For a Healthy, Well Regulated Society Where Every Action is Regulated, Illegal or Mandatory

We live in the era of rule by bureaucracy. The path to this impossibility was a quick slide down a slippery slope of lazy politicians. At some point in time, the early 1960s is my best guess, our elected officials found an easier way to make laws while not needing to understand or research the particulars for the application and implementation of said laws. Their new operational model was they simply passed new legislation that gave a somewhat malleable and vague definition of the target ideas and ideals the legislation was targeted to produce and then assigned to different cabinet departments, cabinet Secretaries, select committees, or even in extreme cases some NGO to make the necessary regulations in order to fulfill the requirements stated and set in the legislation. Never in the wildest imagination of any conspiracy theory was there a more powerful way to slide down the slippery slope to a society where any and every act is either illegal or required or, in the best of cases, both. The epitome and perfection of this procedure will be taking effect throughout the rest of the year and is scheduled to be complete and workable by January 2014; but trust when we tell you that there will be more regulations spawned by this legislation in every year going forward for as far as one can envision. This strangling legislation is the Affordable Care Act which is better known as Obama Care. Most of us probably thought that everything would have been fully fleshed out and completely defined and everything that could possibly be required described in full and complete detail somewhere in the many hundreds of pages of the bill. After all, were we not told by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that we had to pass the bill in order to see what was in the bill? Well, that probably meant something quite different than was understood by most of us.

 

The reality is that within the legislation were hundreds of pages enacting or setting in place the requirement for many items which had absolutely nothing to do with healthcare while also not defining definitively much of anything and simply left amorphous definitions of intent of coverage and systems and left much of the filling in of details and regulations up to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. What is even more worrisome is that when these laws are passed such as Obama Care there is no date which prevents new regulations from being added past that point. This was a peculiarity which President Obama decided provided an unintended plethora of new regulations. In order to mine this gold mine that never stops giving technically, President Obama made a position named Regulations Czar Cass Sunstein with the given job description of reviewing government regulations in order to delete those regulations which are no longer deemed to be fulfilling any necessary purpose. The actual work being performed by Mr. Sunstein is to review all legislation passed into law over the entire history of the United States mining them for potential application of new regulations which serve the intents and ends of the Administration’s legislative and policy aims. Since any new regulations, or any regulations, which are written in order to fulfill the required implementation of passed legislation does not require debate or even the knowledge of Congress and can be completely enacted and implemented by the Administrative branch of the government. Simply put, if the President can produce justification for any regulation within any piece of existing law, then the regulation can be written, implemented, and enforced without the knowledge or action from any other branch of government. If this worries you, welcome to the scariest of secrets with which the Federal government is being grown beyond the wildest dreams of the most ardent fascist or other big government advocate.

 

Now for the really worrisome part of this story, Obama Care. Just imagine what a policy wonk given unlimited power to write regulations with the intent of controlling all actions over such areas as diet, exercise, habits, risky behavior, participation in dangerous sports, accident avoidance, and virtually anything one can imagine a person either participating or avoiding in their lives as long as these regulations can be tied in any manner to healthcare costs. We have seen a small example of such in New York City with Mayor Bloomberg and his smoking ban, trans fat ban, salt limiting, and attempted soda size limitation. When addressing all things which can be considered as potential health risks, where risk is defined as requiring healthcare expenditures, and you quickly realize that everything in life is now legally defined as something that government may choose to regulate. With government health care where the government decides what care you as a patient are entitled to receive, just imagine what requirements can be placed on one so that they can qualify for the best possible care allowed. Your diet can be controlled by requiring a scientifically specified diet with excessively restrictive meal plan. You might also be required to perform specified physical exercise routine. Should your weight deviate from the governmental norms for BMI you could be placed on an even more restricted diet to address your potential health risk. You like trail biking, sky diving, scuba diving, or any other potentially dangerous or injury prone activity? Not if you want healthcare to cover sprains, broken bones or other injuries which could result even if one does not participate in any injury risk behavior. Or perhaps in order to enjoy such activities one would be required to be licensed after taking required instruction which is required for your own good and would presumably teach you the safest manner to participate in your selected activity. Of course the fee for the licenses would be directly proportional to the risks involved in the particular activity. In all honesty, nothing in life is beyond being controlled in order to assure you remain in tip-top healthy shape in order to minimize the likelihood for you to require other than normative healthcare treatments. There is already a system which will likely be the eventuality of Obama Care which is known as the Complete Lives System. This system sets up formulae which are to be used to determine whether or not it would prove to be cost effective for government to provide healthcare services depending on the cost of the care required, the prognosis for success, the age of the patient, and numerous other cold, hard facts which then make the determination whether or not you will be treated. This system almost guarantees that there will be nothing beyond the most basic care provided to the elderly and high cost procedures would also not be approved for youth, especially if the problem will require continued care. This is as impersonal a system and arbiter for the dispensing healthcare as one could ever imagine, but then government has never been accused of being emotional or particularly caring. The future under universal government healthcare, which is inevitable under Obama Care, will result in a tangled web of regulatory requirements and restrictions which will ensnare every life and strangle from them any deviance from whatever is determined to be governmental norm. The other unavoidable result will be the absolute and complete end to personal privacy as in order to assure your life meets all health requirements, your life will necessarily have to be totally monitored. The amount of privacy that remains today, as restrictive as it may seem, will seem like unbelievable freedom in a decade or two when the government has reached the point where it must regulate all activities, diets, exercise, and all else in order to assure the healthiest of populations under its care. After all, it will be for your own good, honest.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

