PEARLS AFTER PORK:

Change in South Carolina (George Will, March 26, 2004, Jewish World Review)

With the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, [Rep. Jim DeMint] has developed an ``index of dependency.''

America is in, he says, ``an eleventh-hour crisis'' of democracy because it recently reached a point where a majority are ``dependent on the federal government for their health care, education, income or retirement.'' Tax reforms, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, have removed many Americans from the income tax rolls: ``Today, the majority of Americans can vote themselves more generous government benefits at little or no cost to themselves.'' DeMint asks: ``How can any free nation survive when a majority of its citizens, now dependent on government services, no longer have the incentive to restrain the growth of government?''

DeMint's fear, that dependency produces ``learned helplessness,'' echoes Tocqueville's warning about government keeping people ``fixed irrevocably in childhood,'' rendering ``the employment of free will less useful and more rare.'' It is, Tocqueville said, ``difficult to conceive how men who have entirely renounced the habit of directing themselves could succeed at choosing well those who will lead them.''

In the context of a welfare state devoted to assuaging the insecurities and augmenting the competencies of its citizens, conservatism's challenge is to use government — collective action — to promote individualism. DeMint believes dependency can be countered by policies that foster attitudes and aptitudes requisite for independence. He favors applying to public policy the axiom that ``no one washes a rental car.'' Which means: Ownership encourages rational maintenance of resources. Consider the pertinence of this to health care.

DeMint was one of 25 doughty House Republicans who, resisting intense White House pressure, voted against the Medicare prescription drug entitlement, partly because of its cost. And this was before the administration's ``$130 billion `oops!'" — the projection of a 10-year cost that much higher than previously anticipated.

But DeMint says the Medicare bill's provision for individual health savings accounts is ``the grain of sand in the oyster,'' from which a pearl of progress may emerge.

The oyster is the cost required for the pearl--Ameriucans are going to have to be tricked into giving up dependency, as Ted Kennedy was on NCLB;'s vouchers and as everyone was on the HSA's in the Medicare bill.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 26, 2004 10:54 AM