Because Ron Paul has been almost painfully consistent in his support of the Constitution and liberty, one of the things that he is best at is showing his fellow Republicans for what they are: inconsistent people who flit back and forth between promoting liberty and promoting big government, shamelessly, and with no rhyme or reason to their arbitrary decisions. In this debate, he started to target Rick Perry, whom he earlier, if you will remember, referred to as an “establishment man” who would dilute the establishment vote, thereby helping Paul’s campaign. As usual, the moderators took actions to marginalize Paul, this time throwing him a question about the minimum wage, an issue which, though important, is not among the issues the American people are currently most interested in. Now, I suppose it is possible that everyone is marginalizing Paul on accident, but I doubt it. Like Reagan, Dr. Paul refused to let the moderators set the agenda for the conversation and dove right into the larger debate. Deftly moving past his unconventional opinion on the minimum wage, he launched into the healthcare debate:

Absolutely. And it would help the poor, the people who need a job. The minimum wage is a mandate. We’re against mandates, so why should we have it? No, it would be very beneficial.

But I was trying to get your attention a little while ago. There’s eight of us up here. I’m a physician, but you sure weren’t going to ask me any medical question. But I would like to address that just a little bit.

First off, you know, the governor of Texas criticized the governor of Massachusetts for Romneycare, but he wrote a really fancy letter supporting Hillarycare. So we probably ought to ask him about that.

Never one to stop at pointing out the shortcomings of his opponents, Paul quickly tied the two issues together, moving back to the essential philosophical question of government intrusion vs. liberty that keeps his philosophy so remarkably consistent.

But mandates, that’s what the whole society is about. That’s what we do all the time. That’s what government does: mandate, mandate, mandate. And what we — we talk so much about the Obama mandate, which is very important, but what about Medicare? Isn’t that a mandate? Everything we do is a mandate. So this is why you have to look at this at the cause of liberty. We don’t need the government running our lives.

What he said next was very, very shrewd. After succinctly answering the original question, pointing out the inappropriateness of excluding the one physician present from issues of medical care, and knocking Perry from his hypocritical stance toward RomneyCare, Paul slipped one puzzling sentence in, guaranteeing himself for debating time:

And I — I do want to address the subject of $2 oil or gasoline, because I can do it much better than that. I can get you a gallon of gasoline for a dime.

Paul may not talk smoothly, but his ability to do so many things at once are a sign of his mental sharpness, and an explanation of how someone could jump directly out of medicine and then into the US Congress, repeatedly voting alone on issue after issue, and still manage to have the national fame that he does. Such a command of strategy will go further than smooth talking anyhow.

Formal rules aside, it was a conversational impossibility that Ron Paul not be given time to explain what he meant by gas for a dime. Ron Paul quickly explained the role of the federal government’s inflationary policies in driving up the price of oil and gas with a simple but memorable illustration.

OK, you can buy a gallon of gasoline today for a silver dime. A silver dime is worth $3.50. It’s all about inflation and too many regulations.

Perry, knocked off balance, weakly attempted to address the issue of HillaryCare. When he realized that he was unable to explain himself clearly in complete sentences, he switched tactics and attacked Ron Paul for not supporting Reagan’s message of small government and low taxes. That was a really, really bad idea. It gave Dr. Paul yet another chance to point out his own consistency in the face of inconsistency by Republicans who promised one thing and did another.

PERRY: I actually was nodding my head when he said that I wrote a letter to Hillary and we were hoping that she would be able to come up with something that would not leave the agriculture men and women — because I was the agriculture commissioner at that particular point in time. We had no idea it was going to be the monstrosity that’s known as Hillarycare.

Speaking of letters, I was more interested in the one that you wrote to Ronald Reagan back and said I’m going to quit the party because of the things you believe in.

PAUL: Oh, I need an answer on that . . . I strongly supported Ronald Reagan. I was one of four in Texas — one of four members of Congress that supported Reagan in ’76. And I supported him all along, and I supported his — his — all his issues and all his programs.

