Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (19 page)

Ted Cruz, the senator from Canada through Texas, is basically not a legislator in the normal sense, doesn’t have an idea that he’s going to Congress to create coalitions, make alliances, and he is going to pass a lot of legislation. He’s going in more as a media protest person. And a lot of the House Republicans are in the same mode. They’re not normal members of Congress. They’re not legislators. They want to stop things. And so they’re just being—they just want to obstruct.
¹

Harry Reid went so far as to call us “anarchists,” simply because we oppose funding an expensive federal health-care takeover that the president himself has arbitrarily repealed or delayed in part some twenty times so far.
²
The senator most responsible for drafting the legislation, Democrat Max Baucus, called it “a huge train wreck coming down” in April 2013.
³
But now we are the “anarchists” for insisting that the government not fund, with borrowed money, something that no one in D.C. seems to think will actually work. They are acting like desperate addicts, aren’t they?

How do we get from here to there, to more freedom and prosperity? How do we get from where we are today—with ever more encroaching government control, unimaginable fiscal liabilities, and so few in Washington, D.C., willing to do what needs to be done—to the point where the federal government is back to its limited and proper role?

Public choice economists might tell us that it’s impossible, that governments naturally, inexorably, march forward—like the White Walkers descending on Westeros in
Game of Thrones
—expanding to the point where they choke off productive initiative, and great nations die. Think Rome, and the tragic devolution from a republic to an autocratic empire, and then to the dustbin of history.

How can we reverse course and make sure that America doesn’t go down that fateful path of no return? To me, this is the most interesting strategic question that constitutional conservatives and small-
l
libertarians—moms and dads who just want a better life for their kids—have to answer.

The solution will never be a quixotic fix of more “revenue” or another top-down reorganization of your life by some faceless bureaucrat who knows nothing of you and your family and doesn’t much care. We need a better, more compelling freedom agenda. The burden on us will always be far higher to explain how freedom works.

We understand our principles. We get freedom. We know that simple rules of personal conduct—Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff—create tremendous upward potential for all of us, and that opportunity for all creates peaceful cooperation. Even though the insiders tell us the opposite, we know that open societies actually spread the wealth, and that closed, top-down systems lock in the spoils of the Haves at the expense of generations of Have-Nots. We understand the ethos of liberty that is ingrained in every one of us makes America an exceptional place.

So what, exactly, should we do to restore liberty?

This chapter lays out a twelve-step policy agenda: positive, innovative ideas that would improve people’s lives by letting them be free, by spending less of your hard-earned money on someone else’s favors, by letting you choose, by treating us all equally under the laws of the land.

Radical stuff, I know.

1. C
OMPLY
WITH
THE
L
AWS
Y
OU
P
ASS

As Steve Forbes likes to say, the planners in Washington should have to eat their “own cooking.” This seems like such common sense, but you won’t be surprised to learn just how controversial this idea is behind the closed doors where congressional staffers and career bureaucrats congregate. Do as I say, they prefer, not as I do.

Former Obama administration Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to enforce your compliance with complex federal tax laws, didn’t even see fit to pay his own taxes,
⁴
apparently believing himself above such prosaic responsibilities.

Back in 2011, it was revealed that House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and other key members of Congress and their committee staff had played the market with the inside information of what their proposed laws would do to the stock valuations of certain industries.
⁵

This sort of behavior is emblematic of the contempt shown by Congress for the laws they impose on the rest of us. While the STOCK Act
⁶
purported to put an end to congressional insider trading, the substance of the legislation was later rolled back before being implemented, by unanimous voice vote. Members of the House were not given time to review the bill that Senate majority leader Harry Reid had sent over in the middle of the night.

“Rather than craft narrow exemptions, or even delay implementation until proper protections could be created, the Senate decided instead to exclude legislative and executive staffers from the online disclosure requirements” of the STOCK Act, reports the Sunlight Foundation.
⁷
So the bicameral vote that insisted that D.C. insiders comply with the same trading laws as the rest of us was public and virtually unanimous, but the gutting of the law carries few legislators’ names or fingerprints.

More egregious still are the constant attempts by members, staff, and federal employees to exempt themselves from ObamaCare. House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp wants to change that, offering a proposal that would place all federal employees, even the president himself, into the same exchanges required by the rest of the country.

“If the ObamaCare exchanges are good enough for the hardworking Americans and small businesses the law claims to help, then they should be good enough for the president, vice president, Congress, and federal employees,” Camp’s spokeswoman explained.
⁸

2. S
TOP
S
PENDING
M
ONEY
W
E
D
ON’T
H
AVE

American families have to balance their budgets. The government should do the same. This is not rocket science.

Why is it so hard for Congress to balance the budget? The core problem, of course, is that they are not spending their own money. They are spending your money. The ghost of John Maynard Keynes provides them with a pseudo-intellectual rationale to “stimulate aggregate demand.” But we are on to them and know that the only real stimulus they are buying with borrowed money is for their own reelection prospects.

Given that, as of this writing, the national debt tops $17 trillion, it seems like common sense would dictate a few things:

•   Stop new spending on new programs.

•   Prioritize dollars and get rid of programs that don’t make the cut as top priorities in a world of scarcity.

•   No sacred cows allowed until we solve the problem, so put everything on the table.

•   Deal honestly with entitlements by acknowledging unfunded future promises.

•   You can’t tax your way to a balanced budget without tanking the job creation that actually generates tax receipts.

I know, more radicalism. Harry Reid is so offended by these budget principles that if you agree with them, he thinks you are an “anarchist.”

So many in both parties have grown comfortable simply kicking the can down the road and rubber-stamping an endless series of increases in the “debt ceiling,” or short-term “continuing resolutions” that claim deficit reduction in future years while spending more today. But it’s really not that hard to map out a plan to clean up Washington’s fiscal train wreck. In fact, FreedomWorks “crowdsourced” ideas for a citizens’ “Debt Commission” that would balance the budget in just a few years. Senator Mike Lee tried to bring those ideas to his Senate colleagues in November 2011 and was literally evicted from the Russell Senate Office Building by staffers representing Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN).
⁹

No, this isn’t an
Onion
spoof. I’m not making that up.

Senator Lee has introduced a constitutional amendment that would require Congress to balance the budget each year and limit spending to 18 percent of GDP, the forty-year average of federal receipts.
¹⁰
It was the basis for a consensus balanced-budget amendment that the entire Senate Republican caucus eventually signed on to.

The Congressional Budget Office has released a report suggesting that if nothing is done to control spending, by 2038 the federal debt could be as high as 190 percent of GDP.
¹¹
At that point we can send congressional emissaries to Athens, Greece, to solicit innovative budget savings ideas from the Hellenic Parliament.

3. S
CRAP
THE
T
AX
C
ODE

The federal tax code should only exist to fund the necessary functions of government.

Special interests and congressional deal making have corrupted the tax code beyond anything imaginable in 1913, when Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, authorizing a national income tax. This incomprehensible complexity favors insiders and the special provisions they lobbied for, and the rest of us foot the bill. It’s political class warfare against working Americans. The problem isn’t tax cuts for the rich; it’s a tax code that prevents working Americans from getting rich.

Complexity also enriches bureaucratic advantage. Complexity means more career public employees to navigate ambiguous rules. The tax code becomes a weapon in the hands of IRS agents who have a partisan or parochial agenda, or hold a grudge.

We need to scrap the code, and abolish the IRS. We need to clean out the whole building, hose it out, and start over with a simple, low, flat tax. The government function of revenue collection should be limited and straightforward. No agendas, no social engineering, no overbearing discretionary authority in the hands of gray-suited soviets.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has proposed doing exactly that. “We ought to abolish the IRS and instead move to a simple flat tax, where the average American can fill out our taxes on a postcard,” Cruz told Fox News. “It ought to be just a simple, one-page postcard and take the agents, the bureaucracy out of Washington. And limit the power of government.”
¹²

The most powerful case for tax reform is a moral one, the common cause of blind justice. If you don’t trust Washington, D.C., to give you a fair shake, why not just treat everyone equally under the laws of the land?

Making the tax code simple, low, fair, and honest would be a powerful means of unleashing human potential. Class warriors on the left would howl about the injustice of treating everyone equally, but their real agenda is in defending the Beltway interests that have designed the current mess.

The true victims of fundamental tax reform are the insiders who have carved out their favors, as well as the legislators and bureaucrats who make their living off soliciting, creating, and navigating new complexity. The reduction in wasted time and money devoted to compliance would unleash capital, job creation, and upward mobility, while the elimination of complex loopholes would level the playing field between Americans and tax compliance enforcers inside government.

4. P
UT
P
ATIENTS
IN
C
HARGE

Okay, so we all agree that ObamaCare is exactly the wrong medicine. We need to repeal the whole thing and start over. That does not mean that there is nothing wrong. But the answer is in more freedom, not the coercive hand of government bureaucrats.

The system as it exists today is plagued by a lack of competition and by complex labyrinths that prevent patients from taking charge of their own care and treatments.

The singular problem with our health-care system is all of the faceless, gray-suited middlemen standing between you and your doctor. So-called “third party payers” are the direct result of government distortions in health-care markets. Remember, allowing employers to provide benefits like health care, with pretax dollars, was a political fix to FDR’s wage and price controls.

What if we cut out the bureaucrats, and their take, and let you make the choices right for you and your family? Would providers work harder to satisfy your needs? Would you get more quality at a lower price?

Of course you would.

There is a simple way to free patients and doctors from third parties like employers, HMOs, the IRS, or the faceless deciders at HHS. This could be accomplished by eliminating the punitive bias in the tax code that taxes health insurance and services when purchased directly by individuals. This would be a pretty simple fix that empowers patients without some complex, top-down redesign by the federal government. If health care is different, and vitally important to all of us, let’s provide care for our families with our own hard-earned dollars, before the federal government takes its cut. In other words, treat everyone the same, regardless of where you work and whom you work for.

Other commonsense reforms include health savings accounts for younger workers, stripping all of the “mandated benefits” from gold-plated insurance plans that drive up both costs and overconsumption of health services. We should also let families shop for better health insurance policies in all fifty states, just like any other product we might shop around for.

No mandates, no coercion. Just choice, and providers who work for your health and your return business. Politicians like to make empty promises about “universal coverage,” even though they can’t possibly provide for it. Besides, the goal should be
better health care at lower costs,
and Washington is particularly ill-suited to provide
that
.

Health care is a fundamentally personal issue. The relationship between a patient and doctor needs to be based on trust and mutual understanding. Let’s stop robbing patients of their privacy, their dignity, and their freedom to choose.