Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney says Democratic presidental frontrunner Hillary Clinton's ideas mean "out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx." I object on two grounds: Hillary Clinton is not a Marxist; Mitt Romney is no Adam Smith free-marketeer.
Who knows what lies beneath the tripe that obscures a politician's real beliefs? All have concrete interests, but few have rock-hard principles. But Hillary Clinton's senate record leaves little evidence of Marxist beliefs. If she harbors such ideas, her voting record doesn't reflect it. The overuse of "Marxist" as a pejorative by conservatives against liberals shakes the stability of the term's meaning. Marxist has become a designation for someone conservatives don't like. There are excellent reasons for disliking Hillary Clinton's program, such as she has one beyond attaining personal power, but her turning over the keys of industry to the workers is not one of them. A Marxist believes in a materialist interpretation of history, state control of the means of production, the notion that profit is theft against wage earners, violence as the means to attain political power, and the inevitability of Marxism. This vibe doesn't radiate from Hillary Clinton's rhetoric, does it?
Not that Hillary reminds anyone of Adam Smith. She harbors many, many idiotic ideas. Her mid-'70s comparison of marriage and the family to slavery and Indian reservations, for instance, closely resembled The Communist Manifesto's promise to liberate children from parental exploitation. "Many of you are well enough off that the tax cuts may have helped you," went one of her most unforgettable remarks. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." The whole notion of "It Takes a Village" emits a collectivist spirit. Her plan to nationalize health care was certainly scary, but it was a mere plan whereas Mitt Romney's scheme to force health insurance upon everyone is Massachusetts law.
Mitt Romney championed coercive, universal health insurance legislation in Massachusetts. It is corporate welfare, in that it requires every citizen in the Bay State to buy a product (health care) from one industry (insurance). If an individual cannot afford insurance, the government will, with money taken from everyone else, pay the insurance company. In forcing individuals to buy health insurance, the law will certainly drive up the price of health care. It usurps individual choice by mandating behavior the state, in blanket fashion, decrees right for everyone. But for some people, e.g., robust young men, health insurance is usually a waste of money (even when the price of peace of mind is factored in). Why do health insurance companies make so much money if health insurance is such a great deal for individuals? It's gambling, and in gambling the house generally wins. When everybody is forced to play, the house really wins. Romney's law punishes anyone without health insurance by removing their individual tax exemption on annual state income tax filings and by issuing a monthly fine for those who haven't shown proof of insurance. Guilty until proven innocent, I guess. It is an unfunded mandate on individuals and employers. It is a burden on taxpayers footing the bill for freeloaders.
Romney's law is anathema to anyone who loves liberty, just as Hillarycare was anathema to liberty lovers in the early 1990s. The problem is that Republicans have rejected the tradition of freedom that reigned from Goldwater through the Contract With America. If Phil Gramm were dead, I'd say he's rolling in his grave. Phil Gramm, thankfully, is alive, but the free market principles he relied upon to defeat Hillarycare are dead within the GOP. The popularity of the former Massachusetts governor among self-proclaimed "conservatives" is proof of this.
Hillary Clinton is no Karl Marx. Mitt Romney, you are no Adam Smith, either.
Interesting. Thanks for calling Romney on the "Karl Marx" comment. I was always wary of him.
I still need someone to explain to me what the fundamental difference is between laws that state you MUST buy auto insurance versus the MA law that states you have to buy health insurance. I haven't heard anyone complain about the mandatory auto insurance laws.
Now, I know that a) not everyone has to drive a car and b) the laws exist to protect the car that is hit by the potentially uninsured driver, not the uninsured driver itself. But the principle remains the same; the auto insurance industry I'm sure is ripely benefiting from these madatory insurance laws. Does the law exists merely to expand their profits??
And besides, from what I understand, the money used to subsidize the health insurance for the "poor" is coming from the taxpayer money used for emergency room care for the uninsured, so its not like they're taking any extra money away from John Q Taxpayer.
I love the fact that Romney is using old school tactics to put the Dems back on their heals.
The old saying goes that politics ain't beanbag and in this politically correct world where everybody is ultra sensitive to criticism, I think it's a breath of fresh air to hear an opposition candidate call a spade a spade.
Hillary may not be a Marxist, but she is the next best thing being that she is a socialist and Romney's statements will resonate. He already has Obama defending his sex education for five year olds statement.
He doesn't need to be righteous or the incarnation of Adam Smith to make it work.
"I still need someone to explain to me what the fundamental difference is between laws that state you MUST buy auto insurance versus the MA law that states you have to buy health insurance. I haven't heard anyone complain about the mandatory auto insurance laws.
Now, I know that a) not everyone has to drive a car and b) the laws exist to protect the car that is hit by the potentially uninsured driver, not the uninsured driver itself. But the principle remains the same; the auto insurance industry I'm sure is ripely benefiting from these madatory insurance laws. Does the law exists merely to expand their profits??
And besides, from what I understand, the money used to subsidize the health insurance for the "poor" is coming from the taxpayer money used for emergency room care for the uninsured, so its not like they're taking any extra money away from John Q Taxpayer." - DJ
I do. The auto insurance laws drive up prices and limit consumer choice, just like the new health insurance laws are going to do.
On the matter of auto insurance, it would be far easier to simply make being in an accident of your own fault without insurance a negligence charge, than force everybody to have it.
Ben T: could you explain how a "negligence charge" would work to offset the cost and the pain when an unemployed poor drunk totals your car and puts you in a body cast. Really, I don't grasp the "negligence charge" concept you are aluding to.