The Sane Solution to Same Sex Marriage

We have written about this solution that addresses the recognition of same sex couples under the law while also maintaining the traditional definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman that should satisfy both sides of the argument. It preserves marriage while granting same sex couples with the legal rights they claim to seek and does so by reducing the intrusion of government into what should be a religious matter decided by each individual house of worship. The answer is to allow houses of worship to issue marriage certificates and hold marriage ceremonies while for those couples who wish the benefits and responsibilities the state applies to couples can receive a civil union contract from the state which will allow their pairing to have all the legal rights which currently are restricted to married couples. The marriage the houses of worship would perform would not allow the couple to claim any of the benefits of those who have a civil union contract unless the married couple also satisfied the state requirements and received a civil union contract. This separates the institution of marriage from any entanglement within the legal workings of the state thus freeing the individual state governments to decide what will be acceptable as a couple in the eyes of the law while the religious institutions decide what defines a married couple. The two are separate from each other and though any couple married by a religious ceremony would very likely also qualify for receiving a civil union contract, not every recipient of a civil union contract would be eligible to be necessarily married by every religious institution. There are also other advantages and options which become available in defining marriage which is currently disallowed due to the state being the issuing body of marriage certificates.

The main advantage is that each house of worship would be enabled to define marriage in whatever manner their congregation decides it should be defined. If the house of worship only wishes to recognize marriages between people of their religion and refuses to allow mixed religion marriages, which would be that house of worship’s right and the state would have no problems as the state has no jurisdiction over any religious service or definition as per the First Amendment. On the other side, if a couple can locate a house of worship willing to marry them, then they can have a marriage license and be considered married. Also, if a couple wishes to be married but does not deem it necessary to have state sanctioning their marriage, they would not be forced to receive a civil union contract but by not receiving the state’s issuance of a civil union contract would negate them of the benefits of being a couple in the eyes of the state and in all state functions. They would not be able to file a joint tax return or necessarily be allowed to visit each other in a state run hospital or have numerous other benefits. They would still be able to be the benefactor in their wills but would face the taxes upon one’s death as if they were not a legally joined couple.

The reason we like this solution is not because it enables same sex unions as much as it removes the government from what should be a purely religious institution, marriage. The further the government can be removed from defining terms in our lives and society, the more free the society will become. It is necessary to have the government define legal contracts as those are enforced in the courts of the state. It is not necessary to have the state define anything that does not require a legal contract. Marriage was originally not a legal contract but was a moral contract issued by the religious culture. The interest of the state in marriage has been as a financial interest, a social interest, a contractual interest, and a left over remainder from when the state and church coexisted almost as one entity through much of human history. By granting the state the issuance of the civil union contract the state continues to have all the jurisdictional constraints which it currently possesses but allows for marriage to be returned to the religious sector of our society. This is something which is desirable as it is fitting to have marriage and civil union contract both exist as the state and religion have been divorced from their previous relationship and thus should have separate interests in the whole idea of marriage. The religious institutions would have their historic interest of defining the basic structure of family and all that entails. The state would have their rightful fee for the contractual legal aspect which has been the main interests of the state as well as defining family for tax and other considerations.

There is one more benefit with this solution. We have heard time and time again that all those wishing to legalize same sex marriages desire is to have the same legal rights as do heterosexual couples. By relegating marriage to religious institutions and removing it from legal and public jurisdiction and in the legal and public forum having the contractual part of marriage relegated to civil union contracts, then all who are accepted by the state, which would likely include same sex couples as the state should not have any legal reason to deny such and moral reasons are not the state’s purview, would have the same identical rights while religious institutions could define marriage in any manner they wish. Religious institutions which allow polygamy or polyandry could allow such and it would then be up to the state on whether such could receive a civil union contract and with what limitations or provisions. Since the state licenses separate from religious institutions such discrepancies should not make for the problems we are currently facing as each would define their own definitions. This is just another application of a kind of separation of powers where the state has its set of considerations, legalizations and limitations while the religious institutions have their definitions and preferences and the two do not necessarily have to match.

Beyond the Cusp

Legislating Morality

There is a phrase often bandied about when talking about issues pertaining to morality that it is impossible to legislate morality because people cannot be made to be moral. If this were true then having and enforcing laws that seek to prevent murder, rape, theft, assault, fraud, traffic rules, and much of the rest of the criminal codes should be equally fruitless as these are actually morality questions. What people mean when they say that morality cannot be regulated by laws is that they are against some of the more acceptable immoral acts such as adultery, coveting, misrepresenting facts, and other immoral acts which are generally ignored by much of the populace and perceived as victimless misdeeds. Of course they are not victimless but what they are is non-life-threatening, not injurious or irreligious in their nature. Many of these immoral actions do have a victim such as the wedded spouse of the adulterous partner, but the victim is usually not hurt physically and the mental injury is not perceived as being overly severe.

