experiencing inflation. But it’s not a coincidence that the most regulated and government-controlled industries (healthcare and insurance) are the most costly. There is a causal factor, which is government intervention.

Medical treatment is costly because the system is already socialized. If you are unemployed, uninsured and sick, you can get free healthcare. This leads to other people having to pay higher costs to make up for the losses experienced by medical providers.

Once you start rewarding people who do not work, you put more pressure on the people who do work to pay more, until they eventually give up. The costs of the socialized goods and services (medical care) begin to get distorted, forcing people into either going broke or joining the welfare community. The more and more people who join the welfare community will, of course, want to vote for more and more handouts. Why work when your money is taken from you to give to people who do not work?

But take the system to its logical conclusion. If everyone is working for the State and free-enterprise vanishes, eventually the State goes broke (as it’s dying now). Historically, socialist countries are countries at war. They must continually take resources by force to keep their irrational system going. (This is why Russia is expanding its control in Europe to have access to the natural gas pipelines. This is why Russia went into Afghanistan.)

But the answer is not more welfare and more deficit spending, i.e. higher inflation. The answer is less government intervention, less regulation, more accountability and self-responsibility. Socialism is ultimately, at root, the desire for the unearned. It is an unjust system that breeds more injustices.

I just don’t agree with the argument that if we all poisoned already, what’s a little more poison? At some point, you put the cigarette down and you quit. And you go through the withdrawal and you are better off for it.

The fight against this bailout legislation has revealed how corrupt our system is. The people spoke through their representatives against this bill and the House rightly voted it down. Then, the Senate ignored the people’s vote and passed it anyway. Now the Senate is resending virtually the same legislation back to the House on Friday to vote again.

This is not how the system is designed. It is designed to stop on the first “no” vote. Whether or not you care for this bill, this manipulation of the system by the Senate and the President is egregious. They are basically strong-arming the House to do their bidding. Instead, they should have rewritten a more free-market solution to the problem, a solution that does not reward the wrong-doers but requires them to pay their way out, just as you would any individual.

How many more bad laws are going to pass because lobbyists are vying for government handouts and paying off the law makers?

There are alternative solutions to this current crisis such as relaxing regulations over businesses, including Sarbanes-Oxley, reducing government deficit spending and beginning to live within our means, which would be easier if government got out of the way.

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