From the Wall Street Journal:
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich praised the health care law that his rival for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, signed in 2006 as governor of Massachusetts, according to a newsletter unearthed by the Wall Street Journal.
“The most exciting development of the past few weeks is what has been happening up in Massachusetts. The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system,” reads “Newt Notes” from Gingrich’s former consulting company, the Center For Health Transformation. “We agree entirely with Governor Romney and Massachusetts legislators that our goal should be 100% insurance coverage for all Americans.”
I was in a discussion yesterday with a guy who said that if someone had the cure for a disease that could help people but he wasn’t willing to share it – because medical researchers only do what they do for bragging rights – then he’d have no moral issue with putting a gun in his face and forcing him to share it.
At least he had the courage of his convictions.
Most sheeple advocating, for instance, government schools fail this argument. I ask: what happens if I stop paying my property taxes? They answer: you’ll get a letter. Extend this to the point that the Sheriff is removing you from your house and you fight back.
Now ask the sheeple: do you have the courage to be the one pointing a gun at me, extorting that money from me for the skewls? Most don’t, and won’t. Or they’ll throw up a cloud of black ink and scoot away into the darkness like a frightened calamari*.
* calamari: a delicious animal found in the sea.
That’s exactly what I told this guy. I told him he didn’t have the balls to do his own dirty work so he advocated violence by proxy.
It doesn’t make any sense to me to threaten one person’s well being in order to ensure another’s. Maybe I drink too much.
They really squirm when you make the violence-by-proxy argument, don’t they? It seems to break the trance for just a moment…and they don’t like it one bit!
Maybe you don’t drink enough. I’m thinking I might start again; it will make my fellows so much more bearable 🙂
In vino veritas!
I’ve made the same argument. Each time those advocating for the state deny there is violence. I point out that all one needs to do is resist sufficiently. They say a letter will be sent, I say ignore it. They say there will be court, I say ignore the summons, don’t go. They will deny there is violence because we are supposed to comply.
But then get these people started on why private charity doesn’t work… then they’ll say threat/violence is required otherwise people wouldn’t give or pay their ‘share’.
Eventually they’ll go silent, but they will not admit the system is based on violence.
Sometimes I try another angle, arguing against violence based systems. They will then bring forth the boogie man, the warlords and gangs and others that the state (composed of warlords, gangs, criminals, etc) will protect us from. That because of this we can only have violence based systems. Of course if every individual was armed and at least winged one or two of them roughly 1/3 of the time they tried to steal eventually these criminal enterprises would cease to exist. They only exist because of the relative low risk of their use of violence.
YES! I’ve had this precise argument with a good friend whose chief counter to my anarchist stance is “yes but then the biggest gang will take over”
To which the obvious reply is: what the hell do you think has already happened?
Arm up. It’s the American way and kept the Republic free for its first 90 or so years.
Nice!
I would say that the researcher, if he knew there was the potential for having a gun in his face would either (a) become a plumber or car salesman thereby avoiding the problem to begin with or (b) destroy the research and never tell a soul about it. You have to wonder just how many inventions, scientific discoveries and other activities that would have benefited mankind have been thwarted, hidden or destroyed due to fear of state action. I know in my own life I have avoided (or been prevented) from doing various harmless things I wanted to out of fear of regulatory penalties or taxes. I laugh when I hear someone call Amerika “The Land of Liberty” nowadays.
Boothe, I can say for a fact that this corporatist economic system has reduced what I could have done considerably. Nobody will ever know what someone like myself could have produced or what millions of others could have produced had they not been put through the government schools and stuck in this system.
I’m sure you are correct Brent. Bureaucracy stifles creativity and independent thinking with deferance to the status quo. New ideas and inventions involve risk. Risk in turn could result in failure which would make the establishment bureaucrats look bad. So it’s safer to do nothing, avoid any mistakes and get a passable annual evaluation. Rinse, repeat and get your pension at 58.