Last August an illegal drunk Mexican crashed into my car and sent me to the emergency room. In this case my insurance had to pick up the bill; that's what uninsured motorist is for. Of course I still had to pay a deductible and my insurance company dragged its feet in compensating me. It was a real pain.
Insurance companies are in the business of not paying claims in a timely manner or not paying claims at all. It behooves them to not make it easy.
So, you get the hassle and the illegal Mexican drunken driver gets off with nothing but a hand slap because......HE'S UNDOCUMENTED!!!!
Hey, he's only here to drunk drive for those Americans who won't.
"Ben T: could you explain how a "negligence charge" would work to offset the cost and the pain when an unemployed poor drunk totals your car and puts you in a body cast. Really, I don't grasp the "negligence charge" concept you are aluding to." - Skeptic
You can sue him?
Even assuming he can't pay you, the state simply allows you to take his capital and liquify it for the money owed. And he must have possessions, or he wouldn't have been driving around in a car in the first place.
Eric, I don't think the massachusetts auto insurance law would have solved your problem. An illegal immigrant is not going to have "getting my car registered" at the top of his list of things to do.
BenT:
Great. So your car has been totalled, and you are now in a body cast, but your have the right to hire a lawyer and confiscate this hippie's 1985 van and his collection of bongs. You will not recover your costs.
Are you serious? Get your head out of the market-fixes-everything sand.
This as opposed to your view, which is that everyone in the state should be forced to buy auto insurance, whether they ever use it or not (while of course driving up the prices and reducing the choices for consumers).
Unless you can prove that the costs of forcing every single driver in the state to purchase insurance at increased prices with reduced choices is offset by the amount of people who get in car accidents which A.) Are the fault of the other driver, and in which B.) The other driver is incapable of restoring the damages, then you have not yet even established a basis for your argument.
Even if you can, the argument still fails, reasons we'll get to assuming you are capable of producing the aforementioned proof.
Ben T: Most accidents are the cause of one of the participants and not both. So (A) is proven. Most serious accidents, where someone is injured or a car is totalled, will have costs that exceed the normal person's ability to pay out of pocket. One cannot "restore" the damages of personal injury, anyway. And regarding recooping one's money to replace a car, making it a law-suit system would put undue onus on the victim, and an extreme and sudden burden on the responsible party.
Now are system is abused, and it is probably not the most efficient way of doing this, but to claim that a law suit system is capable of handling the problems better is utopian: this is your current one-solution-fits-all-problems ideology. You overlook that is an issue of justice. This is not merely an issue of whether the social aggregate cost is minimized in one system or another; it is a question of who bears most of the cost, and in your system the victims of accidents are more likely to bear unfair burdens.
"Ben T: Most accidents are the cause of one of the participants and not both. So (A) is proven. Most serious accidents, where someone is injured or a car is totalled, will have costs that exceed the normal person's ability to pay out of pocket. One cannot "restore" the damages of personal injury, anyway. And regarding recooping one's money to replace a car, making it a law-suit system would put undue onus on the victim, and an extreme and sudden burden on the responsible party." - Skeptic
A is not proven, because you cannot prove one while leaving the other unproven here. We are not talking about whether most car accidents are the fault of one person or another, we are talking about whether you can prove the cost of forcing everybody to have car insurance offsets the benefit of this exceedingly rare scenario. The state is not being overrun by recklessly driving hippies in minivans who own nothing but a small collection of bongs.
There is no question of being unfair to the victim. Your solution forces people to buy car insurance whether they want to or not, and whether they will ever need it or not, so it is equally, if not moreso, an unfair burden on the innocent.
Most people can't pay for the damages caused by a car accident? Do you have any statistical proof for that? Most people have an amount of money that they wouldn't WANT to pay out of pocket for the damages of a car accident. Thats not the same as saying they would be actually incapable of doing so, if it was legally required of them.
"Now are system is abused, and it is probably not the most efficient way of doing this, but to claim that a law suit system is capable of handling the problems better is utopian: this is your current one-solution-fits-all-problems ideology. You overlook that is an issue of justice. This is not merely an issue of whether the social aggregate cost is minimized in one system or another; it is a question of who bears most of the cost, and in your system the victims of accidents are more likely to bear unfair burdens."- skeptic
On the issue of justice my response would be the same. My ethics are the non-aggression principle. Coercing people into buying auto insurance whether or not they want to doesn't stand up to the non-aggression litmus test.
P.S: I totally reject the usage of consequentialist ethics. I am of the opinion that only deontological ethics can be defended, so saying something like "under this system, fewer victims of car accidents will suffer" has no ethical value to me if it cannot also be justified deontologically. Ethics is about what it is and is not acceptable to do to people, and it is not acceptable to legally coerce people into making purchases they do not want to make.
BenT: I simply took a real life example. My mother's car was totalled by a drunk, unemployed, uninsured hippie. I'm sorry if real life doesn't fit your theory.
You are confused about my position and who has the buren of proof here. I am not forced into defended the current system as the best. Rather, all I did was to point out that your proposed solution -- a negligence fine plus a system of lawsuits -- does not even come close to dealing with the problem of victimhood here. If you want to replace the current system with something -- great -- but you've gotta come up with something better than giving the bad driver a ticket and telling the victim to sue him.
Dan,
This post was another perfect time to stump for Ron Paul. Since you won't I will.
Hillary is a cultural Marxist (ex-New Left) and has more in common w/ Romney than either do w/ Paul. He is the real choice in this contest:
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/
