The real price of the stimulus will be individual libertyby Kevin O'Brien , Thursday February 12, 2009, 4:45 AM
If all goes as scheduled -- and barring an exquisitely timed meteor strike on Washington, D.C., it will -- on a holiday formerly dedicated exclusively to the president who saved the union in hopes of "a new birth of freedom," the president we have today will sign freedom's death warrant.
Two quotes from Benjamin Franklin leap to mind:
- "You have a republic, madam, if you can keep it";
- "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."
We have kept the republic poorly. And in a stampede toward a false promise of economic security, we have given up our essential liberty. Next week, President Barack Obama will approve the biggest expansion of federal power, vis a vis the individual, that Americans have ever seen.
Mere pork has never been the problem with this monstrosity. Pork we can digest.
The deeper problem is two-fold:
- This bill will do almost nothing to ease the current financial crisis
- it tightens the federal government's fist on the future of education, energy research, industrial policy and especially health care.
Do we really need Education and Energy departments double their current size?
Should it be left to 15 federal employees to pass binding judgment on the usefulness of every medical product and procedure?
(You'll find that and more in Betsy McCaughey's excellent piece for Bloomberg.
Nor is anything in the power-grab bill temporary. None of it will ever go away, absent the application of political dynamite.
Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's takeover of the U.S. financial sector continues unchecked, with ever deeper debts attached.
- "It is essential for every American to understand that the battle for economic recovery must be fought on two fronts,"
- "We have to both jump-start job creation and private investment, and we must get credit flowing again to businesses and families."
The trouble is, the "remedies" he plans
-- inasmuch as he's let us in on what they are
-- can't win on either front.
The secretary of the treasury
-- the one and only guy who could do the job, and so got a pass for cheating on his taxes
-- gives no indication that he understands the basic truth that government and private enterprise compete for finite capital. To the extent that you feed government, you starve private enterprise by taking capital out of its hands.
Recessions occur when, for whatever reason, private capital runs for shelter. They end when private investors decide that the rewards of putting their capital back in play outweigh the risks.
Since everything Congress and the Obama administration are doing is certain to lead investors to the opposite conclusion, this recession is going to go on for a while. Which ought to prompt two questions in the minds of Americans:
- Do our elected leaders not know what they're doing?
- do they know exactly what they're doing?
Being the suspicious sort, I say it's the latter. They're not, in the words of Obama's top adviser, Rahm Emanuel, letting the financial crisis "go to waste." They're using it to grow, rapidly and exponentially, the dependence of individuals on the federal government. To the degree that they succeed, individual liberty must die, and I don't see anything stopping them.
- "We won,"
Like the biblical Esau, we have sold our birthright for pottage -- a sale we've been mulling for a century as government has eroded freedom and self-reliance a little here and a little there.
But at least Esau got to eat. We're getting an empty bowl -- the illusory notion that government will make us secure; that it can regulate away our risks.
It won't, because it can't. It can only tell us everything is OK until, oops, it isn't. That is precisely what happened when this financial crisis began.
Now we're letting ourselves in for a health care crisis, an energy crisis, an education crisis, etc., but when they hit our options for solving them may well be down to one:
- government.
Our government was never meant for this.
What it was designed to do was to safeguard individual liberty;
to put the power of self-government in the hands of the people.
We're witnessing the end of that grand experiment, and at horrendous financial cost.
As Arnold Kling, a Cato Institute economist, put it this week:
- "I think about the stimulus as an economist, but I feel it as a father. Barack Obama is destroying my daughters' future. It is like sitting there, watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs."
I addressed something similar but shorter to my 17-year-old son when I walked in the door from work Tuesday, the day the Senate passed its version of the stimulus:
- "Good luck getting your country back.
By the time you pull it off, if you ever do, I'll be long dead."
Meet 
