The second most frightening thing the President said at his televised “forum on heath care” yesterday was that “if we don’t tackle health care, then we’re going to break the bank.” That statement, reminiscent of his warning a few weeks ago that if we didn’t give him $800,000,000,000 right now, today, forget about bothering to read the bill, then the result would “catastrophe.” Well, we gave him the dough, and the result? Yesterday the Dow closed down another 280 points to about 6500.
Here’s how it works: the President tells you that we have a bad situation, which is true. He then says that spending huge sums of money–which he proposes to procure by extracting more money from (certain) citizens present and future–will solve the problem, which is false.
In the case of health care, the enthymeme is doubly painful, because not only will more government spending not be cure for government spending, but it will also do grave damage to what is still, despite the efforts of squadrons of government bureaucrats for decades, the greatest health care system in the world.
Obama has promised to change that, and judging by the warm fuzziness in evidence at his Potemkin forum on health care yesterday, I reckon he will succeed. What will we get instead? Obama talks about “universal” health care. He vowed to sign that into law before the end of his first term. If the Canadian experience–so much admired by the Left–is anything to go by, what that will mean is universal access to the government controlled waiting lists for health care. Not quite the same thing as universal health care.
Reflecting on the question of whether the Canadian economy should be a model for the American economy (the answer, by the way, is No), the Canadian journalist Mark Steyn observed that “if you have government health care, you not only annex a huge chunk of the economy, you also destroy a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher, and you make it very difficult ever to change back.”
Those are the depressing bits: the loss of freedom and the difficulty of ever getting it back. On all these government expropriations, what we have is essentially a one-way ratchet. Once the government sinks its teeth into you, it is extremely difficult to wiggle free. The income tax and social security tax, we tend to forget, were both instituted as temporary, emergency measures. That’s why 1895 is one of my favorite years in US history: in that banner year the Supreme Court ruled that the income tax was unconstitutional. Needless to say, the ruling didn’t last long.
Looking at the grinning rogues gallery of mountebanks yesterday–Ted “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy, Charlie “tax dodger” Rangel, and the rest–I thought of Ronald Reagan’s warning about how socialists so often use health care as a wedge to extract not only money but also freedom, including freedom of choice, from the citizenry. “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people,” Reagan observed, “has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.”
The name of that reluctance is compassion. Compassion is a noble human emotion. But it can be exploited by unscrupulous politicians and twisted into self-flagellating feelings of guilt, on one side, and the self-regarding emotion of virtue, on the other.
And this brings me to the even more frightening thing Obama said yesterday. There is, he said, “a moral imperative to health care.” Is there? What he meant was that if you agree with his proposal, you are an upstanding citizen who deserves the warm, self-regarding glow of moral infatuation. If you disagree with him, however, you are a greedy, selfish, unenlightened person who needs . . . well, the President hasn’t gotten around to that part of the scenario yet, except to note that anyone who is solvent can expect higher taxes.
Let me say a few words more about this. Why do I find it frightening when Obama starts talking about there being “a moral imperative to health care”? Is it not an expression of benevolence? Indeed it is. But that is far from reassuring. Why? The Australian philosopher David Stove got to the heart of the problem when he noted that the combination of universal benevolence fired by uncompromising moralism was a toxic brew. “Either element on its own,” Stove observed,
is almost always comparatively harmless. A person who is convinced that he has a moral obligation to be benevolent, but who in fact ranks morality below fame (say), or ease; or again, a person who puts morality first, but is also convinced that the supreme moral obligation is, not to be benevolent, but to be holy (say), or wise, or creative: either of these people might turn out to be a scourge of his fellow humans, though in most cases he will not. But even at the worst, the misery which such a person causes will fall incomparably short of the misery caused by Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Ho-Chi-Minh, or Kim-Il-Sung, or Pol Pot, or Castro: persons convinced both of the supremacy of benevolence among moral obligations, and of the supremacy of morality among all things. It is this combination which is infallibly and enormously destructive of human happiness.
Of course, as Stove goes on to note, this “lethal combination” is by no means peculiar to Communists. It provides the emotional fuel for utopians from Robespierre on down. That is the really sobering thing about the emotional metabolism of abstract benevolence: that the capacity for evil so easily cohabits and feeds upon the emotion of virtue.
Thank you, Roger. Your article today, again, calls for another drink(not in celebration, of course). I’m going to bust into one of my 86 Gruaud-Larose’s tonight. In fact, I might just have to start popping em all and passing it around before the government takes that away too. Hey, red wine’s good for heart, eh?
Since you mentioned Stove, I’d like to point how our supreme leader embodies the four character flaws so rampant in human natre: the simple inability to shut-up:(okay, we all suffer from this one)the man has not closed his mouth since the first day he started campaigning. Now of course, politicians suceed and fail by opening their mouths; most however do make some sort of attempt to make their statments sound rational, but each and everyone of them knows that they must inspire the people as opposed to make logically valid statement(this bring up a question: can a politician make a logically valid statement?).
Hunger for Power: to say that this man is a megalomaniac is the understatment of the day.
Determination to be thought deep: he is deeply concerned about the state of our nation(as anyone ought to be)but his prescription for our ills will certaintly cause more of our demise by “curing” of the thought that we may actually be better able to care for ourselves than the government can. Fear: not fear of an idifferent universe, but fear that if we don’t enact his plans that we’ll spiral downward to the status of a 3rd world nation. Of course his policies, if they’re all enacted will create a new nation status: the 4th world nation, a nation so deprived and impoverished (not just financially) that it will virtually cease to exist.
Sorry, my link was bad. Here it is again.
http://www.globalpolitician.com/25109-barack-obama-elections
Sorry again … my first comment didn’t appear.
