Making the Insurance Companies Pay for (insert you favorite thing here)

I was waiting to go in to see the audiologist when an acquaintance came out. She plopped down next to me and began to talk.

“Do you know that insurance companies don’t pay for hearing aids?” she asked indignantly.

Yes, I’m aware of that.

“Well, we should do something about that! We should make them pay for hearing aids! We need to write to Congress, or start a petition or something.”

But the insurance companies don’t have a pot of money, I pointed out. They only have money they get from us when we pay our insurance premiums. The same thing with the federal government – the only money they have is the money they take from us in taxes.

She was adamant, and I tried again. If hearing aids are mandated, either our insurance rates or our taxes will go up.

She looked me in the eye. “I understand exactly what you are saying,” she said. “And I want you to pay for my hearing aids.”

I was probably staring at her with my mouth hanging open – I really don’t remember, I was stunned. She grinned at me and added, “I guess that’s why you’re a Republican, and I’m a Democrat.”

I guess so.

We in the conservative movement tend to think that those tax-and-spend liberals just don’t understand what they’re doing – that they don’t realize that paying for their stuff takes money from somebody else.

Maybe it’s just that they don’t care.

It’s good, but not enough to argue the moral dimension of economics – that one person has no moral right to take another’s property for the first person’s gain. My acquaintance believes that it’s immoral for the second person to be well off while the first person has to go without hearing aids, or a a new car, or whatever. Like any matter of belief, it’s not susceptible to change by mere reason.

The winning argument is her self-interest – don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg. As many governments around the world have discovered, taxing a percentage of nothing is still nothing.