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"The power to tax is the power to destroy." Justice John Marshall's famous observation in the Supreme Court Case, McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), is one of the immutable truths that have stood the test of time.

Taxation can not only destroy wealth but perhaps, more importantly, it can and often also destroys incentive, the incentive to work and produce, not just for individual gain, but for the benefit of others as well.

However, the government has other powers that can also destroy both wealth and incentive, such as the power to set or fix prices and the power of the purse strings. The Obama administration has been using or trying to use all three with reckless abandon, which accounts for the growing frustration of the American public as they become increasingly aware of the irresponsible proclivity of both the president and Congress, working together to remake the United States into a new socialist state.

A good example of how the power to fix prices can also destroy is the "public option" that is part of president Obama's proposed health care reform plan. It's a government operated insurance system that would compete with private health insurers, theoretically in order to keep them "honest" (competitive).

However, the government is incapable of successfully operating any business in a free market. Government entities always lose money, and the public insurance "option" would be no exception. President Obama noted as much himself in an August 11 "town hall" meeting about his health care plan, when he observed that both FedEx and UPS successfully compete with the Post Office, which must periodically obtain additional funding from Congress in order to continue operating.

Furthermore, although it is bound to fail financially, a government insurance entity will not have to worry about going out of business, because it will have a source of unlimited funding. With that kind of power, the government's health insurance company is bound to ultimately drive private insurers out of the market.

The Heritage Foundation's "Morning Bell" reported that, working with the Lewin Group, they did a study to determine "how many Americans would be forced into the government 'option' under the House health plan" and found the following:

Approximately 103 million people would be covered under the new public plan and, as a consequence, about 83.4 million people would lose their private insurance. This would represent a 48.4 percent reduction in the number of people with private coverage.

About 88.1 million workers would see their current private, employer-sponsored health plan go away and would be shifted to the public plan.

Yearly premiums for the typical American with private coverage could go up by as much as $460 per privately-insured person, as a result of increased cost-shifting stemming from a public plan modeled on Medicare.

Government can also destroy wealth and the incentive to work with price controls, which have always failed and invariably result in shortages. A graphic example of this is the oil crisis during the Carter administration in the 1980s, which caused extreme disruption of the supply and resulted in long lines at service stations, when people became so frustrated that some drivers became violent.

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