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

 

Attacking the Rich-Poor Divide is American

We are hearing a large amount of political noise claiming that the rich are not paying their fair share when the reality is that the poor are paying absolutely no share and a fair number of them receive a tax refund when the reality is they paid no taxes in order to receive that refund. This scapegoating of the rich is both very American and at the same time very un-American. Baiting the poor by blaming the rich is a tempting morsel as it is the low hanging fruit on the political tree, the easy picking and thus often used by politicians to garner some easy votes. Those who choose this route are not taking the hard road or going into deep waters; they are taking the low road and coasting instead of offering the poor an honest American alternative. The American offer is rarely spoken about as a viable option by politicians as such an option does not require any politicians or even government participation. It actually works best when the government is so far from the action so as to not interfere or make the dream more difficult or impossible to reach. America has made more wealthy individuals rising from the ranks of the poor than any other country in recorded history. This has been the result of two major factors, the lack of an established class structure and a small government which has historically remained nonintrusive. The sixty-four thousand dollar question is whether this route is as readily available as it has been throughout American history.

All too often we are taught that the wealthy in history climbed to the top on the corpses of the poor employees who were under paid and worked under ruthless management and harsh conditions. When we hear about the sweatshops and the extremely low pay in college and high school history or economics courses we often take a biased view we are sold as factual. When we are told that workers who made the Ford Model T cars were paid under $75.00 per week and that the factory floor temperatures would reach into the 80 degree and higher in the summer and below freezing in the winter we recoil in horror, at least mentally. What we are not told is that they were well paid and factories did not have airconditioning and often the heat was inadequate in the winter not only in the factories, but in all the buildings of the era. Usually the heating was far more reliable than the nonexistent airconditioning. We also are not given any context for a reason. If we were given a scale representation where we were also informed that a modern worker paid the same level as those Ford workers would be in the most advanced factory of the age with the most modern methods and machinery and would be being paid almost double the going pay scale for factory workers on average. But, these horror stories we were told were occasionally very true. The coal mining stories about company stores and dangerous working conditions and violent union strikes put down by government troops actually are the truth, sadly. But, as a rule, many of the most famous entrepreneurs who made it to the very top did so by paying their workers well; treating them with the dignity they deserved, and changed the relationship between workers and management for the better and often the changes they introduced became permanent.

The sad reality of modern day America is that we are rapidly regulating ourselves into oblivion and stealing from the less fortunate the upward mobility which had been the norm for the first two centuries plus in the United States. Some politicians will blame the political culture in a vague reference and place the blame on too many regulations. They promise that if elected they will not pass any new regulations, and they really, really mean that. The truth be told, our Senators and Representatives do not discuss or pass any regulations and the President has never signed a regulation into existence. They write, debate, pass and sign legislation which establishes laws. These laws are often not well defined and have vague references to a desired goal and then state that some department or agency is assigned to flush out this legislation and invent the regulations which will be utilized to reach, enforce, and fully define the legislation making it actionable. This is the root of many of our societal problems as the exponential growth of the regulation universe has reached a point where it is inflating in size and numbers close to the speed of the initial moments of the formation of the universe. We have reached the point where we have entangled everybody with regulations beyond the ability of any normal person to even remember all of them and beyond the ability of enforcement to enforce the entirety of regulatory legalisms. President Obama has taken the regulatory strangulation to a new level and has actually appointed a Regulatory Czar whose singular function is to peruse old legislation and invent new regulations wherever and whenever he finds any new application which can be inferred. This person’s name is Cass Robert Sunstein, and he may be the most dangerous person in the entire government, let alone President Obama’s administration.

So, how do we go about releasing what was the magic formula which made America the greatest accomplishment for human dignity, opportunity, and freedom in the history of humankind. Unfortunately, it may be impossible to undo the damage we have perpetrated against our own society through over-regulation. The solution would appear to be simple, get rid of as many regulations as we can through a simple review method where we revoke any regulations which we find to be outdated, frivolous, or in some way lacking, deficient or unnecessary. But this is where we run into the real problem which perpetuates the volume of regulations. For every regulation there are departments and people, who either enforce, inspect, handle the paper generated, make the reports fulfilling a demand, or otherwise owe their employment to each and every regulation. To these people their regulation is the most vital and important piece of the government to the wellbeing of society which would crumble should that regulation be repealed, or they would lose their cushy job at the very least. We are in an age where the regulations have built a government that has gotten completely out of control and the out of control government will never allow us to reduce the number of regulations and pare down their numbers. That, my friends is the challenge going forward. Now, who wants to be the first to go forth and draw the ire and direct attacks of the regulators? We will need one who is without sin of the violation of any regulation at any point in their lives and have filled out every single required form and application in every step of their lives so they are unassailable to the enforcers. Does such a person exist, and if they do, would they be willing to brave the inspections of the regulators and their faceless hordes? All I can say is, “Not me!”