This type of personality doesn’t want you, the subordinate, to innovate either because if it goes wrong he’s responsible. If it works out well, you look smarter than him (because you actually are). So he perceives your efforts to think outside the box as a threat to his position in either case.
This is why the Republicrat PTB hates Dr. Paul. He can see an immediate $1.2T in cuts their “super committee” can’t find with both hands and flashlight. He tells the truth and has done so consistently for 3 decades. He has warned them ahead of time what would happen if they stayed the course of foreign intervention and fiat money and it has played out as he predicted.
As far as the establishment is concerned Dr. Paul is not a team player because he dares stand on principle. And whether it be corporate or government bureaucracy (not that there’s much difference), innovation, accurate root cause analysis and honesty will not be tolerated if at all possible. But he hasn’t let that stop him Brent. And by extension we shouldn’t let it stop us either.
Well said Boothe!
Especially the swipe at “team player”–if I hear that term ever again I’m going to vomit on the shoes of the utterer.
“Team player” has become Newspeak for “mediocre automaton”. It’s the same exercise in collectivism they teach school kids when they assign “group projects”–and invariably the brightest most motivated kid ends up doing all the work.
In a way though it’s a good lesson, because that’s what he’ll be doing the rest of his life under the current regime.
Boothe, if were the type to put up with a popularity contest for political office I see your point about not stopping. But I create products for a living.
Like Methylamine points out the basic problem. It’s a “team”. Which brings about all sorts of social problems. Carrying the team makes me very very grumpy and resentful these days because I know there isn’t any reward.
I just found this, which makes some excellent points about Submit and Obey:
I think healthcare for all is a nice thing. (like world peace and no hunger for all)
Some problems I have with it are how to pay for it and mandatory coverage. If coverage is mandatory, then there is little incentive to control costs or offer affordable coverage. (see auto insurance)
How to pay? If it will be through taxes, how high will be the taxes?
If everyone has to pay it might lead to people using it for every little thing, which will cause the cost to rise. Repeat cycle.
If “health care” (that is, medical treatment) is a “right,” then it means some other person or persons has an obligation enforceable by law to provide it. This strikes me as an argument for enslavement. It is an argument that says (if I am doctor) any sick person anywhere is morally entitled to compel me to treat him. It is an argument that says others are obligated to compensate the doctor for his services, or to provide the facilities, equipment and medicine he requires to treat patients.
An obligation enforceable at gunpoint.
All the sweet talk about “providing care” and “helping” people comes down to this.
It’s a repellent concept. A barbarous concept.
As tragic as individual cases of human misfortune can be, nothing in this world is worse than threatening (or using) violence to force others to provide you with a material benefit, be it “health care” or “housing.”
It’s the code of the looter and the parasite – and the foundation of what inevitably results in a society based on parasitism for the benefit of looters.
Why is health care more important than food? Everyone will die within a month or so without food; most people can go years without health care.
So I say FOOD is a more important fundamental right and should be enforced by the state.
*END SARCASM*
The whole debate has been poisoned with a false premise: that health care is the most important good. That has then been elevated to health care as a right…and the destruction of the notion of positive vs. negative rights.
Positive rights impose a burden on someone ELSE to provide it; negative rights require only that I be left alone.
When was this principle lost in debate?
How ineffably stupid have Americans become, that they can’t separate these two and make logical distinctions?
And back to health care: Did sick people wander the streets like zombies, dying of their illnesses, before the “Great Society” programs? NO; we had charity hospitals. In a sufficiently free society, prosperity is so great that charity actually works.
It’s not just a nice theory. It’s what America was until roughly the 1950’s.
You are exactly right. Without food, and shelter from the elements you’ll need health care pretty damn quick huh?
That’s the idiocy of the argument. They’ve politicized health care. They might as well have politicized shoes. It wouldn’t have mattered. They could have convinced boobus-americanus of anything.
It’s like drinking and driving: some mothers who had loved ones killed by drunk drivers got their issue politicized so it became the most important thing. It’s not.