But in the 1980s, we spent too much, we taxed too much, we built up our deficits, and it was a bad scene. Therefore, I support the message of Ronald Reagan. The message was great. But the consequence, we have to be honest with ourselves. It was not all that great. Huge deficits during the 1980s, and that is what my criticism was for, not for Ronald Reagan’s message. His message is a great message.

Perry found himself unable to support his position. He was so enraged at the way that Paul deconstructed his arguments that, during a break, he walked over and got physical, grabbing Dr. Paul’s wrist and putting a finger in his face. Ron Paul is a seventy-five year old man, a gentleman who would never behave that way. Rick Perry, on the other hand, is behaving like the sort of bully who seeks to physically intimidate instead of using his words. For all his bluster and confidence, the fact that he would have to resort to that sort of behavior tells us only one thing: Perry is desperately afraid that Ron Paul has got him licked. Why else would Perry resort to argumentative tactics more characteristic of a threatened gorilla than a human debater? And Perry should be frightened.

MSNBC’s poll after the debates showed that of approximately 200,000 voters, Ron Paul won the debate by a landslide 55.2% — well beyond all the other candidates combined. Romney finished second with less than one third of Paul’s votes (15.3%), and Perry finished a miserable third with less than a quarter of Paul’s votes, at a mere 12.9% of the votes. Despite being thrown questions designed to make him look stupid and keep him out of the larger debate, Ron Paul has overwhelmingly shown the Republican establishment that they have reason to be afraid.

(These three images courtesy of freedom-won.net)

(From the Ron Paul Forums. To the best of my knowledge, the Ron Paul Forums is a discussion board for people interested in Ron Paul, but do not in any way speak for Ron Paul himself.)

When government takes over medicine, the labor and tools involved in medicine increasingly fall under government ownership, whether legal ownership or de facto ownership through control. Now, the government does not operate like a charity. It operates on entirely different principles. It takes its money by force and then hands it out to all the various projects the government sponsors. If the government controls healthcare, healthcare funds will be limited primarily by three things: (1) the government can only take in so much money, (2) a bunch of that money disappears to go into an over-growing serious of interest payments on the national debt, and (3) all sorts of things other than healthcare receive much of the remaining funds. So there’s only so much to go around. Here’s where some of this starts to become a problem. Once healthcare assets are government assets, there is no longer a market-based system for deciding who gets treatment. Instead, a massive collections of laws and medical panels will have to decide who is allowed to receive treatment. And because old people can absorb an almost infinite amount of money extending the last portions of their lives, some old people will be denied life-saving or potentially life-saving treatments. The panels who make such decisions are called, by tea-partyers, “death panels”.

I and a group of friends with Young Americans for Liberty got to listen to and talk with with Jacob Huebert when he was in Columbus plugging his new book, Libertarianism Today. Because healthcare was a hot topic, he outlined the healthcare-related section of his book in a bit more detail than the rest of it. He expressed surprise that Republicans were up in arms about the mere possibility of future death panels, but were utterly concerned about already existing death panels. Existing death panels? Yes indeed. He explained that, functionally, the FDA was a sort of death panel by nature: it exists to restrict the number of drugs that doctors may prescribe and patients may take. First of all, it imposes costs and delays on drug production. The average time and cost for a new drug to be approved in the United States is about 800 million dollars and over seven years. That’s the sort of cash you have to have to jump through all the hoops that the FDA requires. The first group of FDA deaths, then, are people who during the extra wait imposed by government testing procedures for drugs that eventually are approved. The second group of FDA deaths are people who die because a drug which could save them never got to market. Due to the extremely high cost of R&D imposed by the FDA, only a very small proportion of possible drugs receive study. Even a promising drug which would pass all the tests with flying colors will never make it to market if the companies producing them don’t stand to quickly recoup their 800 million dollar investment. This is especially true of drugs that target rare diseases, which even if effective face crazy-high barriers to market entry. The third group of FDA deaths are people who don’t receive help because drugs that should have been approved aren’t.

