Nothing to add here:

[President Obama] didn’t state the main qualification for any person who serves in government, the absence of which has lit a brushfire of discontent, fidelity to the Constitution.

He and his allies haven’t taken that first step to recovery — acknowledging their problem. It’s their utter disregard for the Constitution that is causing this big mess. The concept of a limited government, restrained in what it can and should do, is foreign to them, while for most Americans it’s in our DNA. This is what puts Obama at odds with so many Americans.

President Obama said his Supreme Court nominee will be someone who knows “that in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens.”

Newsflash for the president! The most “powerful interest” in America today that is drowning out citizens’ voices is…. the government!

After I wrote my earlier post on health insurance, I made a similar blog comment over at Reason last week and immediately got into a brief debate with some jackanape hell bent on calling me a hypocrite for relying on my wife’s employer-provided insurance rather than putting my money where my mouth is and buying my own coverage.

So let me clarify my position:

Under the system we have today, the best option for my family is to use my wife’s employer sponsored plan. She works for a large company and, thanks to the way the tax code is set up, it’s cheaper and easier for us to use her plan. I fully admit that I am benefiting from the system we have today.

But that doesn’t mean that I think that the system is the best possible one, nor does it mean that I am a hypocrite who isn’t allowed to have any opinion on the system itself.

(And, for what it’s worth, shouting “HYPOCRITE!” isn’t an argument, its a form of  ad-hominem attack that one falls back on when he can’t argue facts. Loser.)

More detail? OK.

The system we have today, at least from a tax perspective, is geared towards employer provided plans. It’s a relic of World War II wage controls where companies had to offer really good perks to compete for employees since they were prohibited by the federal government from competing on wages. Somewhere along the way the IRS began to allow those health insurance premiums to be deducted as a business expense and the practice continues to this day.

(I am ignoring the whole issue with the meaning of the term “insurance” here, which, along with access, is the other prong of the health care reform issue: rising costs. When I say “insurance” here, I mean a payment plan for health care services, but not necessarily true insurance, which is a provision for the risk of a future liability, which generally is not the same what most people have as “insurance” today.)

As most people probably know, when you have health insurance through your employer, your employer doesn’t usually provide it for “free”, he typically considers all, or at least a portion, of the premium to be a deduction from your net pay. Employees can then usually choose the level of coverage they want – or no coverage at all – and receive a proportionally higher or lower net paycheck based on that choice. Nonetheless, regardless of how employers classify those premiums relative to an employee’s pay, since the employer is ultimately the one writing the check to the insurance company, the IRS considers the employer to be the one who is actually paying for the policy and therefore allows the employer to take the tax deduction.

This only works for plans “paid” for by employers – individuals do not get a similar deduction from their personal taxes. If you were to decline your employer’s coverage and maximize your net pay relative to the insurance coverage, you still couldn’t just go buy an equivalent health insurance plan of your own and see a commensurate reduction in your personal income taxes for the cost of that policy. The employer is buying the policy with before-tax dollars and you’re buying the policy with after-tax dollars, so, in a sense the employer is getting a discount on the policy that you don’t, and you’re not going to come out equal on April 16th.

So, when my wife’s employer deducts our family’s insurance policy from her paycheck the amount of that deduction is MUCH smaller than it would ultimately cost us – in premium payments and taxes paid – to buy an equivalent policy, not to mention the added savings we get because she works for such a large Fortune 50 company with so many employees in the potential insurance risk pool (compared to my company, which has one employee, me, which is why we our on her plan to begin with).

Now get this point straight first: this is just the way that our system is set up and, under that system, it’s cheaper for us to get our coverage through her employer, so that’s what we do.

And it’s that way for all employees all over the country – it’s almost always cheaper for employers to pay for those policies than it is for individuals. There is no fundamental reason for this to be so, except for a political decision made fifty or so years ago to allow that tax deduction to be allowable only for employers, which was, in essence, part of a larger political decision to express a preference for as many citizens as possible to be reliant on large companies and less independent than they otherwise would be. There is a tremendous ineffiency in the labor market because of this, because many many people are reluctant to change employers or strike out on their own because of the change, or loss, it would incur to their health benefits. This doesn’t have to be so, it’s only because of a deliberate political decision to make it that way that we have the system we have today.