I don’t advocate having too much to drink and driving but according to the WHO, death by auto accident – including those that are alcohol related – isn’t even in the top 10 causes of death. It’s number 16. Sixteenth behind diahrrea! You have a better chance of shitting yourself to death than being killed by a drunk driver.
Where’s the war on intestinal bacteria?
When people tell me that people would be dying in the streets w/o gov’t run health care programs, I ask them why we can’t just do what we did the last time people were dying in the streets due to no health care?
They ask: when was that? I respond: exactly.
People also like to make the argument that w/o welfare programs of all kinds that people would be dying in the streets. Really? The people on welfare are the kind of people that if they didn’t get money from the gov’t, they’d just stand in the street until they died? Then why are we giving them welfare? Welfare is meant to be temporary help until the person can “get back on their own two feet”. If they’re the kind of person to just stand there until they die if somebody else doesn’t pay for them then they are not the kind of person to ever get “back on their own two feet” so it’s just a waste of money.
None of those idiotic arguments make any sense or have any logic behind them.
Eric, Don, methylamine:
You are of course right about healthcare. If provided by the state it will ultimately come at the end of a gun. (Although it does sound nice in theory if you do not think too hard about how the healthcare will be provided)
In utopia it would be nice for many things. Unfortunately as I get older I get more aware of the total costs behind much of what is provided by government. (I do not remember who posted the link, but that Stefan Molyneux was a good listen)
The more aware I become of the cost of “services”, the less I want government to provide “services” to me and to others in my name.
From one point of people would be better of without all of the assistance from the government.
There still would be poor and needy people as with the current system. People in general would by necessity need to be productive to live or depend on the generosity of others. The productive people would be in a better situation to lend help (if they choose to help) others. Necessity is a great motivator for getting people to do what they can so they may not die from lack of basic needs.
The government is a middle man that takes a cut of all money it extracts from the public.
Mithrandir, you’re quite right; productive people would be in a much better situation to help others without government interference. The problem for officious government parasites is they can’t make political hay from private voluntary beneficence. They acquire the power and adulation they crave by taking our property and handing it out to those they favor or wish to influence. As we’ve previously noted, narcissistic sociopaths gravitate to government employment. Unrestrained by moral standards, they have no problem committing armed robbery by proxy and “sharing” their ill gotten gains. Most of the recipients of this largess aren’t going to object to the means by which it was obtained. But they would strenuously object if they had to put forth effort for it. Hence, you don’t see welfare recipients being required to pick up trash off the roadsides or even subjected to urinalysis. If so, the Social Services offices would be ghost towns and the power of the Welfare Plantation would evaporate over night.
Locally controlled private charities, although subject to small scale corruption, are better able to determine who are truly needy and who the deadbeats are. And I say go one step farther than privatizing all charity; those who are able to work but are unwilling should not be allowed to eat until they ARE willing to work (typically about 24 hours). I know this sounds harsh and the clovers will say “Boothe you’re just heartless and selfish! What about the truly handicapped and infirm? ‘Ya just gonna set ‘em outside the city gates for the wolves or let ‘em starve?” I have never advocated depriving the truly needy or disabled nor will I ever; quite the contrary. I merely stand by the fact that government charity in not permitted by the Supreme Law of the Land in this Constitutional Republic. Allowing previously able bodied people to become obese, diabetic state dependents is as much a crime against them as it is against those of us that are forced to pay for it. Then in turn trying to saddle the rest of us with the costs of their healthcare is adding insult to injury.
The funny thing is the rabble that gets angry about being cut off seems to be able to do some sort of productive work if they put their mind to it while the truly handicapped and infirm seem to want nothing more than the chance to be productive.
Most of those on the government dole are there due to their own decisions and of course the government’s meddling in the decision process. How it knocks bottom rungs off the job ladder with minimum wage and other costs. How it makes welfare more lucrative than a starting job. How it decimates neighborhoods with laws, regulations, housing projects, and so on.