Why Gay Marriage Is Not an Inalienable Right

I'd like to preface this discussion first by saying that I sincerely wish happiness and peace to everyone, especially my gay friends and fellow citizens. My thoughts here were provoked by a concern over the fact that rights-based arguments that fail to draw a distinction between inalienable rights and vested rights are endangering our freedom. The LGBT community (hereafter just "gay") should be equally concerned about the direction this country is taking with regard to inalienable rights. Neither gays nor natural family advocates should have to worry that government will infringe on their inalienable rights. What follows is my attempt to revive a proper view of rights and see how we can best meet everyone's needs fairly.

I'm amazed that people can get away with the rights-based argument for gay marriage. It is an astounding misunderstanding of individual rights. Gays have the inalienable right to do what they want with other like minded adults. But marriage is an institution that implies the blessing of others. You cannot demand that other people give you their blessing. It is their individual right to give it or withhold it.

The judge who overruled California's Prop 8 today relied on the argument that "Proposition 8 singles out gays and lesbians and legitimates their unequal treatment" and "[it] was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples".

In 1983, Martin Luther King Jr. Day became a national holiday. This was a great honor for a great man. The creation of this holiday cost the federal government an extra day of holiday pay to every federal worker. Doesn't MLK Day discriminate against all other great Americans who were denied the honor of having a day named for them? I guess all these other Americans "aren't as good" as Mr. King. That is a glass-half-empty argument that should be rejected.

When people democratically decide to bestow an honor on someone or a group of people (such as 9/11 workers) it is not a disparagement of the rights of anyone else. And honors such as these are not rights! You cannot demand that somebody else think well of you.

Gay marriage which is forced onto a people undemocratically is a violation of their right to honor whom they will. Take away the economic benefits (which shouldn't be that much anyway in a limited government society) and marriage is nothing but a blessing of your peers. You cannot demand that blessing, it has to be given freely. I have the right to band together with like-minded individuals to give my blessings to whom I may. Government is one way in which people band together.

The fact is, there is only one pairing of human beings that has a perpetual risk of bringing new people into the world: heterosexual unions. Gay unions might have kids from prior marriages or from adoption, but they never have to run the risk of pregnancy planned or otherwise. This special character of heterosexual union makes it fundamentally different than gay union no matter what activist judges may believe. We can give the emperor a new set of clothes, but nobody will be fooled. If some people want to give their blessing to couples who will be creating new members of society, that is their right. Gays can ask for a similar blessing, but it is not an inalienable right to receive it.

If Gays really believed in inalienable rights they would demand that the government stop giving preferential treatment to anyone. Asking that they receive preferential treatment on par with heterosexuals still leaves huge unfairness gaps. What about single parents? What about Catholic Nuns? Shouldn't they have a life partner that can make decisions for them when they are incapacitated? How about two celibate males who live together as friends and are soul-buddies? Why are they "singled out" for discriminatory exclusion from marriage and all the appertaining benefits? You know I'm right. If there is anything that needs to be fixed it is first, we shouldn't be doling out benefits at tax payer expense to any special groups. Second, if we need to fix the law to enable significant-other visitation rights, power of attorney rights, etc. all we need is a "life partner" law. It wouldn't be marriage, it would just be a special legal instrument to fulfill a broad need. Third, marriage should be left to the private sector.

Life partner laws, private marriage, inalienable rights. Problem solved.

IOUSA

This movie is essential viewing for all voting citizens. Schedule 30 minutes to be educated about the looming debt crisis. This is a bipartisan movie which was created largely in response to the Bush years.



The graphical demonstration of historical debt and the social security time bomb is very illuminating. One bone I have to pick is the simplistic description of the 80's as " unprecedented" in peace time spending. The fact is, it is okay to go in debt if you get a return on investment. WWII: great return on investment. Winning the cold war and creating 20 years of prosperity? Great return on investment. So President Bush, to me, is at fault for wasting the Reagan dividend. He gave us TSA, earmarks, and Medicare part D. I agreed with Operation Iraq Freedom, but we should have been making harder choices at home.

The other bone to pick with this movie is the lack of dynamic tax modeling. The 2003 Bush tax cuts are largely misunderstood. Those tax cuts created more revenue for the government. It turns out that when you reduce penalties to wealth generation, more of it gets generated. Kind of like how McDonalds makes more selling Big Macs for 2.99 as opposed to 4.99. So I say "yea!" for the tax cuts, but why squander this excellent tax lesson on expanding government?

