In what I can only hope was an opinion article in the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik asks the question, “What’s so great about private insurance?“  In support of his answer which seems to boil down to “approximately nothing,” he encourages us to “remind ourselves what th[e] American way [of health care] entails.”  Without question, “the American way” is a huge issue in the debate over health care.  It is an issue which extends well beyond doctors and nurses, insurance companies, and bureaucrats.  It is not only “the American way” of health care which is in question, but the American way of life itself.

“So it’s proper to remind ourselves what that American way entails.”  For most of our nation’s history, Americans have prided themselves on being a free and independent people.  The American tradition, in fact, is founded on freedom, and our Declaration of Independence continues to resonate as one of the guiding lights in what it means to cast off the reigns of an overbearing and distant government.  Our people have fought two wars against our own countrymen (the American Revolution, as then-Englishmen against England, and the American Civil War, as Americans against America) against the real and perceived excesses of government authority.  We have fought, with pen and blood, against Nazis, Fascists, Communists, Despots, Dictators, and Totalitarians to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” not only “to ourselves and our Posterity,”(US Constitution, Preamble) but to anyone else brave enough to fight for the right of self-rule.

It is notable that of all of the government intrusions upon the individual Americans have fought in the past, not a single one has been so personal or intimate as government intrusion into the doctor’s office.  In fact, that singular alcove has been the focus of one of the deepest divides in modern American politics.  Some of the most prominent advocates of government healthcare today are the very same people who harp incessantly on the fundamental liberty of choice and the right to no-government-here privacy when medical discussions turn from unwanted illnesses to unwanted fetuses.  So sharp is the conviction against government involvement in the abortion doctor’s office that every year a march is made in front of the Supreme Court on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.  The moral certainty that the government should not direct the fate of people’s lives by interfering with those who help us in white robes is not wrong.  Yet, interfere is precisely what government healthcare by definition would do.

As plenty of other commentators have pointed out by now, government healthcare is a deep threat to American liberty.  Unlike the police and military force which so animated Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, the force of government on our lives through healthcare would be vague and ill-defined.  But once the government has entered our bodies, it becomes far more powerful than a uniformed officer ever could.  Every decision could be rewarded or punished through the evolution of some sort of tax “to help pay for healthcare,” or by lengthening or shortening the line to the doctor’s office.  The government, literally, would have the last word over who lives and who dies.

When Patrick Henry spoke to the Virginia Convention in St. John’s Church, he most assuredly did not have a heart attack, stroke, or cancer on his mind.  Yet, the words “Liberty or Death” resonate through time in the best of the American tradition, and they apply no less to us now in health than they did to the founders in war.  In the American tradition, it is better to die free than live as a slave.

So, what’s so great about the private system?  To be sure, it isn’t perfect.  No system is.  But the private system is able to innovate, able to change, and able to seek out ways to improve.  It is not interested in controlling lives.  The private system allows Americans to live as Americans: Strong, independent, and free.

I had this thought during a conversation with Elizabeth who was talking about the effect of gun free zones on crime.  It’s a cynical idea, but I wonder how much truth it may contain.

More crime means you need more government to control crime. In particular, more police. When liberals are asked to cut budgets, the first thing they cut are police. But people hate that, and will often concede to tax increases instead. Victory: liberalism.

Last night, I got into an interesting discussion with one of my more liberal leaning friends.  The subject of the discussion was about public policy as it relates to vaccination, particularly, the vaccination of school aged children.  In his view, this is clearly an area where existing mandates for vaccination have become too diluted with exemptions, particularly the “personal belief” exemptions which allow parents to opt out of otherwise mandatory vaccinations because they hold strong personal beliefs against administering them.  He seemed to hope that I would come to agree with his position that the solution is to reduce the availability of exemptions.  On principles of liberty, I stubbornly refused.

Society has a clear interest in preserving herd immunity, as the alternative is significant exposure to serious illnesses like small pox and polio which have not afflicted society for many years.  As my friend rightly argues, if enough people individually make the decision to not vaccinate, the collective risk is nothing short of a possible epidemic.  Clearly a bad thing.  Yet, as my friend observes, a rising interest in natural / holistic medicine and fears about the safety of vaccines (perhaps most notably the thoroughly debunked vaccine-autism link) has moved society closer to a dangerous precipice.  And, as he points out, the most efficient way to prevent a bad outcome is to prevent people from making the decision to not vaccinate.

While my friend’s method may be efficient, it is also a direct assault on liberty.

