DEATH IS EASY by Russell Madden

FREEDOM,  As If It Mattered by Russell Madden

The Guardian Project by Russell Madden

RaNdoM by Russell Madden

  

An old saying claims that "ignorance is bliss." As long as someone is unaware of negatives in his life, he will supposedly continue along peacefully and happily in his routine.

Observing the beginnings of a new presidential administration and a fresh session of Congress, I see some of our politicians have affirmed a different take on ignorance. For far too many of them, ignorance does not result in bliss but rather in an overweening arrogance.

My Webster's defines arrogance as "offensive exhibition of assumed or real superiority" and arrogant as "making unwarrantable claims or pretensions to superior importance or rights; overbearingly assuming; insolently proud."

One need not devote much time or effort to reading the news or watching the cable channels to witness prime examples of politicos illustrating these characteristics. The wrangling over how to spend the citizens' money and what new regulations will be imposed to dictate their behavior is in full swing. Taxes, energy, health care, self-defense, and other issues occupy the men and women who were elected to "represent" us.

We can safely reject one aspect of the above definition as inapplicable to our current rulers: "superiority." In normal conversation, of course, we tend to reserve the appellation of "superiority" towards those things that are desirable and actually helpful in enhancing life. We speak of superior intelligence or talent or abilities.

Few of our politicians, however, have ever been producers of anything positive. Lawyers dominate the halls of Congress and the White House. Business people are few and far between. Scientists? Artists? You won't run out of fingers counting them. No, if we are to apply a term such as "superiority" in this arena, these legislators and executives are superior only in coercive power. Does anyone seriously believe that your average Senator, Representative, or President is reluctant to force you to do (or not do) what they believe you should?

Our president informs us that we should be allowed (!) to keep more of our own money; that no one should have to pay more than one-third (!!) of his income in federal taxes. How generous... Our system has become so corrupt that we are supposed to be grateful and satisfied that the State will permit us to keep a bit more of the values we have earned. (Glossed over is the fact that this tax cut is dwarfed by the massive increases expected in spending to be taken from a hypothetical and unlikely-to-be-realized "surplus.") The major justification offered for this extremely modest reduction in our slavery? Morality and justice take a back seat to the collectivist notion that a tax cut will help "the economy" or "society." What about the individuals who created that wealth?

Even this proposed minuscule decrease in legal theft finds its opponents. Apparently, a third of your income isn't sufficient for them. I doubt that even the current nearly forty-percent tax rate "enjoyed" by top earners as their share of social "fairness" would satisfy the redistributionists. They prattle on about "wealthy" folks buying a "Lexus" with the president's "gift" while low income folks get a big goose egg. Such ignorance of basic arithmetic or logic boggles the mind but does not deter the critics.

Yes, a full fifty-percent reduction in taxes for a modest earner might net him "only" an extra thousand or two over the course of a year. And, yes, a mere ten-percent reduction in taxes for the "millionaire" they castigate would net him an extra forty-thousand dollars. So what? The Statists choose to ignore the radically different baselines between these two milk-cows and focus solely on the raw numbers. Equality under the law? A foreign concept to the blanked-out psyches of class-war advocates.

Presumably only when everyone in the country (except themselves, of course) earns the same income and thus pays the same nominal taxes will these ignoramuses be happy. (But, of course, they would not be satisfied even then. Witness any totalitarian government for proof.) The fact that these rich politicians -- most of whom gained their wealth through political pull rather than useful production -- can make such outlandish statements as these with straight faces only underlines their astounding arrogance.

It seems that the less politicians know about a particular field of knowledge, the more they believe they are experts with a natural right to impose their ill-considered and uneducated judgments on those who truly are specialists. If the idiotic notion of legal protection from offense by others had any actual merit, all but a handful of our leaders would be in jail for their "offensive exhibition of assumed superiority."

An energy crisis in California prompts the governor and legislature there not to admit their stupidity in attempting to repeal the law of supply and demand but instead to take over the power companies. The politicians become (literal) power brokers, purporting to save their constituents from the errors the regulators themselves committed in the first place.

"Overbearing," "insolent," and "pretentious," are not the half of the nonsense pushed by these purveyors of obtuseness.

The tides are also moving slowly but surely towards more legislation designed to strangle our health care system. Men and women with no medical or insurance backgrounds yammer vociferously about the evils of HMO's, those callous and uncaring SOB's. Congresses and presidents took a reasonably well-functioning and largely private health care delivery system and royally screwed it up. First came Medicare, allegedly instituted to provide insurance coverage to low-income seniors. After costs zoomed into the stratosphere, Medicaid lurched onto the landscape as another avenue to "save" poverty-stricken folks from those greedy doctors and private insurance companies.

Regulations trickled down from Washington, D.C., to rein in prices. In a kind of Gresham's Law, good (i.e., private) health insurance found itself crowded out by government programs. Increasingly draconian demands for coverage of ever-more esoteric conditions for all customers (whether desired or not) placed further upward pressure on insurance premiums. More people dropped private insurance because they could no longer afford it, not only due to steeply higher prices but because disposable income dropped as taxes at all levels of government ate up ever-larger percentages of citizens' salaries. Plus, why pay insurance premiums when you can always glom onto government-provided coverage after you become sick or are injured.

(Compare this to flood insurance subsidized by the State: few people pay even the diminished rates because they know their "compassionate" leaders will bail them out with "disaster aid" if trouble does strike them.)

Patients complain about costs and quality of care. Doctors complain about paperwork, bureaucrats dictating treatment plans, and micro-management of their decisions. Insurance companies complain about mandates and lowered reimbursements from the feds and the states.

So, of course, Congress and the Prez in their infinite ignorance create HMO's to reign in costs. De facto rationing results as managers focus more on cutting costs than providing treatments patients actually require. People complain. Doctors complain. HMO's complain. So our federal dunces demand insurance portability, insist that even more conditions be covered, and expect HMO's do more with lower payments.

People complain. Doctors complain. HMO's complain.

Now the court jesters want to pass a nonsensical "patient bill of rights" and increase costs even more by providing free drug coverage for seniors, whether they need it or not.

The only "bill of rights" patients need, however, is the one in our U.S. Constitution. What we need is freedom: freedom to keep the money we earn so we can pay for what we decide we want; freedom of contract so we can tailor insurance policies to what we decide is most appropriate for our health and lifestyles; freedom to use whatever drugs we want, to undergo whatever procedures we desire, or to adopt any medical regime we judge is best for us.

Central planning must always fail. Ignorance posing as erudition must always bring suffering and tragedy. Arrogance couched in the language of compassion and caring must always breed contempt and resentment.

Politicians have never, do not, and will never have the knowledge necessary to make the proper decisions for me or for you or for your neighbor. Sadly, what these would-be overlords are most ignorant of is the very thing upon which they should be specializing (and the only area in which they have any valid authority to act): the protection of our rights.

Maybe someday, somewhere, somehow more politicians will admit just how little they do know about us and our lives and thereby become wise men, indeed.