The link in #3 is to a psychologist’s analysis of Obama’s narcissistic personality, posted a year ago. It’s not encouraging.
“…the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom. That species of benevolence underwrote the tragedy of Communist tyranny.”
The brilliance of our constitution is that the founding fathers based it on Judeo-Christian principles. Not to sound preachy, but especially in Judaism, as far as I know, only G-d can legislate the moral imperatives as found in the Decalogue. It is false to believe in the cult of the personality of man alone as the rational being who can create moral law(history under the communists & fascists has proved otherwise.) Those who believe solely in a secular morality, divorced of divine absolutes, contribute to the disintegration of society where this fantasy of equality for all is usually a deathknell for all.
The communists believe that man is rational, hence good, hence able to make moral law. The fallacy, as Judaism points out is that man is not rational, but complex, & hence cannot be trusted to make moral law. Our Constitution is a fence to those like Obama who believe they can divine moral law base on an ethos detached from a maker…(then again Obama thinks he is divine & he will chip away at the periphery of the precepts of even secular morality to reason rational & accommodate his lust for power & liberal “absolutes” i.e., the welfare state, gay marriage, global warming, euthanasia…)
Well done, but a very sobering post (in spite of Scott #1 and 2, although I might accept some fine Georgian wine…)
From the Brothers Karamozov, “The Grand Inquisitor”:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/dostoyevsky/d72b/chapter36.html
After all, its for our own good.
Take a look at Stove, L.C, you might change your mind. Otherwise, sorry your found it less than amusing.
The Great Leader exhibits the great Liberal vice of voyeuristic morality, the sign of our times. By vilifying someone else for their lack of virtue, you are thereby cleansed of any virtuous faults in your own nature, even if you keep on doing the same old sins. Obama has relatives living in dire poverty. Is he not his brother’s keeper? He insists that the common tax payer should be, even when the people he claims are their brothers are people they have never met.
Many limousine liberals are morally outraged that “red necks” in Flyover country drive gas-guzzling SUV’s, but feel no guilt when they take a private jet across the globe to go to a party with their enlightened friends, emitting more carbon dioxide than the people who they have such contempt for do in a year.
Its so easy–just decry someone else’s lack of virtue and you are thereby yourself absolved of that sin, forever and forever. Its the new religion of our time.
People seem amazed about how many
I have no idea where that “People seem amazed about how many” line came from in my previous comment. Sorry.
Scott #7: Thanks, I’ll put him on my list of guys to read. And, I was trying to make a joke with you cracking open your bottles of wine and the “sobering” thoughts of Mr. Kimball’s post. Not a good one. Take care.
L.C,
I was just concerned that Mr Kimball might be drinking Lysol, as one commmenator in another post accused him of; didn’t think he should miss out on a good Bordeaux, that, dollar to donuts, probably tastes much better than Lysol.
…and no Kimball, I don’t think you drink Lysol, and if you do then stop immediately.
There is so much of the worst of human history being demonstrated by this administration it IS truly frightening. We really need to return to the basics, but I fear government has grown so large it has rather taken on a life of its own. And like some slumbering monster it is now being awakened by the ignorant and will swallow them whole.
I only hope the rest of us aren’t swallowed up with them.
Sorry for you guys. I live in Eastern Europe and that’s how it all started back there too… Good luck… comrades?!
Maybe I’m reading Roger’s sentence wrong… but I’m not seeing any sign anywhere that Obama “means well” and seeks “to boost all mankind up to their own plane of enlightenment.” Rather, it appears to be more like all of us are going to be crammed down to the lowest common denominator, with the exception of those Enlightened Ones “ruling” us. Obama has all the appearances of a narcissist, who displays NO empathy for anyone. All this while he and his fellow politicians live the high life enjoying all the perks of office — free rides on Marine One, skipping out on their taxes, spending (taxpayer?) money on cocktail parties and celebrity entertainment, eating wagyu beef in excessively heated rooms, while expecting the rest of us unwashed masses to be “patriotic” via working hard and sacrificing (as we all listen to the sucking sound of our retirements/portfolios being flushed away). There’s no helping the little people in any of this. With healthcare and cap’n'trade, in particular — it’s all about Control. If they wanted to really help with the environment via government aid, why don’t they start with something like subsidizing recycling and waste minimization??
Yo Comrade Kostragh! Here’s to growing potatoes in our backyards!
Roger, you seem to be committed to pontificating and enflaming fear (of Obama) through ethereal and vaguely philosophical devices which would indict Obama as a socialist (and by your unreasoned extension, a communist tyrant, or czar of an empire).
But if we talk rationally about the history of nations since the end of WWII (the second war of modern empires, and the first imperial oil-war) all former empire nations (in Europe and Japan) which expunged empire, and empire-thinking, and successfully developed as anything close to representative democracies, and progressed toward genuinely serving the interests of their people, with equitable GINI coefficients, ‘universal’ health care, absence of willful wars, and a dozen other characteristics that the vast, vast majority of average Americans pray for, took the very same (and only proven) path out of empire —- ‘social democracy’.
Why, pray tell, would you not consider Obama’s helmsmanship of the American political economy quite pragmatic, and defensible as being pragmatic (rather than the ideological bent that you ascribe) given purely the evidence and this existence proof that only ‘social democracies’ have proven to be a successful model to exit the state of unsustainable empire and enter the state of ‘free world’ democracies?
Perhaps, you would not mind dealing in such mundane terms as what ‘social democracies’ have been able to do for their citizens in the real world, and I would be glad to take the reverse role of showing what this ruling-elite ‘corporate financial Empire’ controlling our country behind the facade of its two-party, ‘Vichy’ sham of democracy has been able to do for our people over the last three decades — wherein we could have a rational discourse and public debate, rather than what passes here for discussion, eh?
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