Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (11 page)

If turning over your medical records to the IRS sounds scary, it is nothing compared to the immense Federal Data Services Hub the Obama administration has planned. Wary of the decentralization of information, the president has announced his plans to collect a massive amount of personal data on every citizen, stored in one place and overseen entirely by the infinite wisdom of career bureaucrats who are virtually unfirable.

As part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the data hub is designed to allow health-care exchanges to access personal information on patients through the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the Veterans Health Administration, the Department of Defense, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Peace Corps.
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Why do health-care exchanges need so much information? It has to do with the complex eligibility requirements for the various health-care subsidies included under the law. Since these subsidies are determined by how much money you make, exchanges need access to your tax records, as well as any other information that could qualify you for certain benefits, or indeed penalties.

One of the major problems with having all of this sensitive information in one place is that any successful attempt to break into the Hub by an outside party could result in the identity thefts of millions of Americans. Think about it: names, email addresses, telephone numbers, Social Security numbers, tax data, health insurance records, immigration status, and prison records will all be available for one ingenious hacker to take and use how he will.
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But surely the government would not allow such a thing to happen. The safeguards on such a repository must be enormous, right? Actually, the Obama administration has already missed numerous deadlines in implementing security measures for the Hub. Although the law requires that these safeguards be in place, the administration has so far been unable to meet its own standards. The Identity Theft Resource Center reports 34.1 percent of all data breaches in 2013 were related to health care.
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This is not exactly a reassuring thought. Can we really trust all the details of our private lives to an organization that has consistently failed to fulfill its promises?

The government’s record on keeping its information secure is not exactly exemplary. An inspector general’s report found that the IRS accidentally disclosed the confidential taxpayer information of thousands of people from 2009 to 2010.
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The Social Security Administration has mistakenly disclosed thousands of names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers.
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And in 2012, a lone hacker managed to obtain 3.6 million names and Social Security numbers from a South Carolina database.
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The problem is compounded by the fact that the incentives for information theft will be greater than ever before. The payoffs for a malicious identity thief would be exponentially greater than when data was stored separately across a wide variety of individually encrypted databases. Democratic representative Jackie Speier of California expressed concern over this, saying that the Hub would have a “bull’s-eye” on it for hackers.
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But the threat that this data could be obtained by someone outside the government may well be overshadowed by the potential for internal abuse of the data by government employees. The recent IRS and NSA scandals make it plain that a simple security clearance does not alleviate the temptation to abuse one’s authority. On the contrary, as the editors of the
Wall Street Journal
have pointed out, “putting the IRS in charge of a political program inevitably makes the IRS more political.”
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The more personal information we allow these agencies to have, the easier it will be for them to identify, and potentially target, their political enemies. In the light of recent events, this is a danger that we should all take very seriously. The simple fact is that the ObamaCare data hub will eliminate any semblance of privacy we have as far as the federal government is concerned, and any overzealous employee will be able to wreak havoc with the lives of ordinary Americans.

The regulatory notice detailing the particulars of the Data Hub says that the government is free to disclose any of the information it has collected to a variety of individuals and agencies without the consent of the individual. This information sharing is not limited to secure government agencies, but includes “contractors, consultants, or grantees,” as well as law enforcement officials.
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So not only will your data be collected and shared within government departments; it can potentially be dispersed to any number of private contractors without your knowledge. The notice insists that the data will only go to those people who need it for their records, but it is not clear at what level the “need to know” threshold will be set. It is easy to envision a situation in which the unscrupulous are afforded easy access to sensitive documents.

Like the botched development of Healthcare.gov, the Obama administration rushed to hire a slew of “patient navigators,” individuals whose jobs consist of helping others sign up for the ObamaCare exchanges, a step that would involve the collection of a great deal of personal information. Rather than requiring the same kind of security clearances or background checks necessary for positions in sensitive government agencies such as the FBI or the IRS, the Department of Health and Human Services waived any such requirement, instead asking only for a twenty- to thirty-hour online training seminar. A high school diploma is not even required.
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Among the groups eager to take up positions as “patient navigators” are Planned Parenthood, senior citizen advocacy organizations, and churches.
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By now, both the potential for abuse and the seriousness of the consequences should be obvious. If the Obama administration is prepared to allow barely trained, agenda-driven workers from off the street access to your most private data, is there reason to believe that there will be any serious effort to protect the rights of enrollees on the exchanges? Enrolling in the ObamaCare exchanges means surrendering all of your most private information into the hands of a government that has proven irresponsible, untrustworthy, insecure, and indiscreet at every turn.

But go ahead and trust them; they’re from the government.

A P
ERFECT
S
TORM

The inability of citizens to comply with the labyrinthine laws of their country, the imposition of an oppressive and ineffective health-care scheme on an unwilling public, and the revelation that we have no privacy from our government and little recourse if accused of a crime have coalesced to expose the excesses of a government out of control. This dark cloud is a call to action for those who wish to preserve their freedoms and liberate themselves from an increasingly oppressive federal bureaucracy.

The trend toward more power in Washington, D.C., runs headlong into a world that is quickly trending in the opposite direction. The Internet and its ubiquitous social media mutations are quickly disrupting and mercilessly dismantling many of the outdated, top-down institutional structures that used to tell us what our choices were from a predetermined set of options. Now we are free to choose, to shop, to gather information, to organize, to vote, and to associate as we please based on our own preferences.

