Sunday, December 06, 2009

The Bottleneck of Congress

The best way to make a business fail is to push all decision making for the business through an over taxed bottleneck.

Nevada Senator Harry Reid just issued a charged partisan attack against the hated Republicans and secondary media for the claim that there is not enough transparency in the Health Care process.

Mr. Reid then enumerated all of the time that Congress diverted from its Consititutional duties to the Unconstitutional power grab of health care.

The Founders realized that one of the great problems of the monarchy was that monarchy pushed all decision making through a single point of failure that tended to be both overtaxed and corruptible.

The founders sought a balanced decision making system that distributed those decisions that had the most impact on individual lives to authorities close to the individual people.

They stated this idea in the tenth Amendment in an effort to punctuate their belief that the Constitution enumerated limited powers to the Federal government and reserved the other powers to the local authorities when individuals had a better shot at influencing the process.

So, in response to Harry Reid:

Yes, you and Nancy Pelosi diverted a great deal of legislation time from the jobs you were supposed to be doing. During this period you dropped the ball on a war which put our troops in danger. By dropping the ball, you created a situation where the Taliban had a resurgence in Afghanistan and came close to toppling the fragile new democracy in Pakistan.

The delay in sending additional troops meant that we had insufficient forces to protect the Afghan forces during their important election. Because our Congress took the eye off the ball, there was insufficient resources in Afghanistan to help assure the election was fair. As such, it appears that the election that so many of our troops died for was in fact manipulated and stolen from the people.

In Iran, we find that, while Senator Reid focused the attention of Congress on the power grab, Iran threw hundreds of political dissidents into prison and entered the final stage of its nuclear program.

On the environmental side of the fence we find that the Senate has an important Constitutional duty to provide advice and consent in international treatises.

Because of the Congressional power grab of health care, the President of the United States will attend one of the most important International Treatises negotiation in Copenhagen this month without adequate advice from our Senate leaders.

Dear Mr. Reid, while you dropped the ball on this extremely important Constitutional duty, there erupted claims that some of the data being used to justify the Copenhagen treaty was falsified.

Regardless of one's beliefs about global warming, the ClimateGate scandal is bad news. ClimateGate brings up the spectre that this treaty might be a flawed theory, in which case we will do irreparable harm to our economy for no positive return. The theory might be true, and the charges of fudged data might keep countries from ratifying a treastises that is necessary for preserving life on the planet earth.

All of the time that the Senate took from its Constitutional duties to perform an Unconstitutional power grab is time that should have been spent on the most important international treatises passed since the creation of the UN and NATO.

The really ironic thing is that, despite all of the time that Congress diverted from its Constitutional duties to grab regulation of insurance from the States, the time they gave to the important issue of health care still is not enough.

Don't you see?

Health care is the single most time consuming activity that we humans do. Health care is about the appliction of time, resources and decision making power to the needs of individuals. It is tough, time consuming work.

The founders of the US realized that such time consuming processes should be done through a distributed decision making process in the states or by the people themselves.

Health is an attribute of the individual. Both the financing and administration of health care needs to take place at a level close to the individual.

The desire for remform is not completely unfounded. The method for reform is.

Yes, it is true that big insurance has been failing the American people.

The reason that big insurance fails is that big insurance is too remote from the individual. (Self-financed care as in Medical Savings and Loan puts health care resources in the hands of the patient and the decision making process in the hands of the patient and doctor.)

The great Federal power grab of regulatory authority of health care makes the decision making process even more remote.

It places the decision making process in the hands of a group that is already over taxed with its Constitutional duties, and does not have the time to explore all of the nitty details necessary to deliver quality care to people thousands of miles away from Congress.

Even worse, this power grab is a one shot process. Congress is so overtaxed that people are not going to be able to use the Democratic process to rectify any mistakes made in the initial writing of the bill.

Mr. Reid, the fact that you personally failed in your Constitutional duty as a Senator in your power grab of health care shows the world that the power grab is wrong headed and will lead the American people to great harm.

2 comments:

Scott Hinrichs said...

Unconstitutionality is no barrier to those with a reflexive totalitarian mindset.

y-intercept said...

To break the totalitarian mindset, one has to find a way to engage each generation in the reasoning behind freedom.

The reasoning behind our distributed government is that those areas of most important to individuals needs to be administered at levels close to the individual.