Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto Read online

  [L]awmakers and their staffs previously had about 70 percent of their insurance premiums underwritten by the federal government through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. . . . Under pressure from Congress, the Office of Personnel [created a new ruling] saying the federal government could still contribute to health-care premiums.

  The final rule would keep the subsidy in place only for members of Congress and affected staff who enroll in a Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) plan available in the District of Columbia. Such plans most commonly will be aimed at employees of businesses with fewer than 50 workers, but perhaps the theory is that each lawmaker and his or her staff constitute a small business.24

  When Senator David Vitter (R-LA) introduced an amendment to eliminate this de facto exemption for congressional employees, Democrats descended on him in a rage, calling the effort “mean-spirited,” while Republican staffers quietly lobbied against the efforts behind the scenes to preserve their special treatment.25 Insiders on both sides of the aisle are equally invested in this two-tiered system, the inequities of which will surely come back to haunt them as “consumers” in the ObamaCare exchanges look for relief from the new system’s sticker shock.

  Due to disorganization and a general reluctance for anyone to comply with an obviously bad law, many of ObamaCare’s deadlines have been delayed. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. states have outright refused to set up the health-care exchanges required by the law, forcing the federal government’s hand and resulting in multiple pushbacks of the initial deadline. The employer mandate has also been delayed until 2015, due to panicking businesses realizing that they were unprepared to bear the full financial toll of the requirement. Cuts to Medicare and numerous eligibility requirements for health insurance subsidies have also been put on hold.26 Overall, the rollout of the president’s signature legislation has been nothing short of a chaotic mess.

  So what we have is a large, cumbersome, unworkable, ineffective health-care program that nobody wants, but which is nevertheless the law of the land. What agency could be trusted to enforce such a disastrous policy? You guessed it: the IRS.

  Of all the federal agencies that could possibly be tapped to implement ObamaCare, it would be hard to come up with a worse choice than the IRS. We have already established the political corruption to which the agency is susceptible, but there are a number of other reasons that entrusting them with our health care is a uniquely bad idea.

  First, ObamaCare adds a total of forty-seven new duties and enforcement powers to the agency, which has admitted to lacking the necessary resources to fulfill even its existing duties. In a hearing defending the IRS’s discriminatory practices, then IRS commissioner Stephen Miller testified that “it would be good to have a little budget that would allow us to get more than the number of people we have.”27 How can we expect fair and equal treatment from an agency that blames its ethical violations on lack of funding?

  The gray-suited soviets at the IRS have proven time and again that they have no respect for the privacy of individuals or their records. Apart from the prying questions asked of tea party groups in the discrimination scandal, the IRS has allegedly violated the law by seizing 60 million medical records from a California health-care provider.28 Allowing the agency to manage health-care subsidies and impose penalties will open the door to further abuse and remove the control of sensitive personal information from individual patient-doctor relationships.

  Finally, the IRS has no expertise in the field of health care. They are being asked to regulate an industry they know nothing about, and given the quality of IRS employees we have seen in the public spotlight lately, it seems overly optimistic to expect them to be a quick study, or unbiased enforcer. Indeed, the sample of officials paraded before congressional committees in recent months exposes a workforce that is seemingly immune to public oversight or controls. In a misconduct hearing, Miller responded to an alarming number of questions by claiming that he didn’t know, couldn’t remember, or wasn’t sure of the answers. He expressed no knowledge of his own employees and claimed to lack any opinion on whether the actions of his agency were appropriate.29

  If the IRS is truly as disorganized and unknowing as its leaders claim, why on earth should the agency be allowed to handle your health care? The other option, of course, is that they are obfuscating, parrying with political opponents to run out the clock, knowing that career civil servants will be around longer than any single politician or even a president.

  This alternative scenario hardly seems reassuring. It raises a fundamental question about the legitimacy of the way business is conducted in the federal labyrinth. Do they work for us? Are they accountable to We the People? Or us to them?

  In 2009, then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi infamously said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy” (emphasis added).

  Well, now we have passed it, and the law is far more unpopular than the proposed legislation ever was. When the Healthcare.gov website debuted to disastrous malfunction on October 1, 2013, it became evident that this unpopularity was not simply a result of the “fog of controversy,” but an intuitive understanding of government ineptness.

  Even after the botched launch, however, Nancy Pelosi was still cheerleading the law, oblivious to the reality that was quickly gripping the rest of the country. Speaking several weeks after the website launch, Pelosi insisted that she wanted to “say every chance I get how proud we are of [ObamaCare.]” She then went on to make the tenuous claim that the law “is life, a healthier life, liberty to pursue your happiness, as our founders promised.”30

  It is telling that the president who consistently thinks of himself as the smartest guy in the room appeared downright baffled by his administration’s inability to successfully remake the nation’s entire health-care system with an unbending belief in smarter government. Redesigning one-sixth of the American economy, he now concedes, is more complicated than he imagined:

  But even if we get the hardware and software working exactly the way it’s supposed to with relatively minor glitches, what we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy. And another mistake that we made, I think, was underestimating the difficulties of people purchasing insurance online and shopping for a lot of options with a lot of costs and lot of different benefits and plans and somehow expecting that that would be very smooth, and then they’ve also got to try to apply for tax credits on the website.31

  An embarrassingly botched website is just the beginning. Friedrich Hayek refers to the grandiose pretentions of government redesigners as a “fatal conceit,” because of the unforeseen, and often dire, consequences of big government designs on private life. Real people are getting hurt by the pretensions of ObamaCare, and the only real winners seem to be the insiders who will administer the new complex structure.

