Personal Freedom and Prosperity 101: Personal Power The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism.

The House is set to send the president a bill repealing the majority of his signature health care law. While the president will certainly veto the bill, doing so merely underscores its implied promise: elect the right president in 2016, and ObamaCare's days are numbered.

“If your policy is so good, why does it have to be mandatory?” This is the eminently sensible question posed by people who question the need for government to dictate our purchases. Although often asked, it seldom receives an answer. When it does, it usually amounts to some slightly more diplomatic variation on “people are too stupid to make their own decisions.” Oh, what benevolent masters we have. ObamaCare is only the most recent example in a long line of mandatory programs that are supposedly “for our own good,” but it’s a big one and provides a good example of the futility of trying to force people to act against their own best interests.

The environmentalist left is always eager to talk about the fragility of natural ecosystems. Even slight alterations, they argue, can have huge ripple effects and unintended consequences. Thus, we’re forced to suffer through mosquito bites every summer instead of eradicating that godless species as we should have years ago. Still, the point about the interconnected nature of natural systems is not without merit, and there is such system that is routinely disrupted without adequate regard for the consequences. That system is the economy.

The nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealthcare Group, made headlines last month with an announcement that the company was considering pulling out of ObamaCare. Now, Cleveland-based health insurer HealthSpan is actually doing what UnitedHealthcare threatened, disbanding its network of physicians and announcing that it will no longer participate in the individual markets under ObamaCare. In addition to dropping individual plans by the end of the year, HealthSpan will stop covering small businesses by January 31st.