27 March 2010
By Jacob G. Hornberger The reason that conservatives bit
the dust in the recent health-care battle is simple:
their fateful decision to abandon their principles
many decades ago cost them any chance of defeating
President Obama’s socialist health-care plan.
Think back to the 1960s, when
liberals were celebrating the enactment of LBJ’s
Medicare and Medicaid plans as much as they are
celebrating Obama’s plan today. Those were the halcyon
days when the statists were proclaiming that Medicare
and Medicaid would bring a health-care paradise to
America. At the time conservatives were
warning Americans against traveling down this road to
socialism, a road to serfdom, a road that would lead
to national bankruptcy, a road to where socialism has
led Greece today. But Americans wouldn’t listen.
Surrendering to the siren’s song of the statists, the
American people embraced Medicare and Medicaid (and
the welfare state), in the process ditching what was
once the finest health-care system in the world, one
based on freedom and free markets. Conservatives realized that they had
an important choice to make — whether to adhere to
their free-market principles or to join the statists.
Fearing that they would lose political power and
“legitimacy” and “credibility” with the mainstream
press, they chose to throw in the towel and join the
statists. They embraced Medicare and Medicaid (and
Social Security and the rest of the welfare state)
with eagerness and enthusiasm, sometimes, it seems,
even trying to appear more statist than the liberals.
Meanwhile, libertarian free-market
thinkers were continuing to warn Americans what lay
ahead. Friedrich Hayek, whose famous book
The Road to Serfdom had been published in 1944,
continued to sound the warnings. Ludwig von Mises was pointing out
that one government intervention would inevitably lead
to future interventions to deal with the crises
produced by previous interventions. In his 1962 book Capitalism and
Freedom, Milton Friedman included a chapter in
which he called for an end to medical licensure.
Putting all this together inevitably
led any devotee of liberty to but one conclusion: that
the root cause of America’s health-care woes lay in
the socialism of Medicare and Medicaid and the
interventionism of medical licensure and insurance
regulation. As these government programs developed
over time, the health-care crisis grew bigger and
bigger, producing more and more distortions and
perversions, leading statist proponents to call for
ever-increasing new socialist and interventionist
programs. So, where did that leave
conservatives in the latest health-care debate? It
left them with nothing. Concerned about legitimacy,
credibility, and power, they couldn’t bring themselves
to call for the only real solution there is to a
crisis produced by decades of socialism and
interventionism: Repeal (i.e., don’t reform) Medicare,
Medicaid, medical licensure, and insurance regulation
(along with the taxes that fund them). Yet, calling for nothing would have
left conservatives in the position of implicitly
defending the continuation of the nation’s health-care
crisis. So, they took the predictable course: They
proposed their own alternative reform plan, which
simply called for a bit less socialism and
interventionism than Obama’s plan. That leaves the libertarians to lead
the way. Ever since conservatives threw in the towel,
libertarians have assumed the difficult task of
sounding the warnings against socialism and
interventionism and striking at the root of the
welfare state rather than trimming its branches.
Can we succeed in bringing about a
change in course, one away from socialism and
interventionism and toward freedom and free markets?
Sure, but we must never permit ourselves to do what
conservatives did. We must continue adhering to our
principles and our integrity and to speaking the
truth. It is, of course, no guarantee of success but
it provides the only real chance there is of restoring
a free, prosperous, harmonious, and healthy society to
our land. Jacob Hornberger is founder and
president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Comments 💬 التعليقات |