Repeal

Lynne and I stayed up watching C-SPAN late into the night on Sunday, drawn to the House debacle like spectators at a car crash. The scene––”kabuki theatre,” as one Republican Congressman put it––was almost surreal. Democrats were actually using Social Security and Medicare, the two largest and most crippling wealth redistribution programs in American history, as evidence in favor of the health care “reform” bill. How can this happen here?

Gus van Horn summarized the event perfectly in his post this morning:

In a historic vote yesterday, the Democratic Party told the American people to go to hell -- and tried to send them on their way -- by passing an unpopular bill that threatens to adversely affect the life of every man, woman, and child in this country. Far from being a “credit to Nancy Pelosi’s savvy,” this bill is simply another indicator that something is horribly wrong, culturally, with America. . . It is a manifestation of the cultural rot that occurs when enough people accept or fail to challenge the idea of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

One thing that is encouraging, however, is that the American public is largely opposed to this bill. Of course there are millions who support it––resentful and impotent intellectuals, mediocrities who go along with the crowd, vultures looking for a cut of the loot––but there are many more who know (or at least suspect) that something is very, very wrong. The fact that enough tricks were employed to finally push this bill through shows us that there are a lot of delusional people on Capitol Hill, but it does not necessarily signal a collapse of the American spirit in ordinary citizens.

The real silver lining here is that the takeover is so outrageous, there is already a call for its repeal. This is a huge opportunity. A repeal could trigger more repeals, rolling back the welfare state and restoring freedom. Naturally, there is a lot of work to do in a short amount of time; the whole culture must change. But that change––a turn away from sacrifice and duty, and toward reason and rational self-interest––is something that Americans, more than anyone else in the world, are amenable to. To stand on one’s own feet, to earn one’s own living, to be neither a slave nor a slave-master, is what it means to be an American in spirit.

The Battered Bulwarks

Just a reminder . . . we're running out of time to oppose this latest and most vicious round of intrusions.

At this point, the prospects do not look good. The latest New York Times account has some dispiriting indicators that legislators, by a narrow margin, are going to be able to pierce the battered bulwarks that have so far held back a complete government takeover of the medical industry. For one thing, Nancy Pelosi is continuing to refuse to make concessions to abortion opponents who are opposed to the bill, which seems to indicate that she is confident she doesn't need them. (This aspect of the story is rich with irony: Abortion opponents are in this case actually on the pro-freedom side of the fight!) Also, the House seems prepared to vote today, and it is clear they will not actually vote on it until they know they will get the answer they want, (which charade will let them pretend that they are imposing the "will of the majority").

At the moment of posting this (Sunday at 10:00 EDT), the Code Red site indicates a dead tie at 212 votes each for yea and nay, with only seven undecided Congressmen remaining. (The seven are: Brian Baird (WA), Marion Berry (AR), Kathy Dahlkemper (PA), Lincoln Davis (TN), Paul Kanjorski (PA), Michael McMahon (NY), and Earl Pomeroy (ND).)

I called a lot of Congressional offices last week, but I found it to be increasingly difficult to get through as the week progressed. By the end of the week, even when the line actually picked up and directed me to leave a message, the mailbox was typically full. I got through to only four people out of fifteen Washington offices that I called on Friday. So, at this point, email might be the most effective means of communication. Unfortunately, some of the Congressmen have the obnoxious restriction that in order to email them, you must reside in their district; this is an absurd limitation considering that their "Yea" vote threatens the life and livelihood of every American.

President Obama was accurate when he said yesterday, "Every once in a while a moment comes when you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country. This is one of those moments."[Note 1.] These are the "best hopes," of course, of the countless people who have tried to turn America from a nation that defends the rights of individuals into a European-style welfare state that views citizens as little children that must obey their (allegedly) wise rulers. Such a vision is anti-American . . . as is the abominable health care bill that is on the brink of being jammed down our throats.

NOTES

1. "Democrats, Hunting Final Health Votes, Predict Slim Margin," The New York Times, 21 Mar 2010.

Leftists and Evangelicals Make Excellent Bedfellows

“Hmm. Imagine if sodomy laws could be used to punish the stingy, unconcerned rich!”

So writes popular columnist Nicholas Kristof in a recent New York Times article. Lest you think he is poking fun at religious conservatives, however, as one might expect from a left-of-center Times columnist, think again. Kristof does not write it as tongue-in-cheek parody but pines for it with a yearning, dreamy bliss. If faith-based laws can be placed in the service of a traditionally leftist agenda – namely, soaking those who produce wealth – so much the better for Nicholas Kristof.

