This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Joseph Coletti, John Locke Foundation Director of Health Care and Fiscal Policy Studies.
RALEIGH — As the health care policy studier at the John Locke Foundation, I should write about our new health care law. How it makes insurance more expensive and raises taxes. How it won’t actually improve anything. How John Dingell gave away the game that this legislation is designed “to control the people.” How two-thirds of independents want Republicans to keep fighting against the bill, but some Republicans are already giving up the fight. How the medical-industrial complex was the real winner. How this is another nail in the coffin of American exceptionalism, or how this is just the end of the beginning.
Instead, it is probably a good time to remember how hard freedom is. Historian Rufus Fears, in a talk on empire, stated, “The Romans came to understand that freedom is not a universal value: that people over and over again have chosen security, which is what the Roman Empire brought, over the awesome responsibilities of self-government.”
Americans sought those responsibilities even before they were Americans or even Carolinians or Pennsylvanians. Our Founders declared their independence in full recognition of freedom’s cost in their mutual pledge of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. Tocqueville saw the source of America’s greatness in its goodness and the myriad ways Americans worked within their little platoons to govern themselves.
Power may corrupt, but as we have seen too often in North Carolina, part of the problem is that the corrupt are more likely to seek power. Peggy Noonan has gone so far as to question the sanity of anybody who runs for president. Given the charges allegations surrounding former Gov. Mike Easley and his associates, we might need to ask that question at lower levels of government.
Whether the topic is smoking, commuting, or taking out the trash, we have ceded personal freedom and responsibility to the control of others. At each step, however, the argument is phrased as one of freedom as much as one of protection. We want to be free of the burden of choosing a different restaurant or job so we can avoid cigarette smoke. This is not real freedom. It is the infantilizing of a nation.
Jacob Hacker, one of the architects of the health care law, wrote about what he called The Great Risk Shift, a book endorsed by John Edwards. Companies and governments had once protected Americans, he claimed, from destitution. It was a deal the companies made with their employees. From company towns to defined-benefit pensions and health insurance, companies provided all that their workers needed. Because this wasn’t actually true, the government provided backstops with Social Security, Medicare, and the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. Those backstops, however, relied again on the same taxpayers or future taxpayers to make good on their guarantees. In short, the risk was always being shifted, but few people acknowledged the shift.
Company moves to defined contribution pensions such as 401k’s and IRA’s did not actually shift any risk, but simply acknowledged where the risk always lay — with the worker. Labor bears 70 percent of the corporate income tax burden and all of the risk. Higher prices to customers and lower stock prices to shareholders have limits before they lead to lower wages or smaller payrolls.
Just 20 years ago, smart people worried that Japan or Germany would overtake the United States. But Japan’s Nikkei index already had peaked at 39,000 in 1989. Today it is 10,828. The Japanese have given up. A united Germany is enmeshed in the European Union, which some now claim will lead the way, but Germany is not even willing to lead the EU. Neither country provides much hope for the protections of company or country.
Maybe the model for us is not another system, but our own, as personified by Igor the Kazakh truck driver on Undercover Boss. He came to America with $50. He worked nights. His wife worked days. They saw each other two days a week. He called it the American dream. The American dream is not a house with a white picket fence, health insurance for everyone in your family, or the chance to retire at age 55. The American dream is opportunity and freedom, not freedom from worry, but freedom to succeed or fail, and freedom to start again when we do fail.
Which brings me back to that health care law.