D'Souza: All right.
[audience laughter]
Somewhat like the mosquito in the nudist colony,
I'm trying to figure out where to begin.
[audience laughter]
Student: So tonight, you have presented the Republican Party
as advocating on behalf of individual liberties,
even if that means deregulation
so that there could be a smaller government
and essentially people can have more freedoms,
personal freedoms,
despite the fact that that might
undermine the Clean Water Act
and lead companies to pollute the waters
with toxic waste with no repercussions.
However, my question to you is
how can you explain the deregulation
that the Republican Party supports for smaller government
and simultaneously the hundreds, if not thousands of bills
passed by Republican officials since 2011
that have policed the woman body
and limited female access to contraceptives and to abortion.
D'Souza: All right.
[audience laughter]
Somewhat like the mosquito in the nudist colony,
I'm trying to figure out where to begin.
[audience laughter]
[audience applause] Well, all right.
So I'll say a very quick word about abortion,
a very quick word about deregulation.
Abortion first.
We talk about birth control and abortion.
Let's set aside, for one moment,
the debate about whether or not abortion
is a constitutional right.
I would submit that it is not.
You can read the Constitution, squeeze lemon juice on it,
hold it upside down, it's just not in there.
But let's assume it was.
Let's assume it was sort of invisibly there
as part of the Bill of Rights,
right up there with free speech
and right up there with the right to religion
and the right to assembly and so on.
Here's my question to you.
Why should the abortion right be subsidized
when none of our other fundamental rights are?
[audience applause]
You have a right to free speech,
does the government give you money to start a newspaper?
You have a Second Amendment right to own a gun,
is the government going to buy you a shotgun?
You have a right to free assembly,
you got to do it on your own time.
You have a right to free exercise of religion,
the government's not going to pay for your churches.
So since the government pays for
none of our other fundamental rights,
why does this right get to be in a category of itself?
That's my point number one.
Pivoting to point number two.
No corporation that pollutes the water
should be allowed to do that
because that is an actual infringement upon the common good.
In other words, that is actually doing harm to the public.
This is completely different
from the real point of deregulation.
The real point of deregulation is
to create a scope in which individuals can transact freely.
Now, let me give you an example of what I mean.
We have a right to healthcare
and presumably we have an equivalent right to food,
right, to eat?
What could be more basic than the right to food?
Now let's assume that the government establishes,
not Obamacare, because that's healthcare,
but an Obama right to food.
And the basic idea here is that
when you go to the grocery store,
you can get food and somebody else will pay.
So you walk into the grocery store, you fill up your cart.
I would submit, first of all,
that you will excessively fill up your cart
because you're not paying.
And you're going to show up at the counter,
at which point the woman behind the counter will notice
that not only have you excessively filled up your cart,
but since you're not paying
you don't care what the prices are.
And so suddenly milk will start costing $45
because some third guy
is actually going to be footing the bill.
Now I would submit that this is, in a nutshell,
what's wrong with our healthcare system.
That whenever you go to the doctor,
the reason that it costs $3,000 when you have a cold
is not because it actually costs $3,000.
If you are paying, they'd bill you $75,
but since you're not paying
and the insurance company's paying
and the government is paying them,
the doctor realizes I'm going to run 45 tests,
I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that,
it's all going to be money in my pocket,
it's going to be money for the hospital,
and this poor dude is worse off,
so most of the time when we go to the doctor,
we don't even ask what it's going to cost
because we don't care because some third guy's paying.
So the argument for deregulation
is to try to create a healthcare system
where people do have healthcare protections,
but in which costs are kept down
because the guy who's receiving the service
is actually paying for it.
And we just throw out a wild idea,
if the government were to say to you,
"Everybody in this country
has catastrophic health insurance from now on."
In other words, if you have a heart attack,
you have some catastrophic illness, it's covered,
but for routine health care, right?
Everyone who is under a certain income bracket,
we're going to give you a $5,000 check, right?
You're free to spend that money on healthcare
and if you don't use it, you can keep what you don't spend.
I assure you that this will send a shockwave
through the whole healthcare system.
It changes the whole set of incentives
because suddenly the money is your money.
No third guy is paying.
Now remember, you're covered for catastrophic,
which is actually quite inexpensive
because catastrophic events are rare.
What actually drives our healthcare costs up
is routine healthcare.
And that's why Obamacare is so expensive
is it covers routine healthcare,
which people should pay for.