The Objective Eye

"Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demand for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen."
- Ayn Rand, "America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business" (1961)

My Photo
Name:
Location: Los Angeles, United States

Friday, September 21, 2007

Health Care Nationalization: The False "Auto Insurance" Analogy

Now Playing: "Brother Wind Shear" by Agent 22

One grows weary of hearing the rhetorical tactic of preschoolers used in political debates over vital issues, but a popular one is a variant of the one our parents and teachers typically dispelled with the question "If Johnny jumped into the lake, would you jump into the lake too?"

"We tax x, so why not y?"

"We regulate drinking, so why not smoking too?"

A particularly vapid form of this argument has already been advanced with some frequency in just the three days since Hillary "Umbridge" Clinton announced her wish to join litigation attorney John Edwards in nationalizing American medicine.

It goes like this: "We require people to carry auto liability insurance, therefore we should require people to carry medical insurance."

I say "particularly vapid" because the "auto insurance" argument, upon closer inspection, actually contradicts and refutes Clinton's/Edwards' authoritarian power-grab at root.

To recap the basics of America's Founding ideology, the purpose for which governments are necessary in the first place is, solely, to uphold and defend the rights of the individual against any and all who would violate them. That purpose is stated explicitly in the Declaration of Independence: Inherent to our nature as rational beings are the inalienable rights of life, of liberty, of property, and "...to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men."  Period.

Automobile liability insurance is required precisely because of the possibility that during the normal course of travel a given vehicle may collide with another vehicle, thereby causing personal or property damage to another person. The law is there to protect the rights of every person to their life and their property, should they choose to drive.

Clinton's health care nationalization scam would require that people's property be damaged, directly, as a matter of binding law - via coercive, forced participation and the attendant, inherently coercive taxation to finance it (until the scam's inevitable collapse.) Under Clinton's proto-fascist scheme this property damage would be an actuality in all cases, not just a statistical possibility of accidental damage.

By the same standard upon which automobile liability insurance is required - the defense of individual rights - Clinton's health care nationalization must be prohibited, not endorsed, at the outset.

So much for "If we require auto insurance, then..."

* * * * *

Again, we must demand - from our GOP "leadership" and Presidential candidates - an aggressive policy precisely the opposite of the Clinton/Edwards plan: an immediate dismantling of the entire edifice of government regulation of American medicine, with a complete separation of medicine and state as a specific goal.

If the state owns our very bodies, it also owns the "right" to dispose of them if it suits the whim of the bureaucrat du jour. I do not define Clinton's plan as "fascist" for cheap hyperbole - it's an identification of fact.

[Essential reference: "Health Care Is Not A Right" by Leonard Peikoff, 1993]

_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others." - Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781

_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_ \_

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home