Blog

Across the country, people have been vehemently protesting Obama’s proposal for health care reform.  Thousands have gathered at town hall meetings to show their representatives that they oppose Congress’s plan to completely overhaul healthcare in America.  Representatives in favor of the current proposals insist that the protests are due to  “people  just getting information that’s flat wrong,” such as that care will be rationed, health saving accounts will be illegal, private insurance companies will be driven out of business by the public option, etc.

Dr. John Lewis, associate professor of political science at Duke University, has taken the time to translate some critical passages from the bill into a language easier to understand.  The passages he evaluates clearly describe a rationing of care, an unprecedented amount of government control over private insurance companies, and massive financial incentives to forego private insurance for the public option.  It seems that the protestors are not so misinformed after all.

"It will be hard," President Barack Obama acknowledged in a speech earlier this year to Congress.  But he added, "Let there be no doubt: health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year."  Some years before, then-President George W. Bush said, "...We reached an agreement to reduce pollution from off-road diesel engines by 90%.  I've got a plan to increase the wetlands by 3 million...I proposed to the Congress a Clear Skies Initiative to reduce sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury by 70%. ...I proposed a hydrogen-generated automobile.  We're spending a billion dollars to come up with the technologies to do that."

Such comments are nothing new.  For decades, politicians have spoken about their visions to "take care" of American citizens, the world population, and the Earth itself.  Lyndon Johnson implemented Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s in order to look after the medical needs of the elderly and the poor.  Franklin Roosevelt implemented Social Security in the 1930s to provide for people's finances after retirement.  Theodore Roosevelt implemented forced conservation in the beginning of the twentieth century with millions of miles of government land ownership.

Underlying these policies is the idea that it is the government's responsibility to oversee and take care of its citizens, to establish for them substantive ends such as universal healthcare, workers' insurance, or pristine environments.  But long before Presidents Obama and Bush, long before even Presidents Johnson and Roosevelt, presidents who held a very different vision of the role of government led America.

America's founding presidents conceived of the government as an institution that would protect mans' rights: the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is "to secure these rights," not provide health care or serve as custodians of the Earth, that "governments are instituted amongst men".  The government, in the view of men such as Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, should be an institutionalized policeman and judge, not an institutionalized social worker and gardener.  These men proclaimed the purpose of government to protect man's rights, not to run charities or manage retirement funds.

They understood that if the government endeavored to do anything besides protect its citizens' rights, such as provide health care or worker's insurance, it would have to violate the rights of some in order to give those products to others.

For example, if the government undertakes to provide insurance to workers, it must obtain the funds to do so from the pockets of others and thereby violate their right to the fruits of their labor.  If it promises health care to the elderly, it must ensure, ultimately through regulatory force, that doctors treat them, thereby violating the rights of those doctors to engage in business with whom they choose.  If the government guarantees any material good or service produced by the effort of another human being, it must violate the rights of that human being and force him to forfeit what he has produced to others, making him a slave.  Either the government protects rights, or it pursues some other goal and thereby violates them.

So what vision of government do we, as Americans, endorse today?

The answer depends on our view of human nature.  Do we believe, as our Founders did, that man is a rational animal, capable of achieving his values through his own thought and effort?  Or do we believe that man is helpless, in need of a governmental overseer to decide what is best for him?  Do we believe that the individual is morally entitled to the fruits of his labor?  Or do we believe that he has a duty to sacrifice to his neighbor, a duty that Uncle Sam can force him to practice?  Is our time and property-i.e. our life-properly our own by inalienable right, or can the government force us into service?

These are the questions that we as Americans must examine, ponder, and answer, if we value liberty and want to understand why our politicians keep trying to one-up each other in their social and environmental programs.  The fundamental issue of the day is not whether we should pragmatically support or oppose a particular plan of Obama's or whether John McCain would have been any better in office.  The fundamental issue is our conception of the proper role of government and our justification for that conception.

To accept and endorse the likes of Jefferson, Adams, and Madison is to accept and endorse an underlying view of government as the protector of individual rights.  It is to uphold a view of man as a being capable of achieving his own happiness through his own effort.

In contrast, to accept and endorse the likes of Roosevelt, Bush, and Obama is to accept and endorse an underlying view of government that rejects America's founding values of individual rights and sacrifices them to governmental 'caretaking'.  It is to surrender to a view of man as a helpless being, incapable by himself of achieving his own values and happiness.  And it is to concede that noble vision of our Founders as just an impotent, faded memory.

Such a concession should not be made lightly.

Corporate America was once criticized for its alleged culture of conformity and tacit support of "glass ceilings" preventing minority advancement.  Now, a day hardly goes by in any corporate setting without mention of the importance of "diversity."  Nearly all major companies name diversity as among the central values of their corporate philosophies—PepsiCo strives to "Win with diversity and inclusion," while American Express declares that "Diversity is our business formula for success."