My RX for the national debt is simple: the FairTax along with a balanced budget amendment. Raising taxes on the rich is the wrong answer. If anything we need a flatter tax with less deductions and credits and one which includes all voting citizens not just the top 50% of tax payers.

Gun-point analogy doesn't hold water

(This is my rebuttal to BadTux's explanation of why health costs defy free market forces. There it is argued that inelastic demand allows health providers to hold patients hostage for any amount they want to charge)

BadTux, at least your honest that Obamacare IS the takeover of the insurance industry that Obama refuses to admit. He got this through by hook and by crook. IF we wanted to make the insurance companies into a public utility, it should have been sold to the American people that way, not as a trojan horse. BTW, I agree with you that single payer is more efficient than Obamacare as it now stands.

I flatly reject your points numbered 2 and 3. I have two points to make about your argument #2 (I'll label mine using letters) A. Your point about inelasticity of demand could be applied to food. Why don't farmers hold us all at sickle-point for all our money because we'd die if we didn't eat? Because supply is not inelastic (at steady state and when natural resources are not a limiter). The more people are willing to pay, the more supply springs into existence until an equilibrium is reached where prices cannot rise further. (The price is where the supply and demand curves intersect.) And there are ways to create the conditions for a steeper supply curve. Like in France where they subsidize medical training.
But you're gonna say supply is inelastic when it comes to highly trained doctors who can perform transplants or rare treatments. Nope. It is only temporarily inelastic as doctors cannot be trained overnight. The only way the gun-point scenario can exist is if doctors operate as a cartel. And I agree the do! So what do labor cartels do to inflate wages? This is classic Adam Smith BTW: they raise barriers to entry! Yes, American doctors raise barriers to entry into their profession. Obamacare does nothing to help with this. The way to ensure that the cartel cannot hold people at gun point is to break the cartel. This means creating more paraprofessionals that require fewer years of training, it means relaxing accreditation rules to allow more medical schools. It means allowing pharmacists to prescribe drugs, optometrists to perform laser eye surgery, etc. etc. It means allowing tradeoffs wherein inexperienced doctors are allowed to perform heart surgery if the patient is willing to accept the risk (and benefits in terms of cost). There are so many ways to solve the inelasticity of supply and Obamacare does none of it. Badtux, have you read my post Freedom-based Vision of Health Care?

Okay point B) to your point 2. The heart surgery example is not what I was speaking of when I said we should eliminate all middlemen. That is an example where insurance is well suited. We do have middlemen for high stakes items. But we don't need middlemen for routine maintenance. You maintain your automobile without insurance don't you? You only see the insurance company for an accident. As pointed out recently by David Goldhill in the Atlantic, there is no reason whatsoever why people shouldn't be able to budget for and pay directly for 90% of the healthcare they will need during their life. Especially things like pregnancies, vaccinations, eye exams, etc. Why in the name of Pete do we need to buy insurance for anything but a catastrophe? How much do you think food would cost if we had a food insurance system with a bureaucracy to pay for it? Even if your inelasticity argument carried weight for heart surgery, it wouldn't for 90% of the reasons why we see a doctor. Obamacare takes over the 90% that is non-catastrophic. In fact he abhors the concept of catastrophic only insurance (insurance was invented for catastrophes)

Now point C) to your point 3. Do you mean to say that the writers of the constitution meant that the tax code should be used to influence (socially engineer) individual behavior? Please! How much have you studied the constitution? I've read the Federalist papers and Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, the original protagonist of both taxation and the welfare clause. The power of taxation was to fund the federal government not to manipulate people! The revenue was to enable the government to perform its enumerated powers, which for Hamilton and Madison meant mostly national defense. Manipulating people was not the primary motivation. (that the Whiskey tax might reduce liquor consumption as a side benefit was completely adjunct to raising revenue) And for the record, I don't support the home interest deduction either. I've always been consistently against using the tax code to micromanage people. In fact, the only good solution is the FairTax.

In a followup, you said the fact that uninsured who have no middleman and who get charged exorbitantly are proof the we need middlemen to fix prices. This again harks back to my catastrophic versus routine care point. We do need middlemen for catastrophes. But we'll all benefit when we eliminate middlemen for 90% of non-catastrophic care especially the uninsured who benefit from lower prices more than any of us. The exorbitant fees (which are usually negotiated down even for the uninsured as pointed out in the article) are a reflection of a bureaucratic 2-middleman system that discourages price transparency. They have all the incentive in the world to hide the true price of care because demand is not checked by price but by bureaucratic wrangling. Obamacare just enshrines this system into place while trying to cover the uninsured in a way that will ensure that the true price of medicine is never found and thus, capital will never flow to where a free people would want it to go.

