The Left’s ‘Colonel Kurtz’ Summer
The complexity of a proposed solution can suggest great intellect, but if the problem is summing one and one, only a mid-century German philosopher would suggest a sufficiently complex solution could get us to three. And so goes Obamacare, and with it much of the Left’s ideology.
The upcoming Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare cannot bury Leftism in a moment’s time; perhaps it will not even precipitate Barack Obama’s defeat. But do not ignore the potential: the expected plainspoken defeat of the Mandate — and the continuing current dialogue prior to the decision — constitutes the most significant national lesson in a century regarding the mathematical certainty of Natural Law.
A Court ruling against Obamacare would necessarily present the tenets of human rights as simply as arithmetic, which the tenets are: you have as many and as few rights as you can ever have. No mastermind or team of committed policymakers can define a new one, in 2700 pages or a billion. It cannot work, and further, a bill containing such an attempt unavoidably defines the bill’s advocates as limiters of freedom. Dictators or thieves.
Understandably, this reality — as much of it as each of the bill’s advocates has been able to stomach — presents for a disturbing session of logical reasoning for the left-leaning; a sweaty, horrific bleat from the Vietnamese jungle, if you will. Immediately following a day of the Court proceedings, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin proclaimed the Obama administration’s appearance a “train wreck.” Toobin appeared stunned, and likely was, considering his prior prediction of an 8-1 victory for Obamacare. Meanwhile, those aware of the definition of Rights — an immutable, inalienable definition — responded as Rush Limbaugh did: pleasant surprise, tempered with indignation that a middle school civics quiz just advanced to the Supreme Court.
Again: you cannot invent a right. The government attempted to do this, and found they could not do so without also violating a right.
Why? Because a “right” to a good or service necessitates a violation of the rights of the provider of that good or service or of whomever is chosen to be stuck with the bill, and further, as the citizen receiving the proposed new “right” is also subject to the violation in different time and circumstance, any new “right” is by definition a decrease in liberty for everyone, and might I add “duh.”
Elsewhere in the field of reality lies a perfect analogy for the Left’s century of affronts to Natural Law:
In all cases in which work is produced by the agency of heat, a quantity of heat is consumed which is proportional to the work done; and conversely, by the expenditure of an equal quantity of work an equal quantity of heat is produced.
This sentence, the First Law of Thermodynamics, represents the end of all inquiries into the creation of a perpetual motion generator. The First Law cannot tell you what form a proposed perpetual motion generator will take; it is, however, unfailingly predictive of the experiment’s conclusion in failure. Of course, that didn’t halt centuries of “mathematical leftists” from attempting to design and construct perpetual motion machines. The builders predating the First Law pursued knowledge in the best tradition of humanity; the builders following the Law belonged to one of three categories: they either refused to accept the Law; were ignorant of its discovery; or were charlatans who knew a great number of suckers resided in the other two categories.
“A right to health care” offers equivalent parallels to the First Law of Thermodynamics and its three categories of opposition: the deniers, the ignorants, and the common schmucks.
Unfortunately for the suddenly uncomfortable, the bigger problem for the left-leaning does not halt beyond Obamacare: can you name many Leftist proposals that do not either violate Natural Law or disdainfully tread on its boundaries? Any? How much of Leftist thought is, and should have been, dead on arrival? How many landmark bills, slogans, teachings, entire executive branch departments?
For the intellectually honest Leftist, today the pupils must widen, lest you mislead yourself and waste another day or life. The Constitution forbids Leftism. Further, Leftists cannot amend the sections of the Constitution forbidding Leftism, as those parts are based on incontrovertible arithmetic — they simply are, even if no law had been established. Choose to try anyway? Then you choose to spend your finite, sacred time on Earth forcefully restricting your neighbor’s, an act none can ever possess the right to do, and an act which the only possible just government — one founded in Natural Law — must condemn.
The left has spent over a century pursuing tyranny, mostly without self-awareness. Now a shrinking portion of the nation must, if their conscience demands it, confront the truth of a stricken Mandate: I am guilty, not them?
The horror.
I dunno, I think it will just push them towards single payer, like Canada or Europe.
I mean, remember, this mandate stuff was originally not just a Republican plan, but a conservative one. Even magazines like Reason (which is Libertarian) supported it years ago, just like Newt did once as did many others.
