Update! At least he's honest...Rev. Al Sharpton says America clearly voted for socialism when we elected President Obama...and so it goes...
Fundamentally, success is a feeling. That’s why money alone can’t define one’s success; it’s simply not possible. You can have all the money imaginable and still not “feel” successful while someone else with barely a pot to piss in might feel satisfaction in the extreme.
The only consistent feeling associated with success is abundance. When you feel a sense of abundance, or if you prefer, fulfillment in material, emotional and spiritual life you probably feel successful. That threshold of abundance or satisfaction is determined only by the person you’re looking at when you brush your teeth in the morning.
The destructive forces that act against success are:
• Fear,
• Doubt,
• and Complacency.
Of the three, complacency is the most dangerous.
Never in my lifetime have I seen a more serious threat to individual freedom and personal liberty than the threat posed by the debate over mandatory healthcare in the United States. This is the most egregious attempt at collectivism in U.S. history and is proof that government imposed altruism is the most destructive force working against individual freedom.
The United States was founded on the principle of individual freedom. This made us, for the first time in history, a society in which the government was a servant of the people rather than one in which the people were subjects of the government. This important distinction was expressed to the world in the elegant prose of the Declaration of Independence. Most important was the declaration that individual rights are natural rights and not defined by a ruler or a ruling body. Our founders created a government that would above all assure that individual rights would be protected from any actions of that government.
The fact is, despite the rhetoric, healthcare is not a right. Your freedom to care for your own health is. You don’t have the right to health insurance anymore than you have the right to a plasma screen television or a new car. You have the right to pursue these things provided you don’t impose on the rights of others to do the same.
This important distinction resonates most clearly in the words the founders used to define exactly what natural rights were: “…life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Note clearly the word “pursuit.” Your right is a freedom to pursue happiness, not a guarantee of it.
“A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one’s own effort.” Ayn Rand
As soon as you allow your government to take from one to satisfy the needs or desires of another, you’ve crossed the line from freedom to tyranny; the only debate is one of scale.
If you feel it is morally just to provide for the healthcare of others, do it! It may be a moral obilgation to care for others, that's the job of charities not the government. You’re absolutely free to pay for the healthcare of another person or to purchase health insurance for your employees. In fact, you can even through the political process persuade the majority in your own State or municipality that you should provide all the basic material needs for the citizens of those entities and do so. The States and the people do have the privilege to create programs and make laws outside the power specifically enumerated in the Constitution; the federal government does not.
Why were the founders so paranoid about the power of a strong, centralized authority? That’s exactly what they rebelled against. As soon as the central authority has control over the natural rights of the individual, the government becomes a threat. It doesn’t matter if that threat comes from a king, a dictator, a president or from Congress.
Before you respond with the argument that all people living in the United States should be entitled to a basic level of healthcare ask yourself at whose expense? Before you consider that, remember that expense is not just a dollars and cents issue; those dollars and cents are only symbols representing the product of each individual’s labor. The government simply does not have the right to control the product of your individual labor (though arguably that limit has been violated numerous times throughout our history.) As soon as the government confiscates your labor and gives it to someone else, that government has become tyrannical and you’ve become a slave, not a free man.
One might argue that each of us offers our consent through the electoral process. The potential for abuse of that consent is exactly why the founders specified so clearly the limitations of federal power. The Constitution does not tell the government what it can do; it specifically tells the government what it can’t do.
So why do so many people want the government to expand and become the beneficent provider of our basic material needs?
Is it because we’re attempting to evolve into a more enlightened society that assures a basic level of material comfort for everyone? That’s the argument of every elitist in history. There are always those who know best you need most. When those people are elected to Congress, it’s inevitable that they feel entitled and endowed with the wisdom to decide what’s best for you. This is not theoretical; it’s happening.
Did the great socialist regimes of the 20th century succeed in creating a perfect altruistic society? No; every one failed miserable and slaughtered millions of people in the attempt. You can argue that this is because those societies were not ruled by Aristotelian intellectuals who theoretically rise above personal interest to rule with pre-ordained wisdom and kindness but rather by despots and psychopaths. It’s no accident that despots and psychopaths do pretty well politically when they can appeal to a society’s sense of entitlement or complacency.
