The price for equality: You lose freedom

It's happening before your eyes every day, more than it has since the dark days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: The takeover of your life by the Next New Deal.

Step back for a moment and absorb what you have witnessed in the first 100 days of the new administration. Domestically, it has cast a wide net:
• Money: Disguised as rescue plans, Barack Obama's Next New Deal has executed de facto takeovers of the largest corporations in American banking, insurance and finance. And he's not finished yet. The federal government (Obama & Co.) now controls enormous swaths of the American financial system and is dictating the terms to the bankers and insurers. The man who controls the money calls the shots.
• Energy: Obama's Next New Deal has expressed its intent to control the production and use of energy via its cap-and-trade initiatives and constant drumbeat to invest “stimulus” money into alternative fuels. Consider Obama's firing of Rick Wagoner at General Motors the government's first step and takeover of dictating energy usage via the manufacture of one of Americans' lifelines, their cars.
• Health care: There should be no doubt that Obama and certainly his Democratic colleagues want (and will race this year for) a nationalized health system that controls the price and supply of health care.
• Education: This is the smallest of the initiatives so far. The Next New Deal wants universal pre-kindergarten throughout America, funded, of course by taxpayers. From a government acorn grows a mighty bureaucratic oak.
Combine the government's control of money, energy and health care, and together you have Obama's vision of economic equality for everyone.

Winston Churchill had a description for this: “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

Count on it.

+ Mexican stimulus
This is just the beginning.

Over the next four years, we'll be reading many news stories about how your “stimulus” money was wasted.

To be sure, there's no humanly possible way the federal government can mete out and spend $700 billion efficiently and accountably — especially when you consider this largesse is being passed through Washington and its bureaucracies, 50 legislatures and their bureaucracies and more than 20,000 U.S. counties and municipalities and their bureaucracies.

Poof! Up in smoke it goes. Or rather, down to Mexico — to fuel our southern neighbor's economy.

Consider the accompanying table. This is only one-third of what Florida is expected to get for transportation projects from the federal stimulus.

And what are we getting? Trails and sidewalks to nowhere.

The Legislature is sending this list of municipal and county transportation projects to the Department of Transportation for a boat-load of cash that Obama is borrowing against your grandchildren's future taxes.

Think about this. Think what else could be done with that $40 million. But also think about who the most likely beneficiaries of this tax giveaway will be. When you see trails, sidewalks and roads being built these days, who does the work?

Unemployed auto workers? Unemployed mortgage brokers? Unemployed investment bankers?

If this money is going to stimulate anything, it'll provide a hefty to boost to the Mexican economy.

What's more, this stimulus is nothing more than a crack-cocaine high. It will last for only a short time. These projects won't stimulate sustainable economic activity. Once they're done, they're done. Walking trails don't generate commerce.

Sidewalks don't generate commerce. Nor do, for gosh sakes, wildlife crossings!

+ Finally, deregulation
Floridians won't get the landmark, economic-altering legislation this year in the two areas where it is needed most — property taxation and property insurance — but they may get it in one: insurance.

Property taxes: On the former, there were two great bills — Senate Bill 1906, House Bill 1263 — that would have limited the growth in state and local government revenues to the combined annual growth rates in population, inflation and school enrollments. The bills also would have required voter approval of new taxes and fees.

Unfortunately, the bills didn't get the committee votes to push them to the floors of the Senate and House.

For obvious reasons — i.e. the recession — interest in capping government spending isn't a high priority this year.

Too bad it's not. The lack of such controls led directly to today's budget cutting in Tallahassee.Florida State University economist Randall Holcombe said his studies showed that had state and local governments not let their spending grow as fast as it did during the boom — i.e. faster than inflation and population growth combined — lawmakers would not be faced with such wrenching decisions over what to cut.

Property insurance: As of this writing, House Bill 1171 still looked to have a chance to make it to the House floor, where it is likely to receive approval and be sent to the Senate.

The bill essentially would deregulate property insurance rates, allowing insurers to charge whatever the market would bear.

Of course, there would be restrictions and requirements on the insurers. They would have to prove their solvency to regulators and would not be eligible to tap the Florida Catastrophe Fund in the event of a disaster.

While this bill is a step toward free-market insurance — the only solution to Florida's insurance shortage — it defies some logic. What consumer would pay a higher price if he could get the same coverage at a lower, taxpayer-subsidized rate from, say, the state-owned Citizens Property Insurance Co.?

Legislators never like to give up power. It's their only currency. Which explains why they are not going all the way with this legislation.

If they would remove all caps on rates, the results would be miraculous — just as it was for the Pilgrims in the 1600s when they stopped trying to feed themselves through communal living.

Back then, the Pilgrims nearly starved to death when everyone was expected to contribute food and labor to the communal warehouse. The strong subsidized the weak, just as taxpayers are subsidizing low insurance rates. But when the elders decided that everyone should have property and operate for himself, food overflowed.

Why do you think Florida's TV stations are overflowing with car insurance ads from Geico, AllState and Progressive? Florida is a lucrative market. With the right incentives (i.e. rates that generate profits) investors compete for a share. This competition in turn holds down prices.

Imagine that.