Indeed, Obama ran against it, not from the right, but from the left. I think he only embraced it not as a compromise, but simply because he realized it was his sort of plan – corporate crony capitalism on a massive scale, dwarfing the green energy swindles.
My own opinion is that, if health care were predominantly free market, then almost anyone could get if they wanted, and any kind they wanted. If the market was competing for your health care dollar, there would be many different and reasonably priced plans available. The only issues is what to do about the folks who will absolutely not buy health insurance under any circumstances. Obviously, one should not just kick their carcass to the curb in the event of catastrophic illness or accident.
rrbs,
You state the obvious truth, but we are probably too far gone to recognise that a free market is the best antedote for high costs. Pathetic when you think about it.
Why on earth would anyone buy health insurance? My family went without for years and years. We had had major medical but JohnsonCare (Medicare) trashed that and insurance premiums skyrocketed right out of our ability to pay. We self-insured, meaning we saved for emergencies. When we got sick, needed surgery, had a baby, we paid for it out of pocket. Period. I’ll bet that we still came out ahead – non-paid premiums + interest on savings = health care costs + surplus savings. Now, of course, we’re forced to have Medicare and pay premiums. NOT because we asked for it, but because we are FORCED to have it. Plus we paid for it in SS taxes, called deceptively “payroll” taxes. For the self-employed, like us, that meant 13% or more per year of our earnings. Govt-paid or govt-supplied anything is just plain excrement!
Evidently no one in your family contracted any illness that required really expensive care.
Hemodialysis for kidney failure costs around $65,000 *per year*. Visits to specialists and the various medications can push that to over $75,000 *per year*.
Very few people can afford that kind of money.
A bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia can cost as much as $500,000.
Did you miss the part where JoWriter noted that they had MAJOR MEDICAL? What you describe comes under the heading of Major Medical.
Robert, sinz54 is a Daily KOS plant.
It chose to ignore, not face the truth.
Remember the old saw…”You can lead a lieberal to the truth, but you cannot make “em think”
BMT costs 500K+ BECAUSE the government meddling in healthcare has skewed costs out of all proportion. Remove the deduction for employer-based coverage. Remove Insurance Commissioner positions at all levels of goverment. Responsible people WANT to get the coverage they need at a price they are willing to pay.
These things cannot happen soon enough.
True free market health care would have the following features.
1. No prescription laws.
2. No drug laws.
3. No government licensing.
4. No laws against importation of drugs for one’s own use.
5. No government regulation of hospitals regarding equipment.
6. Medical providers certified by a non-government public agency.
7. Freedom of choice, freedom to use existing knowledge for your own health.
8. Prepaid health insurance sold by more organizations than insurance companies.
JeremyR,
Very good point, but I don’t think they will try it for a little while. They are going to be a little busy losing elections and gathering their shrinking forces together to regroup and lick wounds. A few more months of high gas prices and unemployment are not going to help the lefties either. Wait until the OWS crowd gets done disrupting peoples lives over the summer and making complete fools of themselves and their friends in Congress, Americans are going to be in a poor mood come November. It ain’t going to go well for the candidates with a “D” behind their name.Nationalized health care will be a tough sell for at least a decade. By then the European welfare state will have pretty much collapsed. Won’t be a lot of buyers left.
Here in Europe I told some people the following :
If someone tells you “You must pay for this to help the poor people” then it is not an act of charity. It is an act of coercion. They were aghast and called me a barbarian.
“Pay for this insurance to Big Brother tohelp the poor people or I will break your arm.”
Would it fit on a poster?
How about this for a slogan?
“What is rendered unto Caeser is not charity”.
The breaks would be for 3 lines in a vertical presentation
What is
Rendered unto Caeser
is not charity
“Steal from the rich to give to the poor”, still starts with the word “steal”. It really is that simple.
steal from the rich
say it is for the poor
then give to some other rich
when poor stay poor blame it on bush
This was actually all parodied on Monty Python decades ago in the skit “Dennis Moore.” He was a Robin Hood like character who stole from “the rich” and gave to the poor, until the rich were now poor and the poor were rich, but didn’t appreciate anything they had and complained anyway. Throughout their program, this brief skit would come up with Dennis Moore pulling his pistols on some well-to-do persons on the road and saying “Stand and deliver!”
