To simplify a complicated issue, I propose that there are a few things that reasonable people can agree on, and these points are:

1. health insurance is expensive;
2. without health insurance, if you get a major illness or injury, the financial burden may be disastrous;
3. no one wants their fellow man to suffer financial ruin through no fault of their own; and
4. in a compassionate world, there would be a way to care for all of the most unfortunate of our fellow man.

Where we encounter difficulty is in what manner we can properly address this manifestation of inequity. Despite beliefs to the contrary, evidently, by large segments of the American public, health insurance is not a civil right, nor is it a human right. If insisting the opposite could cure the problem, we would be obliged to insist that mandated home ownership would cure homelessness; and our recent national experience in the real estate market might be an effective argument against pushing home ownership as government policy. We might also note that when a person is disabled or dies without disability or life insurance, the costs to the family can be devastating, but this does not lead politicians to call for universal disability insurance, or universal life insurance.

What the health care debate is all about, again, is the reach of government under the guise of compassion for our fellow man. I mean “guise of compassion” to be read without malice, and possibly, without awareness on behalf of advocates for national health care reform. They may indeed be well-intentioned and not see the fallacy of their ground. At this point, however, there is a reasonable solution that is simple to understand, and would be readily accepted by most Americans; I might be so bold as to say it would be accepted by all Americans.

Not a word therein absolves us of responsibility for ourselves

This paradigm, in which a domestic matter affecting the lives of Americans is either discharged, or it is not, by a local unit of government, is precisely how American government was intended to work. Our system is neither mysterious nor difficult to comprehend. James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist #45:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

In plain English, national governments must be occupied with national issues. Local governments must be occupied with local issues. National issues are those that Madison identified, to which it is reasonable to add administering the national courts, mitigating disputes between the states, and serving as a defender of last resort of the inalienable rights of the citizens of the country. That’s it.

Our health care/health insurance debate should be a good thing, but it’s not. We should be debating what the just duties of government are at each level, including the self, but we’re not. Like a sick patient putting off going to the doctor for fear of what the diagnosis will be, we’re delaying an inevitable reckoning, and making that much harder the work that will have to be done, or the patient will die.

Now, reasonable people will correctly infer that what the President meant was that a budget plan that cut certain programs was inconsistent with our values as Americans, somehow, and thus deserving of the “un-American” label. We could quibble at the fringes of this topic by discussing what he meant; what values we’re betraying, in his mind, by making an attempt at fiscal sanity. Let’s not do that. Let’s take another approach. Namely, there’s two gigantic pitfalls here that a politician of average intelligence should have seen, and avoided stepping in. The President didn’t, and instead has picked a strange fight. Now, most people will admit he is an intelligent man, so we can only look to the President’s ideology as his Achilles heel in this case.

Ryan’s plan, briefly, as the Weekly Standard notes “would cut 46 percent and $4.4 trillion from proposed deficit spending under President Obama’s budget, reform Medicare and Medicaid to put these programs on solid financial footing, and repeal Obamacare.” There are two problems with attacking Ryan’s plan as he did, and here I mean specifically calling it un-American.

Do you know what this document intends?

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

Got that? Anything deviating from the intended design (that design created and ratified by Americans in 1787), then, is more accurately deserving of the un-American label. Forget all of the touchy-feely intentions of nice people for a minute, Mr. President: it’s outcomes that count in the real world.

Secondly, and more damaging, this may very well be Mr. Obama’s “Mission Accomplished” moment: calling spending cuts un-American is a slap in the face of every American who can’t print money or borrow from the Chinese. Every individual, family or business has to be focused like a laser on 1. how much they make and 2. how much they spend. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had since the beginning of the recession with friends, family, and business owners, and they all have to be painfully aware of where every dollar comes from and where every dollar goes.

(Naturally if you work for the government, this all sounds like a foreign language to you.)

Rep. Ryan gets it. His budget proposal might not be perfect, but we have an extraordinary, existence-of-the-Republic-threatening problem on our hands. We’re $14 trillion in debt. Remember how President Bush was mocked endlessly for the “Mission Accomplished” banner? Calling the hard spending discipline that every American family has to do “un-American” further suggests that the President is out of touch and blinded by his ideology, two persistent knocks against him.

Not a good combination in your Commander-in-Chief.

The $787 billion economic stimulus program Obama signed into law soon after taking office included $4.3 billion in competitive grants for states, nicknamed the “Race to the Top” fund. States must amend education laws and policies to compete for a share of the money.

The Education Department is expected to announce its first of two rounds of awards in April. More than 30 states were expected to apply by Tuesday’s deadline.

Obama will ask lawmakers for another $1.35 billion so that states not chosen in either award round will have a chance to compete for money, according to the officials, who spoke anonymously Monday because the president had not announced his plans.

This all sounds rather innocent, on a superficial level.  States merely improve their education and get money from Washington.  An artful spin on this might even be that Washington is encouraging competition among the States; who could object to that?  There are a couple problems with this view, however: one problem is the effects of such policies and one problem is the sustainability of such policies.

