Small minds, big stomachs, bigger government

I awoke Thursday morning, as I usually do, to eat breakfast and read the daily newspaper. Since the new issue of The Vista was out, I opted to forego the liberal New York Times to read our campus weekly. Flipping through the pages, I stumbled upon a piece entitled “Republicans stubbornly refuse to eat their vegetables.”
As a Republican, I can vouch that my Party ardently supports eating vegetables and is against childhood obesity. But, seeing as that was not the point of the article, I digress.
This piece claimed that the Republican Party was making it a “priority to block, shoot down, criticize and demonize everything proposed by Obama and the Democrats.”
While this is somewhat accurate, Republicans are not blocking the Democratic Party’s agenda out of spite after losing the 2008 election. Instead, this opposition represents a fundamental ideological disagreement. It is one thing to accuse the GOP of being the party of “No,” but it is quite another to claim that it has succumbed to type-2 diabetes and that the only hope is for the government to tell us what to do.
Why do we assume that our healthcare and financial institutions need to be fixed by government? Why can only government resolve massive unemployment and the increasing deficit? Perhaps it is not the Republican Party that is fat and desirous of the metaphorical McDonald’s Happy Meal, but the bloated bureaucracy that is government, whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans.
The problems facing our great nation are not only the result of greed in large financial insititutions, but also the greed of almost every man and woman who swore to protect the rights of the citizenry upon taking office. Is it too much to suggest solving our problems on our own, instead of pushing a $900 billion debt 10 years down the road in a vain attempt to mask the real problems we are facing?
The GOP has not merely been the party of “No,” as many in the liberal media would love to claim. Its solutions have been overlooked by many Democrats who simultaneously claim that Republicans bring nothing to the table. Granted, the Republican version of the Healthcare Bill was not as stuffed as the Dems 1,000 plus pages, nor nearly as expensive as the almost $1 trillion plans submitted by the Congress. But that does not mean that no measures were undertaken by the Right.
The platform submitted by many conservatives uses free-market solutions to fix our healthcare system. Instead of taxing those persons who make money and fund all of the entitlement programs that Progressives enjoy so much, Republicans would rather see the government remove its heavy hand from the whole process.
The federal government’s suffocating laws make it impossible to buy insurance out of state, limiting free-market alternatives and driving the price of already limited options up even further.
My simple answer to this complicated message is to enact tort reform to severely limit the number of doctors who are wrongfully sued, allow for more options in the private sector and restrict the government to ensuring that the coverage promised in private contracts is given to sick individuals.
Any other options miss the big picture, claiming that the only way to insure legitimacy in the private sector is to strangle and regulate it through the government, a government already billions of dollars in debt.