At each instance of this skit, you’d hear men singing “Dennis Moore Dennis Moore riding through the night, Dennis Moore Dennis on his horse Concorde, he steals from the rich, and gives to the poor, Dennis Moore….”
Finally, at the end, he had robbed rich people who had been robbed so often they were already wearing nothing but underwear, and he delivered what little he was able to get to the poor, who now derided him asking, “Is that all you got?”
And this was accompanied by the singers singing “Dennis Moore Dennis Moore riding through the night, Dennis Moore Dennis on his horse Concorde, he steals from the poor, and gives to the rich, Stupid Bitch!” I cracked up when I heard it. They were taking a huge slap at the repressive taxation in the UK which was killing that country’s wealth. It’s what’s happening here.
Yes, it is true that mandating the ‘right’ to healthcare in effect enslaves the providers of said healthcare. The response by the Left is always the same; it’s about fairness and the greater good. Fair enough. What about the right to affordable legal services, affordable financial planning, affordable luxury vacations. The latter introduces an interesting problem; is the right to healthcare the right of the best healthcare, merely adequate healthcare, or just bare bones care? Must we remove all suffering, or just enough to make it bearable? Is five Viagra per month reasonable, or does it constitute an illegal restraint of trade? But healthcare is different you say? Different from starvation (although one must recognize the absurdity in having to explain why so many mired in poverty are cursed with obesity in the US but nowhere else on the planet), different living on the street? And should those who abuse bodies and degrade their health with tobacco, alcohol, drugs, unprotected sex, and risky behaviour deserve the same level of care at no cost to themselves? Should they pay no penalty? What about that segment of the population that has figured out how live comfortably on the dole what with the plethora of financial assistance programs that have sprouted like mushrooms after a heavy rain? Such as the 25 year old lottery winner still collecting food stamps. Can you imagine being 25 years old and not being able to find any work? Certainly she ruled out those jobs that were ‘beneath her dignity’. It’s nice to have high standards, I suppose. John Galt, please come home. All is Forgiven.
Exactly! The problem with Socialism is that everyone is entitled to the best regardless of their contribution to the pot.
Great assessment and post – thanks!
The Constitution forbids Leftism. WELL… HALLELUJAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! How many of us have been saying that FOR DECADES?????? The Constitution forbids…MEDICAID, MEDICARE, SOCIAL SECURITY, HEAD START, EDUCATION, THE EPA, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. It forbids the ENTIRE LEFT WING Treachery/Tyranny that we have had to suck up and deal with. That’s why the next Civil War in America will pit the Constitutionalists against the Marxists. It will have NOTHING to do with race except where race and its exploitation so neatly served the goals of Marxism. And while we’re at it? Who will tell Bernie Sanders, a SOCIALIST and the rest of the pinkos in Congress that you CANNOT BE A LEFTIST AND SWEAR TO UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTION? Each is antithetical to the other and if you are a leftist you CANNOT SERVE. It should be an immediate disqualifier. Makes sense, right?
Wow, great post. I couldn’t have said it better myself. The US in effect ceased to be the US after FDR.
As a lawyer, I am required to take a certain amount of continuing education classes every few years—almost fifty hours of classes every three years, in fact. It is not optional. If I do not take the classes and prove to the bureaucracy which governs lawyers in my state that I have done so, my license to practice law will be taken away.
In a similar fashion, lawyers have to maintain a bank account, a trust account, which temporarily holds their clients’ money separate and apart from the lawyer’s day-to-day operating bank accounts. The interest which would otherwise accrue to the monies held in the trust account cannot go to the lawyer. It cannot, if one wanted to go to the trouble, be accounted for and be disbursed pro-rata to the clients involved. The banks maintaining the trust accounts for the lawyer cannot use the accounts’ accrued interest to offset the expense of maintaining the account. Instead the accrued interest must be turned over to a separate bureaucracy which governs lawyers’ trust accounts. Believe me, the amounts of money involved are substantial. This bureaucracy then chooses to which approved groups the money gets doled out to. (I can assure you, Catholic Charities or the Salvation Army are not among the recipients.) Many of these groups which receive money from this collectivisation of trust account interest are an anathema to me and to my clients, but, practically speaking, we have no say.
