Thursday, January 05, 2012

You Can't Repeal, You Can Replace

The Founders realized that their Constitution was far from perfect and designed the document for change.

The interesting thing is that they created a mechanism to amend the Constitution, but did not create a mechanism to directly repeal parts of the document.

There is wisdom to this structure.

It is in our nature to want to change the past. But it is physically impossible for humans to change the past.

By one definition, a conservative is a person who wants to return to a given state of things. In politics 101, a conservative is a person who reacts to progressive change.

Regardless of the definition, Conservatives have a long history of trying to repeal legislation passed by progressives and they have a dismal fail rate to show for the effort.

Notice the failure of financial deregulation. Derivatives and short selling were created as regulatory tools. These tools depend on regulation. Removing the regulations regarding these regulatory devices led to economic chaos.

Conservatives would be wise to listen to the wisdom of the Founders: You can amend, but you can't repeal.

Rather than trying to repeal laws they don't like, advocates of the free market need to think through the foundations of free market economics and devise replacements for bad laws.

I dislike ObamaCare. But ObamaCare has already changed the state of things.

One cannot simple repeal this bad law. This anti-market "health exchanges" are already being implemented at the state level.

The only way to get rid of this thing is to come up with a free market alternative to state run health care.

Unfortunately, Conservatives are so caught up in their rhetoric of nullification that they have ignored the wisdom of the founders. You cannot repeal, you can only ammend.

Any changes we make must take into account the current state of existence.

If we don't like socialized medicine, then we must come up with a proactive mechanism for unrolling a group health pool (socialized medicine) into individual accounts.

I've been working on this problem for thirty years and could contribute to an effort to restore health freedom. That would involve something radical like holding a meeting somewhere. If anyone is interested in restoring health freedom, they could contact me.

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