Blessed Independence Day

After Christmas and Thanksgiving, I miss family, friends, and country most on the 4th of July--given that this is, naturally, my 3rd favorite holiday.

Similar to those two holidays, Independence Day causes me to pause and reflect and give thanks for those who have gone before and given so much that I and those I love may be free.

I am grateful to the Founders, pictured above, who laid out the principles on which rest this, the greatest of all countries, ever. I am also grateful to those who have fought to defend her and our principles--in wars past and present.

In addition to the Declaration of Independence, may I suggest that you read Calvin Coolidge's Speech on the Occasion of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It is brilliant.

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From The Facebook Thread: Detente, Liberty, Healthcare &c.

[ed. note: This is for those who do not follow the lively discussion on Facebook]

Ryan D. writes:

What's the difference between the moral imperative for using US resources to spread freedom, and the moral imperative to provide affordable healthcare for the poor? IMO, it's just team politics. I'm interested in seeing how [you] distinguish between using the moral imperative in foreign policy (and, for that matter, social policy), and health care.

And my response:

IIRC, I did not argue that spreading freedom ought to trump national interests full-stop, but that at a minimum, we should err on the side of freedom & democracy when in doing so we were not clearly acting against our own best interest. I think that our own best interest in the long term ought not be subordinated to unclear, debatable, potential gains to be made in the short term.

Historically speaking, the failure of detante in the middle Cold War is a pretty strong critique of realpolitik. And I'm not advancing a strictly neoconservative view of this history. This is coming from the godfather of Cold War history himself--John Lewis Gaddis.

I did not say that I felt no moral obligation or desire to help those w/o health care. I just don't translate that into wanting to tax other people to fund a government program that assuages my guilt & makes me feel better about myself.

I'm a natural rights guy.

My moral impulse to spread the "unalienable rights" is the same at home as it is abroad. I reject the cult of rights that has become progressive morality. As Folsom argues, these ever-expanding rights impose an obligation on society--an obligation which infringes on individual liberty by using the coercive power of government.

I firmly believe in the ability of market reform to drive down costs (of procedures & meds, etc. see Lasik surgery for a prime example of this), increase access, and continue medical technology innovation.

Eliminating the de facto government subsidy of employer provided healthcare & giving everyone a flat tax credit would go a long way towards accomplishing what I envision. Hell, I don't make a sufficiently compelling/persuasive argument in favor of market-based reforms, but Holman Jenkins does.

A collectivist response with fairness/equality as its main goal will not innovate. It will not drive down costs. And rather than using the amoral price mechanism allocate healthcare resources, will employ some arbitrary bureaucracy to ration care.

It may well be called "universal," but tell that to the queues of people who die waiting for cancer treatment & heart surgery. Tell that to the seniors who do not get hip replacement surgery. Tell it also to people waiting to get a friggin' MRI or colonoscopy. And don't forget about one other unintended (I'm sure) consequence of going socialist, the decline in future med tech innovation & pharmaceutical development.

Sure, Americans pay a lot of money on healthcare. So what? They are self optimizers who do so largely because they value the extension in life they believe they are receiving as a result of that care.

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Ceding Liberty To Your Social & Intellectual Superiors

Daniel Henninger puts it best (he always does):

Barack Obama isn't a reformer. He's the president of Earmark Nation. We are about to enact the Obama federal health-insurance entitlement, which on top of all the other entitlements and their limitless liabilities will require pulling trillions of dollars more into the federal budget. Whatever nominal public good this is supposed to achieve, it means that they, these 535 pols, most of them gerrymandered for life, will decide in perpetuity the details of how to dole it out.

When this experiment called the United States began some 200 years ago, neither the "liberals" nor "conservatives" of that time imagined their successors would have such vast sway over the nation's income, or that U.S. politics would be mostly factions begging and fighting to have fragments of it disbursed back to them. The phrase "pay to play" would have disgusted them.

That so many Americans (mostly liberals in favor of the ever-growing nanny state) would willingly cede their liberty in favor of a bigger government to take care of them from cradle-to-grave would also have disgusted the Founders.

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Supreme Court Will Rule In Favour Of 2nd Amendment

From the Financial Times and My Way News, word that the Supreme court has ruled for individual possession of firearms.

Bravo, Supreme Court. Intellectually, historically, legally, there was only one way they could have ruled: in favor of the individual right to bear arms over some amorphous-collective-militia.

Any student (including BYU's American Heritage students, with whom we, as former TA, are well acquainted) of the Constitution knows that the Bill of Rights were written to guarantee the rights of the individual against incursions from the government. The fear when writing the Bill of Rights was that government would assume it could do anything not specifically prohibited by the Bill of Rights.

But some Founders, rather than worrying about the tale (Bill of Rights) wagging the dog (Constitutionally outlined powers), anticipated correctly the exponential growth of government and knew that citizen's individual rights would need to be protected. Thus, the "afterthought" of the first ten Amendments to the Constitution--the Bill of Rights.

So, summary: the Bill of Rights were written to protect the rights of the indivudal--the 2nd Amendment is no different to all the rest. Fortunately, the anti-2nd Amendment judicial activism du jour did not persuade swing-voter Anthony Kennedy.

Score one for Constitutional originalism.

*UPDATE 19 March 1:43am: The Left Fires a Counter-Volley, Meet the NRA's little known, highly influential opponents (subscription required, email us if you'd like to receive a digital copy of the article).


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