Universal truths used to lie

I came across a wonderful quote earlier this week:

"Remember that every government service, every offer of government financed security, is paid for in the loss of personal freedom.....In the days to come, whenever a voice is raised telling to you to let the government do it, analyze very carefully to see whether the suggested service is worth the personal freedom which you must forgo in return for such services." Ronald Reagan

Now I don't think this quote is wonderful because I particularly agree with it. But it does ring in my mind as a truth. So I had to examine it to see why I thought it represented a truism, and also something that I didn't agree with!

I think this disconnect is from that the above quote is a more specific version of a more general truism:

"Everything that you do not do for yourself is paid for in the loss of personal freedom."

This is a very simple to grasp fact of life, if you are not doing it yourself you have less control how it is done.

So this is the root of the truth in President Reagan's quote. He just puts the superfluous quantifier of "government" in there in order to demonize it.

Let us give an example that is very current: Health Care.

If you are not going to be your own doctor, then you lose a lot of your personal freedom regarding your health care. In our current situation you lose this control to the actual doctor, the hospital and to your insurance company. All these entities impose quite a few restrictions on what sort of care you will receive. My main problem with the current system is that most of the restrictions are there to protect the cash-flow of those entities, not the well-being of the patient. This is not altogether a bad thing, but it is a bad thing when it is the number one consideration. And while many of the entities in this chain may put the patient first the sad fact is that the entity that controls the purse strings is only concerned with that one aspect.

So unless you would like to become an Amish and do everything for yourself, we are fated to lose some of our options.

But this has not been a uniformed decision. While we do definitely lose some options, the number of options or "freedoms" we gain far outweighs them, that is why we made these choices to begin with. Example: I don't build my own roads. I pay some taxes & submit to various licensing authorities and I get a LOTS or roads that I can then use as much as I want! So what I gain in this instance for me FAR outweighs what I loose.

In the end you do always need to weigh what you get for what you pay, but it really not the "always loose" scenario that Reagan makes it sound like.