Compassion, as I noted in an earlier column on this subject,
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. . . .
[Obama argues that there is ] “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.
AdvertisementLet 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.
Keep it in mind as you listen to our masters in Washington.
“Does he believe himself?”
God save us from the followers of John Rawls and John Kenneth Galbraith. I most assuredly do believe that Barack Obama is sincere. That’s what makes him so dangerous. He is convinced that big government polices managed by elites is the answer to just about everything. Obama is stunned that anyone might disagree. People are innately self-centered. They are inclined to argue backwards. Keynesian big government policies fantastically reward elites who graduated from the “best” universities. These individuals are virtually guaranteed great paying careers—and tremendous power. This stuff must also therefore be great for the unwashed masses.
‘What Ronald Reagan has to say about today’s “bipartisan” circus on health care’
… and what Ronald Reagan had to say about Medicare:
“The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.”
—Ronald Reagan, in 1961, arguing against the creation of Medicare
Wrong then, wrong now.
Mr. Reagan accurately forecast the Canadian system, it seems. I know of one doctor who came to the university at which I work to be able to practice her specialty, because the Canadian health service told her they already had enough like her.
Power in the hands of the many is good.
Power in the hands of the few is bad.
Libertarians and most conservatives understand this while leftists choose to pretend otherwise. They dream of a world in which people have to do as they command, “for their own good” of course. This is why they are so rancid. They would deny those around them the fundamental right of self-determination. The world would be a better place without them in it.
From “The Logic of Failure” by Dietrich Doerner:
“The original value is twisted into its opposite….In our political environment, it would seem, we are surrounded on all sides with good intentions. But the nurturing of good intentions is an utterly undemanding mental exercise, while drafting plans to realize those worthy goals is another matter. Moreover, it is far from clear whether ‘good intentions plus stupidity’ or ‘evil intentions plus intelligence’ have wrought more harm in the world. People with good intentions usually have few qualms about pursuing their goals. As a result, incompetence that would otherwise have remained harmless often becomes dangerous, especially as incompetent people with good intentions rarely suffer the qualms of conscience that sometimes inhibit the doings of competent people with bad intentions. The conviction that our intentions are unquestionably good may sanctify the most questionable means.”
Mix the two, that is, the “good intentions plus stupidity” of the electorate with the “evil intentions plus intelligence” of the present administration, and you get the strange sophism of comment 1, and the apparent strength of the Democratic Party.
I meant the comment above by Joseph, not comment #1. Sorry.