The reason that drugs which should reach the market don’t is due to an asymmetry that is critical for anyone who wants to understand why government bureaucracies work so incredibly inefficiency. And that asymmetry is an asymmetry of risk and reward. You see, because the FDA has to approve any drug before it comes to market, the FDA is, in terms of public response, responsible for any drug that has unforeseen side effects. For example, if a drug comes out and kills 100 people with heart problems that the FDA failed to spot, there will be outrage. The number one nightmare of any FDA bureaucrat responsible for any significant part of product testing is that by some tiny error, oversight, or insufficient testing some deaths might get blamed on the bureaucrat. So, any self-interested and conscientious worker will order extra tests when in doubt, make a very big deal of even small to moderate risks, and continue investigations year after year. It is, of course, good that people are concerned about deaths. But in the eyes of the public, not all deaths are created equal. If a Muslim blew up a wedding in the US and killed five people, Americans would be outraged. If American drones blow up a wedding in Afghanistan and kill forty people, and then, oops, another wedding where we kill thirty people, and then maybe some more weddings, you don’t get the same sort of rage at all. That’s because the voters distinguish between inexcusable deaths (American citizens, including soldiers) and excusable deaths (collateral damage that inevitably happens when you try to fight wars from the air). Similarly, drug casualties are classified as inexcusable, excusable, and even invisible. If 10,000 deformed babies are born due to a morning sickness pill, people go up in arms and demand much stricter drug scrutiny. Babies with deformities are inexcusable. Just ask some older people about thalidomide and most will get angry about how lax regulations were. But if ten thousand adults die due to the delays those such restrictions caused in the development of statins, so be it. No one even thinks to wonder whether ten thousand adults are an acceptable price for drug safety. And if tens of thousands of people die of rare diseases because their would-be drugs aren’t commercially viable under the FDA, and if hundreds of thousands of people die of more common diseases because R&D is so much more expensive, so be it. Acceptable deaths. A bureaucrat, scientist, or politician might lose his job if he’s implicated in releasing a drug that has unforeseen risks. I don’t know of a single person who ever lost a job because people died while he legally obstructed the process of bringing drugs to market. Because bureaucrats share in the risks of drug production, but receive none of the benefits, they pick up that annoying trait you’ve probably seen plenty of times in a variety of organizations: paranoid risk aversion with no thought for benefits.

It was this concept that first made me interested in the FDA. Now, here’s an article in which the FDA decides that walnuts are drugs and walnut sellers may not inform the consumer about the scientifically proven benefits of walnuts to human vascular health and heart health despite 35 peer-reviewed scientific studies proving them. Yech.

There are a variety of approaches to answering it.  The most common is what we might call the “Marxist” response, although radical Marxists make up only a tiny percentage of those who advocate it.  The Marxist position is that there is something unhealthy in the holding of property, an inherent evil that will naturally lead to the existence of a wealthy controlling class and will make cattle of the poor.  The radical Marxist will advocate the ending of all property rights.  Other leftists will admit that the existence of private property, despite its exploitative tendencies, is for some reason necessary.  So the soft Marxist will advocate government regulation of property rights, with a sliding scale of property taxes and other devices to reduce inequality and keep the rich in check.

Another option is what we might call stereotypical right-wingerism.  The stereotypical right-winger will respond that the poor are in trouble because they are simply stupid, lazy, worthless people who refuse to work.  He maintains that the only way to stop them from sucking all the wealth out of the nation is to remove all government helps for them and to promote anything big business every does.  He looks at the billionaires of the world and assumes that the massive wealth they have is the result of their being good people and hard workers.  One such fellow I knew, a junior-high student named Tim, was raised wealthy and was convinced that our country would become a better place if we simply restricted the vote to the wealthy and vastly increased the number of police in bad neighborhoods.