Setting aside the fact that he would actually favor such a manifestly irrational and unjust policy, Mr. Kristof’s overall argument is right on target. He demonstrates insight that few of his colleagues seem to have when he notices that alleged political enemies – Democrats and “liberals” on the one hand, Republicans and religions conservatives on the other – have much in common and are largely fighting on the same side. He writes:

[T]he divide has dissolved, in ways that many Americans haven’t noticed or appreciated. Evangelicals have become the new internationalists, pushing successfully for new American programs against AIDS and malaria, and doing superb work on issues from human trafficking in India to mass rape in Congo . . .

A growing number of conservative Christians are explicitly and self-critically acknowledging that to be “pro-life” must mean more than opposing abortion.[Note 1.]

To be “pro-life” in this sense means to sacrifice all humanity, not just pregnant women, on the altar. Which altar? That is where disagreement is introduced; some think God or Allah demands their servitude, while others think it is the nation, race, species, planet, or class. Kristof exhorts his fellow “liberals” to put aside these differences and temper their snobbishness toward evangelicals. After all, he writes, “those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals,” and are “less likely to spend vacations volunteering at, say, a school or a clinic in Rwanda.” Stop flaying conservatives as mere knuckle-dragging, gay-bashing hypocrites, advises Kristof, when they can be adopted as allies committed to the grand humanitarian goal of universal, voluntary slavery. Similarly, religious conservatives should not hesitate to jump into bed, figuratively speaking, with those contemptibly effete, bleeding-heart save-the-worlders whom they despise; they are, after all, doing God’s work.

I have long argued that for all their superficial differences, the political left and right share the same essential moral foundation. The left sees the right as ignorant, homophobic fascists and the right sees the left as Godless, iconoclastic socialists. But they agree on one thing: all men ought to live their lives in servitude to the needy. The moral underpinning of both conservatives and “liberals” is altruism.

Observe the “debate” over the legislation that threatens the medical care industry today. The Democratic agenda is unambiguously driven by the morality of need. Leftists do not even bother to hide behind lip-service; the justification for the federal government taking over the already over-regulated health care industry is that some people can’t afford the same level of health care as others. Period. The so-called “liberals” assume that “everybody knows” health care is a right, and they need not elaborate upon so uncontroversial a notion.[Note 2.]

What is the Republican opposition to this? Scott Brown, whose recent election in Massachusetts was widely seen as a rebuff of a heavy-handed Congress and Obama administration (and for whom I myself voted for exactly that purpose), believes “all Americans deserve health care coverage.”[Note 3, emphasis mine.] He voted for and still favors “Romneycare” in Massachusetts, an outrageous compulsory insurance plan that is a precursor to “Obamacare.” Such an obscene violation of individual rights, such a naked redistribution of wealth, such a sacrifice of those who have earned to those who have not, is okay, according to Senator Brown, as long as it is not the “one-size-fits-all” plan of President Obama. Behind empty and contradictory platitudes about “private market systems,” Brown and his conservative colleagues cannot escape the gravitational pull of their moral premises. Altruism infests and informs the policies of all parties today - left, right, and center.

___________

As has been pointed out by others, the reason Americans are trapped and paralyzed, frozen into passive compliance as we plunge into serfdom, cannot possibly be because they are wholly ignorant of the superiority of capitalism to socialism. Outside of academia and Hollywood, no sane, sentient person in the modern world could think the facts of history show socialism and collectivism to produce wealth while capitalism and individualism lead to poverty. The primary explanation for the willingness of Americans to sacrifice themselves - to surrender happiness for misery, prosperity for privation - has to be because they think it is moral to do so.

The disaster here is not that Americans are driven by moral concerns, which is a good thing, but what Americans have accepted as being moral. From birth, we are bombarded with the mantra that “Selfishness is wrong,” and scolded with the universal and unquestioned dictum, “Don’t be selfish!” - despite the fact that all life, especially human life, demands the opposite. What Americans need to do is cease to swallow whole the morality of sacrifice and see that altruism is the very opposite of “pro-life.” Altruism, as Ayn Rand wrote, “holds death as its ultimate goal and standard of value - and it is logical that renunciation, resignation, self-denial, and every other form of suffering, including self-destruction, are the virtues it advocates.”[Note 4.]