Whenever people in society are free to make decisions, it is inevitable that some of the decisions people make will be sub-optimal, or flat out wrong.  Sometimes disastrously so.  Knowing the danger, it is tempting to want to step in to reduce the chance of a bad outcome.  It is tempting to step in and say that some decisions are too risky to leave in the hands of the people.

Liberty demands more.  It is impossible to talk seriously about liberty when the only available freedoms are with respect to low risk issues.  Liberty itself is dangerous business and, as history has shown, the freedom to talk about freedom is always one of the first that governments try to strip away.  The reason, of course is obvious: A free person might decide to do something other than what whoever has power wants them to do.

A commitment to liberty demands accepting the fact that some things will not go your way.  To be sure, it is proper to try to persuade people to your side, and much of the discussion I had with my friend focused on how to persuade parents to vaccinate their children even if they may be skittish about the idea.  At the end of the day, however, a freedom itself requires that parents themselves make the decision.

There is only meaning in liberty if the people are at liberty to decide something meaningful.

In one of its most memorable phrases, George Orwell’s 1984 sounds out a ringing indictment of how to transform a society.  “If there is hope,” he tells us, “it lies with the proles.”  As Winston discovers, what hope may lie there is more illusory than real.  The proles are too misdirected and disconnected to rise, united, against Big Brother.  Cheap beer and ficticious war are all that it takes to keep the most populus class from doing anything particularly remakrable.

This week I spent some time talking to some friends who, like me, are basically American proles.  Like our storybook counterparts, we have little if any impact on the political structure of our nation.  Sweet drinks and the manufactured wars broadcast on television are enough to keep us distracted.  However, from these conversations and by remarkable coincidence, I got onto a subject which Orwell’s masses and even Winston himself likely could not understand: The power of community.

As history has shown us time and again, people are at their strongest when they are interconnected in a meaningful way.  The number of connections need not be numerous, and the people involved need not be politically powerful, to have a major impact on a person’s life.  Ask any teacher and they will tell you that the children who excel are almost invariably the children with a parent who gets involved in the education process.  Ask any psychologist and I’m sure you will find that many of their patients leave feeling better simply from having had someone to talk to.

Americans have always had an interesting relationship with community.  We are highly individualist, a reflection of the principles of independence which mark the founding of our nation.  At the same time, we also recognize that no person can be truly independent; school shootings tend to be done by “lone wolves”, violent criminals in general are often social outcasts, and there is a growing consensus that inner-city poverty can be traced in part to the weak family ties which characterize much of urban life.  We are suspicious of government, with its power to create and destroy communities on a whim, tempered, we like to pretend, by the government’s commitment to justice and our own ability to check government misbehavior through the ballot box.  But we are also suspicious of individuals; the manipulative, self-serving creatures who seldom care about anyone but themselves, even when helping others.  The contradictions animate much of American politics.

And so, what were the ideas that prompted this chain of thought?  A faith based community centered on supporting families, and a school centered on creating a communal family for kids who have none of their own.  Both, I think, would be shining examples of how to improve a society.  Hope never requires all of the proles.  A revolution can begin with two.

As I have followed some of the lingering fallout from CPAC 2009, I have found myself spending a bit of time considering some of the stuff Rush said about putting principles before policy.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that I agree with that approach, as I began my own posting on this blog with an articulation of First Principles which I view as being important to the future of American conservatism.  Rush tells us that there is no need for anyone to redefine conservatism and complains that anyone who tries to redefine it is at best missing the mark, and at worst a destructive force.  While I’ll take no position on that debate, I am sure that there is a significant and growing population for which conservatism needs to be defined in the first place, and that some of those in the “redefinition” business are actually trying to figure out just what the actual definition is.

The essential hallmark of a true blooded conservative appears to be a deep belief in God and Ronald Reagan.  Conservative principles are Reagan’s principles, and those who would seek to deviate are frowned upon or ostracized.  For members of the current political class, for people like Rush, and for Baby Boomers in general, the invocation of Reagan’s name codes for a whole collection of principles and policies which set most or all of the entire definition of modern conservatism.  For these people, who lived through Reagan, the full set of principles is entirely clear, and perfectly summarized in speaking His name.

America has reached a point in time where people who have never known Reagan are beginning to become politically active.  Though they are only just now becoming politically active, the up and coming leaders and opponents of Reagan’s Party are people who were just starting elementary school when Reagan himself left office.  Their knowledge of Reagan comes not from bearing witness, but from teachers and textbooks.  To them, and to the liberals who have no incentive to correct any misunderstanding, he is the man of Iran-Contra, compassionate conservatism, and that silly trickle-down “Reaganomics” thing.  Oh, and the end of the Cold War.

