August 6, 2009
Dear White House Bureau of Acceptable Ideas;
I received some "fishy”
ideas about the government today. As anyone with the approved
ideological bearing knows, in 1776 the king and Parliament only wanted
what's best for us all--but he was thwarted by a bunch of radicals who
were obviously under the pay of foreign billionaires. Such ideas as
individual rights, if not rooted out today, could undercut the
government's ability to control our lives in ways we are unable to do
for ourselves.
This is only an excerpt. Below it are three pieces of fishy writing that
appeared recently. It's as if the writer actually understands individual
rights and wants to protect them. He has also read the bill for
socialized medicine--something which should not be allowed. With that
kind of information floating about, it's no wonder people are starting
to question the motives of the government.
But as I am sure you agree, unless we submit to authority blindly and
without question, we can never be free.
Your Loyal Subject
Dr. John David Lewis
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Excerpts from HR 3200 ‘‘America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009’’:
p. 167, Sec. 401.59B, lines 17-23, Subpart A—Tax on Individuals Without Acceptable Health Care Coverage
(a) TAX IMPOSED.—In the case of any
individual who does not meet the requirements of subsection
(d) at
any time during the taxable year, there is hereby imposed a
tax equal to 2.5 percent . . .
pp.
194-196, Sec.431: DISCLOSURES TO CARRY OUT HEALTH INSURANCE
EXCHANGE SUBSIDIES
a) IN GENERAL.—Subsection (l) of
section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended
by adding at the end the following new paragraph:
DISCLOSURE OF RETURN INFORMATION TO CARRY OUT HEALTH
INSURANCE EXCHANGE SUBSIDIES.—
(A) IN GENERAL.—The Secretary, upon written request from
the Health Choices Commissioner or the head of a State-based
health insurance exchange approved for operation under
section 208 of the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act
of 2009, shall disclose to officers and employees of the
Health Choices Administration or such State-based health
insurance exchange, as the case may be,
return information
of any taxpayer whose income is relevant in
determining any affordability credit described in subtitle C
of title II of the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act
of 2009. Such return information shall be limited to—
(i) taxpayer identity information with respect to such
taxpayer,
(ii) the filing status of such taxpayer,
(iii) the modified adjusted gross income of such
taxpayer (as defined in section 59B(e)(5)),
(iv) the number of dependents of the taxpayer,
(v)
such other information as is prescribed by the Secretary
by regulation as might indicate whether the taxpayer
is eligible for such affordability credits (and the amount
thereof) . . .
pp. 197-198: SEC. 441.59C SURCHARGE ON HIGH INCOME INDIVIDUALS.
(a) GENERAL RULE.—In the case of a
taxpayer other than a corporation, there is hereby imposed
(in addition to any other tax imposed by this subtitle) a
tax equal to—
(1) 1 percent of so much of the modified adjusted gross
income of the taxpayer as exceeds $350,000 but does not
exceed $500,000,
(2) 1.5 percent of so much of the
modified adjusted gross income of the taxpayer as exceeds
$500,000 but does not exceed $1,000,000, and
(3) 5.4 percent of so much of the
modified adjusted gross income of the taxpayer as exceeds
$1,000,000.
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The Charlotte Tea Party SpeechThe Charlotte Tea Party Speech by Dr. John David Lewis, Dept. of Political Science, Duke University was first first delivered on April 15, 2009, Charlotte, North Carolina. This is a slightly revised version by Dr. Lewis for printed publication. Permission is given to read this in full, wherever defenders of liberty may gather.
It is high time for a tea party in America!
But to do this right, we need to understand what it means. So I want to think back for a moment to what happened over 200 years ago, at the time of the original Boston Tea Party.The Founders of this nation brought forth a radical idea. It was truly radical, practiced nowhere before this time.
This idea was the Rights of Man. The Founders saw each of us as endowed with certain inalienable rights, rights that may not be separated from our nature as autonomous beings.
These inalienable rights are:
· The Right to Life--the right to live your own life, to choose your own goals, and to preserve your own independent existence.
· The Right to Liberty, which is the right to act to achieve your goals, without coercion by other men.
· The Right to the Pursuit of Happiness, to act to achieve your own success, your own prosperity, and your own happiness, for your own sake.
· And the Right to Property—the right to gain, keep, and enjoy, the material products of your efforts.
Unless I’m mistaken I don’t see anything here about a right to happiness. I see a right to the pursuit of happiness: the right to take the actions needed to attain one’s own happiness. Nor do I see any rights to things at all—no rights to food, clothing, healthcare or diapers. There is only a right to act to achieve those things. This is called freedom.
