Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (13 page)

According to one front-page
Wall Street Journal
article, “The success of the new health-care law rides in large measure on whether young, healthy people . . . decide to give up a chunk of disposable income to pay for insurance.”
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Jonathan Scarboro, when asked, did the math. “I’m not going to pay for that,” he says of mandated coverage. At thirty years old, Scarboro makes $29,000 a year and is now required to pay, at minimum, $147 a month, with a $6,350 deductible. “It breaks down to: Can I afford it? And, am I getting my money’s worth?”

All good questions, Jonathan, and the answer is “no.” Better to opt out of the program, burn your “ObamaCare card,” and pay the fine. That’s the conclusion of eight out of ten young people interviewed by the
Journal
. Turns out, this strategy could save young Americans hundreds of dollars a year. A National Center for Public Policy Research study recently revealed that single, childless Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four could save at least $500 by opting out of ObamaCare and paying the $95 individual mandate penalty instead.
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The Obama administration made its case for the Affordable Care Act by insisting that the law would reduce health-care costs and premiums, but this claim turns out to be just as true as the president’s memorable promise that you could keep your current plan, period. Particularly for young people, the very purpose of the Affordable Care Act is to increase costs and coverage. When the final prices for the plans being offered on health-care exchanges were announced, the news was far from reassuring for a generation struggling to keep their heads above water as it is. While prices vary considerably by state, the national average cost to a young, healthy person turned out to be $163 a month.
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That’s for the lowest-quality “bronze” plan they are permitted to buy. The kind of coverage young people actually might need, insurance against catastrophic injuries, was not an option. After all, a plan like that would not have the redistributive effect so desired by the architects of ObamaCare. The rational choice for young, healthy people is
not to comply.
A study from the American Action Forum concluded that, on average, premiums for men under thirty will increase by 260 percent.
²²

What eighteen-year-old can afford to pay $163 a month—$2,000 a year—for health insurance that covers services most will never use? How can we, in good conscience, impose this cost on millennials who can barely make ends meet now?

Reason
magazine’s Nick Gillespie sums up the wholesale generational theft of ObamaCare nicely:

It’s a feature and not a bug of the President’s signature health care law that insurance premiums for those under 30 are likely to increase significantly to allow premiums for older Americans to fall. Indeed, the whole plan hinges on getting 2.7 million whippersnappers out of a total of 7 million enrollees to sign up in the individual market during the first year. If too many older and sicker folks flood the market, the system will crash even faster than the HealthCare.gov website.
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There is a rational alternative to this government-run health-care hostage situation. A better, patient-centered model would cut out all of the gray-suited middle men who currently corrupt the effective provision of health care.

Why not respect young people enough as sovereign individuals to let them choose? Why not let young people save for their future health care needs tax free in exchange for voluntarily choosing a catastrophic health insurance policy? Notice that, without really trying, I just solved two of the main challenges in any health reform plan: portability and pre-existing conditions. Turns out that choice, individual savings, and personal responsibility work well, even in health care. The only problem with my plan is the political class’s loss of control over you. It turns out that independent young people can’t be bought as easily on Election Day.

In the meantime, young people will do the simple arithmetic and reject ObamaCare, perhaps going without. Or they may choose to buy outside the government-engineered system.

The Man says he has a plan for you. Better for young people to turn on, tune in, and drop out, and take back for themselves control of their own health-care needs, back from the insanely authoritarian new left.

A L
OST
G
ENERATION

It has become fashionable to stereotype the new generation of Americans as narcissistic, disconnected, and lazy. Last year,
Time
featured a cover branding them “The Me Me Me Generation.”
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This is partially a manifestation of every generation’s belief that “kids today” just aren’t as good as they used to be, but the mainstream attitude toward millennials has acquired a vitriol as puzzling as it is unjustified. No wonder politicians struggle to connect with today’s youth.

In his book
Invisible: How Millennials Are Changing the Way We Sell,
author T. Scott Gross confronts some of these myths. He points out that millennials are reluctant to buy into tradition for the sake of tradition, that they prefer participation to observation, and that they embrace diversity in a way earlier generations never have.
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These are not the values of the social parasite who prefers government dependence to individual initiative.

Millennials are not disconnected, they are just lost, looking for something better. They’re searching for a political home. They are a generation without a voice, sold out by the Democrats they helped put in office, and uninspired by the limp and disingenuous Republican alternative. The poor performance in presidential elections by establishment candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney shows that the same old ideas are not going to win over younger voters. They are tired of endless wars, tired of broken promises, and tired of politics as usual.

Barack Obama got elected by claiming to be a new kind of politician. He was young. He was energetic. He was super cool. He looked different than the pasty, old Washington insiders we had gotten so used to. He spoke with charisma and enthusiasm for his cause, and he utilized new technologies to reach out to young people in a language they understood.

But it all turned out to be total BS. Obama promised the end of lobbyists, but he employs an army of them. He promised to run the most transparent administration in history, but the Committee to Protect Journalists reports that his administration’s efforts to control the media are “the most aggressive . . . since the Nixon administration.” “This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered,” said David E. Sanger, veteran chief Washington correspondent of the
New York Times
.
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Obama’s presidency has been rocked by scandal after scandal. From Fast and Furious to IRS abuses and unprecedented cyber-snooping at the NSA, secretive insider tactics have been business as usual for the last five years.