These relatively useless bits of information are not helpful to an up and coming conservative when it comes to understanding conservative principles, particularly if that understanding is meant to make conservatism sound like a good thing.  To make matters worse, young conservatives and pretty much all liberals now define conservatism not in relation to Ronald Reagan, but to George W. Bush.  What Reagan actually stands for has been communicated very poorly from the elder to the coming generation, leaving younger conservatives to pretty much try to make it up as they go along.

Perhaps one upshot of the current squabbling will be an effort not so much to redefine conservatism, but for the people who already know the definition to spend some time filling the rest of us in.

Over in the comments section discussing the First Principle of limited charity, Patrick offers an observation which is entirely relevant and insightful.  What Patrick points out is that I “seem to be relying on your ideal government governing an ideal people.”  The easy answer to this charge is that it is certainly true; I have spent this series discussing the principles which I feel belong at the foundation of post-Bush conservatism, which necessarily requires me to expound a world which does not currently exist.  Each of the First Principles, however, draw strength from the practicality of the system they would produce and the liberty that would be secured.

The challenge for conservatives in bringing about any of the principles I have elaborated is the need to change the incentive system which has developed in the realm of politics.  It is a well known axiom that people will do what they are rewarded for doing; a fact which has been verified by years of study and experience in the realms of psychology, economics, business, politics, and elsewhere.  Conservatives have allowed themselves to fall into the trap of using an incentive system which is fundamentally misaligned with nearly every foundation of conservatism.  Small government, personal responsibility, charitable acts, fiscal responsibility, and freedom in general have all suffered.

Perhaps nowhere is the incentive system more fundamentally misaligned than with respect to small government.  Americans of nearly any political stripe evaluate political leaders on the basis of which laws their politicians work to pass.  To phrase that differently, Americans, including most conservatives, reward politicians for passing laws.  If ever there was a greater impediment to small government, it is hard to imagine.  Every new law which does not repeal an old law is an expansion of government.  Even laws which at first appear to restrict (rather than remove) previous laws are really expansionary in nature as the addition of restrictions implies adding government authority to evaluate and enforce those restrictions.  As a coercive force, every new law, every expansion of government, eliminates choices and restricts liberty.  Yet, we as a society cheer for our politicians when they enact some new law in order to make us “more” free.

What conservatives have forgotten, and liberals have never understood, is that most bad ideas do not need to be prohibited by law.  They are, after all, bad ideas.  Assuming that people are held personally responsible for their actions, very few bad decisions will ultimately pay off, and people will generally learn to avoid making them in the future.  The zealous enforcement of property rights will generally act to deter externalities by transferring much of the social cost of bad decisions directly back onto the decision maker.  Further, because the socialized cost of a bad decision can often be extensive, individuals affected have an incentive in the form of a first-mover advantage to enforce their rights quickly, before others who are harmed drain the decision maker’s bank account and leave late comers with nothing.  Because the effects of bad decisions compound with time, an incentive to catch problems sooner will reduce the ultimate costs.

While strong property rights would reduce or eliminate the supposed need for the regulatory state, not all bad ideas have a strong connection to economics.  Social issues, in particular, tend to resist being converted into a matter of dollars and cents.  Even liberals claim to agree that the government has no right to legislate a moral agenda, which immediately puts nearly every social issue beyond the authority of law.  Filling the gap are social organizations (churches, youth groups, athletic clubs, etc.) which are perfectly capable of promoting an agenda and winning or losing converts in the marketplace of ideas.  If laws were truly capable of changing people’s opinions, prohibition would never have happened after the enactment of the 18th Amendment and America’s prisons would not be filled with people arrested for drug crimes.  However, as nearly every minority group can attest, there is a significant social cost associated with being outside the mainstream; but as civil rights activists know, the definition of mainstream can change with a sufficiently good argument made consistently over time.

Social organizations also have other roles beyond promoting their social ideas to society.  They are also centers of charity.  Social organizations can only exist when members have built up a certain level of interdependence.  Once entangled, people have a natural tendency to help their friends.  The organizations themselves have a further incentive to help their members because people who are having trouble with life have a tendency to withdraw from non-essential activities, citing a lack of time, resources, or both.  An organization which helps its members is more likely to keep its members.  At the same time, very few groups are willing to prop up a defective member forever.