I happen to be re-reading Atlas Shrugged and I just came upon a passage that captures the essence of this paralysis, this hesitation of Americans to defend their own lives and liberty. In the novel, Orren Boyle, a villainous businessman who is perfectly willing to play the “pull-peddling” games that arise when the government intrudes into economic matters, makes his choices according to the prevailing ethics - from which we can see the indirect effect upon an economy already crippled by such choices.

Orren Boyle made a selfless sacrifice to the needs of others. He sold to the Bureau of Global Relief, for shipment to the People’s State of Germany, ten thousand tons of structural steel shapes that had been intended for the Atlantic Southern Railroad. “It was a difficult decision to make,” he said, with a moist, unfocused look of righteousness, to the panic-stricken president of the Atlantic Southern, “but I weighed the fact that you’re a rich corporation, while the people of Germany are in a state of unspeakable misery. So I acted on the principle that need comes first. When in doubt, it’s the weak that must be considered, not the strong.” The president of the Atlantic Southern had heard that Orren Boyle’s most valuable friend in Washington had a friend in the Ministry of Supply of the People’s State of Germany. But whether this had been Boyle’s motive or whether it had been the principle of sacrifice, no one could tell and it made no difference: if Boyle had been a saint of the creed of selflessness, he would have had to do precisely what he had done. This silenced the president of the Atlantic Southern; he dared not admit that he cared for his railroad more than for the people of Germany; he dared not argue against the principle of sacrifice.[Note 5, emphasis mine.]

Americans must question the premises that would have us don our own yokes . . . before it is too late.

NOTES

1. “Learning From the Sin of Sodom,” Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, 27 Feb 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28kristof.html.

2. On this topic of the alleged “right” to health care, I highly recommend these articles:

Leonard Peikoff, “Health Care is Not a Right,” Capitalism Magazine, 27 Dec 2006, (http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4880).

John David Lewis, “What ‘Right’ to Health Care?” RealClear Politics, 3 Aug 2009, (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/08/03/what_right_to_health_care_97742.html).

Paul Hsieh, “Health Care Reform vs. Universal Health Care,” PajamasMedia, 5 May 2009, (http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/health-care-reform-vs-universal-health-care/).

Richard Ralston, “Orange Grove: Wrong way to think of rights,” The Orange County Register, 19 Oct 2009, (http://www.ocregister.com/articles/right-215397-government-care.html).

3. “Scott Brown and the debate over health care,” The Economist, 19 Jan 2010, (http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/01/scott_brown_and_debate_over_health_care).

4. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, Signet, New York, 1964, p. 38.

5. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Plume/Penguin Group, New York, 2005 (originally 1957), p. 499.

UPDATES

I fixed a minor usage error.

Just Take the Blue Pill, Lady

The newspaper headlines today declared the new recommendation. A typical woman should start breast cancer screening only at fifty years of age instead of forty. This new guideline, issued by the federal government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, is ostensibly intended to prevent harm from “overtreatment.”

Not for an instant do I trust this recommendation.

My mistrust has nothing to do with the medical evidence, of which I have no opinion, one way or the other. The guidance might be correct, or it might not be. I have no specialized knowledge in that field, so I cannot judge the matter directly.

The reason I do not trust the recommendation is that it comes from the federal government. No specialized knowledge is required to observe that Congress and the Obama administration are taking over the American health care industry, one piece at a time. It is currently dismantling what remained of private medical insurance, and in doing so, will essentially control the purse strings of what is already a heavily regulated medical industry. With the fathomless complexity typical of a mammoth bureaucracy (particular one that wishes to conceal the nature of its intentions), the federal government will in the end fix the prices that doctors, hospitals, and drug companies may charge for products and services, and will control the distribution of those medical services.

History and logic indicate that such freedom-suffocating activities have a one hundred per cent chance of driving American medical care into the ground, and the Obama administration seems to be at least dimly aware that it must anticipate some drastic cost cutting. After all, one cannot stride so confidently and blindly in the dark like Barack Obama has without bumping one’s shins into reality from time to time. We have already seen Mr. Obama qua medical dictator blithely prescribing the blue pill instead of the red pill.[Note 1.] It is not hard to imagine this Chicago political boss “persuading” his government panel to significantly reduce the recommended number of mammograms required by American women; all the panel had to do was change one little number. The next step will be to use this recommendation to set the maximum number of mammograms that will be paid for by Obama’s national health insurance plan, which in turn will make it impossible or illegal for an ordinary woman to get a yearly mammogram. Such services, considered basic in relatively free countries, will thus become luxuries in America, available only to those who have an “in” with a politician or to those wealthy enough to travel to another country for the service.