Both of these regimes are theft on a grand scale justified by the wishes and desires of so many goody-two-shoes on the left. The first scheme is a massive theft of lawyers’ time. The second scheme is a massive theft of accrued interest. But, they are set up in such a way as to prevent any one lawyer or client from fighting the erosion of his or her freedom.
From time to time, a third regime has been proposed: that each year, as a condition of holding a lawyer’s license, the lawyer must donate a certain number of hours of legal services to those in need. Forced charity is not charity. It is theft and coercion.
The common denominator of each of these ideas is that some leftist dreamed up a feel-good program based upon different schemes of theft and coercion to appease the guilt that the leftist felt about the inequities of the world. But, we are not supposed to mind. Each scheme is a small burden to bear.
But, collectively, the addition of scheme upon scheme does, in fact, become a burden to bear, a huge burden to bear. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself if your community requires recycling. Ask yourself, how much time you spend sorting the paper from the glass (of different colors) from the plastic (of different colors and types) from the yard waste, etc. etc. Ask yourself where once there was a single fleet of garbage trucks taking all this stuff to the dump–sorry–the landfill—there now is a second or third fleet of trucks, and people to drive them, which handles all the recycling. Where is the economy, gas mileage wise, or labor-wise in these programs? Oh. But, it feels so good for the leftists!
I could go on and on, but before I started writing this comment, I placed a frog in a pot of cold water upon my kitchen stove. I then turned on the burner to a low flame. I have to check if it has come to a boil and to see if the frog is still in the pot. And, whether the frog is still alive.
Oh! And I hear a very loud knock at the door from somebody claiming they are from a group called PETA.
I am right there wit’ YA’.
We should abolish law licensing. I should be able to contract with anyone I want to represent me in any court or legal endeavor.
Shout it loud! The postulate behind all of the Left’s notions about positive rights is that all rights are granted by the State, and may be modified or withheld at the State’s pleasure. This runs so clearly against our common American understanding that it alone should have stopped ObamaCare (and much that preceded it) before it ever rose to public attention.
But they don’t really think of it as a “right”. The most damaging concept ever to come along in economics is that of “externalities”. If in the exercising of your individual rights there are external consequences to others, then progressives believe that government has a right to control your actions or impose a cost or penalty to counteract that externality (think second hand smoke). In the case of health care, they believe that your freedom to eschew health care insurance has the external affect of raising the costs for everyone else.
The mother of all externalities is the supposed affect of carbon dioxide on Global Warming. There is nothing that you can do (including standing still and breathing gently in an empty meadow that you own) that does not affect everyone else. So basically your a** belongs to the government. Better get used to it if the “progressives” stay in power for another 4 years.
Externalities in the way described here, my not having health care insurance externalizes the costs that I create but are unable to pay for to the population in general, is just another way that our God given rights and the constitution are abrogated on a daily basis.
With my rights come responsibilities. If I choose to not carry health care insurance, the responsibility I bear is to be denied service if I have no visible means to pay for it, thus internalizing my choice to do as I please.
Yea, I would do that. If someone doesn’t take on the responsibility of providing for their own health care, retirement, housing, etc…, then they should consequently be unable to coerce the rest of us to pay for it through the force of government edict.
providing for their own health care, retirement, housing, etc…, then they should consequentially be unable to coerce the rest of us to pay for it through the force of government edict.
I can agree with your position on this but progressives unfortunately do not. They will layer on the additional contention that the reason a person does not buy insurance is that he/she cannot afford it – due to an unfair capitalist system that quickly seperates people into haves and have nots. The two points together – externalities and unfair competition – are awfully seductive to those who feel they do not have as much as they think they deserve. This (IMO) is why calls for socialism have persisted inspite of all the observable failures throughout history and around the planet.
Unfortunately, progressives don’t agree on anything that elevates the individual above the state. They don’t believe in personal liberty, they don’t believe in personal freedom and they surely don’t believe in responsibility.
I agree with your statement, however.
Take the example you put forth. What moral argument can a progressive put forth that coerces me to pay for the health care insurance someone else can’t afford? Even if I accept this argument, it is still a violation of my rights to coerce me to pay for it whether I make 50K or 50M a year in income. Stealing is stealing.