The United States is the only society, or at least the first, that placed the interests of the individual above that of the collective; and it works. In the midst of our self-interest we are still the most dynamic, generous, charitable and selfless nation on earth.
So why are we locked in the most contentious debate in modern history over what seems to be the moral and logical desire to provide basic health care for every American?
Because we’re lazy.
Wouldn’t it be easier to simply have one system? We wouldn’t have to shop for insurance, we’d know that no matter what happens to us we can go to the doctor or hospital and our needs would be taken care of. Everyone would have access to the same basic care. Best of all, just like taxes, we really wouldn’t notice the costs of this service because it would just be taken care of; all we have to do is manage the money we have left after all the deductions are taken from our paychecks. Our healthcare, for all intents and purposes would be “free!”
Not so much.
The experiment has already failed. “FREE!” is not the same as freedom. Every example of nationalized healthcare has some degree of restriction, rationing and denial of treatment. The difference is that the authorities decide who is treated and how, not the individual. Certain treatments even in the most democratic versions in Canada and England are outlawed and access to them is restricted by law regardless of your ability to pay on your own. At the same time taxes in these semi-socialist states are the highest in the world; no, it’s not free.
This is the heart of the issue. It’s not about covering people with authentic need; we could have done that for the next 10 years with the money and resources we’ve wasted on this battle.
We’re again facing a defining moment in American history. Are we a bunch of complacent wimps who need a paternal government to provide for our basic needs? Are we reverting to the status of subject, subject to the generosity of our rulers?
Will we emerge from this as a people who above all cherish individual liberty or as a people who would prefer a central authority vested with our trust to define and assure just access to minimal standards of living for all?
Complacency will certainly assure just that.
Jim Bouchard is a speaker, media personality and author of Think Like a Black Belt (available May 2010) and Dynamic Components of Personal Power. Visit JimBouchard.org.
Note from Jim: Hey, I love to write in a hard-core, pithy, “man of the streets” style; that’s who I am. I’d love to inject some sarcasm and have a little fun with this whole issue. This issue is too important, so pardon my departure. For those who look for the “Black Belt” theme in my articles I’ll say that in this case, the real Black Belt Mindset is expressed by simply facing the challenge in front of us. Whichever way this issue goes, I’ll be back to task next week.
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3 comments:
This is from a debate with an intelligent and thougtful friend on my use of the word "socialist" in describing the healthcare bill.
This will appear in several parts, here is part one...
(My friend), we agree. Many of the programs you cite are socialist, in the strictest dictionary definition of the word.
"a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole." (I know you're aware of the definition, but I include it because many people do not apply the term properly.)
Many of the programs you identified do just that. The recent bailouts are perhaps the best examples; the government decided who would stay in business and who would be allowed to fail. My business was just directly impacted as a company I deal with was bankrupted due to unpaid bills caused by the bailout and bankruptcy of GM. The government decided that GM had to succeed, while this smaller business was crushed by the uncollected invoices.
Rather than enforcing the contract, the government decided that the smaller business was not as valuable to society and the economy. They delivered on their promise, and yet were left unprotected by the federal government.
I guess I am an originalist. If we are continuing our march toward socialism, the Constitution needs some adjustment. Last night Nancy Pelosi re-interpreted the carefully chosen words of our founders. They attempted to prevent governement intrusion into social affairs by the guarantee only of the PURSUIT of happiness; not the assurance of it.
Lincoln is a good person to debate. His presidency arguably did the most damage in regard to diminishing the autonomy of the states. We can argue, and I certainly would, that ending slavery was just, right and neccessary. Imagine us fighting for that cause today?
Still, had he lived and had been able to follow through on his plans for reconciliation with the southern states, it's likely that much of the expansion of federal control would have been rolled back. You're right, many of these powers were enacted in and justified by a state of emergency and in many instances were never meant to be permanent; you'd probably find exception in the states' privilege to secede, but even that is debatable. Lincoln was justifying his actions based on immediate circumstances and not on Constitutional grounds, something that still haunts his legacy and is still hotly debated by scholars.
