Daily Archives: 7 January 2016

Greed and Freedom

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Greed is not good. And, here is a New Year’s Resolution that we will keep: if you do not end your greed, we will end it for you.

That’s Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (D, VT) claims.

Either he’s never read Adam Smith, never heard of the invisible hand, or he finds free markets and the individual freedom engendered by them anathema to his socialism.

When two men come together to make on exchange of goods—labor for money, for instance, or bread for money, or software coding for bread—each of those two men are acting strictly and solely for his own, personal benefit. Each of those two men is acting on his own greed. Yet, as a result of their voluntary exchange—the one’s money for the other’s item, or the exchange of goods—both men are made better off: both men have something of value to them that neither had before the exchange.

It’s this free market, it’s this basic freedom, that Bernie Sanders wants to destroy.

He uses his line as an excuse to break up entities (banks and insurance companies in his spiel) that he says are too big to fail. It’s certainly true that “too big to fail” is an unacceptable risk to us citizen-taxpayers. But the right answer is not to bail “too big to fail” enterprises out (the risk) or to force onto them a Big Government mandated business decision (the attack on freely agreed exchanges), but to let them fail, with no government—no citizen funded—bailout. Our existing bankruptcy laws are sufficient, and they work well within our free market economy.

We don’t need a Progressive, Know Better Government dictating answers to us, interfering with our own market choices.

Health Insurance and Regulation

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Faith-based organizations that share the costs of health care among their members are a tiny part of the health care coverage industry. They’re also not regulated by government.

[Faith-based] ministry officials say they aren’t offering insurance, don’t guarantee claims will be paid, and don’t need to be regulated.

Naturally, regulators object.

But now, some insurance commissioners are concerned that the ministries could put consumers at risk if bills aren’t paid.

This is the consumer’s choice to risk, though, not government’s authority to command not to. At least in a free society.

And more tellingly:

State regulators also say health ministries disrupt the insurance market because they tend to attract healthier consumers, siphoning them from commercial plans that can be left with sicker or older customers.

What these government regulators carefully omit to mention, though, is that the only “market” liable to disruption is their precious regulated “market.” In a free market economy, such competition is healthy, if disruptive, leading as it does to improving products and lowering costs.

Unfortunately, the number of faith-based health cost sharing entities that are exempt from Obamacare is carefully and deliberately circumscribed by Obamacare. That needs to change.