The word "diversity" often brings to mind desirable things.  In biology, diversity of a population makes it more robust in resisting disease.  As consumers, we benefit from a diversity of choices in the products and services we buy.  In business, a company needs a diverse collection of knowledge and skills to accomplish its mission—human resources, finance, engineering, marketing, management, and others are all critical to its success.  It would seem that diversity is indeed something worth promoting as a central corporate value.

But there is a subtle yet important difference between the kind of diversity just described and the kind so zealously sought after by the corporate world today. The term "diversity" simply means difference or variety; for a group of things to be diverse means to be different in some way. The significance of that difference depends upon the context and standard. Owning a portfolio of stock in different companies, for example, serves the goal of minimizing financial risk. But having a diversity of strong and weak players on a football team does not serve any valid goal, and is therefore a strategy for defeat.

"Diversity" per se is thus not necessarily a value—it can be good, bad, or irrelevant, depending on what the goal is. In the context of business, we should ask: what is it that PepsiCo wants to "win"? What is the nature of the "success" that American Express seeks to achieve?

The fundamental goal of any corporation is to profit by offering a quality product or service to its customers. If it fails in this goal, it will cease to exist. Achieving profitability is a difficult and continuous process. The people involved need to identify and research markets—to develop, produce, and sell products—to market and deliver services-to maintain and improve systems. To accomplish all this, especially in the globally competitive business world of today, a company's workforce must possess a vast array of knowledge, skills, and personal traits like intelligence, diligence, and creativity.

In their efforts to "win with diversity", however, the corporate world is seeking a diversity not of talents and knowledge, but of genders and skin tones. Companies like Verizon and Xerox tout the number of minorities in executive positions, and General Motors has been praised for choosing its suppliers not based strictly upon price or quality, but also upon the number of the supplier's black employees.  As one leading "diversity expert" put it, "If the diversity program is not effective in producing a diverse racial, gender, ethnic workforce, then it's not worth the paper it's written on."

Such actions reveal that companies are using "diversity" as a basis for making basic business decisions like hiring and purchasing.  But such a standard offers no legitimate guidance in these areas. For example, there are many important questions to be asked when choosing a new company executive or supplier.  Does the individual have the drive and experience to lead a division?  Is the potential supplier cost-efficient and reliable?  The answers to such questions determine whether the prospective employee or supplier will advance the company's ultimate goal.  The race and gender of the people involved, in contrast, should never have reason to enter the discussion, since those traits have no bearing upon the fundamental issue: an individual's ability to do what needs to get done to make the business productive and profitable.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was right to argue that everyone "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." By highlighting traits like skin color and gender, corporate diversity programs achieve exactly the opposite: an environment where important character traits are valued less, while insignificant traits are treated as essential.

If companies want to succeed by encouraging and rewarding talent and productive achievement, the proper goal is not to promote diversity, but to make it irrelevant—to make the corporate office a place where one's abilities and virtues are what counts, and one's race and gender are beside the point.

Of the many specials on health care that have been taking place these past few weeks, this recent PJTV forum should be singularly commended for daring to ask of our political leaders the one question upon which the whole concept of government health care rests: Is health care a right?

This crucial question has been notoriously absent from Presidential speeches, interviews in the mass media, and political debate. Yet the answer could not have more fundamental implications for the Obama administration's health care plans. Rights, loosely speaking, are the governing principles of society, the conditions that must be met if human beings are to successfully live together in a social setting. If something—liberty, property, freedom of conscience—is a right, it means that government is properly concerned with securing that right. To say that health care is a right is to say that it is proper for government to be concerned with providing health care. On the other hand, if health care is not a right, then the very idea of government-sponsored health care rests on a faulty assumption 

So how did the Congressmen on PJTV, self-declared opponents of the Obama plan, answer the question? Republican Congressman Eric Cantor, described as one of the leading voices in opposition to the Obama health care bill, began his answer, "Health care is something all of us want to be able to access, no question. We want coverage..." He went on to note that this question is not something we think about when we think about health care, and then stopped talking about it. Congressman Tom Price, asked the same question, similarly evaded the issue by noting that "[w]e're a compassionate nation. The American people want to make certain that folks are able to seek the healthcare they desire."  Faced with the central philosophic question underlying their entire campaign, these two politicians simply avoided confronting the matter.

America needs its lawmakers to approach the issues of the day in fundamental terms, and to base their advocacy on those fundamental judgments. In the case of health care, there is no more fundamental question than whether health care is or is not a right. Any politician that holds a position on health care—and all should—has a responsibility to ask and answer this question in his own mind, to announce his view to his constituents, and to consistently advocate his own position.

For the Undercurrent's view on this question, see here:

http://www.afcm.org/hcinar_video.html

http://the-undercurrent.com/paper/the-business-of-healthcare/

http://the-undercurrent.com/blog/a-tale-of-two-economists/

http://www.westandfirm.org/

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=media_topic_healthcare