The Department of Education’s budget for 2009 is a remarkable $64.9 billion.  I won’t make the argument in this space that the education system in the United States is a complete failure.  While a whole host of data could be drawn upon to make that argument (such as college completion rates remaining essentially unchanged, an indication of how  well-prepared students are upon graduation), that’s not the issue for now.  The question we have to ask is this: should the federal government be in the business of education?

The Federalist Papers

I generally consult James Madison when questions of propriety and responsibilities among the spheres of government come up.  Not surprisingly, in the entirety of the Federalist Papers, not a word is made about what level of government should be responsible for education.  Which is not to say that Madison didn’t have an opinion on the matter, as he notes in Fed #39:

In this relation, then, the proposed government [contemplated by the new Constitution] cannot be deemed a national one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.

It’s a recurring theme in the Federalist Papers, if you’ve taken the time to read them.  The Constitution that was to be ratified required explanation about what it authorized the federal government to do, and just as importantly, what it didn’t authorize the federal government to do.  Of course, Fed #45 also notes:

The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state.

Perhaps another time we could recount the reasons for our arrival at this point. Certainly there are multiple causes for our ailment. One can point to the progressive left agenda dating back to the New Deal as one such cause. A general apathy about the purpose of government is another. Given time, a book could probably be written detailing each step along the way to today’s environment in which the most distant spheres of government are the most “important” and intrusive.

What we can conclude is that an entire re-ordering of the roles and responsibilities of each sphere of government is necessary.  Our current trajectory – ever more centralized, ever more intrusive, ever more unresponsive – is fiscally unsustainable and has the seeds of future failure sown in it.  The operative question we must ask in relation to government actions or programs is this: whose responsibility is it?  Just as we must do for ourselves that which only we can rightly do, so too should States do for themselves that which only what they rightly should be doing.  Abdicating our responsibility and allowing the larger sphere of government to do for us what reason and experience dictate we must do for ourselves may seem innocent enough, but it ever shall be the first chapter in the story of tyranny.

This is the entirety of the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and the last of the ten amendments referred to as the Bill of Rights.  Thankfully, there are people left in the Union who understand the importance of the Tenth Amendment, and some of them are acting on it.

Oklahoma, under the leadership of Representative Charles Key reasserted the rights of the States pursuant to the 10th Amendment.  New Hampshire will soon vote on another such measure.

I’ve discussed Federalist 45 extensively on this site and others, but the facts are indisputable: the Founders intended a federal government limited to certain responsibilities, with most responsibility for the domestic matters of American citizens belonging to the States (as delegated to them by those same citizens).  This is the entire basis for our system of government.  Recent history proves that imbalance – an overly intrusive federal sphere – isn’t working.  Let’s support measures like this as we find them as a means of ensuring the continuity, not to mention the solvency, of the Union.

Yet, we proceed down a dangerous path, immune, it seems, to the warning signs around us. This story today notes that there is a proposal for expanding the FHA: a Depression-era holdover that defies reason by growing in importance as we move further away from the Depression.

The most noteworthy part of the article (emphasis mine):

The plan would be a massive expansion of the Federal Housing Administration, the Depression-era mortgage insurer. FHA would take on $300 billion in new loans for as many as 1 million distressed homeowners, most of whom otherwise wouldn’t qualify for a government-backed loan.

Taxpayer dollars would be at risk should borrowers default on their new mortgages.

So, most of the homeowners in question wouldn’t qualify for a government-backed loan; yet, they’d be getting one. On top of this, defaults – when they occur – will be borne largely by the American taxpayer. Translated loosely, if you’re not getting one of these loans, you’re acting as the bank with your tax dollars (and no, you don’t get a vote in the credit committee). If we hit a recession and people default? That’s no longer the problem of Bank of America, or Wells Fargo, or Indymac Bank. Now it becomes the problem of the American taxpayer.

The complicated scheme gets worse, but the details aren’t the important point. The important point is that the federal government has no business bailing people out of private contracts they entered into in good faith. Even if one could imagine a scenario whereby having “the government” void a perfectly legal contractual agreement seems like a good idea (and I cannot), there’s absolutely no basis for having that sphere of government be the one that’s furthest away from the people. Hard hit real estate markets – such as Miami or Detroit – will be supported by people from all over the country. Their lack of caution, greed-driven speculation or simple indifference to obligations and lack of respect for contracts shall be subsidized by productive persons who manage their affairs properly and respect the law.

The bill is H.R. 5830: if by some chance you’re calling your representative, you might voice your displeasure specifically with this legislation.

And lest you think imbalance is confined to the realm of bad economics masquerading as “compassion”, there’s this story today about No Child Left Behind. It appears that the federal government is rolling out more laws to regulate the way States – and by extension, parents – educate their children.

To be perfectly clear, Mr. Madison wrote in Federalist #45:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.

The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State. The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the State governments, in times of peace and security. As the former periods will probably bear a small proportion to the latter, the State governments will here enjoy another advantage over the federal government.

To Madison’s list I would add only: administration of the courts.

Amazing, then, that we’ve sunk to the condition we’re in. Will liberty be lost, crowded out by the ever-greater expansion of external government, simply because people aren’t educated on the proper role of the federal government? Or will we once again hold accountable ourselves, our neighbors, and our government?

The Tenth Amendment reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The guidlines are there; the justification has been made; all we’re required to do is learn it and insist on compliance by those we send to represent us.