Liberal Hypocrisy

Ten questions for liberals**

1. Why would you support a health care law that requires people to report to the IRS what they do for health care but then vilify President Bush for wiretapping terrorist suspects?
2. Why would you rant about profligate Republican spending from 2000-2008 but then support trillions in new government programs and deficit spending under Obama?
   
3. Why did you rail against Republican threats of a "nuclear option" to bypass the filibuster in 2005 (to confirm judges) but then support the effectively the same tactic to pass health care in 2010?
4. Why did you harp about the Iraq war for 4 straight years, but now that Obama is president (and has "stayed the course" for the most part) you are silent? Why no calls to bring the troops home anymore?
5. Why do you care about 18,000 who supposedly die for lack of health insurance (this has been debunked) but you stand idly by while the lives of 1.2 million preborn children are aborted?
6. Why is the secret ballot sacrosanct for general elections, but not for union elections? Why is it okay for big labor unions to support political causes but big companies should be barred from doing so?
7. Why was Karl Rove style politics wrong during the Bush years, but Chicago style politics is just fine in 2010? Why isn't Obama called out by prominent democrats and reporters for 180 degree turnabouts on two major campaign promises to improve transparency and bipartisanship? (Have you seen his "50 plus one" statements before being elected?)
8. Why is big-anything bad (big pharma, big oil, big banks, etc.) except when talking about the government?
9. Why does your love of free speech stop at the doors of Fox News and Clear Channel Communications?
10. Why do you claim to be rights activists while attacking the 1st, 2nd, ninth, and tenth amendments?

I understand that a similar "conservative hypocrisy list" can be generated. Let's hear it. I'll answer it honestly if you answer this.

**Neo-liberals. Classical liberal = modern conservative

Why the current "demon pass" healthcare should be voted down

The "demon pass" health care bill should be voted down. Here is why.
(USA Today has a great summary of the recent changes as of 3/19/2010)

1. Forcing insurance companies to accept patients with pre-existing conditions destroys the concept of insurance. We will no longer have insurance in the U.S. but instead we'll have an inefficient form of socialized medicine that will magnify all the bad aspects of our current system.
2. This bill is a blow to freedom.
   
   • It takes away individual freedom by mandating that everyone purchase insurance. People are forced into economic relationships against their will. It forces priorities onto people that they may not otherwise choose for themselves. This directly interferes with freedom of conscience and the the pursuit of happiness. **
     
   • It forces companies to provide benefits outside of normal market forces. This is an affront to free enterprise and can only have the side effect of increasing unemployment and depressing wages.
   • It forces insurance providers to run their business in a way the government sees fit. They become agents of the government rather than agents of free enterprise.
     
3. One of the ways the bill attempts to pay for itself is with Medicare cuts. Medicare cuts in and of themselves would be a great way to ensure future solvency of Medicare, but the cuts should not be used to "rob Peter to pay Paul". Medicare is being used as a cow to milk. It is wrong to use this sleight of hand to create yet another entitlement which cannot possibly be anymore solvent than Medicare has turned out to be. (And who believes that these cuts will even stick? Every year congress relents and delays cuts that were supposedly already made in the past.)
4. New taxes. An increase on the Medicare payroll tax on high income earners. Does anyone believe high income earners will just "eat" tax increases without changing their behavior? A new excise tax on health insurance. Taxes and surcharges on individuals and companies who don't comply with mandates. When push comes to shove, these initiatives will backfire in ways that reduce the optimistic CBO revenue estimates. Which leads me too...
5. Exploding national debt. If you really believe this bill will "cut" the deficit (and the word "cut" here is like when a furniture store has a "sale" after marking up prices) then you haven't been paying attention to the last 30 years of entitlement history.
   

This assault on freedom will damage what our nation stands for possibly beyond repair. Rather than solving current health care problems, it will exacerbate them by further decreasing the incentives for consumers to be cost-conscious and for providers to be transparent.

See:
Right to Health Care: When Freedom is Slavery by Another Name
My Freedom Based Vision for Health Care Reform

**Some folks may in fact want to trade health for comforts of another sort. It is not up to the government to make those choices for them. By the same token, the government cannot be on the hook to bail out people who change their minds about being uninsured when it is too late...their care must be at the whim of whatever society can afford but be NOT guaranteed.