Government Expansion
Mar 18th, 2010 by Frank Knotts
Some people may watch the evening news and believe that the number one debate in the nation today is about health care. On the one side, I’ll call it the left, you have people in power and control of the Congress who want to take over the nation’s health care industry and put it under the purview of the Federal government. On the other side, I’ll call it the right, you have people who still believe that the individual and the private sector are still the best way to handle such an important decision as life and death.
The real question in this so-called health care debate isn’t just what is best for the consumer, it’s about whether the nation wishes to continue down this dangerous path of out of control government expansion.
If we allow the Federal government to take over the decision-making of where and how and of what kind of health care insurance we are to buy, or even if we wish to buy it, then we will have conceded that we as individuals are not capable of running our own lives. We will have admitted that we must have government agents make all of our life’s most important choices. We will have become nothing more than a small piece in the government machine.
We have over the years allowed government expansion in so many areas of our lives that we now take it for granted. Many times we hear that government expansion has been for the benefit of the nation and the people. Examples such as how much safer our roads are due to the fact that government inspectors give our cars a good two-minute inspection every two years.
But as so often is the case, inspections by the government then turn into regulating. Once we gave the authority to the government to inspect our car and to determine whether they were safe or not, the government then took it upon itself to make our cars safer and more efficient. The government started mandating such things as fuel mileage. The car companies were forced to make their cars out of lighter materials to achieve this , without giving up the performance that the consumers desired.
Due to the lighter materials however the cars were not as safe , because they crumpled so easily. So the government came back and saved the day again by mandating all sorts of safety changes. Then the government took it upon itself to mandate environmental limits on the exhaust of the vehicles.
Now some will say that all of this is for the good of the nation, the world and the people. This can be argued, but what it did was to raise the cost of the vehicles. Some may ask , so what ? Well just imagine what people would be able to buy with the extra two, three or even four thousand dollars, that all of that government regulation has added to the price of a car. What this has done , it has narrowed the consumer’s choices of where they can spend the money they earn.
Another favorite example that the left loves to use to justify government expansion is the FDA. They will tell you that millions of lives are save every year because of the FDA’s inspection of food and drugs. Again this can be argued to be a benefit, one that even I would not deny. But also again , once we handed over the authority to the government to make the determination of whether our food was safe and whether our drugs would do what the pharmaceutical companies said they would, we also opened the door for the government to expand its authority .
We have reached a point in this nation where , not only does the government regulate the preparation of food and the testing of drugs, we now see governments such as New York City regulating such things as saturated fats and salt limits in the foods that restaurants sell, we see the government telling restaurants that they must post calorie content on their menus. Is this really what government should be doing?
If this health care reform is passed in any form, by any party, we will see the largest expansion of government control and regulation in the history of this nation. We will witness the government take over of every aspect of our lives.
Once we allow the government to have the power to decide our health care issues, it will expand and grow and regulate everything from the food we eat to the kind of car we drive, to the leisure activities we choose to participate in.
If we allow the government this power, it will be the end of freedom in this nation. It will be the end of the great experiment.
