Gingrich is Not Alone in His Errors

While I rail against Newt Gingrich as the symbolically anointed leading intellectual of conservatives’ failure to present an actual alternative public policy, such a fault in conservatives is not limited to the U.S.

Paul McKeever, leader of the Freedom Party of Ontario, makes the following observation local to his politics:

The essential problem is: conservativism. [The conservative] Hudak is a good exemplar of it, but replacing Hudak with another conservative would not change the fact that conservativism is not the answer…that the conservatives offer little of substance to take the place of what [the Liberal] McGuinty [government] is offering – is founded on the fact that both the liberals and the conservatives are essentially poll-driven pragmatists who, when nobody is complaining, find new things to control; more ways to reduce your discretion.

As I did yesterday, McKeever identifies that Pragmatism is the common ground and the common error shared by conservatives and liberals. Further, McKeever identifies that the proper role of government is being evaded by conservatives in their opposition to the liberals:

Notice – as an almost perfect example – that, in the little and vague bit that Hudak does offer as a “good start”, we see the words: “We need a new direction — one that reduces the cost of the public sector and fosters growth in the private sector”. I respond:

(a) no, the “cost” of the public sector is not the essential issue. The essential issue is: of *what* ought the public sector to be comprised. The answer should *not* include: “tax funded health care” or “tax funded education”, the two elements that account for about 75% of all tax revenues in the province. The “new direction” is not to reduce the cost of those services, but to stop funding them with taxes altogether…

(b) no, the problem is not that McGuinty’s governance fails to “foster the private sector”. If anything, failing to foster the private sector is a *virtue*. The simple fact is that the government ought not to be *fostering* anything except respect for the life, liberty, and property of others. It ought *not* to be a player in the economy; a lender of last resort; a business “partner”; or any of the other things that today’s corporativists (whether liberal or conservative) want it to be.

Both conservatives (like Gingrich and Hudak) and the liberals (like Pelosi and McGuinty) identify problems, but their proposed solutions fail because they do not integrate objective principles and facts from reality in the context of the limited proper role for government.



Paul McKeever
Leader of the Freedom Party of Ontario

Gingrich v. Government Health Care?

In a Washington Post Op-Ed with Texas Gov. Rick Perry (11/6/2009), Newt Gingrich focused upon what he must consider to be his best case against the Pelosi-care bill. His is a very pragmatic argument against expanding federal regulation of health care: if it has not worked then try something else, but do not stop and examine the failed premise at the heart of the problem. In his effort at opposition, Gingrich demonstrates that he is not in fact opposing the fundamental error, but instead accepts and embraces it.

According to Gingrich, the Democrats’ plan violates the proper relationship between the federal and state governments by imposing an unfunded mandate upon the states and ignoring state efforts seeking waivers to federal regulations that would enable state innovation in health care reform.

As evidence for his advocacy of multiple disjointed concurrent state-centric reform efforts, he cites 1) the positive impacts from Texas’ tort reform that resulted in the availability of more doctors, and reduced costs for liability insurance and lawsuit settlements, 2) the unpermitted promise offered by Texas’ Medicaid reform proposals to facilitate the indigents’ acquisition of private insurance and reduce emergency room expenses, 3) the poor quality of care under Medicaid caused by federally imposed price controls, and 4) the high costs of improper payments within Medicaid.

Essentially, his argument is that federal direction of health care policy has not worked and should not be expanded; instead he argues that this failed regulatory system should be reformed by devolving policy decisions to state governments. While this particular position pragmatically contradicts Gingrich’s advocating elsewhere that federal regulation of interstate commerce nullify state mandates upon private insurance contracts, inconsistency within his own positions is not his primary error.

Gingrich, Pelosi, and the Democrat sponsored health care proposals share an invalid view of the proper role of government. All agree that through democracy our representatives can dictate via statute any health care policy that is ephemerally supported in a public opinion poll by 50% + 1 of the electorate, and that such policy can be changed to the opposite tomorrow when the poll results shift. Their elevation of popular whim evades the fact that such democratically based legislative commands on health care policy violate individual Americans’ fundamental right to association and contract.

Currently, public health care policy is based upon the premise that government should force someone other than the patient to pay for the patient’s medical bills, a compelled risk sharing scheme. Consequently, public health care plans (Medicare and Medicaid) are going bankrupt; meanwhile, government subsidized employer-based health care plans erode jobs and wages by diverting capital from productive investments. In response to this government sponsored failure, our two political factions argue about how an intrusive government can solve the problems created by intrusive government policy.

Instead of focusing upon what novel pragmatic actions could be taken by government to maintain the premise that each of us must be forced by government to pay for someone else’s health care, a new perspective is needed to focus upon individual rights, an individual’s freedom to act without compulsion while respecting others’ freedom to act independently upon their own judgment. Concretely, this focus upon individual rights in health care policy would result in protecting individual contract rights from state mandates, civil suit reform to facilitate the timely and just resolution of private disputes, ending the expansion of government’s policy domain through legislative abuse of the tax code, and winding redistributionist public welfare programs down to their complete elimination.