It is also important to note that companies are not required in any way to offer this coverage, most do so out of their own benevolence towards employees (even if employees “pay” for the entire premium through a paycheck deduction, there are still administrative costs and efforts to the company that are associated with offering health plans), and because modern workers today expect to be offered a health plan in conjunction with employment. But there is no legal requirement that employers offer coverage and there shouldn’t be. Running a business is hard work, containing and controlling expenses is difficult, and there is still a nominal level of autonomy and independence in our economy today that should still be respected. Mandates on businesses make business harder to run and operate and encouraging business creation and growth should be a goal of the government as part of its obvious role in growing the economy.

When President Obama was making his final remarks last week, he spoke of employer insurance almost as a right to be asserted by the employee, and insinuated that employers who don’t pay for insurance for their employees are doing wrong by the employees and should be criticized for contributing to what he sees as too high a percentage of Americans without health insurance. In a sense, the tone was one of wanting to force employers to offer coverage and not one of trying to enable more individuals to take care of their own needs. There was an unspoken assumption that employer-based coverage is always the best way.

This assumption may or may not be correct, but I think it’s fairly clear that the system we have today, where employer-based coverage is financially privileged via tax incentives and therefore is the dominating paradigm, has caused serious inefficiencies both in the growth of the economy and in the labor market. And if that’s the case, then it should follow that we should be looking for ways to minimize those inefficiencies, and one way of doing so would be to make it easier and cheaper for individuals to acquire and pay for their own insurance if they so choose. Under the system we have today, it is usually cheaper and easier for employees to be covered by employer plans, but that doesn’t mean that the system itself is the best choice.

And this gets to my ultimate point: President Obama apparently has made the decision that employer-based insurance – or government provided insurance – is the only acceptable system for our health care needs. There is no mention of individual responsibility or enabling individuals to provide for their own care. My preference – and the preference of anyone who believes in liberty and free markets – is for a system where employees are not afraid to move from job to job and where employers are free to run their businesses as they see fit. If employers are benevolent and generous enough to provide coverage to their employees, then that’s good, but their employees’ health is ultimately not their responsibility and they should not be forced to offer coverage or be bullied by the government when they don’t. This is not to say that I don’t agree that people’s lack of access to care is not problem, only that I think people should be allowed and enabled to provide for themselves if they so choose and not be punished for it by the tax code or by an overbearing federal government.

It’s clear that President Obama disagrees and thinks that the only way to expand coverage is to expand the reach of large organizations, whether through employers, or, as he has said before, through government, with no mention at all about individuals. I can only assume that this is for political reasons, best described as a pursuit of the “Dependency Agenda” that George Will often talks about. This worries me and is a major substantive part of the debate we are having today about health care reform. I do not believe the current system is as efficient as it could be and I prefer a completely different system.

Whether or not my family takes advantage of the system we have today is utterly irrelevant.

“NRO Staff “(Jack Fowler?) over at The Corner posted this gem from our good “friend” Max Baucus:

Baucus said the governors would be “pleasantly surprised” at their minimal burden. “The Medicaid costs, through the expansion, are not going to cost states near as much as feared,” he said.

Well gee, Max, thanks!

This quote embodies is the entire problem with our current government today, especially the Senate. The original purpose of the Senate was to act as a voice – and an advocate – for the respective state governments, and a check on the ability of the House to expand the power (and spending) of the federal government at the expense of the states. Instead, we now have a dysfunctional system wherein a United States Senator, from Montana no less, has the power and the hubris to throw policy mandates at the state governments to advance national partisan political ends and frames his actions as doing the state governments a favor. Senator, your job isn’t to come up with a mandate that isn’t as painful as would otherwise be proposed, your job is to make sure there are no mandates at all.

Instead, we now have DEMOCRACY! and the scope and power (and credit line!) of the federal government has now been growing consistently for pretty much 80+ years. This isn’t what Madison or Jefferson had in mind, is it?

I mean, seriously, it’s wee bit of inaccurate to use George Washington for this poster, but damn if it isn’t spot on:

Some things just get me going and the transformation of the Senate into a supersized version of the House over the past 100 years is one of those things.

