Losing Freedom to Choose

To the Editor:
Famed economist Friedrich Hayek observed: a fundamental freedom is economic freedom, the basis for all other freedoms. That is, the freedom to earn money (legally) according to our skills and ambitions, spending disposable income in a manner of our choosing, based on our own perceived value of goods and services in a free marketplace. This basic freedom has been eroded over the years by laws and regulations, big government activism, including coercion. A most glaring recent example is Obamacare.
Obamacare requires us to buy health insurance. Worse, Washington bureaucrats, abetted by ivory-tower academics, demand we purchase a list of coverage features they deem essential even if we don’t want them or they’re inappropriate (like maternity care for 50 year olds). Then there’s the scheme to coerce young, healthy folks to buy expensive insurance they don’t think they need or want and pay dearly for it to subsidize older, less healthy folks and those unable to afford insurance. Let’s not forget the millions of people who have had their health insurance cancelled because it doesn’t include what politicians and bureaucrats think it should (dubbed “junk” policies by Beltway elites). It is “sold” as a benign law, helping those in need, but is really a huge income transfer device, which President Obama and his progressive big government friends love, as part of their ideology and political-power ambitions.
This is but the most recent in a huge string of laws and regulations eroding our freedom to choose. On a more practical level: try to buy a 100-watt incandescent light bulb at your home-center store. You can’t. Instead you either must purchase a much more expensive halogen replacement or one of those spiral compact fluorescent ones. Sure they use less energy, and that’s a good thing. They might even be cost-effective given their long life. But that’s not the point. We should be free to decide for ourselves based on our own value judgments, not coerced by government regulations.
The other day I tried to buy a replacement tile for a drop ceiling. It’s the kind that’s flexible and lightweight, backed by fiberglass. No can do. Only a heavier, rigid replacement (which doesn’t match) is allowed because the government has decided the older version I have is not fireproof enough. I’m sure there are dozens of other examples of stuff we can’t get or things we can’t do because some government bureaucrat has decided it’s not good for us.
The buzz phrase for all this government meddling is: It’s for the greater good. They don’t seem to like free-market capitalism and individual choice. What they do like is lots of government control of our lives and the economy, which gives them political power. As far as the “greater good” is concerned government doesn’t create national wealth, it consumes it, inefficiently. The private sector is the source of national wealth and the key to a robust economy, which provides government far more revenue than any of their subsidies, bailout schemes or bad investments like Solindra and electric cars.
Despite the talk of safety nets, level playing fields, livable wages and host of other progressive fantasies, it’s really about government power, not altruism. They seem willing to bankrupt the country in the process. We seem to be willing to surrender our freedom of choice, an essential element of being a U.S. citizen. Sadly, adding John Podesta to Obama’s staff means more executive orders and regulations, skirting Congress and the Constitution.