Three Near-Term Threats to Liberty in America

Over the past year, I have maintained that the United States is threatened by three immediate-to-near-term problems that endanger individual freedom in this country, as well as the more tangible material quality of life for most Americans. Here they are, in order of increasing harm.

1. Healthcare "reform" as contemplated by the Obama administration, particularly the highly coercive, unconstitutional, and freedom-depriving health insurance mandate: This package of impositions, while it has already passed, will only be fully implemented in 2014. Until then, there is time for either a legal challenge to succeed or for a repeal to be promulgated. If these countermeasures fail, however, health insurance will become another tax, except that it will be much larger than most taxes and paid to private entities instead of governments.

2. The alleged anti-global-warming cap-and-trade bill: This bill, founded on pseudoscience and alarmist doomsday scenarios, threatens to micromanage every aspect of virtually every citizen's life. With energy usage coming under the control of the federal government, and with the federal government particularly aiming to restrict such usage, there is no way that the gargantuan enforcement apparatus that would emerge for this bill would not intervene into every lifestyle choice you make and every appliance you use. Fortunately, it has not passed yet, and its reintroduction in the Senate has been postponed. It will probably not be enacted if it can be resisted by the 2010 midterm elections.

3. Hyperinflation: With the massive recent expansion of the money supply by the Federal Reserve, particularly in the form of excess reserves given to the bailed-out banks, there is no way that the general price level cannot rise, as there will be much, much more money "chasing" roughly the same number of goods. The question is, rather, when it will happen, and how severe it will be. We will be quite fortunate to get away with 10% annual inflation. A more realistic, "conservative" expectation would be circa 100%. Hyperinflation harms everyone who saves and works for a living, and it eviscerates the entire economy. Look at Zimbabwe for a recent example.

To forestall these threats, both vigorous intellectual opposition and equally vigorous technological innovation will be necessary. The latter is particularly crucial in order to (1) greatly reduce healthcare costs by providing cheaper, more effective prevention and treatment, (2) provide free-market, viable alternative energy sources and energy conservation measures that would render carbon dioxide emissions a moot point and would render any restrictions of such emissions substantially less burdensome on individuals, and (3) create an environment where the real prices of goods decrease as rapidly as they do in the computer industry, counteracting the nominal increases in the money supply imposed by the Fed. Absent such innovations, I cannot see how genuine catastrophe could be averted during the years to come.

Read other articles in The Rational Argumentator's Issue CCXLVI.