These rights to act—the rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness—are founded on a certain view of man. Each of us is an individual, autonomous, moral being, with the right to choose his own values and capable of directing his own life.
Look at the person next to you, and look in the mirror—do you see the individual sovereign human being, existing for his own sake, with the right to live, to love, and to act?
This idea—the Founders’ idea of the individual Rights of Man—led to a radical view of government. Government was not to be inherited by the force of an entrenched aristocracy as in Europe, imposed by the divine right of kings through generations of oppression, or enforced by the force of a club.
Government in America was to be designed and instituted by thinking men, for a single purpose: to protect and defend the Rights of Man.
This is what the American Declaration of Independence says: “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” Thinking men, armed with the idea of rights, created a government limited to the protection of individual rights.
For centuries in Europe, the relationship between the people and the government had been that of serf to master: everyone was a servant of the ruling elite. In America, this was turned upside down: government became the servant of the individual. The very reason for a government--and its purpose--is to secure our inalienable, individual rights.
The results in America speak for themselves: the greatest most prosperous nation the world has ever seen. I here quote the writer Ayn Rand (and if you want to understand what is happening today, read her novel Atlas Shrugged). Ayn Rand, speaking to the graduating class at West Point, said that the United States was the first and only moral nation in the history of man, the first nation founded on a moral principle, the Rights of Man, and with a moral purpose, to secure these rights for all men.
This principle of rights is so strong that over years the Americans were able to correct the original shortcomings that the Founders’ could not overcome. Slavery and the denial of woman suffrage both fell when the principle of rights was properly applied to all men. To correct the original errors did not require the Americans to overthrow the principle, but rather to strengthen and to deepen it, to apply it to everyone, and to renew their commitment to it.
And that is what we must do today.
Because something very bad has happened in America over the last century. A cancer has implanted itself in the land of the free. A cancer has grown in our government and in our society. The cancer is the idea that government is no longer to be the defender of our rights, but rather the grantor of wishes.
Over the past century the idea took hold that government’s purpose was not to secure our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but rather to satisfy our needs, whims and wants. That idea has been implanted in our schools, our media, and our government.
Do you wish for a better house? There’s a government
housing agency to give it to you, with taxes extorted from
those who buy their own house. Do you wish for health
care? There is a government agency who will extort it from
others and give it to you. Do you need food? There is a
welfare agency to grab the wealth needed to give you food
stamps. Do you need a new car? There is a "Car Czar" who
will decide what kind of car it is right for you to drive.
And who will provide these handouts? The government, many people say, the all-powerful being that looms over us and grants our wishes. But who is to provide the goods that government hands out? Every person who works and produces, and whose property, gained by the sweat of his efforts, is taken from him by force.
The government has, once again, become a ruling aristocracy, set up as our masters, disposing of our lives.
This cancer has now grown to the point where this ruling elite controls a budget of over four thousand billion dollars a year—more money than can be conceived by the human mind. The government had to grow this big—and it will continue to grow until it destroys this nation—because it is acting according to the idea that it is morally right to take the wealth from those who produce it, and to give it to those who want it.
At the root of this idea is a view of man that is totally at odds with the vision of the Founders: the modern vision of man as a whining dependent, who begs for the needs of life from an all-powerful governing aristocracy. This ruling elite claims the moral right to distribute the wealth of those who earn it to those who wish for it.
If we are going to challenge this monstrosity, if we are going to expunge this cancer, then this is what we must reject. We need to regain the vision of ourselves held by the American Founders. We need to stand up, and assert ourselves as autonomous moral beings, with the right to our own life, liberty and the pursuit of our own happiness. We need to reject the claim that we are weak and dependent beggars, and to assert our own competence to run our own lives.
It is going to take as great a commitment to destroy this cancer as it took to build it. We’re going to have to be strong, we’re going to have to be independent in our thinking, and we are going to have to reject handouts when they are offered to us. And we’re going to have to speak out.
At its heart, the economic and political crisis is a deeper problem—a moral problem. The cause of the crisis today is the worship of need, and the view of man as too stupid to act for his own sake, and worthy of being milked of all his values, to provide for others. This is what we must reject.
Do you think that this is a conspiracy to seize your wealth? It is far worse than that. As Ayn Rand wrote, “It is not your wealth that they're after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.”
