A logical look at liberty by Stephanie E. Watson.

This evening, President Obama spoke to a joint session of Congress to address concerns about the health care bills currently making their way through committees. On the positive side, he showed a lot of strength, outright scolding folks for bickering and making false claims. He likewise expressed appreciation for people showing their passion and wanting to make the best decision about health care reform.

As I followed the speech, though, I spotted a few logical inconsistencies. I’m not sure if he has consulted with many economists on his plan, but it seems in direct contradiction to the “encouraging competition” goal that he claims is one of his guiding principles. Here’s a breakdown of what I mean:

(1) Obama said that he wants there to be no choice about whether or not an individual actually carries insurance. In short: he wants to see compulsory coverage. His reasoning was that it was the individuals without coverage that are costing everyone else more money.

This means, no matter what your income level or financial situation, you *must* have health insurance coverage. As this is not free, it means you have to shop for what you can afford. Without a public option, the financial outlook for individuals is frightening… with a public option, the economic outlook for healthcare is in danger (see #2 coming up).

Compulsory health insurance is a direct affront on liberty: forcing an individual to purchase something whether they want it or not. As such, anyone who reads my blog will know where I stand on that matter. The real solution to my not having to pay for someone who doesn’t have health insurance is not to require me to do so in the first place.

(2) Obama said that he wants a public health insurance option that will be self-sustaining and compete with other health insurance companies. What he isn’t telling you is that the federal government would be breaking its own rules: it would be competing across state lines while continuing to restrict private insurance from doing so.

This means, if you are in a state with unreasonably high rates, and the federal government offers something significantly less, they can gain thousands of customers where private companies are unable to come in. How Obama can call this competition is confusing: if the federal government offers a public option in the true spirit of competition, the only right thing to do would be to allow all private insurance companies nation-wide to compete on a level playing field.

(3) Obama said he wants employers to be required to provide health insurance benefits to employees. He did say there would be assistance for small and start-up businesses, but I’m not sure how he’s going to fund that without the aforementioned public option. I’d like to see more numbers on this. Again, though, any compulsory requirement like this is an affront to liberty. I don’t think there’s more I can say to that here… except that I hope this does not create further stagnation in the job market.

These are the three areas that are concerning me the most. Even a multipartisan bill will be a great source of personal frustration for me if it includes any of the items mentioned here.

For me, the true question is simple… and paints me as cold-hearted in some respects:

Is “health care” a right?

or further…

Is “good and affordable health care” a right?

How you answer those questions probably says a lot about where you stand in your own ideas of how healthcare and health insurance can be improved.

My answer? I have a right to pursue any health care as much as I have a right to refuse it… but I have no right to require or expect others to provide it to me.

President Obama and his administration like to boast "bipartisan support" for certain things, simply because they had at least one Republican "cross the aisle" to support a piece of legislation sponsored by Democrats.  Obama is certainly not the first to do this; "bipartisan legislation" has been a key political boasting point for every president in the last two decades.  If a bill has "bipartisan" support, the administration proudly proclaims it as a solution that everyone can agree on, as a collectivist ideal.

The damage this is doing to public perception is frightening, but it is still reversible while the First Amendment still stands.  One way we can start a return toward the respect of multiple political views is through our word choices.  We need to be accurate, logical, and truthful rather than assuming, emotional, and conniving.

The use of "bipartisan" systematically perpetuates the assumption that there are, and only will be, exactly two political parties.

If we can change the use of this word alone, I think we can positively affect public opinion.

Of course, Republicans and Democrats are truly "bipartisan" in their efforts to give little or no credence to the mere existence of another party, preying on public apathy that this is the permanent and accepted reality.

The truth is that there are, and have always been, other voices and other views that do not align with the Republican or Democratic parties.  These voices are too often stifled because they are not backed by large marketing engines with limitless financial resources.  However, over the last decade, these voices are getting louder, in part because of the Internet.  Thanks to an increasingly educated and reasoning public, so-called "third-parties" are poised to get their voices heard both during campaigns and in the halls of local and state government.

The two-party assumption is dead.

Will you join with me in using "multipartisan" instead of "bipartisan" in conversations and writings?  How do you feel about a movement to write letters to the President, asking him  to bring "hope" to people with individual voices by replacing the word "bipartisan" in his press conferences and speeches?

I attended the second of the two tax-day protests in downtown Raleigh yesterday. (I was still finishing my sparkly poster during the first one. I took about 100 tea bags with me with a two-sided note attached: a quote from Thomas Jefferson on one side, and a quick LPNC.org promotion on the other. With what WRAL reports as about 1500 people at the Capitol Building, though, I ran out of those pretty quick! It was a great multi-partisan turnout.

Naturally, as in every protest movement, you have your folks with misspelled signs, personal-attack posters, and off-color messages that tend to embarrass the core protesters. Unfortunately, too many of them ended up with a microphone in front of their face. I facepalmed a few times listening to the media coverage last night and this morning.

Consequently, as many liberals saw the tea parties as a protest against their beloved Obama, some individuals in the media acted as if we had no right to object to anything the government was currently doing and dismissed the protesters with incredulous sarcasm. Personally, I’m glad they didn’t dismiss 2008’s large Obama/Hope movement with the same disdain, or we’d have McCain and Palin in charge and getting closer to an unreasonable marriage of Christianity and State.

Personally, as a Libertarian, it was frustrating to see the GOP and Fox News so heavily involved. Why? Well, the Libertarian Party has been doing tax day protests every year nationwide since it formed in the 1970s. Having the GOP and Fox News coming out as if leading the way in these protests is almost hypocritical on their part being that the GOP leadership is much to blame for our current economic state. I feel like the intelligent, libertarian message was drowned out by those targeting Obama and his administration… and I still hate that I ran out of my information-tagged tea bags.

The bottom line of the protest for me, every year, has been that taxpayer apathy is a dangerous fuel to government’s power. Since the federal income tax was made permanent with the Revenue Act of 1913, and the coinciding Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, citizens of the U.S. have resigned themselves to assuming any “big” solution (involving money they can’t imagine ever having, let alone spending) requires a government solution rather than a big movement in the private sector.

Instead of looking to their communities to come together, they march to their legislature with outcries of “We’re entitled to X, so use our tax money to give us X.” By taking on this attitude, and electing people to office inclined to cater to them, they resign more of their money, and more of their personal choices, to the hands of the government.

Is there really a “greater good consensus” we can all agree on so much so that we can leave it in government’s hands to make our decisions for us?

Even computers don’t all agree on everything.

This disturbing attitude of helplessness and entitlement is in direct conflict with the nature of our people defined in the original U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It is my sincere hope that logic, reason, rational thought, and skepticism will prevail in time in government so that we will not have to bleed in revolution.