The question we need to ask about any actions or infractions that are of an immoral nature is will the resultant injury from the act be something which is actively destructive to the fabric and tranquility of the society. What makes this question at all interesting is that the answer will differ from one area to the next. What is considered beyond the pale in Ottumwa, Iowa is likely not so shocking or even notable in Las Vegas, Nevada, especially on the strip in the heart of Casino Row. Such a factor would not be possible to be universally applied when it comes to the vast majority of what might be termed minor moral transgressions. What makes the legal codes against murder universal is that it is something that is a universally agreed upon moral transgression. There is nowhere in most countries where out and out premeditated murder is not a punishable crime. The same can be said about most laws that ban an action or interaction.  The question then becomes at what level of severity of moral turpitude constitutes an act beyond acceptable levels? Those items which are near universally deemed too severe will be constituted in law while those of a lesser severity will only result in possible scandal and setting a mark against your good name to as little as a shrug or raised eyebrow. The problem is that in many areas of our society things that used to be of a shaming nature are now almost considered to be rites of passage committed by virtually everyone and no longer carrying any level of shame.

The other problem which is considered far more problematic in some neighborhoods than in others is that our lawmaking procedures have become increasingly more centralized. With our neighborhoods growing to the point that they form a patchwork of interconnected neighborhoods has led to the blurring of local laws being applied. One of the ways that some neighborhoods have coped with this has been to form community councils which often decide what standards of appearance residents must upkeep and restrictions against some actions. These local groups usually have little if any actual weight to enforce their edicts beyond fines though such is often sufficient to force compliance. As far as actual laws for which incarceration is a possibility, these laws at the most local of levels is usually city at best and county at least. From there the jumps become significant as from the county level the only higher levels are State, Nation, and if those who espouse a single world government, planet. The problem is that the closest to the community where laws are enacted with serious consequences is either city or county, both of which contain numerous different communities which are fused together to form the ruling entity. If you live in or near a major city you probably know of at least one neighborhood where the people are provincial and very religious while there is likely another neighborhood where the accepted morals and acceptable behaviors would be an anathema to the former community. The problem is the City must find some acceptable set of laws which can be applied with only minor allowances for different enforcement levels between these two disparate neighborhoods. The ending legal codes is usually slanted more towards the lower enforcement of morality than the provincial and very religious community would prefer and still would have some laws which the seedier neighborhood would prefer did not exist as they put a crimp in business as usual when the police crackdown and fully enforce all the laws and codes.

Another influence on which of the moral codes is enacted into laws in a community is very dependent on the age in which you study. Laws were far more strident and forceful of a solid Christian ethic in the eighteenth century American colonies than the laws are that exist in the present day. This has much to do with the makeup of the population and the importance of religion which was the central and unifying factor in many of the colonies as everyone was of one religion in many of the townships. Where in the early colonies church attendance was required and if one did not regularly attend church they would quickly find themselves placed in the stocks or possibly worse. Such a law today would be completely unenforceable especially as we have a very diverse society with people of many differing religions and some with no religious affiliations at all. As populations grow and cities continue to hold greater percentages of the total population, the more watered down morality written into the code of laws will become as a result. It is a simple fact which somebody needs to make a formula to fit and define this occurrence; after all they seem to have formulas for everything else. I can predict that the formula would be one representing an inverse proportionality.

But the real question that needs to be addressed as our societies become ever more expansive and this will cause less laws and thus less enforcement of items of a moral basis. Where I doubt that murder as a rule will ever be allowed and the laws against such universal evils will be retained, what I do question is whether some of the definitions of who is considered a person become transformed. One prime example is the rules pertaining to murder under some forms and interpretations of Sharia. Under some interpretations of Sharia it is permissible to kill an infidel, an apostate, a homosexual or anyone like Salmon Rushdie who has a fatwa calling for his death with the most minimal of mitigating requirements. Honor killings are often considered a lesser crime and not really prosecuted as a murder and more likely to be prosecuted as manslaughter under extenuating circumstances. Under traditional Hindu laws it is required for the wife to throw herself onto the funeral pyre of her husband, something the British tried unsuccessfully to eradicate. This is more an example of a completely separate morality for these societies than the one people in the West are accustom to witnessing, but that does not mean they may not eventually end up as the accepted morality on which universal laws are based. How would a one world government rule on such actions and the numerous others where different societies have dramatically different ideas and underlying ethos? Looking at many of the actions which are passed by the United Nations General Assembly and also many United Nations agencies have made over the years and some of the adjudications coming out of the ICC (International Criminal Court) and ICJ (International Court of Justice) do not exactly fill me with even a shred of hope or confidence that a universal governance based on the current form of the United Nations would have a base set of morality which even remotely would match mine. I am actually very sure that I would not be able to live in such a world as my sheer existence would very likely be something punishable by numerous laws emanating from such a body. How about you, would you feel safe under such governance?

Beyond the Cusp