Continued...
Part two...
You mention the differences between European style socialism and what you call an American style socialism, yet the legislators that crafted the healthcare bill and President Obama himself have continually cited European style social programming as their models. They have taken a great step toward that today.
As an originalist I cannot condone any American style socialism. As soon as the federal authority involves itself in social engineering, the freedom of the individual is diminished. I hate to say it, but Maine is a culprit in the injustice propagated by federal social programming; we take more than we produce on a federal level.
I want to debate the issue of civil rights for a moment. No, taking action to free the slaves and later to assure equal Constitutional protection for all people is not socialism, that is justice as clearly defined by the Constitution. Those actions were the proper use of federal authority in that the federal government was enforcing the rights guaranteed to all citizens, not attempting to redistribute the bread of one man's labor to another.
These actions did not create new "rights," they corrected the abuse of a group of people who were denied the natural rights specified in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the Constitution. In this area the states do, according to the Constitution, voluntarily submit their soverignty to federal jurisdiction...the State does not have the power to deprive an individual of his Constitutional rights any more than the federal governement; that's where it turns.
Having said that, Lincoln probably did exceed his authority. In a strict legal sense he likely should have pushed for the 18th Amendment before "invading" the South. On the other side, Longstreet was probably forward thinking when he said that the southern states should have freed the slaves before firing on Fort Sumter.
Socialism in some fashion is still Constitutionally allowable, to the States and the people, provided they don't excede Constitutional limits. In one action, Congress just passed a bill that mandates citizens make a purchase of what is still today a product of a private enterprise; they just confiscated our property and gave it to another private citizen, that is from you to the insurance company (at least to them for the time being.) This action was justified in their arguments by saying this is simply a form of taxation. Putting aside that argument for the moment (especially since they simultaneously promised this would not raise taxes), taxation has always been justified by the consent argument; that we elect representatives who have our consent to raise taxes for those activities of the government that are legal and Constitutional.
The second violation here is the attachment of the education package which strips private businesses of the right to offer a particular product, the student loan, and makes the federal government the sole vendor in that area, albiet with suspicious exemptions.
Again the federal government has crafted a way to redistribute private wealth and interfere with, not jus regulate commerce. The Commerce Clause was specifically intended by the founders to prevent individual states from imposing protectionist policies that deprived citizens of a free market. This is a crtical distinction and much abused today.
In fact, the Commerce Clause should have been used to enforce an unrestricted purchase of health insurance across state lines, not to confiscate the power of lending for a specific market segment in banking.
Continued...
Final argument...
You cite some of Roosevelt's programs, which he unabashedely trumpted as socialist, (though you are correct in that many people in that time associated socialism with communism; perhaps justifiably as Marx identified socialism as the second part of the evolution from capitalism to full communism. He was wise to change his semantic in public.)
His speeches on "new" rights put him squarely in the socialist camp when he espouses a "right" to a job, to housing and to live free of the worry of poverty. With each of these "New Deal" rights you have to ask the natural question, at whose expense?
Under the orginal intent of the Founders, they deliberately enumerated rights which would not permit the labor of one man to be confiscated to provide comfort to another. As soon as you deprive the individual of the freedom to choose how his personal wealth is to be distributed, you automatically introduce the problem of whose right it is to make that decision. If it's not my right to do with the fruits of my enterprise as I see fit, it is either your right to decide for me or the governement's right.
Despite past momentum in that direction, this new legislation marks an unprecedented violation of that fundamental individual authority. Simply compelling the purchase of a private product destroys individual freedom like never before. (The "auto insurance" argument does not hold up here; that is a state issue. My arugment is centered on the 10th Amemdment, that the powers not specifically enumerated...)
There is still one terrible spectre that will, I predict soon, rise up to haunt us justified by this new expansion of federal authority. It is the continual expansion of eminent domain. I won't labor the case studies here; I'll save that for another day though I will say a quick review of Kelo vs. New London will illustrate my point.
No, for the time being I'll be worried...but unlike many, I'll also be active!
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