Beyond the Cusp

What Could Happen if the Supreme Court Strikes Down the Health Care Law?

For argument’s case we will assume that the Supreme Court will strike down the individual mandate specifically and then quoting the lack of a severability clause in the Affordable Care Act, rule that the entirety of the Law has to be voided and thrown out. So, the entire two-thousand-plus pages of the Affordable Care Act would be unconstitutional and voided by the ruling. This would include the employer mandate, the disallowing insurance companies using preexisting-conditions as a consideration when considering granting insurance, and every other item even those items which were placed in the law having nothing to do with healthcare but were inserted simply to get these items approved surreptitiously and without serious debate. Will such a verdict be the death knell of the government injecting themselves even further into controlling healthcare in the United States? What will the future hold and will the health insurance companies now need to undo those items they had adjusted in order to begin to comply with the Affordable Care Act? What will be the effect of the uncertainty caused by this strike down of the government’s attempt to set in motion laws and regulations which would eventually lead to their complete usurpation of the healthcare industry in the United States?

My greatest fear is that the Supreme Court striking down the entirety of the Affordable Care Act will simply be the first volley in a war for the heart and soul of the future of health care in the United States. Any actions which have already been implemented by the government and as many adaptations the insurance companies have taken will be attempted to be cemented in place. We can expect Cass Sunstein to implement new regulations to shore up and make these changes and adaptations permanent fixtures going forward with healthcare in the United States. People who have chosen this as their fight to save individual rights and restrain the government from acquiring more influence and power over society and individual citizens’ lives will need to stay motivated and ever watchful to root out and prevent the passing of the mechanisms of the Affordable Care Act as individual regulations included in other pieces of legislation attempting to pass them stealthily. We can expect there to be a series over months of Executive Orders coming out of the White House which will be utilized as a single step-by-step implementation of the individual rules, regulations, and requirements which can be implemented individually as stand-alone regulations directly from the White House without even needing the Congress to vote or consider them. We can fully expect a coordinated effort to implement the entirety of the Affordable Care Act singular item after singular item which will later be woven together forming the completed legislation or a close facsimile thereof.

We have seen such actions in the past by those who wish to transform our country from its republic formulation of governance under which it was established into just another Nanny State top down dictated society controlled centrally with government imposed restrictions on individual liberties choking off our freedoms one small step after another. The one thing I have learned while watching the changes that have taken place during my lifetime and studying how the changes were rooted in actions from the past two centuries is that those who wish to control and regulate every small piece of our lives seldom are forced to step back and when such small wins have occurred, they are always followed by the use of incrementalism to accomplish the same ends one iota after another for as long as it takes. I have often marveled at their dedication to duty shown by those who favor government oversight and influence over all of society and life choices as they never take no for an answer and will settle for small baby steps when their sweeping legislative attempts are refuted or struck down. If those who are opposed to such a takeover of our lives and society by the busybodies of government honestly wish to hold their ground and prevent these usurpations, they will need to gather themselves and stand dedicated and unified in constant diligence guarding against the guaranteed onslaught by incrementalism. This is going to be the battle which will be fought and the sides have been defined. The end result will be totally dependent upon which side can remain relentless, dedicated, focused and determined going forward into the distant future as neither those wishing to regulate, tax, or subsidize every action, thought, possession and individual themselves will never stop proposing their nefarious schemes so those who will rally as the protectors of liberties and freedoms will need to be ready to make an even stronger effort to stir the people to their side and protect those rights spoken so elegantly of in the Declaration of Independence if those rights are to be continued to be enjoyed by our children and their children after that onto the last generations. As we were warned by Wendell Phillips, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!” Lest we not forget for as we were warned by Ronald Reagan, “Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.” We must be patriots of vigilance such that we never need long for the taste of freedom and liberty we have lost.

Beyond the Cusp