The brutal, nasty, hard fact is that there are always margin cases. Folks who live at the margins also can’t afford nice houses, although the recent housing crash was the progressives attempt to remedy that. They can’t afford expensive vacations, expensive cars, expensive restaurants, etc. By what reasoning should society pick up the bill for their health care and not all of these other things they can’t afford?
We have an obligation to set up systems of economics and governance that, as much as is possible, guarantees equality of opportunity. You can never guarantee equality of outcome! Any attempt to do so drags us all down and the simple fact is that in an attempt to make us all “equal” will fail. Unless of course one thinks of massively increasing those of us who live at the margins the ultimate goal.
The Supreme Court has in the past invented all sorts of ‘rights,” so don’t think for a moment they will not create another right of government to impose its tyranny on the citizenry.
Recall that in the 1930s the court held that a farmer growing wheat ONLY FOR HIS OWN CONSUMPTION was violating the law because it affected interstate commerce.
Also, Judge Ginsburg (formerly chief counsel of the ACLU, the legal arm of the CPUSA) has no use for the US Constitution, and neither do Kagan and the other female justice.
What right does the govt have to force you to enter medicare? Or social security? Well, our ‘GOVERNMENT” (i.e., dictatorship) does. And it is legal.
The Supreme Court will do what it will do, the constitution, individual liberties be damned.
Well put. There are three kinds of leftists; the ignorant, the bone headed, and those seeking tyranny.
Anytime you hear a leftist speaking disdainfully of the constitution you can be sure they are of the third type. What comes to my mind specifically is barry’s ‘flawed’ comment.
“How much of Leftist thought is, and should have been, dead on arrival?”
A lot of it, if not all of it. And it is our responsibility to stand up to it. The Obama administration is a classic example of what happens when socialism is left unchecked. Instead of giving us more freedoms, it takes them away from us. Obamacare is just one such example, but what about all those “czars” that Obama still has on the payroll? These are unelected officials who are not even approved by Congress and yet they have all sorts of powers. Is this the Presdient’s secret government and why doesn’t Congress refuse to fund any of them unless approved BY Congress? Well, hard to do that when the liberal Democrats under Pelosi and Reid controlled ALL of Congress. Even now, the Republicans still only control the House, so Harry Reid can still block any proposal that would harm his king.
But there is an election coming in November. Time to end this once and for all and put as many conservatives in Congress as possible. So even if Romney does stray a little from conservatism, Congress will pull him back in line. And it has to work, because our nation depends on it.
The Constitution authorizes, via our common commitment, a right to national defense, limiting freedoms through taxation and in some historical cases, conscription. It does not authorize a right to healthcare. HOWEVER, there is nothing magically different about those two situations. It’s merely a matter of compromises and choices. The founders chose to keep the federal government limited, fearing the effect of it’s growth on freedom. But it always comes down to the compromises we make with our freedoms. If we chose to authorize a constitutional amendment granting healthcare to all citizens, it wouldn’t be very different than authorizing the federal government to provide for the common defense.
I just realized these two phrases are poorly worded – “a right to national defense” and “a right to healthcare”. These are not rights. They can be thought of as compromises, balanced against freedom, to be authorized by the constitution.
National Defense was not described as a right. It was described as a necessary duty of the state allowing it to protect itself and its citizens. Again this is not a right but one of the primary functions of the state. To call national defense a “right” shows little understanding of a what a right really is.
The founding fathers began their declarations on the inspiration of “God given rights”. The 10 commandments were also divinely accredited. Far be it for a secular progressive to not supplant the divine with the obscentities of man to launch their social experiments, take credit for what works, and pass the costs on for their failures.
What greatly supplants health issues is to remove the patient from the responsibilies of their own health and turn that right into the entitlements of the nameless faceless permanently seated bureaucrats. The blame for health issue failures becomes permanently marked to ‘someone elses fault.’
Your thermodynamics analogy was brilliant. It applies to health care in that the aging and degenerative processes are permanent and cumulative. But who wants to hear that when the something for “free” incentive is such strong bait? Exactly what is free in the thermodynamic universe?