I once debated with a friend of mine about the propriety of the assumption in economics that capitalist greed can be leveraged as a force for good.  My answer at the time was weaker than it should have been, and we quickly moved on to discussing the difficulty economics has at addressing non-economic values like the good feeling that comes from helping a fellow man.  The real answer to his charge is that law is no different; it merely adds extreme artificial costs to any decision disfavored by the government and assumes that most people will follow along.  There is nothing magical about the First Principles, save for the recognition that people can take care of their own, and that force can never be freedom.

It is hard to imagine any difference more pervasive between conservatives and liberals than each group’s view of charity in America.  Despite the often useless commentary, it is apparent to anyone willing to see the viewpoint of the other side that both groups believe strongly in helping the less fortunate.  For too many years, however, the conservative view of charity has been maligned in politics to the point where it would be easy for the unobservant to question whether conservatives are charitable at all.  While the answer is obvious — we are — conservative charity is nuanced and easy to misunderstand.  A vocal commitment to limited charity, however, is essential to the progress of the conservative movement.

The easiest way to describe limited charity is to begin with the saying about the man and the fish.  As the saying goes, “If you give a man a fish he will eat for a day, if you teach a man to fish he can eat for a lifetime.”  As a matter of principle, liberals and conservatives can readily agree that teaching is the better option for improving the starving man’s life.  Teaching, however, has implications which are not immediately obvious from the saying alone.  Limited charity distinguishes itself by the way in which it deals with those implications.

The thing to realize is that teaching a man to fish is a much harder job than simply giving him something to eat.  The charitable giver, a capable fisherman, has likely spent years practicing his skill and learning the tricks needed to catch whatever food he needs, probably with some surplus left over.  Teaching a man to fish is certainly not a one day project.  The man, however, is starving.  The fisherman will need to give the man a fish so that he doesn’t starve before learning how to catch his own.

To the uneducated man, this is now an incredible deal.  He is now learning how to fish and being fed by the generous fisherman.  To give the story its final twist; the first lesson the uneducated man is likely to learn is that it is far easier to eat the fish being given to him than it is to catch his own.  Thus, the uneducated man has a selfish incentive to avoid learning how to fish for as long as the fisherman sticks around.  It is in resolving this dilemma that the principle of limited charity distinguishes itself.

To proponents of limited charity, the resolution to the uneducated man’s free-riding is to remove his incentive to avoid learning.  More concretely, the fisherman must eventually walk away, even if it means that the uneducated man will die.  The fisherman, however, in taking on the act of charity, has also taken on certain responsibilities that conservatives today must recognize and live by as well.  The most important of these is the responsibility to tell the uneducated man exactly when his instruction will end.  The fisherman may choose to extend the end date if the uneducated man is genuinely trying to learn, but in no case should even the most genuine of effort be rewarded indefinitely.

Free-riders are ultimately dependents which bind the fisherman and themselves until neither is actually free.

For conservatives, the choices which must be made are strikingly straightforward.  A man who can fish is almost always more useful than a man who is dead.  Conservatives should never for an instant be content with allowing a man to die without ever having been given a chance.  However, leaving a man for dead is better than tying two men down and forever restricting the useful output of one to offset the uselessness of the other.  As a matter of mathematics, 2 > 1 > 0.5.  As a matter of principle, “Live free or die.”

Personal responsibility is one of the most fundamental principles of representative democracy.  It is characterized by the general belief that in the vast majority of situations, a person is responsible for their own decisions and, as such, must reap their own rewards and consequences.  Personal responsibility is the foundation of accountability and justice.

In modern America, accepting the blame when something goes wrong has become a strikingly costly proposition.  In business, situations which once might have been resolved with an apology and reparation are now routinely brought to the government for administrative or legal processing.  In the product liability context, almost any defect with a product — including defective users — can be cause for a class action lawsuit.  Companies which once used discriminatory employment practices continue to face the threat of lawsuits if any of their employees end up discovering that discrimination had once taken place.  Given that most companies are not in the business of creating dangerous products or intentionally discriminating against employees, most of these lawsuits are the result of accidents, oversights, or individuals acting against the company’s best interests.

The result for business is a perverse incentive to bury or disguise known faults in the hope that nobody will discover the problems beneath the surface.  The logic even for companies that get caught is disturbingly simple: Admit guilt now and be sued right away or deny guilt now and be sued later.  In the meantime, people get hurt and all of society pays the price.  Whistleblower laws, which seek to make it harder to shirk responsibility, do little to fix the broken incentive system because they are all stick with no carrot.  Worse still for believers in small government, whistleblower laws are a big government correction (more law) to a big government problem (lawsuits).