But there is a third option.  The third option is libertarianism.  Libertarianism embraces the concept of inequality.  Let me clarify.  The libertarianism believes that the economy can be boiled down to a variety of people trying to get a variety of things and doing whatever they think is the best way to get those things.  For the libertarian, things boil down to incentives, and the fact that one’s well-being will depend on one’s effort is a great stimulus to constructive action.  So the libertarian believes that inequality is not a monster to be exterminated but rather a positive force.  Don’t get us wrong, though.  Libertarians do acknowledge that there are exploiters out there, people whose greed and control leads to unhealthy and unnatural levels of inequality and oppression.  The more theoretically-minded divide the entire society into an exploiters and exploitees.  But there’s a crucial difference.  We see the primary destructive economic force as not business per se, but government interference.  We believe a number of counterintuitive ideas, such as that minimum wage laws harm the poor, that taxing the wealthy heavily hurts the poor, that zoning laws destroy small business, and that both the poor, middle class, and rich are best off in a world off laissez-faire.

And so the when we oppose legislation designed to redistribute wealth, it’s not that we don’t like the poor.  It’s that we believe different things are helpful.  Even hard-core libertarians are appalled at the way the elite have shared a level of growth that the middle class and the poor have missed out on.  The real question, then, isn’t how much inequality there may or may not be.  The real question is not whether liberalism or libertarianism view is most compassionate.  The real question is whether governmentally imposed outcomes are better than voluntarily reached outcomes.  The real questions are these:  Does a minimum wage protect the poor, or does it hurt them?  Is it Walmart that’s destroying our small businesses, or is it zoning laws?  Is the war on drugs making our poor neighborhoods safer, or turning them into hell-holes?  Does government involvement in healthcare mean that we get better care, or is it making healthcare worse and more expensive?  Is social security an important way we care for our older folks, or is it a Ponzi scheme?  The questions could go on and on, but the libertarian is the one who sees government interference as almost always counter-productive.  We see the exploiting class not as the local MacDonald’s that gives you $1 sandwiches, but as the well-connected politicians and their beneficiaries who receive trillions of dollars of your money and get to tell you what to do with your life.

I can’t speak for all libertarians, but it is my belief that the poor are indeed being oppressed that drives my libertarianism.

Britain is looking to decentralize (or as they would say, decentralise) their healthcare system.  One more indication that National Health Plans aren’t working out so hot for the countries that’ve already got them.

Pelosi is opposed to raising the retirement age for Social Security, saying that the budget deficit and social security are like “apples and oranges.”  That’s a really vague statement, but presumably she’s trying to imply that the 700 billion we spend each year on Social Security is not at all a factor in producing our 1,400 billion dollar deficit.  As though social security was just some self-sustaining program separate from everything else the government does.  Democrat majority leader Stenny Hoyer, however, understands that Social Security spending and deficit spending are indeed apples and apples.  Attaboy, Hoyer.

And the recent leaked military documents are suggesting that while we pay for the maintenance of the Pakistani military, they are in turn guiding the Taliban with information and strategic help.  If that’s true, the US is fighting US-backed Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan.  From the Cold War, to Bin Laden, to ousting the Shah of Iran, it always seems like we wind up funding our enemies in the name of protecting ourselves.

But now, the judge presiding over the case is noticing something:  it appears that there is no evidence of such plans being drawn up, nor of any attempt to carry out the killings of police.  Thankfully, though, the story has already faded so it won’t be a major embarrassment to the government. You can read the story here, and here’s some select excerpts.

A federal judge challenged prosecutors Wednesday to show that nine members of a Michigan militia accused of plotting war against the government had done more than just talk and should remain locked up.  U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts heard nearly 10 hours of testimony and arguments over two days. . . .

Prosecutors say the public would be at risk if the nine are released. But defense lawyers claim the government has overreached with a criminal case based mostly on hateful speech.  An undercover agent infiltrated the group and secretly made recordings that have been played in court. While there is talk about killing police, it’s not specific. . .

The judge suggested that she didn’t hear or read in the transcripts any indication that violence was imminent.

See if that becomes a front-page story.  Naw, don’t bet on it.  The mainstream media has no interest in telling us that an earlier threat was probably nothing.  And the present administration certainly has no interest in the story any longer–it no longer serves the purpose of making people fear all those who oppose government policy.

Think about that.

For any good, there are a variety of people supplying and there are a variety of people interested in getting some of that good.  The suppliers each want to sell at as high a price as they can, and the buyers want to buy at as low a price as they can.  As suppliers and buyers bid for each others business, market prices emerge.