It has always amazed me how much trust the general public puts in government recommendations of this sort. The group in this case, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, is characterized as an “independent panel of experts in prevention and private care appointed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services.”[Note 2.] But what exactly is this group independent of? The implication is that they are independent of individuals and corporations that have a vested interest in the guidelines. However, what the panel is entirely dependent upon for its existence is the federal government, an institution that has absolutely no incentive to meet consumer demands. The panel is independent of responsibility and accountability.

This naive trust in government is equalled only by the distrust in private individuals and corporations. Considering the incalculable life-advancing benefits that freedom has made possible, I would find the suspicion of unfettered men and the general anti-corporate sentiment of the public to be completely incomprehensible but for one fact: Americans obviously spend far more time watching movies and television than they spend studying history and economics. In a free market, the very existence of a business requires it to exert every effort to please its customers. Companies cannot, with impunity, make promises or recommendations that are not consonant with reality.[Note 3.]

If Americans want to stop the hemorrhaging of liberty in this country, we will do well to stop demonizing the businessmen who treat us like customers and start questioning the motives of the politicians who treat us like serfs.

NOTES

1. In an ABC News interview with Dr. Timothy Johnson, Mr. Obama said, “What I've proposed is that we have a panel of medical experts that are making determinations about what protocols are appropriate for what diseases. There's going to be some disagreement, but if there's broad agreement that, in this situation the blue pill works better than the red pill, and it turns out the blue pills are half as expensive as the red pill, then we want to make sure that doctors and patients have that information available to them.”

The sheer dishonesty of this short passage is manifest. Obviously, if an individual deems a particular pill to be both better and cheaper than an alternative, he does not need the government to jam it down his throat. Mr. Obama’s obvious intention is to soften resistance to the prospect of government panels making these decisions.

2. “Panel Urges Mammograms at 50, Not 40,” The New York Times, 16 Nov 2009.

3. Of course, when companies in a mixed economy like our own mingle or collude with the government, the free market is surrendered, along with its prosperity and justice.

UPDATE

I fixed a minor typographical error: The phrase "number of mammograms" was supposed to be "recommended number of mammograms."

Death Panels

Like most of the media, a recent NY Times article [Note 1.] condemns crazy right-wingers for concocting the “stubborn yet false rumor” that the Obama administration is planning to adopt “death panels” to decide who gets medical care and who doesn’t.  The Times characterizes the very notion of “death panels” as baseless rumor - a false “assertion” that has somehow spread despite an “avalanche of reports laying out why it was false.”  The term evokes a “specter of government-sponsored forced euthanasia.” 

To be sure, there are some people who think literal Nazi-style forced euthanasia and abortion are on the White House agenda.  However, reports of such opinions are straw men used by the White House and media to discredit with one sweep all opposition to the president’s plan.  

The term “death panel” should not be limited to such concrete exaggerations as forced euthanasia committees; the use of the term does not indicate irrational fears.  On the contrary, there are very rational reasons to fear and condemn the president’s agenda.  It is obviously not correct to assign intentions of forced euthanasia and abortion to the Obama administration, but it is certainly appropriate to extrapolate the consequences of the centralized planning it is pushing for.  Such projections are perfectly valid, and indeed, vitally important.  By embracing socialism, Barack Obama has opened himself up to this.  It is fair play to project the ominous trends of his administration and to compare it to the tyrannies of the twentieth century, which were all based on the same socialist principles.

The fact is that opponents of Obama’s health care reform need not exaggerate or embellish the administration’s policies to show that it is a disaster in the making.  “Death panels” properly refer not to a hidden, sinister agenda but to the policies of which the president openly boasts.

The Times article itself provides a perfect example of the stunning inability (or unwillingness) of modern “liberals” to connect ideas.  As an alleged demonstration of how ridiculous and unfounded are the claim’s of Obama’s opponents, the piece quoted Betsy McCaughey as saying that the economic stimulus bill “would create a bureaucracy to ‘monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost-effective.”  The Times gleefully this as a refutation:

The legislation did not direct the coordinator to dictate doctors’ treatments.  A separate part of the law- regarding a council set up to coordinate research comparing the effectiveness of treatments - states that the council’s recommendations cannot “be construed as mandates of clinical guidelines for payent, coverage or treatment.”[Again, Note 1, emphasis mine.]

So, the fact that a federal bureaucracy, which holds mammoth regulatory power over the medical industry, calls its commands “recommendations” is supposed to show that McCaughey exaggerated?  Far from refuting her point, the example proves it.

