Washington (CNN) -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Wednesday unveiled a sweeping health care bill that would expand health insurance coverage to 30 million more Americans at an estimated cost of $849 billion over 10 years.

Reid and other Senate Democrats cited an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office for the coverage and cost figures. The CBO estimates the proposal would reduce the federal deficit by $130 billion over the next 10 years, through 2019. Any effect on the deficit in the following decade would be "subject to substantial uncertainty," but probably would result in "small reductions in federal budget deficits," according to the CBO.

Great (eyes-rolled).

My colleague Jim Buchanan has a new article entitled "Afraid to be Free: Dependency as Desideratum." It's forthcoming in a special issue of Public Choice.

In this paper, Buchanan identifies four "sources or wellsprings of ideas that motivate extensions in the range and scope of collective controls over the freedom of persons to act as they might independently choose." These four sources of collectivism are:

1) "managerial socialism" - that is, the idea that central planners can outperform the market at producing material prosperity

2) "paternalistic socialism" (or what in French is called "dirigisme.")

3) "distributionalist socialism"

4) "parental socialism"

It's parental socialism that's most interesting. Here's Buchanan on this source of collectivism:

In one sense, the attitude is paternalism flipped over, so to speak. With paternalism, we refer to the attitudes of elitists who seek to impose their own preferred values on others. With parentalism, in contrast, we refer to the attitudes of persons who seek to have values imposed upon them by other persons, by the state, or by transcendental forces. This source of support for expanded collectivization has been relatively neglected by both socialist and liberal philosophers, perhaps because philosophers, in both camps, remain methodological individualists.

.....

Almost subconsciously, those scientists-scholars-academics who have tried to look at the "big picture" have assumed that, other things being equal, persons want to be at liberty to make their own choices, to be free from coercion by others, including indirect coercion through means of persuasion. They have failed to emphasize sufficiently, and to examine the implications of, the fact that liberty carries with it responsibility. And it seems evident that many persons do not want to shoulder the final responsibility for their own actions. Many persons are, indeed, afraid to be free.

Reading this paper for a class, I had the following comments. (I don't have time at the moment to include the Lakoff information, but I'll try to find an ungated version of his "Metaphor, Morality, and Politics. Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals in the Dust" paper and provide a link to it later so you can see the competing parent models he provides for the major political parties here in the states.)

Taken together with Buchanan's earlier point of paternalism, that system where the elites provide the masses with guidance toward "what should be wanted if the masses only knew what was in their own best interest" (Buchanan, 21), there is a strong connection between people as children, and government as parents. I believe Buchanan makes a good case here--experientally, this just rings true. As classical liberals, we may be doing some of the same 'paternalism,' though of a different sort...and that might be a good thing.

Where a leftist paternalism would seek to administer ever-increasing amounts of the citizens' life, giving the masses what they should want if they knew what is good for them, our classical liberal dogma can be seen as much in parental terms as any soft-statist position: we are the parent who believes in the adolescent and encourages him to leave the house and get a job. It's almost a combination of the nurturant parent and strict-father mentality in one...the tricky part is that there is not a uniform age when the transition from one parental model to the other is appropriate (further enhancing the knowledge problem with centralized, uniform positions). The classical liberal position, then, is as much paternalistic as the leftist/conservative one: we simply believe that people should want to be free, if they knew what was good for them, much as New Yorkers should want to avoid trans fats.

We can affirm the desires in both competing systems' models, and bring them together under a classical liberal model, realizing that the parenting can be done best (when at all, apart from actual parents) by club-level societies. I believe churches are well-suited to this role, and provide transitionary roles for individuals as they progress through life, surrounded by other individuals who seek the same mix of independence and interconnectedness.

There is the classical liberal 'parent' model to compete with Lakoff's strict- and nurturant-systems.

I'm tired of reading stories like this:

(NNPA)--On any given day, nearly 23 percent of all young Black men ages 16 to 24 who have dropped out of high school are in jail, prison, or a juvenile justice institution in America, according to a disturbing new national report on the dire economic and social consequences of not graduating from high school.

Article here.

New paradigm: skip urban youth ministry and get Christians in the classroom so that these fellas and have academic discipleship as well. A middle-school or high school teacher will have far more opportunities for "contact work" when they see the kids all day, everyday.

I think some urban ministries may be the easy way out for some. If you're a teacher you won't even need to raise support because you'll be making nice change too. I can seen now that the real urban youth may actually be in the trenches in the classroom day-to-day and not at basketball games coaching and once-a-week Bible studies; shouldn't urban ministry be about discipling minds as well--like algerbra, physics, literature, etc?