Read “The Path to Tyranny” or “The Road to Serfdom”. We are 100 years along the raod/path.
How to avert what until now has been true of all free societies, that they voluntarily descend into tyranny, is the question.
The left is doing everything in their power to divide and pit American against American.
What to do? Well, Freedom is not Free.
It will make no difference because the Left draws from our dear revealed religions. If the a program fails it is the fault of evil men who must be exterminated if we are to become as we should be.
Remember Moses had some poor doofus stoned for unapproved twig gathering. That is the Left’s model: kill for peace murder for justice.
Until we shake that mental model for natural law, such foolishness will not die, but flourish.
I suggest we don’t calculate our juvenile poultry until the process of incubation has been completely materialized.
one plus one equals three, for sufficiently large values of one.
The only natural law that needs to be understood is the natural law of bureaucracy: the more poorly something works, the greater its increase in funding.
The idea that there are honest leftists is oxymoronic.
The First Law of Thermodynamics doesn’t actually forbid all perpetual motion machines. But the type it doesn’t preclude violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is also pretty well established, at least for large objects. At least until the Supreme Court gets done with it, anyway.
Back in 1962, my parents had to pay for my hospital stay to have my appendix removed. No health insurance, please, my dad was self employed, busy feeding 6 kids. Total hospital expenses: $250. Back then very few had health insurance and competition ruled. Now there’s no competition and people don’t see the actual cost of the procedures. Much of that cost is augmented by all the paperwork needed to account for all the payments and who pays what. Another large amount is the money the hospitals need to cover the non-insured people who have no money and use the emergency rooms as their medical doctor. This is required by the federal government already and has sent paying people’s costs skyrocketing, just like our energy costs as stated by Obama in his speeches.
you might be amazed (or not) with how many sensible statements begin with “back in (fill in year prior to massive govt takeover of something)”. I, too, remember fee for service health care; my dad simply wrote the doctor a check for services rendered and everybody was satisfied. Plenty of doctors to choose among, too, in case one was dissatisfied with a provider.
No, I’m not surprised. One thing I forgot that current fees have to cover is ridiculous lawsuit awards by idiots on juries.
Now you see why “liberal engineer” is an oxymoron.
Or just a lie.
I’ve been using the perpetual motion model to explain what’s wrong with leftism my whole life. You have employed it to such good effect that I will not quibble with the rights to it. Use it in good health.
Theft is theft. You do not try to argue the point with a thief. You shoot him between the eyes.
If the government could outlaw the KKK, why can’t we outlaw the Democratic Party? Or launch a RICO investigation, at the very least.
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
The sixteenth amendment lays waste to all the rights that preceded it. The election of Scott Brown stopped the lechers from creating a proper law, so they passed a fatally, half-baked law. However, with the sixteenth amendment in place our government has the ability to define income and then take it from the appropriate victims. This abominable amendment laid the groundwork for Social Security and Medicare. With a little tweak, it would have opened the door to Obamacare.
– has already tried to portray the Justices as grocery clerks and errand boys.
This is a beautiful piece, just beautiful. The metaphysics, if you will of why right is right. Reminds me of the first time I read Rand.
Additionally, one can trace most coginitive psychological difficulties to failure of the imagination or denial of reality. For those lacking the former, the latter can still be (and always eventually is) addressed.
I believe a good layperson’s analogy explaining the violation of natural law would be the expresion: Having one’s cake and eating it too.
All of Keysnian economics is predicated on a violation of natural law. Proponents of this false pretense wrongly suppose that pulling money out of the economy to inject in their own fashion is helpful to the same economy from with the money was originally yanked. The effort expended in the very act of such redistribution (overhead, etc) must diminish any supposed return by the same amount, leading to an overall loss. This is so “DUH” that anyone who openly supports Keynsian economics should be required to invent an actual perpetual motion machine or else find their supposed credentials stripped from the record.
