Well, this being a political blog (although one which tries to focus on local issues), I suppose a post or two on the hot topic of the moment — health care — is de rigeur. And there is a local connection, after all, since access to “affordable preventive health care” is one of the fiat “rights” asserted in the “Community Bill of (F)rights” City Charter Amendment — that wish list of free lunches hoked up by the local Green/Left cabal — which will appear on the November ballot as Initiative 2009-2.

Perhaps because there is no Whole Foods outlet in Eastern Washington or Idaho, the local cabal seems to be ignoring the matter, but their comrades across the country are all in a snit these days over Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s Aug. 11 Op/Ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he pointed out the obvious: that there is no “right” to government-provided health care, and that the problems with the health care system in the US are mostly of government making. He even had the lack of sense, considering his customer base, to quote Margaret Thatcher: “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

Said Mackey,

“Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This ‘right’ has never existed in America.”

He went on to advise:

♦ Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.

♦ Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.

♦ Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.

♦ Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.

He did not mention the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), the federal decree which transformed every emergency room into a “free” public clinic (which some other patient pays for, of course), or FDA regulations which keep life-saving drugs off the market for years while people who need them die, and add billions to their costs, but he could have.

Well, Whole Foods being the grocer of choice of the green/left/vegan/organic foods set, those remarks had about the same effect on that crowd as we might expect the revelation that their preacher was a Darwinist would have on a congregation of fundamentalists. They are, figuratively speaking, marching on Whole Foods as we speak, with flaming torches and pitchforks.

The notion that there is a “right” to health care is a popular one, however, even among persons who do not think of themselves as leftists or generally support leftist causes. They believe there is such a right — there must be! — because health care is a “basic need,” and because they assume it to be the reponsibility of government to provide for their “basic needs.”

Where did they get this idea? Well, from government, of course. For the first 100 years or so of their country’s history Americans did not expect government to provide for them; they took pride in providing for themselves. And they succeeded — becoming, by 1900, the first society in the history of civilization in which a majority of the population were not poor. But politicians crave power, and have long understood that the way to acquire more of it is to promise various constituent groups that if they support their bids for power, they’ll use that power to bestow free lunches on the supportive groups. Naturally, each new free lunch program inspires other interest groups to organize and demand their turn at the trough. So each new expansion of power and round of free lunches begets another, and soon people begin to look upon the government as the Great Provider.

Tocqueville anticipated the result:

“I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest—his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not—he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.

“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book 4, Ch. 6 (1835-40)

Ah, yes. “The government is my shepherd, and I shall not want.”

Tags: Democracy, Envision Spokane, individual freedom

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Democracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.