The Freedom Bulletin

Florida Governor Rick Scott recently signed a law requiring people to pass a drug test in order to receive welfare, and several other states have been debating and voting on similar measures. The ACLU is suing Florida over the requirement, saying that it constitutes a suspicionless search and seizure, in violation of the Fourth Amendment. I agree with them.

While I share the desire to decrease spending on welfare, and the idea that someone with enough money to afford drugs shouldn’t be getting welfare, requiring people to give a urine sample is just plain wrong. I actually don’t think welfare should exist at all – forcibly taking from people with money and giving to those without is not the best solution to poverty – but having welfare plus mandatory drug testing is just adding one wrong on top of another.

Being made to give a urine sample is degrading. It also violates people’s privacy rights, since what substances are in your urine are none of the government’s business. Instead of merely blocking drug users from receiving welfare, the urine test requirement punishes all welfare applicants by taking away their dignity and privacy. It is indeed a search – quite an invasive one at that – that would be performed on all applicants, regardless of whether there was any reason to suspect them of wrongdoing.

One could argue that you don’t need to apply for welfare, so no one is required to submit to the search, but this is like justifying the use of naked machines and pat-downs by saying that no one needs to fly. Some people need to fly for their jobs, just as some people need welfare money in order to live. In any case, people should be free to choose travel plans and methods of transportation, as well as to apply for government assistance, without having to include in their calculus the need to avoid degrading searches.

If you want to cut welfare spending, just cut welfare spending…or even abolish it. Drug tests inflict degradation on all welfare recipients, which is in itself a grievous wrong, and solve nothing.

The medical system in America is in crisis and needs reform. But the problem isn’t that 47 million people are uninsured, or that people don’t have access to health services. There are three main problems, listed below in order of importance:

1. People have no freedom. In today’s society, people do not have control over their health decisions; doctors do. People can’t get medications without a doctor’s prescription, thanks to the Durham-Humphrey Amendment. Doctors think it’s their job to take notes on people and tell people what procedures they should get, what they should eat, and how their should live their lives. The FDA bans many medications that would benefit people. Instead, a doctor’s job should be to serve customers and give advice when asked for, and the FDA’s job should be to protect the public from deception by drug companies.
2. Payment methods are too complicated. You never see signs in doctors’ offices listing how much each procedure costs. Instead we have a huge mess of insurance companies paying doctors for some procedures and not others, insurance companies paying for some medications at the pharmacy and not others, the government paying for some people’s insurance but not others, employers paying for some of your insurance, you paying for some of your insurance, you paying a co-pay or a deductible or co-insurance…the confusion never ends.  Plus, the insurance companies won’t tell you up front what’s covered and what’s not. They have the power to refuse to cover you altogether, to refuse to cover any procedure they say isn’t medically necessary, to require proof that you’re a student, to require all sorts of incomprehensible paperwork, et cetera. This system is disorderly, messy, ugly, and intuitively displeasing, and it rips people off and sometimes even kills people.
3. The government spends too much money on health services. It’s wrong for the government to take money from the rich and use it to pay for Medicaid, SCHIP, and other health programs for the poor. It’s also wrong for them to take from the young and give to the old, like they do with Medicare. The only things that tax money should pay for are the military, roads, and the legal system.

Unfortunately, all three of these things are deeply entrenched in our society, and anyone who questions them is considered a radical. In my next post, I’ll go more into detail about problem #1 and show some examples that I’ve noticed in the news recently that really epitomize what is wrong with our medical system.

…would be to raise the income tax. So, what do you know, I opened up the Globe this morning to find an editorial in support of just that.

This editorial, by state senators Sonia Chang-Diaz and Jamie Eldridge, has so many things wrong with it that it will be hard to list them all. But I am going to try.

First, they write that “there are no easy solutions” and that “cutting alone will not get us out of this budget crisis.” Actually, cutting is a fairly easy solution, and it will get us out of the budget crisis if we cut enough. There is $3 billion less in revenue then at this time last year, so cutting $3 billion will solve the budget problem. It will be unpopular and will be painful to some people, but it is the right thing to do.

Then, they write that “taxes are the way that we, as a society, pay for the things we value: education, police and firefighters, and public transportation. Each day we rely upon government services, public infrastructure, and state regulation, paid for by our taxes, in order to allow us to work and raise a family.” I think it’s more accurate to say that taxes are a way that other people force me to pay for the things that they value. In addition to education, police, firefighters, and transportation, taxes also pay for free food, housing, cars, medical services, contraceptives, and baby supplies for poor people. I don’t know about you, but I don’t value free stuff that I am not allowed to get because I have too much money, nor do I value free stuff that I would never use (like the last two). Plus, firefighters, and possibly also education and transportation, can and should be privatized so that they are not paid for with taxes. Yes, we do use public infrastructure, but this, along with police, the military, and the court system, are the only things that should be funded with taxes. Using the word “rely” is going a little too far; that makes it sound like people are getting something they don’t deserve just because roads and laws exist. Also, not everyone raises a family.

Next: “A fair tax system asks residents to contribute to the cost of government services based on their ability to pay – and few people would consider a tax system to be fair if the poorer you are, the greater proportion of your income you pay in taxes.” No, a fair tax system asks residents to contribute based on how many services they use or how good of a person they are, or asks each resident to contribute the same amount. I guess I am one of those “few people,” because I consider a lump sum tax to be the fairest tax.