In science and rational philosophy, the author is exactly correct; I agree with him 100%. The problem is that Leftists are not rational thinkers but magical thinkers. They wish it, therefore, it is so. Like Pharoah’s “So let it be written, so let it be done,” they fully expect to command the rest of us mere mortals as they please, natural laws be damned. I’m not even sure we live in the same world; I KNOW there are no unicorns or vampires in mine. As long as they are certain they can’t win, leftists can get along with others, but whenever they feel strong enough, they’ll do their best to impose their will on the rest of us. After all, it’s for our own good. There is also the small matter of the Supreme Court not having issued its ruling yet. Not only can they decide to delay the decision, they can decide the law is perfectly acceptable just as it is. I found out today my family doctor, an exceptionally nice lady we’ve been seeing for more than a decade, is “going Galt.” She’s calling it something else, of course, and will still practice medicine, but not in the same way or location. I wish her well and will miss her. But, when a society tries to enslave its medical practitioners, it shouldn’t be any surprise the smarter ones refuse to be enslaved. And, of course, that leaves us with…. Ron Pittenger, Heretic
FDR did us no favors in his State of the Union Address in 1941 when he enunciated his Four Freedoms. The first two – freedom of speech/ assembly and freedom of religion – were indicative of rights that limited government because they were based in rights that were based in a human nature that all earthly and human governments were bound to respect. So far so good.
The second two – freedom from fear and freedom from want – were something else again. For a government to commit itself to actively eradicate these conditions (and perhaps preventively eradicate the preconditions in the minds and hearts of its citizens that purportedly create those conditions) is going to require a very invasive and powerful government indeed. In fact, you might well say that such a government is taking over a task formerly ascribed to the Divinity (who, however, is now Correctly considered as to either not-exist or to be grossly inefficient in oversight).
What FDR didn’t give thought to – and the Beltway hasn’t done so either in its 40-plus Biblical years of trying to terraform national culture and the minds and hearts of the Citizenry (presumably, in the American system, its ultimate governors) – was the Question: What sort of government is it going to take to enforce and impose and ‘protect’ those second two Freedoms?
It would have to be a government with an authority and power rivaling the Divinity. And yet no doubt would lack the Omniscience also required, and perhaps over the long run the Benevolence too.
Marx pooh-poohed the ‘right to privacy’ and the ‘right to property’ because in a bourgeois society those rights simply helped maintain the status quo. American thinkers who are Correct drank him in when trying to give Beltway pols a philosophy to justify the huge expansion of the government’s terraforming authority 40 years ago. The ‘right to privacy’ had to go if it meant you could be a Racist in your heart, and if it meant you could continue your patriarchal dominance and hegemony and oppression in your own house and raise your children to continue all the patriarchy and so on and so forth.
Meaning – ominously and lethally – that for the past 40-years or so Correct elites have been pushing on Congress and in the law schools the idea that there are n-o rights unless the government approves and grants them. Meaning that the government is the source of the rights of American Citizens, and not some fuddy-duddy, white male sky-god and his ‘natural law’. This is what happened when the Beltway bought into the idea of injecting the principles of an alien political Universe into the American political Universe of the Framing Vision. You could even say that Marx’s vision is an anti-universe to the American political Universe.
When rights flow only from the whim of the government (and whatever groups manage to control it by suppressing genuine ‘deliberative democratic politics’ – which thinkers like Chantal Mouffe and Catharine MacKinnon dismiss as useless since it’s a waste of time listening to people who ‘just don’t get it’) then you are on your way to tyranny. And in this ‘rights thinking’ matter, it is a tyranny of Leviatha from the Left as well as the more familiar Leviathan from the Right (caged in the beginning by the Framers).
Who on the Left any more than on the Right now in this country could or would want to deny Mussolini’s pithy formulation of Fascism: “nothing against the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state”?
Pastor using the F word for forgive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVtZk7gma_I&feature=related
This decision proves that even the Supreme Court, no less than Congress, are nothing but paid shills for corporate interests. Obama tried to introduce a tiny modicum of compassion into a system dominated entirely by greed. Indeed, it was just a modicum, for greed would still exist and the insurance companies would still have wide, but not absolute say in determining the who gets what level of health care. However, the greedy insurance companies could not bear to have any limitations placed on their power so they bought the Supreme Court just like they bought the Congress. The idea that the Constitution limits the rights of society to have more compassion and less greed is ridiculous. It says right in the preamble that its purpose was to “Promote the general welfare.” If that phrase means anything it means more compassion and less greed. This decision is ridiculous!
america ahhh now the land of the entitled. NOT