_____________

It is not a misrepresentation to call an all-powerful government board that controls access to health services a “death panel.”  It is a perfectly apt label.  What else shall we call a central committee of bureaucrats who make “recommendations” that must be obeyed, meting out from a dwindling pile of loot (dwindling, because the American health industry will be choked to death; loot, because it is paid for by the seized earnings of citizens and the virtual enslavement of medical professionals) every treatment, therapy, medicine, test, doctor visit, and hospital stay?  What better than “death panel” could capture the meaning of a council of wise government officials who sit around a table deciding who gets what health care, like the Three Fates, spinning, weaving, and - yes - cutting?

The essence of Obama’s plan is to pool the earnings of all citizens into one pile from which this solemn panel will dole out portions.  Of course, the actual details of this are much more complicated than that - necessarily so, for complexity provides the obscurity that lets the president and Congress get away with it.  The Obama administration cannot summarily take over private insurance (such as it is) in the manner of a South American dictator.  Instead, the White House explains that all they really wish to do is tell the insurance companies what they can charge for products, and what they must pay out to the customers that they are forced to have.  Nor can the Obama administration seize citizen’s paychecks directly; it is less upsetting to the public to tax, inflate, and regulate away their earnings in innumerable indirect ways.  

The ideology that drives Barack Obama’s health care “reform” is: to each according to his need, from each according to his ability.   As such, it is manifestly unjust.  It severs the earner from the earned, enshrines need as the standard of value, and holds citizens at the mercy of politician’s whims.

Let us now consider the opposite of the president’s plan: the health care that would exist in a free country (and did exist when America was more free than it is now).  When a private individual has to make a decision about his health (or that of a dependent family member), it is indeed life and death that is at stake.  It is a fact of reality: people must sometimes make hard choices and painful decisions.  But the consequences of those decisions directly affect only themselves.  They can neither force others to pay for them nor be forced to pay for others.  

In a free market, private insurance companies would exist to offer a range of plans that people could purchase - or not - as they see fit.  Individuals would visit their doctors, seek treatments, and consume medicines according to their own standards and means.  If they want health care (or anything else, for that matter) they must purchase it with their own earnings; they cannot force others to pay for it.

The reigning principle of free-market health care - as opposed to the Obama administration’s socialist system - is justice.

The president is counting on his ability to cancel the true meaning of his policies by using words that obscure their nature, or denying labels that are apt.  Don’t let him get away with it.

NOTES

1.  “False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots,” New York Times, 13 Aug 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/health/policy/14panel.html?scp=1&sq=False%20Death%20Panel%20Rumor&st=cse. 

The Absolutism of Principles

An article I read recently told an anecdote attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to G. Bernard Shaw. While at a dinner party one evening, Shaw asked the woman next to him if she would sleep with him for a hundred thousand pounds. She considered for a moment, then consented: “Yes!” Shaw continued, “Well then, how about for five pounds?” To this, she replied indignantly, “What kind of woman do you think I am?” “We’ve already established that,” said Shaw. “Now we’re merely haggling over the price.”

The anecdote is amusing, but more importantly it points to something crucially important: the absolutism of principles. Like a crack in a dike, a single breach of a principle is enough to collapse it. The tiniest compromise eventually becomes a gaping hole through which all the values that the principle once supported pour out.

Consider Barack Obama’s programs for “overhauling” American health care. In his press conference last week, the president promised millions of listeners that he would improve their health care and make only the very wealthiest Americans pay for it. I am not disheartened enough to think that nearly everybody would be taken in by this, but it is surely true that many Americans, probably millions of them, would vaguely (and some, enthusiastically) consider the president’s policy to be beneficial.

As the president himself urged his listeners to ask themselves the question, “What’s in this for me?” I am sure some Americans leaned forward a little, eagerly hoping to find out what they would receive. After all, isn’t it good to be healthy? And if the government can make other people (best of all, the greedy rich) pay for the health care that everyone else uses, doesn’t that benefit the common good? It’s a “win-win” situation; the majority gets the stuff that they want and they don’t have to pay for it.

The problem is that all Americans do pay for it - not with money, but with something more fundamental and precious: our freedom.

Americans who would applaud an explicit government policy of flaying the rich for the sake of a share of plunder do not value freedom anyway (though like any parasites, they need at least a modicum of freedom to exist in order to survive themselves). It is not to them that I direct this article; they are beyond reach.