He campaigned on a platform of peace, but he has conducted military operations in multiple countries at once, costing American lives and racking up still more debt. He has even ordered drone strikes on American citizens without granting them the due process guaranteed by the Constitution.

The nation’s youth are tired of having their hopes dashed by broken promises. They are searching for something new, something different. Public opinion polls are beginning to reflect this desire for a change. A poll by Harvard University of 18- to 29-year-olds finds that trust for every aspect of government, from the Supreme Court to the presidency, is declining, and a growing number disagree with the idea that government spending can cause greater economic growth.
²⁷
A 2013 Rasmussen Reports survey found that 63 percent of respondents think a government with too much power is more dangerous than one with too little power, the highest number ever recorded.
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The president recognizes that he is in trouble with young people. The core principle of his health-care law is that the young will have to buy plans they don’t want or need to subsidize older Americans. How do you convince an underemployed eighteen-year-old that it is their social responsibility to pick up the tab for their grandparents? To address this problem, the president did what he always does: He gave a speech.

Speaking at a so-called “youth summit” at the White House in December 2013, Obama attempted to browbeat a crowd of 160 young activists into compliance, urging them to return to the troubled Healthcare.gov website and sign up for ObamaCare.

Look, I do remember what it is like being twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and aside from the occasional basketball injury, most of the time I kind of felt like I had nothing to worry about. Of course that’s what most people think until they have something to worry about. But at that point, often times, it’s too late. And sometimes in this debate, what we’ve heard are people saying, well, I don’t need this, I don’t want this; why are you impinging on my freedom to do whatever I want.
²⁹

Unable to win them over with talk of social responsibility and their shared sacrifice, the president instead resorted to using fear to convince people to support a program that more and more were finding unpalatable.
Look: You just might die without “free” preventative care.

According to a December 2013 study released by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University (IOP), kids today just aren’t buying what Obama is selling anymore. A majority under 25 would throw Obama out of office given the chance. Fifty-seven percent of millennials now oppose ObamaCare. Among the most coveted potential enrollees currently without health insurance, fewer than one third of 18- to 29-year-olds plan to enlist in the ObamaCare exchanges.

That’s a sea change from the salad days of hope and change.

The survey, part of a unique thirteen-year study of the attitudes of young adults, finds that America’s rising generation is worried about its future, disillusioned with the U.S. political system, strongly opposed to the government’s domestic surveillance apparatus, and drifting away from both major parties. “Young Americans hold the president, Congress and the federal government in less esteem almost by the day, and the level of engagement they are having in politics are also on the decline,” reads the IOP’s analysis of its poll. “Millennials are losing touch with government and its programs because they believe government is losing touch with them.”
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In 2011, a CNN poll that has been conducted regularly since 1993 found a record high number of respondents thinking like libertarians, with 63 percent saying that government is doing too much and 50 percent saying the government should not favor a particular set of values.
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Another CNN poll asked, “Do you think the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens, or not?” Sixty-two percent of respondents answered yes, it does pose a threat, up from 56 percent in 2010, the last time that question was asked.
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A polling company survey asking about the role of government found the highest levels of support for libertarian values in more than a decade.
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Another found growing levels of support for libertarian ideas among the Republican Party.
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Young people are often characterized as economically conservative and socially liberal. A better configuration, or at least a challenge of old, broken premises, might be a clear-eyed skepticism regarding the wisdom of giving third parties the power to make decisions for us.

On questions like the definition of marriage, a better solution might be to let individuals and communities and proven religious institutions decide for themselves. Social norms are created by people working together, not by governments. Governments, and the political process, and the inevitable self-interested agendas that define political outcomes, typically corrupt our best social traditions. America’s youth have never been defined by conformity and submissiveness. You don’t have to agree with the choices of others. You just shouldn’t use force to make them conform to your own set of values.

As long as you don’t hurt people, or take their stuff.

N
OT
THE
P
REFERRED
N
OMENCLATURE?

Conservatives, as you might understand the usage of the term, used to be “liberal,” as in pro-freedom of the individual and pro-limiting the power of the state. Now, many of us use the term “classical liberal.” Former socialists in Europe, prefer to call us “neo-liberals.” Today’s liberals in the U.S. used to be “progressives” in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt and the splinter Bull Moose Party of 1912, but have chosen to misappropriate our classic “liberal” brand. The modern left has so trashed the meaning of “liberal” that they have re-appropriated “progressive” as their preferred nomenclature. “Neo-conservatives” used to be socialists, and despite their respect for traditional social values they still cling to the socialist penchant to rearrange things and manipulate the choices we would otherwise make for ourselves.

Nobody wants to be branded a socialist, or a fascist, or a communist in the United States anymore, including the president. “I am not a socialist,” Obama pointedly told an editorial board at the
New York Times
in 2009. It appears to bug him enough that he reiterated the distinction at the
Wall Street Journal
’s 2013 CEO Counsel meeting: “People call me a socialist sometimes, but you’ve got to meet real socialists, you’ll have a real sense of what a socialist is.”
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Is it all clear enough for you?

Skeptics of too much government power—right, left, and center—struggle with brands. And maybe that’s natural. Maybe this is the inevitable lot of individualists. We don’t always want to be categorized, or collated into one of the two preexisting mail slots that say “Republican” or “Democrat.”