Capitalism and Socialism: Who Owns You?

From last week’s Daily Camera Editorial Advisory Board:

The question: “Recent debate on economics and politics has been framing recent events in terms of socialism and capitalism. Is this warranted or a sign of hyperbolic rhetoric?”  My response:

Debating political issues in terms of socialism and capitalism helps address a fundamental question: Who owns you? Who has a claim on your time and the products of your physical and mental efforts?

Under capitalism, you do. Consenting adults have the right to voluntarily associate with each other — in personal relationships or for-profit and non-profit ventures. Others have no right to interfere by mandating or prohibiting such relationships. The purpose of government is to protect our individual rights to freely cooperate and pursue our values.

Under socialism, everyone else owns a piece of you. They use the political process to stake a claim on your time, life, and property, whether or not you consent. In this sense, Socialism is anti-social. Under socialism, you are a means to other people’s ends.

A President, not a Savior (non-partisan)

Cato’s Gene Healy had an excellent article in the Christian Science Monitor last week.  Some excerpts (emphasis added):

What moved Barack Obama to seek the presidency was “the basic idea of empathy” and the notion that if “we see somebody down and out … we care for them.” Republican John McCain explained that he was running “to inspire a generation of Americans to serve a cause greater than their self-interest.”…

Noble sentiments, to be sure, but in the original constitutional scheme, the president was neither Empath-in-Chief nor a national life coach. His role was to faithfully execute the laws, defend the country from attack, and check Congress with the veto power whenever it exceeded its constitutional bounds. …

McCain vs. individual liberty

Reason magazine editor Matt Welch‘s column in the New York Times (published in March) summarizes John McCain’s opposition to individual freedom:

Behind any successful politician lies a usable contradiction, and John McCain’s is this: We love him (and occasionally hate him) for his stubborn individualism, yet his politics are best understood as a decade-long attack on the individual.

Read the rest here.

Welch has also written “Be Afraid of President McCain: The frightening mind of an authoritarian maverick.”

Should the president “manage the economy”?

No.  And it’s not possible, anyway. But apparently people think that’s part of the job.

On McCain’s Battery Prize

From Reason.tv:

Paying $4 for a gallon of gas is a drag, but what may be worse is listening to White House wannabes who promise to rescue us from our misery.

Take Senator McCain’s recent proposal to offer a $300 million cash prize to the inventor of a car battery that can out-green 100-mpg plug-in hybrids. Is McCain’s money pile really necessary to spur our nation’s geniuses to get it together and invent an ultra-efficient car? reason.tv’s Ted Balaker thinks not.

The big lie behind politician-controlled medicine

The Denver Post printed the following letter of mine last week (on-line version):

Re: “Who has your health at heart?” May 22 guest commentary.

AFL-CIO executives John Sweeney and Mike Cerbo perpetuate the big lie behind politician-controlled medicine: that the free market is not working and that costs have been spiraling out of control because of markets.

But costs have been increasing precisely because of the employer-based insurance they espouse, which is a consequence of a biased and non-free-market tax code. It favors employer-based insurance and penalizes other types of medical insurance.

We consume medical care like a business traveler dining on the company’s expense account: Since someone else pays the bill (insurers), patients need not shop around, so providers don’t compete on price. Why?

Tax-discounted insurance encourages us to buy more costly insurance than we probably need, hence penalizing saving for future medical expenses. Our “insurance” has become prepaid health care.

Employer-based insurance also coddles insurance companies, which have little incentive to please consumers. They know we’re essentially locked to our employer and the costly insurance plans they offer. To buy a competitor’s product, we must change jobs or pay a stiff tax penalty.

The AFL-CIO should be ashamed of promoting self-serving policies that both empower labor unions and result in expensive medical care and insurance.

For a way out of this policy mess, see Michael Cannon’s piece on Large HSAs here and here. He compares it with McCain’s plan here.

Infant voters & narcissist candidates

From George Will’s Newsweek review of The Cult of the Presidency, by Gene Healy:

If you can name it, presidents are responsible for it. The name for this is infantilization. “The average American,” said President Richard Nixon, “is just like the child in the family—you give him some responsibility and he is going to amount to something.” Vice President Al Gore said the government should act like “grandparents in the sense that grandparents perform a nurturing role.”

Such demented talk encourages presidential candidates to make delusional promises—energy independence in eight years (Mike Huckabee), “an excellent teacher in every classroom” and “every school an outstanding school” (John Edwards, who presumably knows how every school can stand out when all are outstanding), a “perfect” nation (see above) and so on.

The last presidential candidate to talk sense about the office was fictional. In an episode of NBC’s “The West Wing,” the Republican candidate, who was not the hero, was asked, “How many jobs will you create?” “None,” he replied, adding: “Entrepreneurs create jobs. Business creates jobs. The president’s job is to get out of the way.”

An occupational hazard of the inflated presidency is a hazard to the nation. It is what Healy (borrowing a term from psychiatry) calls Acquired Situational Narcissism. As repositories of absurd expectations, and surrounded by sycophants, presidents become deranged. Inevitably, the inflation of expectations causes what Healy calls an “arc of disillusionment” that diminishes one president after another.

For a summary of the book, see Healy’s article in Reason magazine.

McCain & Obama: live for the State!

David Boaz of the Cato Institute points out that neither candidate for Life Coach of the United States (or is it Daddy, High Priest, or Santa Claus) has much respect for individualism. Rather the derive meaning from our own personal life goals and priorities, we can do so only with service to something, anything, so long as it is not ourselves, as we were ants living for the sake of an ant colony. He concludes:

The real issue is that Messrs. Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is “self-indulgence,” that building a business is “chasing after our money culture,” that working to provide a better life for our families is a “narrow concern.”

They’re wrong. Every human life counts. Your life counts. You have a right to live it as you choose, to follow your bliss. You have a right to seek satisfaction in accomplishment. And if you chase after the almighty dollar, you just might find that you are led, as if by an invisible hand, to do things that improve the lives of others.

The article is here.