Each buyer finds the lowest price he can for whatever it is he wants to buy.  And so a buyer buys, say, a can of peanut butter for $2.89, or a gallon of gasoline for $3.15, or a used car for $2200, or a new house for $200,000.  These goods, and all goods sold on the market, have one important thing in common:  they are always sold at a higher price than the buyer would prefer.

Sure, sometimes you buy something and you think, “What a great price!” but the truth is that you would prefer a lower price.  Sometimes, for particularly expensive goods, people get the idea that a given price–the best price they can find–is unfair.  And so politicians love to campaign on promising to “do something” about high prices.  And it is here that it becomes difficult.  Because tampering with prices will always produce certain predictable reactions.

If a market price is artificially forced down by government, there are a vast number of ways that this can be done, but there is only one possible outcome:  as the price is forced down, less people will be willing to sell the good and more people will be willing to buy the good, leading to the forced exclusion of some people in the form of shortages.

And so forcibly lowered prices will inevitably produce shortages of treatment.  With a simple and insignificant product like cheeze whiz–I know, it’s probably more significant and complicated than I know, but bear with me–for cheeze whiz, this will simply mean that a lot of the time you won’t be able to get your hands on any.  For more complex products like the complex and expensive set of goods we call healthcare, this shortage may manifest itself in a number of ways.  Some people who come to buy healthcare goods may be turned away.  Some people who come to buy may be forced to wait into lines that are long enough to force some people to either give up, find illegal treatment, or die.  And some people will simply be given less healthcare product than they would prefer to buy:  either in the form of less medicine, less medical attention, less time in recovery, or what have you.

The shortage may manifest itself in a number of ways, but it will manifest itself.

In the case of this recent healthcare bill, we have massively complex legislation the final aim of which is to reduce the burden of healthcare prices.  And in just the very short time we’ve had it, it’s produced shortages.

For example, there’s the recent shut-down of 60 hospital building projects because their methods of providing treatment was considered too fancy by the current legislation.  That is, these 60 hospitals were doctor-owned, and planned to produce a higher quality, and therefore higher price, of care than is now legal.  Under the current anti-doctor-ownership laws, some other hospitals are prohibited from adding new beds.  That’s right.  A law which we were told would help is is outlawing the production of new hospitals and beds.  Of course, the patients (many upper-class) who would have slept in those beds and gone to those hospitals will now be forced to compete against the average or below-average Joe in the average hospital for treatment.  That’s neither good for the upper-class patient nor average-or-below Joe.  And this, of course, produces shortage.  If you thought the competition of the free market was brutal, you should see the competition for needed services when government forces prices and supplies down simultaneously.  People are people, and people with lots of extra money will bribe doctors to give them treatment preference.  And then instead of having to deal with more expensive treatment, the poor and the honest will have to deal with the possibility of no treatment.

Another example is the developing doctor shortage.  Estimates say there could be a shortage of perhaps 150,000 doctors developing over the next 15 years.  And because in the U.S. we have about one doctor per 310 people, this equals about 46 million doctorless patients.  Of course, we could either have 46 million people without doctors, or, more realistically, spead the doctors around so that everyone is partially doctorless.  This is a natural side effect of over-regulation and price shortage controls:  people draw away from government-manipulated markets.

On top of this, we’re all being forced to buy insurance.  Just another example of legislation distorted the normal operations of the marketplace.

Hurray, the United States government just declared the Church is officially off the hook in regards to the care of the sick and infirm. Now all we need is some social action to clear out that pesky widows and orphans problem and we can get back to the real job of speculative theology and anathamatizing each other.

Of course, he was speaking in jest but I will say this plainly–regardless of what effect the bill has on medical bills, the Church worldwide needs to know that we are most definitely not off the hook on the matter of helping the poor.  It is and always has been a mission of the church and the growth of the welfare state gives us no excuse to turn away from those in need.

