Cheaply Apodictic

Jonah hits it out of the park today:

What I don’t think we hear enough about is intellectual hypocrisy. What’s that? Well, if moral hypocrisy is saying what values people should live by while failing to follow them yourself, intellectual hypocrisy is believing you are smart enough to run other peoples’ lives when you can barely run your own…

Or consider Rep. Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.), currently subject of a House ethics investigation. Rangel heads the Ways and Means Committee, which writes the tax code. He backs the imposition of an income-tax surcharge on high earners to pay for health care, calling it “the moral thing to do.” Yet he can’t seem to figure out how to file his own taxes properly or, perhaps, legally.

Now, I also know lots of conservatives who are basket cases at everything other than reading and writing books and articles, giving speeches, and thinking Big Thoughts (likewise, I know liberals who despise conservative moralizing about sex and religion who nonetheless live chaste, pious lives themselves). The point is that conservatives don’t presume to be smart enough to run everything, because conservative dogma takes it as an article of faith that no one can be that smart.

This is exactly right. One of the basic tenets of libertarianism and capitalist economics – the principles that this country were founded upon – is that the only person qualified to make decisions for a person is that person himself and I’ve been meaning to blog on this for some time. I have a nice long post in my head on this topic for someday in the future if I can ever get around to it.

On the other hand, the actual hypocrisy that Jonah is talking about here might be that these guys -Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Obama, and the rest of them – don’t actually think they can run things better or that they can accomplish the things they claim, and they know they can’t, rather, their actual reasons for doing what they do are different than what they claim. Anyone with half a brain can see that expanding government entitlements isn’t going to save money in the long run, nor is forbidding malpractice reform going to lower costs incurred by healthcare providers, but if the goal is simply to expand the size and power of the federal government in pursuit of craven political purposes and majority building, then they’re doing a bang up job and are clearly up to the task.

Maybe that’s not hypocrisy, but it is dishonesty.

Like I said, more on libertarian theory later.

I’ve been meaning to get back to blogging and this morning is as good a time as any.

Ed has a good post this morning on the growing debate over the constitutionality of health insurance mandates and the left’s solidifying position that of course it’s allowed because Congress can do anything if they say they’re doing it for people’s own good, which is obviously what the framer’s intended by “general welfare.” (No really, that’s what they’re saying)

So I’ll ask again: What authority does Congress have to mandate that people buy a product?  What precedent do they have to threaten people with imprisonment if they don’t buy a product merely for existing, as opposed to a prerequisite for accessing public roads as with car insurance?  The reason why Pelosi, Leahy, and Hoyer refuse to answer those questions is because they don’t have an answer to them.

I’m not so much going to focus on the specific post content, because Ed’s got the whole constitutionality argument covered, but there were some interesting comments on enforcing the mandates that I wanted to touch on.

As a bit of background, in all of the proposed healthcare bills containing an individual mandate, the mandate will be enforced by the IRS.

Now, knowing that the IRS will be the enforcer of this mandate, what can one logically conclude about the following statements?

its like taxes, pay voluntarily so you don’t get fined or thrown in jail.

If this monstrosity passes, I can all but guarantee you will see MILLIONS dare the feds to imprison them.

And here’s the rub with the individual mandate: yes indeed, paying income taxes is considered to be voluntary, but for tens of millions of people in this country, it’s voluntary only to the point where it’s also voluntary to go to work and get a paycheck. Yes, self-employed people (I’m ignoring corporations in this argument, because they aren’t applicable) have to actually write a check and have a little flexibility in deciding whether or not to write that check, but for millions of Americans, they pay their taxes every two weeks whether they want to or not. It’s called “payroll withholding” and it’s insidious.

They don’t withhold taxes from your paycheck because it’s more convenient for everyone that way (although that’s how they justify it). They withhold taxes from your paycheck because it makes you more docile and ignorant and easier to be lied to. This is why the IRS is always so interested in trying to classify people as employees when they might not actually consider themselves to be, because the IRS gets more money with less hassle that way and you’re not as informed about how much you’re actually paying.

So what does this have to do with the individual mandate? Like a lot of things, the actual enforcement mechanism will be a matter of regulation rather than statute, but my guess is that signing your paperwork when you start a new job will become something like registering your car at the DMV: you’ll have to show proof of insurance when you fill out all of the forms and if you can’t, they’ll just automatically take the fine/fee/premium out of your paycheck just like normal income taxes and it will be up to you at the end of the year to prove that you were really insured so that you can get an interest-free refund of the nominal amount they withheld. No one will be wiser and there will be no way for anyone to protest or otherwise not pay.

Just watch.