April 17, 2011
The New York Times told readers that the battle over Representative Paul Ryan’s proposal, which would redistribute tens of trillions of dollars from poor and middle class people to the wealthy is a debate over:
“the size and role of government — of the balance between personal responsibility and private markets on the one hand and public responsibility and social welfare on the other.”
This is not true. Paul Ryan, who is ostensibly the proponent of small government in this story, wants the government to be able to arrest people for conducting free market transactions with prescription drugs and medical devices. In Ryan’s world, the government will give certain companies patent monopolies that allow them to charge prices that are many thousand percent above the cost of production.
Ryan also has shown zero interest in opening trade for doctors and other highly paid medical professionals, which would go far towards reducing costs in the United States. Ryan also wants to deny seniors in the United States the option to buy into more efficient health care systems in other countries.
According to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) projections, Ryan’s plan would increase the cost of providing Medicare equivalent care to seniors by $30 trillion over Medicare’s 75-year planning period, an amount that is 6 times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall. This is entirely the additional cost to the country in the form of higher payments to insurers and health care providers. This does not include the cost shift from the government to beneficiaries.
It is entirely possible that strong believers in small government would prefer having the government provide health care given the enormous savings projected by CBO. The savings are equivalent of $100,000 for every man woman and child in the country. Even libertarians generally advocate having the government take responsibility in areas where large potential efficiencies exist by dealing with an issue through a centralized body.
The one unifying theme to Representative Ryan’s proposal is that it redistributes a vast amount of income upward. It does not always lead to smaller government rather than bigger government.
It is understandable that proponents of redistributing income upward would try to conceal their motives by feigning an interest in small government. The prospect of a small government probably has more appeal to most citizens than the prospect of further upward redistribution of income. The NYT should not be assisting the proponents of upward redistribution in concealing their agenda.
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