Many extreme things are being said on both sides of the aisle, so I thought I would try to, if not persuade any of you, at least give you a glimpse of what’s happening in the minds of folks like myself regarding this bill.  Many on the right have hurled about accusations of fascism, Nazism, and communism against the supporters of this bill.  Naturally, those supporters who support the bill out of a love for the poor and hurting see such accusations as ridiculous.  On the other hand, there are those on the left who are shocked that the Republicans and libertarians of this country are almost unanimously against this bill.  Do they hate the poor?  Do they deliberately wish to prolong suffering?

And so, as someone against this bill, I will explain what I think.  The goal is not so much to persuade any of you but to show that opposition to this bill is not simply grounded in hatred for the poor and opposition to the principles of Christianity.  Because there are a number of points I want to bring up, I’ll only address each one briefly.  If you want more information on any of them, feel free to ask.  So here are some of my objections to the bill:

1)  Abortion.  As someone who believes that human life exists in the womb, I am against abortion.  Let’s leave aside for a moment the difficult problem of pregnancies which threaten to an unusual extent the life of the mother, which I won’t argue one way or the other at present.  As opposed as I am to even the toleration of elective abortion, it is even worse in my mind if the federal government were to pass a health bill granting my forcibly taken tax dollars to pay for elective abortions.  There has been debate over whether this bill includes such funding, but what is most telling for me is that the bill was forced through without Stupak’s amendment to forbid abortion coverage.  Instead, the bill was sent through with the promise of an “executive order” by President Obama to stop money from being used on abortions.  However, the President does not have the power to use an executive order to stop funding, so the order is not worth the paper it’s printed on.  See here and here.

2)  Personal choice.  There are, in my mind, two general tendencies any government can follow.  It can provide a minimum framework of law and order, and then allow individials to make choices about their own personal lives.  Or it can set about with the goal of planning out people’s lives for them, with the government given the power to make people make choices that the government thinks is right.  This bill, which severely limits the choice of the individual as to whether to get insurance and what kind to get, is a clearly coercive action by a government which thinks it can decide what is best for people–an action which is contrary to the principle of liberty which is the foundation for all prosperous societies.

3)  Socialism.  This bill is socialist in that it gives the central government the power to the healthcare industry–to regulate prices, what sort of health products are sold, who gets healthcare, how much healthcare they get, what treatments they get, etc.  It forces doctors and insurance companies to form policies not by competing to provide the best value to paying customers, but instead to try to keep up with a myriad of regulations imposed by the existing overgrown bureaucracy and 159 new agencies created by this bill.  To my mind it is about as sensible to say that this will result in better healthcare as it would be to say that North Korea’s Kim Jung Il has hatched a communist utopia in his nation.

4) Spending.  The United States government spending is currently equal to just under 50% of the nation’s total domestic product.  Amazingly, this massive spending by government, including incredible amounts of wealth redistribution, has not removed poverty from the U.S.  And yet rather than say that government spending is creating problems, our nation repeatedly resorts to simply spending and borrowing more each year to try even larger projects.  This new healthcare bill already requires a tax hike of 400 billion over the next decade to help pay for it, and that’s just the beginning, even according to our federal government’s ridiculously optimistic estimates.

5)  The national debt.  This point is of course closely related to the previous one.  We have a national debt greater than $12,600,000,000,000.00, (12.6 trillion dollars), we are borrowing about $1.5 trillion ($1,500,000,000,000.00) annually at our present rate of spending, and we spend 18.2% of our national income just keeping up with our interest payments.  Our interest payments will grab more and more of our federal revenues as we continue to increase our debt and as interest rates on our debt go up as the world begins to distrust our ability to pay back money.  If you doubt that the world would mistrust our ability to pay the debt, know that it is no coincidence that on the same day our already-broke government passed this massive socialist bill, it was announced that the market now finds more security in loaning to an individual (Warren Buffet) than to the U.S. Federal Government, and that we are in the process of losing our stellar national credit score.

So there it is, my friends.  Whether you agree with me or not, I hope I’ve made clear that the reason me and others like me oppose the stimilus bill is because of our concern for our nation’s stability and well-being, and not because we want the poor to suffer.