  ObamaCare seeks to supplant a broken system with more of the meddling and discretionary reengineering that broke it in the first place. Increased complexity and difficulty of compliance is precisely the opposite of what is needed to fix health care in America. The only certainty is that more bureaucrats will be hired, and that they will be given extraordinary discretionary power over the health care of your family.

  AN EMPIRE OF DATABASES

  If turning over your medical records to the IRS sounds scary, it is nothing compared to the immense Federal Data Services Hub the Obama administration has planned. Wary of the decentralization of information, the president has announced his plans to collect a massive amount of personal data on every citizen, stored in one place and overseen entirely by the infinite wisdom of career bureaucrats who are virtually unfirable.

  As part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the data hub is designed to allow health-care exchanges to access personal information on patients through the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the Veterans Health Administration, the Department of Defense, the Office of
Personnel Management, and the Peace Corps.32 Why do health-care exchanges need so much information? It has to do with the complex eligibility requirements for the various health-care subsidies included under the law. Since these subsidies are determined by how much money you make, exchanges need access to your tax records, as well as any other information that could qualify you for certain benefits, or indeed penalties.

  One of the major problems with having all of this sensitive information in one place is that any successful attempt to break into the Hub by an outside party could result in the identity thefts of millions of Americans. Think about it: names, email addresses, telephone numbers, Social Security numbers, tax data, health insurance records, immigration status, and prison records will all be available for one ingenious hacker to take and use how he will.33

  But surely the government would not allow such a thing to happen. The safeguards on such a repository must be enormous, right? Actually, the Obama administration has already missed numerous deadlines in implementing security measures for the Hub. Although the law requires that these safeguards be in place, the administration has so far been unable to meet its own standards. The Identity Theft Resource Center reports 34.1 percent of all data breaches in 2013 were related to health care.34 This is not exactly a reassuring thought. Can we really trust all the details of our private lives to an organization that has consistently failed to fulfill its promises?

  The government’s record on keeping its information secure is not exactly exemplary. An inspector general’s report found that the IRS accidentally disclosed the confidential taxpayer information of thousands of people from 2009 to 2010.35 The Social Security Administration has mistakenly disclosed thousands of names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers.36 And in 2012, a lone hacker managed to obtain 3.6 million names and Social Security numbers from a South Carolina database.37

  The problem is compounded by the fact that the incentives for information theft will be greater than ever before. The payoffs for a malicious identity thief would be exponentially greater than when data was stored separately across a wide variety of individually encrypted databases. Democratic representative Jackie Speier of California expressed concern over this, saying that the Hub would have a “bull’s-eye” on it for hackers.38

  But the threat that this data could be obtained by someone outside the government may well be overshadowed by the potential for internal abuse of the data by government employees. The recent IRS and NSA scandals make it plain that a simple security clearance does not alleviate the temptation to abuse one’s authority. On the contrary, as the editors of the Wall Street Journal have pointed out, “putting the IRS in charge of a political program inevitably makes the IRS more political.”39 The more personal information we allow these agencies to have, the easier it will be for them to identify, and potentially target, their political enemies. In the light of recent events, this is a danger that we should all take very seriously. The simple fact is that the ObamaCare data hub will eliminate any semblance of privacy we have as far as the federal government is concerned, and any overzealous employee will be able to wreak havoc with the lives of ordinary Americans.

  The regulatory notice detailing the particulars of the Data Hub says that the government is free to disclose any of the information it has collected to a variety of individuals and agencies without the consent of the individual. This information sharing is not limited to secure government agencies, but includes “contractors, consultants, or grantees,” as well as law enforcement officials.40 So not only will your data be collected and shared within government departments; it can potentially be dispersed to any number of private contractors without your knowledge. The notice insists that the data will only go to those people who need it for their records, but it is not clear at what level the “need to know” threshold will be set. It is easy to envision a situation in which the unscrupulous are afforded easy access to sensitive documents.

