February 2004: You Can’t Always Get What You Want

About once a year, I try to answer a seemingly simple question: Are we winning or losing?

Many people ended 2003 disappointed with President Bush, Congress, and/or their state and local elected officials. I disagree. It helps if you keep in mind the words of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards:

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find, that ya
Get what you need
Oooh, yeah!

What We Want

We want to exercise our natural right to live our lives as we see fit, limited only by the requirement that we not harm others. America was founded on the notion that freedom comes first. If you want to live for the sake of someone else or submit to their bondage, go right ahead. But don’t even think about making the rest of us drink your Kool-aid.

Our Founding Fathers faced the difficult task of balancing their passion for individual liberty with the need for enough government to provide for the common defense, a judicial system, and a few other essential public goods. The Constitution they wrote put the terms and conditions of that balancing act on paper. The basic idea was a strictly limited government to protect the borders and deliver the mail, and reliance on individuals and civil institutions--families, churches, businesses, and charities--to do everything else.

It is possible that for the first few decades after the Constitution was written, we didn’t have enough government to prevent the use of force or fraud by the powerful against the weak or naive. I don’t know. What I do know is that today, two centuries and 17 years later, the greatest threat to individual liberty is not too little, but too much government.

What We Got

We’ve given up a lot of our natural liberty over the years to politicians, bureaucrats, and busybodies who want to tax and regulate us into docile grazers in the giant state-herd. Taxes take nearly half our incomes, and inflation quietly drains away the value of the other half. Government, not private businesses, is the biggest employer and land owner in many cities and states.

Regulations make it illegal to own or use some products, such as guns and recreational drugs. Even smoking a cigarette in a bar or restaurant is now a crime in New York City and other places. Regulations limit what cars we can and can’t own, what health insurance we can buy, and in some communities, whether we can park a pickup truck overnight in our own driveways or burn leaves in our backyards.

You can’t launch a new product without having it inspected seven ways from Sunday ... and even then you’ll be sued if a million people benefit from your product but 10 suffer some unexpected side effect. If you’re a farmer or rancher, you can’t fill in a mudhole without EPA approval. If you’re a doctor, you face criminal prosecution for making a mistake on your Medicare paperwork.

What Happened in 2003

But things are improving. In five important public policy arenas in 2003, battles were fought that ended in victories for freedom.

• Taxes: Federal tax receipts as a percentage of gross domestic product are down to 16.6 percent, the lowest bite since 1959. President Bush has delivered twice on the tax cuts he promised during the 2000 campaign and says he’ll go back year after year with more tax cut proposals. Total state tax collections were down from $557 billion in 2001 to $536 billion in 2003, a two-year decline of 3.8 percent. By these measures, the state shrunk is shrinking.

• Health care: The Medicare reform of 2003 renamed medical savings accounts “health savings accounts,” or HSAs, removed restrictions that made them unattractive or unavailable to most people, and made them permanent. HSAs are similar to 401(k) retirement accounts. They allow you to pay for medical expenses with pre-tax dollars the same way your employer now buys health insurance. That makes it easier to pay for higher deductibles, which means premiums can fall and hospitals will have to rationalize the prices they charge to patients paying with cash.

“HSAs will revolutionize the U.S. health care and health insurance industries,” says John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, who ought to know because he’s been campaigning for free-market health care reforms for more than two decades. “Democrats know that a reinvigorated private health insurance market will end their dream of a Canadian-style health system,” writes The Wall Street Journal in an editorial appropriately titled “Teddy’s Nightmare.”

• Environment: The year was, in the eyes of many observers, a turning point in the global debates over global warming and sustainable development. Russia announced it probably would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the global warming treaty, and the U.S. Senate defeated a watered-down domestic version of it. An international conference on sustainable development held in Johannesburg rejected the left’s anti-human and anti-technology agenda and endorsed a much more sensible pro-market approach.

• Privacy: In June, the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that sodomy behind closed doors is protected from government interference. Cultural conservatives warned this was a step down the path toward gay rights, which gives them the willies. As if to prove them right, gay activists quickly launched a campaign for gay marriage.

I oppose all group rights and privileges, period. Justice means equal treatment of individuals before the law, not awarding extra points to people who claim to be victims of past or present circumstances. Consistency requires that I also oppose laws harassing people engaged in peaceful conduct I disagree with. What consenting adults do in the privacy of their homes is none of my business, and consequently is not the business of my government.

• Education: Colorado passed a statewide voucher program and Congress is about to approve an appropriations bill that includes vouchers for Washington DC. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), President Bush’s education reform package signed into law in 2001, may yet emerge as the straw that broke the back of the government school monopoly.

In return for more money (not as much as Bush had promised), NCLB forced government schools to inform parents when they fail to educate children or to employ qualified staff. Parents whose children aren’t learning must be allowed to choose another government school or given vouchers to hire private tutors. These rules have delivered a massive dose of discomfort to school administrators long accustomed to hiding evidence of their shortcomings. Parents are getting an education in just how bad their government schools are and how resistant they are to allowing parents to choose.

We Get What We Need

In these five areas, freedom took some long strides forward in 2003--but each step had to be paid for. It’s as if we are slaves buying our freedom on an installment plan. We have every right to complain about having to pay at all for what should be our natural right ... but real-world politics makes this the only way.

The price of lower taxes is a bigger federal budget deficit, $374 billion in 2003. The price of expanded HSAs is a prescription drug benefit for seniors that will cost at least $400 billion over the next 10 years. New and unnecessary air and water pollution regulations supported by the Bush administration to appease the environmental lobby will cost consumers billions of dollars. And the federal sodomy case and NCLB damage our federalist system of divided government power by putting new authority in the hands of national officials.

Was it worth the price? I think so. We may not always get what we want, but in 2003 we got what we needed.

Joseph L. Bast is president of The Heartland Institute. His email address is jbast@heartland.org.