In the uber Facebook thread that I wrote about last night, another comment came up this morning that I think deserves some attention and another “part 2″ blog post:

Obama’s background isn’t any more radical than McCain’s. And “going around the parents” is what teachers, school administrators, and clergy have been doing for years and years. Why that suddenly translates into a 1984-feeling now is hard to grasp. Don’t go Billy Martin on us!

So the first sentence and the last sentence don’t make sense to me yet, so I’ll let those sit for a while and see if the commenter can clarify a bit for me, but the middle part? Hell yeah.

I tend to disagree when people, usually on the Left, say  that there is no such thing as objective truth, because there quite clearly is: 2+2=4. Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, Elephants eat grass and hay, and the sun literally never set on the British Empire, among other things.

But when it comes to the dissemination of information, there is no such thing as an unbiased educator. This is why Neil Boortz calls them “government schools,” because ANY institution run by politicians is going to be inherently political and why home schooling and private schools will always be with us. Not because home schooling parents are religious jesus freaks or because they’re bad citizens, but because they see the only way to get away from the inherent bias in the public school system is to opt out altogether.

Rush has been playing this all week. Definitely a classic.

Maybe this, is related to this:

For Tocqueville, this is a critical distinction between America and the faux republics of his own continent. “It is in the township that the strengths of free peoples resides,” he wrote. “Municipal institutions are for liberty what primary schools are for science; they place it within reach of the people.” In America, democracy is supposed to be a participatory sport not a spectator one: In Europe, every five years you put an X on a piece of paper and subsequently discover which of the party candidates on the list at central office has been delegated to represent you in fast-tracking all those E.U. micro-regulations through the rubber-stamp legislature. By contrast, American democracy is a game to be played, not watched: You go to Town Meeting, you denounce the School Board budget, you vote to close a road, you run for cemetery commissioner.

Does that distinction still hold? As Professor Rahe argues, in the twentieth century the intermediary institutions were belatedly hacked away—not just self-government at town, county, and state level, but other independent outposts: church, family, civic associations. Today, very little stands between the individual and the sovereign, which is why schoolgirls in Dillon, South Carolina think it entirely normal to beseech Good King Barack the Hopeychanger to do something about classroom maintenance.

I say “Good King Barack,” but truly that does an injustice to ye medieval tyrants of yore. As Tocqueville wrote: “There was a time in Europe in which the law, as well as the consent of the people, clothed kings with a power almost without limits. But almost never did it happen that they made use of it.” His Majesty was an absolute tyrant—in theory. But in practice he was in his palace hundreds of miles away. A pantalooned emissary might come prancing into your dooryard once every half-decade and give you a hard time, but for the most part you got on with your life relatively undisturbed. “The details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control,” wrote Tocqueville. But what would happen if administrative capability were to evolve to make it possible “to subject all of his subjects to the details of a uniform set of regulations”?

Yeah, the original post is technically about employment laws and healthcare, but it just feels like it’s connected, maybe because the underlying assumptions are the important part: 1.) the ever increasing scope and power of the federal government and 2.) that servitude of some form, whether for a large employer or for a large omnipresent government, is the natural and preferred state of people, because, frankly, we just can’t be trusted with anything else.

Just let Uncle Barry and Aunt Nancy take care of this boring stuff and you go watch The Bachelor, but don’t stay up too late, tomorrow’s a school day!

I think there’s something to this.

Regardless of how disturbing this whole thing may be to me, I did find the Steyn piece through David Frum, so his advice of “quit whining” does need to be heeded a little bit, no?

I’ve always thought this was kind of obvious, but nonetheless it’s probably a good idea to spell it out explicitly:

But the depressing thing for climate warriors was that Obama could not get developing countries, without whose cooperation there is simply no way to avert climate change, to accept—even just in theory—the idea of binding emissions cuts. India’s prime minister took the occasion to position his country as a major victim of a problem not of its making. “What we are witnessing today is the consequence [of] over two centuries of industrial activity and high-consumption lifestyles in the developed world,” he lectured. “They have to bear this historical responsibility.” And even before the summit began, China declared the West had “no right” to ask it to limit its economic growth…

…Indians currently consume roughly 15 times less energy per capita than Americans—and Chinese consume seven times less. Asking them, along with the rest of the developing world, to go back to 2000 emission levels with a 2050 population would mean putting them on a very drastic energy diet…

In short, the choice for developing countries is between mass death due to the consequences of an overheated planet sometime in the distant future, and mass suicide due to imposed instant starvation right now. Is it any surprise that they are reluctant to jump on the global-warming bandwagon?