This collision is imminent. Like an incoming cold front rolling forward on a hot summer day, this is a perfect storm between the power hoarders in the Halls of Discretion and your right to design, as best you see fit, your own future.

One way or another, something’s going to give.

CHAPTER 5

S
AME
AS THE
O
LD
B
OSS

IN JANUARY 1973, RICHARD
Nixon ended the military draft in the wake of a series of high-profile draft-card-burning protests by antiwar activists. (That’s right, a Republican ended the military draft. And it was
Nixon
.) His presidency would soon enough end ignominiously, though, in part due to his eagerness to use the IRS to selectively punish his political enemies. The Democrats, the Republicans, the left, and the press were all outraged by this remarkable abuse of executive power.

The current IRS scandal, where the agency systematically targeted moms organizing their communities to defend constitutional principles like the freedom to associate and peaceably assemble, elicits no such outrage from Democrats or the many tentacles of leftist activist organizations. Few seem willing, or even interested in, defending
everyone’s
civil rights and the First Amendment protection of political speech for
those guys
. How sad.

The Democrats’ and progressives’ act of omission on IRS harassment leading up to the 2012 election is bad enough. Don’t they remember Watergate? Are they no longer repulsed by what federal agents at the CIA and the IRS did in an all-out bureaucratic onslaught to silence Dr. King? But then there is the left’s blatantly partisan act of commission as head cheerleaders for a new individual mandate that involuntarily conscripts young people into ObamaCare, whether they like it or not. They are literally drafting millennials into a system designed by administration technocrats, powerful committee chairmen, and a whoring mob of big insurance interests that got to the table first to carve out an acceptable return on their political investments.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss, but worse.

Advocates of conscripting our youth into ObamaCare typically hide behind the fact that various advocates on the “right”—notably Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich—advocated on behalf of the individual mandate. It’s a ridiculous argument for them to make, because you know that they would oppose, lockstep, this sort of reverse Robin Hood scheme if it were proposed by a President Romney or a President Gingrich.

Why not apply a consistent set of principles, consistently applied, regardless of which party label is attached?

It’s a dirty business, and this oppressive wealth transfer from young Americans to special interests and the more-wealthy appears to be the Achilles’ heel of the new, insanely authoritarian progressive movement. Whatever the clarion call of “social justice” was supposed to entail, surely garnishing the wages of the young and struggling to bolster the earnings reports of Big Insurance and Fortune 500 dinosaurs was never part of the plan.

D
EAD
IN
THE
L
ONG
R
UN

While the generational theft inherent in ObamaCare will become increasingly obvious as young people sit down and consider their coerced “choices,” the relentless process of making financial commitments we can’t afford today, to be foisted upon the buckling shoulders of future taxpayers tomorrow, is pretty much business as usual in Washington, D.C.

In his important critique of modern public finance practices, the late Nobel Prize–winning economist James Buchanan referred to the dominance of rob-the-cradle fiscal policies as the sad legacy of John Maynard Keynes. Our democracy was in deficit, he said, literally and structurally. Keynes, who single-handedly severed the cord between Adam Smith and the new “macroeconomics,” was culpable.

Since America’s founding, it was generally understood that governments should not spend money they don’t have. “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family,” Smith argued in
The Wealth of Nations,
“can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.” Under the old rules, says Buchanan, “government should not place future generations in bondage by deficit financing of public outlays designed to provide temporary and short-lived benefits.” But all that changed with the publication of Keynes’s
General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
. Here’s how Buchanan puts it:

With the completion of the Keynesian revolution, these time-tested principles of fiscal responsibility were consigned to the heap of superstitious nostrums that once stifled enlightened political-fiscal activism. Keynesianism stood the Smithian analogy on its head. The stress was placed on the differences rather than the similarities between a family and the state, and notably with respect to principles of prudent fiscal conduct. The state was no longer to be conceived in the image of the family, and the rules of prudent fiscal conduct differed dramatically as between the two institutions. The message of Keynesianism might be summarized as: What is folly in the conduct of a private family may be prudence in the conduct of the affairs of a great nation.
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So Keynes provided a pretense of intellectual legitimacy to the natural, and very destructive, instincts of politicians wanting to spend more money than public coffers held. “In the long run we are all dead,”
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was how Keynes himself rationalized the idea of spending binges that were unsustainable. Such shortsighted thinking fits perfectly into the psyche of politicians thinking in two-year increments, or presidents thinking about a single reelection bid after four years in office.

Keynes is, in fact, dead, but if you are eighteen years old today, you are on the hook for his bad economics. The irresponsible choices being made today will have to be paid for in the future, by our children and grandchildren. You can only pass the buck so far. As of this writing, every man, woman, and child in America owes more than fifty thousand dollars toward the national debt, a number that grows larger with every passing day.
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With a declining birth rate and a generation of baby boomers starting to enter retirement, Social Security has become neither social nor secure. It is a massive, cross-generational wealth transfer, with millennials losing a huge chunk of their paycheck to pay into a system that they know is unlikely to exist when they seek to retire in forty years. The finances for Medicare are far worse, and you can only expect the financial burden on young people to grow as ObamaCare raids Medicare coffers.