So I’ve been waiting for someone to write the definitive piece on this whole Obamacare/Catholic/contraception kerfluffle. There is much to write about it, but to date I have yet to see anyone spell out the central lesson that needs to be learned. So here, in a nutshell, is that lesson:

Free stuff and freedom are inherently incompatible concepts. You can choose the free stuff, or you can choose the freedom, but if you choose the free stuff, you will eventually lose the freedom. Here’s why:

1. As any economist can tell you, appetites are unlimited, but means are not. Which is to say, we all can consume unlimited amounts of stuff, but we don’t because we don’t have the money. Thus when you tell somebody that you’re not going to interfere with their freedom to consume, you’re just going to foot the bill, it should come as no surprise that they gorge like pigs at the trough. When the bill comes due, you are then forced to make a choice: curtail the freedom or the free stuff. Either you end the subsidy or you put all sorts of limits on how it can be used. Or, I suppose, you go bankrupt like Europe is doing now, and like the US is about to do soon, in which case the free stuff will go away.
2. Even if the people consuming the free stuff don’t gorge at the trough, even if they are limited in the amount of free stuff they’re given, eventually the choices they make in consuming their free stuff will offend somebody. And because it’s their tax money, indeed everyone’s tax money, that is paying for the free stuff, those people will seek redress that their tax dollars not go to fund the free stuff that so offends them. Likewise, others will believe that because some free stuff is funded that they for some reason or another cannot put to use, that their other free stuff must also be funded in order for things to be fair. This creates endless conflicts and fights. One may think that these fights are mostly between prudes and libertines. Yet one can easily imagine passionate fights between vegetarians and Atkins dieters, or between Mayor Bloomberg and anyone who enjoys anything whatsoever. Literally, the available permutations are endless.

   Moreover, there will invariably be people whose economic interests are at stake as well. They want the stuff they produce available to be purchased as free stuff, and the stuff their competitors make eliminated. This means that they too will lobby, and adopt the arguments of their idealogical brethren mentioned in the preceding paragraph as their own.

   Eventually, someone wins out. That someone is either the lobby with the most to gain financially or the lowest common denominator amongst public opinion. But whatever it is, the freedom to choose for the person receiving the free stuff has been curtailed.

If you want to see this work in a concrete way, find a teenager at the mall and hand him your credit card. Tell him he can do with it what he wants for the time he is at the mall. By the time the bill comes due, the teenager will undoubtedly have spent more than you would have foreseen, and would have spent it on items that you would not likely have approved of. The same thing happens in the public sphere.

You can see these forces play out whenever some politician calls for banning the use of food stamps for candy and cigarettes. But food stamps are a program for the poor only. Obamacare, by contrast, is designed to manage everybody’s health care. The goal is for everybody, or at least most people, to be able to get whatever health care they need without paying for it themselves. The bill is picked up by the employer or the state. And because every decision you make in your life has an impact on your health, and the state is paying your health bill, the state will presume to have a say on those decisions. Put aside the specific reasons why the Obama administration wants contraception covered by insurance (a subject for a later blog post). The fact is that these kinds of fights and loss of freedoms will become a normal part of our life under a state run health care system. The loss of our personal freedoms, religious included, is inevitable. Just wait until the state starts monitoring your daily routines with technology like this. It will happen, it’s only a matter of time.

So apparently the Catholic Church were big boosters for Obamacare when it was being passed, being fans of free stuff for the poor and all. One should hope that they have learned something from this episode about the incompatibility of free stuff and freedom. Though I’m not holding my breath. But perhaps the rest of us might learn something instead.

Again, I’m not holding my breath.

Tags: Free Stuff, Freedom, Obamacare

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 18th, 2012 at 3:53 pm and is filed under News & Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.