The only quibble I have here is that there seems to be an underlying assumption for anthrpogenic global warming and our ability to reverse it, but either way it’s still a key point that the evil Americans aren’t the only one’s who are being “selfish” in the eyes of the rest of the world.

A couple years ago when David Mamet “converted” to conservatism (actually, he jettisoned emotionalism from his politics and just sat down and thought things out for the first time), he referred to Thomas Sowell as America’s greatest living philosopher. I’ve always thought that was pretty darn accurate, if only because he has a knack for keeping his message simple and still effective:

The same principle applies elsewhere. If you are going to try to equalize the chances of women getting jobs as firefighters, for example, then you are going to have to lower the physical requirements of height, weight and upper body strength.

That means that you are going to have more firefighters who are not capable of carrying an unconscious person out of a burning building.

If you are going to have these lower physical requirements be the same for both women and men, that means that you are not only going to have women who are not capable of carrying someone out of a burning building, you are also going to have men who are likewise incapable of carrying someone to safety.

Most activities do not exist for the sake of equality. They exist to serve their own purposes– and those purposes are undermined, sometimes fatally, when equality becomes the goal.

Nor would a politician encouraging me to feel resentful toward Michael Jordan do any good. If I had such resentments, they would do me more harm than they would do Michael Jordan. They would make me feel bad– and could make me miss seeing some great basketball.

UPDATE: this reminds me of the original link (keep trying and it will eventually connect) that got me to the 100 greatest Americans post from yesterday, a paragraph that is about as common-sensical and reasonable as any I’ve read lately:

They were selected to go into space for the simple reason that they were the best men for the job, a criterion that today is often no longer enough, as Frank Ricci discovered.  Today’s NASA seems as interested in trumpeting its commitment to multiculturalism and diversity as in the exploration of space, a commitment that would have struck the men who actually planned and achieved multiple landings on the moon as simply irrelevant to what they were doing.

(h/t Derbyshire)

Being an entrepreneur, the political scene over the past few months has unnerved me quite a bit. Sure, there are the obvious things: a weak economy, a spendthrift federal government intent on amassing power, rhetoric rich in class warfare – but there’s also something else, something I can’t quite put my finger on.

So I’ve thought about this for a while and this story in the Journal today has helped a bit:

House Democrats on Tuesday unveiled sweeping health-care legislation that would hit all but the smallest businesses with a penalty equal to 8% of payroll if they fail to provide health insurance to workers…

Under the House measure, employers with payrolls exceeding $400,000 a year would have to provide health insurance or pay the 8% penalty. Employers with payrolls between $250,000 and $400,000 a year would pay a smaller penalty, and those less than $250,000 would be exempt. Certain small firms would get tax credits to help buy coverage.

The relatively low thresholds for penalties triggered the sharpest criticism yet from employer groups, who said the burden on small business is too high and doesn’t do enough to help them expand insurance coverage.

I guess what’s bothering me is this: Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, always seems to be coming from this assumption that unless a business is publicly traded and on some list in Fortune Magazine, it doesn’t really count and the people involved with them either have to play by the rules of the big boys or not play at all.

Or maybe it’s a little different – that the optimal way for anyone to exist in the United States today is as a 9-5 employee of a large company and if anyone chooses to exist out of that paradigm, whether to be a freelancer or a business owner, then the rules are harsher.

For example, in the article cited above, the assumption is pretty clear that individuals are not responsible for their health insurance, their employers are, so every business, no matter how small, must provide health insurance to employees. Why do we have to look at things that way? Why can’t congress pass a law that says that individuals may band together and buy their own insurance policies on their own terms with providers? And not only that, get a tax credit of their own for doing so? Not all businesses can afford to provide health insurance, but the assumption now is that they must in order to pay employees. That just seems backwards to me.

And it’s not just the health insurance – it’s everything. It’s this whole assumption that people cannot take care of themselves or make their own decisions.

Like I said, I still need to flesh this one out. Sorry for the crazy-assed rambling post.