“Of course, there is nothing more regressive than a budget cut, particularly to programs that help the most vulnerable among us.” Why does that make budget cuts bad? And what do you mean by vulnerable? Vulnerable to what? “Poor,” “sick,” or “badly-off” would be a better word. Programs that only help those whom the government have decided are vulnerable are discriminatory against those who aren’t vulnerable.

“We applaud the House on its tough vote to raise the sales tax, because any means of raising revenue right now is a better solution than drastic cuts to vital services.” Actually, it’s the exact opposite. Any cut is a better solution than an increase in revenue.

“Because the income tax is more progressive, it relies more heavily on those who can most afford to pay it.” Why is that good?

“There are also ways we could modify the income tax to make it even more progressive.” Great idea! Let’s take something that is unfair and make it even worse!

“We rank in the bottom half of all states in terms of the overall amount of taxes we pay as a share of personal income.” That’s a good thing. Wouldn’t you want to keep it that way or even improve? I guess not if you’re a Democrat.

In short, raising the income tax is the absolute worst thing Massachusetts could do to solve the budget crisis. Chang-Diaz and Eldridge should be ashamed of themselves for advocating something so immoral and unfair.

Note: Sometime in the next few days I will put up a list of things that I would cut from the state budget, to show that it is possible. The budget is so long that it’ll take a little while to go through it all, but I hope to have my budget up ASAP.

…is more taxes. But guess what the state legislature just did? Voted to raise the sales tax!

This is absolutely ridiculous. Legislators passed the tax increase to avoid the horror of having to pass a budget that was slightly smaller than last year’s and makes small cuts in programs that shouldn’t even exist in the first place. How terrible that would have been. NOT!

I have never heard of a tax being lowered in Massachusetts. All that happens is taxes keep going up and up and up, and so does the state budget. Now that we have a 6.25% sales tax, unless a revolution occurs, you can bet the sales tax is never going back down to 5%. Voting no on Question 1 was an incredibly dumb decision. Foes of the question argued that there would be huge sales tax increases if the income tax was repealed. Well, the income tax sure wasn’t repealed, and there is now a huge sales tax increase anyway!

The state government needs to do what is morally right: stop stealing people’s money and redistributing it to other people who don’t deserve it. This Globe editorial bemoans the fact that the budget would have cut $4 million from food banks, $21 in home care for the elderly, $2.4 million for homeless mentally ill people, $15 million in emergency rental assistance, $4 million for students who are flunking the MCAS exam, and $22 million for drug and alcohol recovery programs. But what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with people having to (gasp!) pay for their own food, their own home care, mental health, and addiction services, and their own housing, or to study for the MCAS themselves using books or the Internet? Liberals might respond that people simply cannot pay for these things. Well, if you don’t pay for something, you shouldn’t get it. If private charities want to operate food banks, fine. But it is simply wrong for people to have their money forcibly taken from them and given to those who have less.

The Globe makes one interesting point. “Those who think they don’t need government services should thank their stars, and dig a little deeper,” the editorial reads. First of all, it is probably not true, as the Globe suggests, that success or failure in life is entirely due to luck. But perhaps it is to some extent – for example, maybe people get jobs because of their looks, the employer’s bias, or random chance, instead of their merit. That would mean that society is sometimes unjust in distributing wealth, and that some of the poor deserve to be rich and vice versa. But this is where liberals and libertarians disagree. As a libertarian, I believe that the way to solve this problem is to change the rules for how society distributes wealth, to ensure that wealth is being distributed justly. Liberals, on the other hand, have no problem with the unjust rules, but then once the wealth is distributed they want to take money from people simply because they have a lot and give services to people merely because they don’t have much. This is never the right thing to do, since it does not take into account whether the wealthy people justly earned their money, or whether the poor people actually deserve more than they are getting. Disparities in wealth are not a bad thing. What is bad is for people to get what they don’t deserve, and taxes and social programs don’t do anything to fix that.

Hopefully that long rant gave you an idea of why I philosophically oppose government-funded social programs. It’s also worth adding that in addition to being morally wrong, tax increases are bad for the economy. We need people to buy more stuff to get us out of the recession, and raising the sales tax is certain to cause the exact opposite to happen.

Thanks, Speaker DeLeo! Your budget proposal almost gave me hope for Massachusetts, but now you took that hope away. It’ll just be another year of exorbitant taxes, socialist redistribution of wealth, intrusive and oppressive government, and a ballooning budget. Hooray!

NOT!!!!

President Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill today to keep the government funded until the end of the fiscal year. Although on the campaign trail he talked about reducing earmarks and waste, if this bill is any indication, it sure doesn’t seem like he meant it! According to Fox News, the omnibus spending bill contains an estimated $7.7 billion in earmarks, in addition to a 14% increase in aid for poor women and babies and a 10% increase in housing vouchers for the poor.

After the porkulus bill that they just passed, this is the last thing the government should be doing. Obama should have vetoed all earmarks and increases in funding for social programs. The number one priority when it comes to federal spending should be to make sure that expenses are less than or equal to revenues. With a national debt of over $10 trillion and a gaping budget deficit, there should be no increases in government funding for anything, period.