But I believe many Americans sincerely do not understand what is at stake, and would not hold their liberty so lightly if they did. From politicians and the press, they hear the words “freedom” and “marketplace” and “efficiency” associated with the government’s actions, while individuals and corporations are characterized as “predatory,” “greedy,” and “wasteful.” They hear Mr. Obama assure them that it is the government that will “give you the security” of having health coverage while it it private companies that “force you to pay” for it “out of your own pocket.” And since they’ve been told for as long as they remember that selfishness is wrong, that private corporations are corrupt, and that something as complex as a modern economy cannot possibly operate properly unless it is managed by a cadre of “disinterested” geniuses such as may be found at the helm of the federal government, they nod assent to the president in a ill-founded trust that the “experts” must know what is best.

What those nods of assent grant to Barack Obama and Congress is permission - permission to direct the lives of all Americans as they see fit. (Whether or not they are well-intentioned is irrelevant; both parties now, Democrats and Republicans, are hell-bent on tightening the federal government’s grip on American citizens.)

How do politicians receive this permission from basically good people in a free country? It is simpler than it may seem. What the president and legislators know, and what most Americans do not know or evade, is that politicians need not ask citizens directly to surrender their lives and livelihoods. They would never get away with it. Instead, their approach is indirect. All they need to do is obtain the public’s assent to dispose of a relative handful of citizens.

This is particularly easy to do today for two reasons. First, the fact that America is a republic safeguarding the rights of every individual has been completely obscured and (through sheer repetition) supplanted by the false idea that America is a democracy that institutionalizes the “will of the majority.” The second thing that facilitates demagoguery is the ready availability of a group that is hated or resented. In other places and times, foreigners and Jews have served as suitable targets; in America today, it is businessmen that are the disposable minority. Mr. Obama rode into power fomenting this resentment with smooth eloquence, pitting “Main Street” against “Wall Street.” In his speech last week, after briefly pretending he didn’t know the exact details, the president reassured his listeners that only “families whose joint income is a million dollars” would have to “shoulder the burden” for his plan.

Once you have granted the president permission to dispose of millionaires, what stops him from disposing of anyone and everyone? Nothing. The only defense from enslavement is to stand on principle - the very principle that was cast away. Like the woman in the anecdote who gave away her honor for a hundred thousand pounds, the American public has, by giving Barack Obama the green light to throw the yoke upon a few millionaires, surrendered its moral ground. It has lost its ability to object to any conceivable command to serve. When the Obama administration raises taxes and inflates away the wealth of all working Americans (which it will), the Americans who nodded assent can blame no one but themselves. Surcharges? Tax increases? Rations? Waiting lists? Having established that individuals are expendable, all of this is “merely haggling over the price.”

If you want a thorough examination of the compromise of principles played out to its logical conclusion, I refer you to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. In the novel, as the once free nation collapses by excruciating degrees into dictatorship and ruin, the hero identifies the reason. “In any compromise between food and poison,” he says, “it is only death that can win.”

Obviously, such compromises by the American public did not begin with the ascent of Barack Obama; the freedom established by the Founders has been whittled away steadily for more than a century. However, the last decade or so has been an ominous one, a period in which Americans ushered into office presidents and legislators that apparently feel unlimited in their power to prescribe and proscribe the activities of individuals. They think they have a democratic mandate to do so, and with good reason: Americans as a whole have given them permission in the manner I described above. For the love of our lives and liberty, we must withdraw that permission.

Now.

NOTES

1. Transcript from “News Conference by the President, East Room, July 22, 2009,” Office of the Press Secretary, White House, 23 Jul 2009. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from the president were taken from this transcript. In two brief quotes, I applied italics for emphasis.

Yaron Brook’s Call to Action - July 2009

In a newly released video, Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute speaks out against the socialization of the medical industry (i.e. “health care reform”), reminding us that health care is not a right.

A Bumper Sticker

I am not generally a fan of bumper sticker slogans, which are often designed to appeal to emotions by deliberately ignoring some fundamental consideration or other.  But every now and then I come across one that genuinely captures the full context, condensing a broad idea into a pithy and clever phrase.  Conservative radio talk-show host Jay Severin shot out an excellent one-liner in one of his monologues the other day:

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it is free!

This could hardly be original (and he made no claim that it was), but I had never heard it before.[Note 1.]  It aptly captures the fantasy and fraud that is "liberal" welfare policy.

NOTES

1.  The slogan is similar to the popular bumper sticker, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance," which is also clever.