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While most newspaper editorialists in Florida will decry the Legislature's lack of significant action, Floridians should celebrate. A do-nothing Legislature is a big success!
When Congress and the Legislature do nothing, taxpayers are spared from more new laws that cut away at their freedom.
Indeed, the nature of lawmaking is anti-freedom — granting favors to one at the expense of another. French economist Frederic Bastiat called lawmaking “legal plunder.” Rare is the Legislature that takes the opposite approach and bestows more freedom on its citizenry.
But lo and behold, this year's Legislature may have done just that, assuming Gov. Charlie Crist doesn't veto two pieces of freedom-giving legislation:
• A bill that would allow some property insurers to charge whatever rates the market would bear;
• And the growth-management bill that would loosen some of the shackles around the development market that have driven up the cost of housing and encouraged sprawl.
As of this writing, Sen. Mike Bennett, R-Bradenton, one of the driving forces behind both bills, was on his way to Tallahassee to meet with Crist to persuade him not to veto the property-insurance bill. Bennett feared he would.
Which totally would defy economic freedom and logic.
For many people, of course, the idea of letting insurers charge whatever they want to charge is an anethema to consumer fairness. Most consumers would view this approach as legal plunder.
But as Bennett told us last week, “What's not to like?” The consumer has the freedom to choose. He doesn't have to pay the insurance company's price. If a consumer wants to be insured, say, by State Farm and is willing to pay the higher price, why should he be denied that choice?
There are many winners in this scenario: A consumer with peace of mind that his insurer will be there if the Big One hits; an insurance company that is free of government regulation (i.e. which typically adds more costs that are passed on to the consumer) and free to earn a profit on its investment for shareholders; and Florida taxpayers, who would not have to carry the burden of this policyholder in the state-run, state-owned Citizens Insurance.
If given the freedom granted in this legislation, State Farm can't plunder the consumer. Selecting State Farm is voluntary; the state still has Citizens as a last resort insurer; and competition ultimately will hold State Farm's prices in check.
What's mind-boggling about this legislation is that Bennett must persuade the governor not to veto it!
The growth-management bill unravels in a small way one of the monsters of Florida's high housing costs and residential sprawl. As Government Editor Jay Brady explains on page 18, the growth-management bill would relax concurrency rules for urban developments, meaning such developments would not be required to add road capacity in an existing high-density area.
The anti-growth nuts will go nuts over this. But this bill untangles one of the perversities of the state's growth-management laws. As Brady points out, even though one of the intents of the law was to discourage sprawl, it did just the opposite. What's more, it also discouraged high-density development in areas that already had infrastructure.
County commissions voted against sprawl and voted against high-rise, high density. But if you can't go up or spread out, where are the people to go?
The result of this conundrum was an ever-rising price of housing.
At long last, it seems, lawmakers are starting to get it. Here's to this year's freedom-giving, do-nothing Legislature!
America's do-gooders love to bash and villify the smokers. No smoking at the beach. No smoking in the office. No smoking in restaurants. No smoking on airplanes.
And we love to tax them to death. The feds slap a $1.01 tax on each pack. On average, states pile on another $1.34 in taxes per pack. And now it looks like the Legislature is going to raise our cigarette tax from 33 cents to $1.33 cents a pack.
To be sure, there's a lot of cheering going on. Slay the smokers!
Blithely, lawmakers think this is going to raise $800 million a year in new taxes to feed their own addiction (spending) and narrow the gap between state spending and income.
They, of course, appear to be ignoring what is economically logical: That when you increase the price, you reduce demand and the taxes collected.
What's more, this tax is being imposed on those who can least afford it during an economic recession. It's a tax on the poor and middle class. Really, talk about a dumb idea in a recession.
There's an allegedly noble justification for the tax, however. Our paternal/maternal lawmakers believe this higher tax also will bring a public health benefit. Smokers will smoke fewer cigs or quit, thus reducing society's future health-care costs to care for the smokers.
So let's recap: We tax the cigarette smoker, who in most instances is poor or middle class. When we raise the cigarette tax, we take more of that poor person's money, making him even poorer, and we redistribute it to some government program or, in some instances, to help pay for the health care of other poor people.
The smoker keeps smoking. He plods through life. He has no health insurance. He gets cancer. He is treated at a public hospital. The hospital writes off as uncollected losses thousands of dollars of his costs that are not covered by Medicaid. This raises the hospital's prices and the cost of health care for those who pay.
In other words, those who don't smoke, pay for the health care for those who do.
Truly perverse and backward.
Try this instead: What if the burden of behavior were shifted to be borne by the person enacting the behavior, rather than borne by the taxpayer?
For instance, if you smoke, you would be denied public health care, or at least be limited severely to rationed health care. Insurers already do this: If you act wrecklessly, you pay high premiums, or you get no insurance at all.
In other words, in the if-you-smoke scenario, you pay the ultimate price for bad behavior. Kind of like murder. If you shoot someone in cold blood, you will hang. If you want to engage in smoking, auto racing, skydiving, shark diving, alligator wrestling, etc., you pay the price.
Who would win and who would lose if smokers had no public, health-care safety net?
Winners:
• The poor smoker. Educated on his likely fate, that there is no social net, he would be more likely to be healthy, more productive and therefore wealthier, less of a burden on family and society. It would work like Singapore. Crime isn't tolerated in Singapore. If you leave chewing gum on a public bench, you get publicly whipped. They don't have a gum problem in Singapore. Gum chewers have seen what happens.
• The insured. The cost of their health care would fall because they are not subsidizing the smokers.
• The hospitals. They will write off less uncollectible debts, making them more profitable to reinvest in new cures and procedures.
• Families. Fewer cancer deaths, fewer smokers, fewer kids growing up sick from second-hand smoke and becoming future smokers.
Losers:
• Tobacco growers and sellers. But they will abandon an unprofitable crop and product for one that is more profitable and in higher demand (another societal win).
• Governments. They will lose a source of revenue that feeds their own incurable addiction. It would induce much-needed withdrawal.
This was one of the many forwarded political, e-mail rants that didn't get nuked by the spam filter. The author is unknown, but he's right on the money:
“Let it sink in: '¨'¨
“Does anybody out there have any memory of the reason given for the establishment of the Department of Energy during the Carter Administration?
“Bottom line: We've spent several hundred billion dollars in support of an agency ... the reason for which not one person who reads this can remember.
“It was very simple ... and at the time everybody thought it appropriate. The Department of Energy was instituted Aug. 4, 1977, to LESSEN OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL. Pretty efficient, huh?
“Now it's 2009, 32 years later, and the budget for this necessary department is at $24.2+ billion a year. It has 16,000 employees and about 100,000 contract employees, and look at the job it has done!
“This is where you slap your forehead and say: 'What was I thinking?'
“Ah, yes, good ol' bureaucracy.
“And now we are going to turn the banking system, health care and the auto industry over to them? '¨
“God help us!”
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