On the other side of the coin, individuals are just as eager to pass off responsibility as companies are to shirk it.  Nowhere is this better seen than in the criminal context where rapists and murderers try to pass off their crimes as the long term consequences of childhood abuse or other unfortunate things from their past.  Then there are the people suing the tobacco industry over their marketing of “Light” cigarettes because such cigarettes were not as healthy as they thought they were, apparently missing the fact that any health issues were entirely their own fault for smoking in the first place.  Presenting people who have made harmful decisions as victims does little except detract from justice and breed contempt from people who go through life without any reward for their attempt to live an upstanding life.

For conservatives, the road to promoting personal responsibility is bound to be long and hard.  Despite the cost, conservatives must stand up and practice what we preach.  We must be more upstanding, more forthright, and more honest than those who go through life shirking or shifting responsibility.  We must hold our own feet to the fire.  But at the same time, we must avoid the trap of acting as though we are better than those who do not hold our values.  It is our own fault if we act like jerks.

A nation where people admit their mistakes is a nation where reconciliation is possible.  Nobody comes out of court happy with the opposing party, while apologies can often be the first step on the road toward friendship and trust.  Companionship, not hostility, is the fabric from which a free and peaceful society is woven.

For as long as I can remember, Republicans have been hailed as the party of small government.  When voting Republican, it has been generally safe to assume that the vote will go to somebody who wants to cut taxes, educe government spending, and ease the burdens of regulation.  In recent years, Democrats have made the argument — successfully, for it is true — that Republicans are not nearly so good at reducing the size of government as they claim to be.  The time has long past come for Republicans to return to this most central of pillars for all of modern conservatism.

The principles of small government are deeply rooted in the American tradition.  Back in the 1700s, America’s founders fought a war against the tyranny and oppression of a powerful yet distant monarch who exerted his influence needlessly and harmfully against the colonies.  In winning that war, the founders secured for themselves and their posterity a network of states under a strong but limited national government.  They recognized that distant leaders were somewhat immunized from the needs of the people and determined to not allow their nation to fall under the rule of yet another distant sovereign.

Today, the very liberties secured by the founders and reserved by them to the states and the people are used as tools for expanding the power of the national government.  The list of national powers, though still few and defined, has been read so expansively as to have become effectively unlimited.  To make matters worse, the people have been largely complacent in the national government’s radical expansion.  Debates over national policy are frequently made over whether or not the policy is good, with very few people bothering to inquire as to whether the national government even has the authority to implement the solutions they seek.  To make matters worse, when politicians do call some policy unconstitutional, it tends to be because they disagree with the policy as a policy matter with very little real concern for what the Constitution actually permits or requires.

America’s modern small government advocates remain in a state of disarray.  The most organized small government group are the Libertarians; a fact which is rather unfortunate for small government conservatives in general.  The trouble with Libertarians is that they undervalue the necessity of government to nearly the same degree as Democrats overvalue the virtue of government authority.  As a single cause movement, Libertarians are ill-prepared to deal with the fundamental issues which give rise to the need for government power in the first place.  Put briefly, Libertarians offer nothing to promote the order and security of American society other than the generalized assertion that the people themselves will figure out some non-governmental way.  Libertarians also fail to meaningfully distinguish between local and national governments.  The result is a group that looks mostly anarchist and not worth serious attention.

While Libertarians may be fairly accused of going too far, their guiding philosophy has all of the rigor and consistency which conservatives would be wise to adopt.  Conservatism as a whole is fully capable of filling the massive void left by the Libertarians in terms of how to go about organizing a society in the relative absence of government.  The remaining First Principles, personal responsibility and limited charity, provide the grounding for a complete picture of society which libertarianism alone lacks.  Conservatives are able to recognize that the local governments, which are most responsive to the people, are able to be entrusted with greater power than the distant and generally isolated national government.  Conservatives can also build the non-governmental organizations necessary to perform those tasks which are necessary for society but not right for government intervention on any level.

The entire journey begins by asking whether any proposed government action is rightfully within the government’s authority.  Politicians must be encouraged to honestly ask this question and to vote against any proposal which exceeds the government’s authority, even if they agree with the proposal as a matter of policy.  Politicians can be much more than simple law makers.  Using the same talents and abilities that give them office in the first place, politicians are well prepared to champions and advocates for causes throughout society.