  Like the botched development of Healthcare.gov, the Obama administration rushed to hire a slew of “patient navigators,” individuals whose jobs consist of helping others sign up for the ObamaCare exchanges, a step that would involve the collection of a great deal of personal information. Rather than requiring the same kind of security clearances or background checks necessary for positions in sensitive government agencies such as the FBI or the IRS, the Department of Health and Human Services waived any such requirement, instead asking only for a twenty- to thirty-hour online training seminar. A high school diploma is not even required.41 Among the groups eager to take up positions as “patient navigators” are Planned Parenthood, senior citizen advocacy organizations, and churches.42

  By now, both the potential for abuse and the seriousness of the consequences should be obvious. If the Obama administration is prepared to allow barely trained, agenda-driven workers from off the street access to your most private data, is there reason to believe that there will be any serious effort to protect the rights of enrollees on the exchanges? Enrolling in the ObamaCare exchanges means surrendering all of your most private information into the hands of a government that has proven irresponsible, untrustworthy, insecure, and indiscreet at every turn.

  But go ahead and trust them; they’re from the government.

  A PERFECT STORM

  The inability of citizens to comply with the labyrinthine laws of their country, the imposition of an oppressive and ineffective health-care scheme on an unwilling public, and the revelation that we have no privacy from our government and little recourse if accused of a crime have coalesced to expose the excesses of a government out of control. This dark cloud is a call to action for those who wish to preserve their freedoms and liberate themselves from an increasingly oppressive federal bureaucracy.

  The trend toward more power in Washington, D.C., runs headlong into a world that is quickly trending in the opposite direction. The Internet and its ubiquitous social media mutations are quickly disrupting and mercilessly dismantling many of the outdated, top-down institutional structures that used to tell us what our choices were from a predetermined set of options. Now we are free to choose, to shop, to gather information, to organize, to vote, and to associate as we please based on our own preferences.

  This collision is imminent. Like an incoming cold front rolling forward on a hot summer day, this is a perfect storm between the power hoarders in the Halls of Discretion and your right to design, as best you see fit, your own future.

  One way or another, something’s going to give.

  CHAPTER 5

  SAME AS THE OLD BOSS

  IN JANUARY 1973, RICHARD Nixon ended the military draft in the wake of a series of high-profile draft-card-burning protests by antiwar activists. (That’s right, a Republican ended the military draft. And it was Nixon.) His presidency would soon enough end ignominiously, though, in part due to his eagerness to use the IRS to selectively punish his political enemies. The Democrats, the Republicans, the left, and the press were all outraged by this remarkable abuse of executive power.

  The current IRS scandal, where the agency systematically targeted moms organizing their communities to defend constitutional principles like the freedom to associate and peaceably assemble, elicits no such outrage from Democrats or the many tentacles of leftist activist organizations. Few seem willing, or even interested in, defending everyone’s civil rights and the First Amendment protection of political speech for those guys. How sad.

  The Democrats’ and progressives’ act of omission on IRS harassment leading up to the 2012 election is bad enough. Don’t they remember Watergate? Are they no longer repulsed by what federal agents at the CIA and the IRS did in an all-out bureaucratic onslaught to silence Dr. King? But then there is the left’s blatantly partisan act of commission as head cheerleaders for a new individual mandate that involuntarily conscripts young people into ObamaCare, whether they like it or not. They are literally drafting millennials into a system designed by administration technocrats, powerful committee chairmen, and a w
horing mob of big insurance interests that got to the table first to carve out an acceptable return on their political investments.

  Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss, but worse.

  Advocates of conscripting our youth into ObamaCare typically hide behind the fact that various advocates on the “right”—notably Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich—advocated on behalf of the individual mandate. It’s a ridiculous argument for them to make, because you know that they would oppose, lockstep, this sort of reverse Robin Hood scheme if it were proposed by a President Romney or a President Gingrich.

  Why not apply a consistent set of principles, consistently applied, regardless of which party label is attached?

  It’s a dirty business, and this oppressive wealth transfer from young Americans to special interests and the more-wealthy appears to be the Achilles’ heel of the new, insanely authoritarian progressive movement. Whatever the clarion call of “social justice” was supposed to entail, surely garnishing the wages of the young and struggling to bolster the earnings reports of Big Insurance and Fortune 500 dinosaurs was never part of the plan.

  DEAD IN THE LONG RUN

  While the generational theft inherent in ObamaCare will become increasingly obvious as young people sit down and consider their coerced “choices,” the relentless process of making financial commitments we can’t afford today, to be foisted upon the buckling shoulders of future taxpayers tomorrow, is pretty much business as usual in Washington, D.C.

  In his important critique of modern public finance practices, the late Nobel Prize–winning economist James Buchanan referred to the dominance of rob-the-cradle fiscal policies as the sad legacy of John Maynard Keynes. Our democracy was in deficit, he said, literally and structurally. Keynes, who single-handedly severed the cord between Adam Smith and the new “macroeconomics,” was culpable.

  Since America’s founding, it was generally understood that governments should not spend money they don’t have. “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family,” Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations, “can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.” Under the old rules, says Buchanan, “government should not place future generations in bondage by deficit financing of public outlays designed to provide temporary and short-lived benefits.” But all that changed with the publication of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Here’s how Buchanan puts it: