2 PARAGRAPHS 4 LIBERTY: #237 "HEALTHCARE FOR ALL"

      Obviously the subject of healthcare for all is actively being discussed in today’s world.  I agree this result is desirable, not because anyone is entitled to it but, because we are a compassionate society, we would do it voluntarily.  But what form should it take?  Bringing a single-payer system, or so-called Medicare for all, would be fine, as long as people don’t mind having their healthcare run by the equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles.  But we truly can do better.  As an illustration, we have some great friends visiting us now from Canada, and they volunteered that Canada’s socialistic system simply does not seek out innovation.  Why?  Because it is a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies have a strong tendency to resist change.  So for creative care, they must come to the US.

       So what should we do?  The answer is that we should install a system of Medical Savings Accounts.  That means that for those people who can afford to address their own healthcare needs, we should simply require them to put $5,000 into the equivalent of an ATM account at the beginning of each year, and then get the government out of the way.  Then they would purchase the catastrophic health insurance of their choice, probably costing them something like $1,000 per year. Then all of their healthcare expenses would be paid directly out of the $4,000 that remained in the account.  Studies show that most adults pay far less than $4,000 per year on their healthcare needs until they approach the end of their lives.  So if they spent less than that, the remainder would simply roll over into their account for the next year and, eventually, it could be used for their retirement.  However, if they needed to spend more, their insurance would kick in, such that they would only be required to pay their $4,000 “deductible” and then their co-pays.  That would result in everyone spending their money wisely – because it was their money!  And that would also bring competition back to the healthcare field which would, in turn, bring prices back down.  For those people that needed some financial assistance for their healthcare needs, as long as they were legal residents, a voucher system could be used on a sliding scale depending upon their financial abilities.   Then those vouchers could be spent on the private market for payments and co-pays.  So this program would combine the best results that competition brings to the marketplace, which are competition, responsibility for one’s own healthcare needs, and medical coverage for all.

Quote for the week, with one elderly businessman talking to another: “It was slanderous, it was insulting and it was an outrage; but I see their point.”

Judge Jim Gray (Ret.)

2012 Libertarian candidate for Vice President, along with

Governor Gary Johnson as the candidate for President

Please listen to our weekly radio show entitled “All Rise! The Libertarian Way with Judge Jim Gray” as we discuss timely issues, and show how they will be addressed more beneficially by employing Libertarian values and approaches.  You can hear it every Friday morning at 7 Pacific/10 Eastern by going to www.VoiceAmerica.com, clicking on the Variety Channel and then upon the word “live.”  You can also hear past shows on demand as well.  And, by the way, these 2 Paragraph columns are now on Facebook and LinkedIn at judgejimgray, Twitter at judgejamesgray, and wordpress at judgejimgray.wordpress.com.  Please visit these sites for past editions, and do your part to spread the word about the importance of Liberty.

2 PARAGRAPHS 4 LIBERTY: #193 "THE 'TRANSFER STATE' IN ACTION"

 Recently I read the book Your Money or your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax by Sheldon Richman (The Future of Freedom Foundation, 1999), which discusses how we have spawned such an expensive and intrusive federal government, and what it does to repress Liberty.  It truly is worth the read in itself. But he wrote the following three paragraphs, beginning at page 93, that I simply had to pass along to you.  Please think about this situation and share your thoughts with others.

“The irony is that even people who claim to support limits on government power play the transfer game.  The late libertarian teacher Robert LeFevre used to ask conservative businessmen to list the government activities they liked. These people, who claimed to favor limited government, would each write a short list of programs.  The lists would differ, though; so when they were consolidated, the result was a government that had its hands in many areas of the economy.  The point of LeFevre’s exercise was that the political process can produce big government even when self-styled limited-government advocates are calling the shots.

“Observe the transfer state in action.  Social Security imposes taxes on working people and hands the money to retired people.  Medicare does almost the same thing, except the money goes to doctors and hospitals.  Agricultural programs take money from taxpayers and consumers and give it to farmers for not growing or for growing particular crops.  Welfare programs give the taxpayers’ money to people who do not work. Subsidies reward well-connected business people with the hard-earned money of the middle class and working class. Foreign aid indirectly subsidizes particular American businesses by giving tax money to foreign governments that will buy American products and services.  Government cultural agencies transfer wealth to artists, musicians, broadcasters, and humanities scholars.  The education bureaucracy subsidizes trendy social experiments on children.  The defense bureaucracy floods contractors with cash for equipment that is not needed and for missions that are improper.  The list goes on and on.

“In each case, people seeking reelection and aspiring to prestigious ‘public’ careers extract wealth from the general population to finance their schemes and benefit those with the time and resources to gain influence.  The textbook model of democratic government responsive to the people is not found in the real world.  Rather, government is a vast auction hall (to use Mencken’s metaphor) in which people enter bids for access to politicians and the vast booty collected by the tax system.”

Thomas Jefferson famously said that we should have a bloody revolution every generation to keep the vested interests at bay.  Well, our Constitution can keep it from being bloody, but how long has it been since we had a revolution?  The 1860s when the Republicans took over from the Whigs?  So maybe it’s long since time! And the Libertarian Party is the only hope in sight!

Judge Jim Gray (Ret.)

2012 Libertarian candidate for Vice President, along with

Governor Gary Johnson as the candidate for President

Quote for the week by Author Unknown: “Dreams don’t work unless you do.”                                                                                

By the way, these columns are now on Facebook and LinkedIn at judgejimgray, Twitter at judgejamesgray, and wordpress at judgejimgray@wordpress.com.  Please visit these sites for past editions, and do your part to spread the word about the importance of Liberty.

Are we watching? Do we care? - by Judge Jim Gray

In the April 18 edition of Newsweek, columnist Philip K. Howard published a "Dear Congress" letter setting forth several national policies that are broken, and demanding that they be addressed and fixed. This is similar to the open letter that was published in this space on April 3 that "gently but firmly" demanded strong leadership from Rep. John Campbell to address and resolve the problems with illegal immigration.

As a practical matter, with all of the political polarization and other problems facing our great country, mostly there is no one left but "We the People" to take action. Are we watching? Do we care? If so, we need to persuade our public leaders that getting and staying elected is not the same thing as governing.

In addition to illegal immigration, some of those areas that must be addressed are sunset provisions for all federal agencies, the reduction of the welfare system for both the poor and the wealthy, requiring new public employees to invest in 401(k) programs for their retirement, just like workers in the private sector, and the failed and hopeless policy of drug prohibition. All of these have an enormous negative impact upon our federal budget deficit, and there appears to be no good faith effort by Congress even to address, much less resolve them.

Two additional areas that simply must be addressed are the entitlements of Social Security and Medicare. Painful as it could be, we must understand that if Congress had indexed the retirement age of 65 to increases of life expectancy when it implemented these programs in 1935, people would not be eligible today for these entitlements until they reached their middle 70s. So since the national government simply cannot remain solvent by paying entitlements at this rate, we simply must increase the ages of eligibility.

But when addressing our budget deficits, there remains a huge issue that is almost never even mentioned that will go a long way in helping us regain fiscal solvency, and that is the federal ownership of land. Most people do not realize this, but today the federal government owns about 650 million acres of land, almost 30% of our country! This property is held as national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, Indian reservations and military reservations, and for the good of the country's economic health, this landowning should be reassessed.

Of course, no one is proposing to sell Yellowstone, Yosemite or any of our other national treasures or military reservations that are necessary for our security. But the federal government also owns huge tracts of forests, deserts, meadows, mountains and shore lands. It would be better for everyone if that ownership were significantly reduced. (And if it is Native American land, give it back to them and let them run it!)

What would happen if some of this land were to be sold to the private sector? In addition to the monies received from the sales, the privately held land would also generate property, sales and income taxes, all of which would reduce the government's financial deficits.

But the benefits would be much more than financial. Not only is the federal government the largest polluter of land in the country, it virtually never manages property nearly as well as people do in the private sector. Why? Today the Bureau of Land Management, for example, leases out public grazing lands at artificially low rates to politically powerful people, who, in turn, have no incentive to keep from overgrazing it.

Put yourself in their place. If you had a lease to graze your cattle on government land for five years, you would want to maximize your short-term revenues as much as you could, without consideration of what it might do to the land. So you would tend to overgraze it. But if you were the owner, you would have incentives to husband the land, because if you didn't, it would decrease in utility and value.

As another example, in England many trout streams have been privatized, which means that, among other things, the owners can sue anyone who pollutes them upstream. As a result, the property is carefully husbanded, because a clean, beautiful and natural stream full of trout is more valuable for bringing in visitors and people who fish than one that is less so. Other examples are abundant, particularly in Africa with their wild animals.

That is not at all to say that the government should not have laws regarding things like pollution. The biggest example of that would be drilling for oil. It should mostly be allowed, but anyone drilling anywhere should first be required to post a significant bond with a financially strong and stable company that will be forced to pay for the cleanup and other ramifications of every drop of oil that is spilled. That way the bonding company will rigorously supervise all of the drilling, because its own money would be at stake.

So there is a better way. Are we watching? Do we care? If so, please join me in writing a letter to your member of Congress demanding that he or she take steps that will actually fix these problems. As we have said before, it is our government, and if it isn't working, it is nobody's fault but our own.

JAMES P. GRAY is a retired judge of the Orange County Superior Court, the author of "Wearing the Robe: the Art and Responsibility of Judging in Today's Courts" (Square One Publishers, 2010), Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It, A Voter's Handbook, Effective Solutions To America's Problems and can be reached at jimpgray@sbcglobal.net or http://www.judgejimgray.com. Judge Jim Gray is also currently offering his 25 years of experience on the bench to ADR Services in Orange County for Arbitration and Mediation services.