This is an attempt to seize your life, to destroy your sense of self as an independent human being, and to replace it with a being with no self-esteem and no capacity for individual action—a being doomed to beg for sustenance from an all-powerful ruling elite.
This ruling elite, looking down on us right now, cannot understand gatherings such as these, in which free people gather to defend liberty. They think that this must be orchestrated by a vast conspiracy, because they cannot understand how autonomous human beings might gather by their own choice, to affirm their commitment to liberty.
Our so-called leaders think this because they don’t see autonomous moral beings at all. They see only serfs, sniveling and whining, begging their masters for the scraps needed to survive, acting as a collective mob rather than as thinking individuals.
Look at yourselves again. Do you see in your face, and in the face of the person next to you, the slave of a group, with no moral status, no rights and no liberties, who is bound from birth to serve? Or do you see an autonomous being with the right to live for his own sake?
Will you knuckle under and become a helpless dependent? Or will you stand tall, and defend your right to your own life, your own liberty, your pursuit of your own individual happiness, and your own property?
It is time to stand up, to say no to the creed of dependence, to assert ourselves, to assert our own moral status, to defend our right to our own lives and property, and to make our voices heard.
Thank you very much.
John David Lewis
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As the issue of health care reform builds to a legislative climax, it is important that we not merely parrot the same kinds of proposals we have seen for the past 50 years. A Point of View writer on this page recently lamented that "after a half-century of attempted reform" we have not reached the promised land of equality in health care. Let me rephrase this: After 50 years of increasing government interventions, through a maze of agencies that now control half of all medical dollars in America, the financial mess is getting worse.
But rather than simply presume that more programs and more coercions are the answer, should we not at least consider that the source of the problem may be those very programs and that the solution lies elsewhere?
Historically, the huge rise in health care costs began in the 1960s with the Great Society programs, especially Medicare. Fiscally, that program is approaching insolvency. To create an even greater labyrinth of bureaucracy now -- in new programs that, after juggling the figures, advocates are proud to say will cost less than a thousand billion dollars over 10 years -- is to add to the very cause that led to the rising costs and to invite a monumental financial crisis in the next decade. Economically, this is hard to dispute.
But such economic arguments have not stopped the train to further government intervention, and we should ask why.
The answer is that the advocates of government medicine are upholding health care as a moral right. Desiring to mandate this "right" by legislative fiat, they have been unwilling to face the cause and effect relationship between increasing government actions and rising prices. That is because the moral goal of equality, measured against the claims to a right to health care, has trumped the mere economic arguments.
As a result, calls for more and wider programs -- to enforce the "right" -- have continued, even as prices rise. This has led to even greater price distortions, which have fueled calls for more interventions, leading to higher prices and demands for more programs.
This vicious cycle is blinding people to the fact that the fundamental cause of the problem is the government interventions, which have caused the distortions.
Again, even a cursory look at the evidence shows the cost problem beginning in the late 1960s, when the government began its massive increase in programs designed to make us all equal by legislative decree. And if one thinks that England today is a model for what a country should do, one may not know the reality of six-bed wards in National Health Service hospitals, of patients waiting over a year for heart operations or of refrigerated trucks in hospital parking lots to store bodies from the flu season (all of which I saw when living there).
Just ask yourself what your car insurance would cost if everyone demanded it as a government-guaranteed "right." Imagine car repair shops having to go through a 10-year approval process -- as pharmaceutical companies must -- before offering a service that the government will then provide to millions of people as a "right." Then ask what the response would be if some people broke with the consensus and said that car repairs were a service to be paid for. They would be shouted down as immoral -- while people demanded that their insurance pay for oil changes and ripped seats.
Congress would pass more programs. Prices would quadruple, and car insurance would become a crushing expense.
Those who want to see an end to spiraling medical costs should challenge the premises behind the government interventions.
The first premise is moral: that medical care is a right. It is not. There was no right to such care before doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies produced it. Health care is a service, which we all need, and none of us are better served by placing our lives and our doctors under coercive bureaucratic control.
The second premise is economic: that the government can produce a positive result by redistributing thousands of billions of dollars from its most productive citizens. This is the road to stagnation and national bankruptcy, not universal prosperity.
If Congress really wanted to address health care problems, it could begin with three things: (1) tort reform, to end the ruinous lawsuits that force medical specialists into insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year; (2) Medicare reform, to face squarely the fact of the program's insolvency; and (3) regulatory reform, to roll back the onerous rules that force doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies (who are pilloried for producing the care that many people then demand as a "right") into satisfying bureaucratic dictates rather than solving patients' problems.