Though Iâ??d agree that government has shown itself incapable of successfully running anything larger than a lemonade stand without totally screwing the pooch, that is hardly the most important reason to avoid the single payer fiasco. Many of the particulars of the proposed plan may be nothing more than barely disguised eugenics experiments, but that is of no more importance than government's history of incompetence. these details are merely the trees obscuring our view of the forest and, though they may make great fodder for discussion, we shouldn't get too involved with such minutiae. The greatest reason for keeping the state's greedy mitts off of health care is that it is not government's place to engage in the daily care and feeding of its citizens. Government is not the father figure so many of us seem to desire. It is not the doting mother that is there to see to our every need. It is more the slightly aloof uncle, there to keep us from decimating each other and to see that the family picnics don't get too far out of hand.
The founders of this country were well aware of the dangers of an all-powerful government and went to great pains to insure the rights of the individual against the aggressions of the state. The bill of rights is less a list of the rights of the citizens than a list of limitations on the ways in which government may intrude on our natural rights. The tenth amendment is little quoted, but I feel you should all take a good look at it - The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. The powers of government that strive for total control have spent a great deal of time and energy perverting the meaning of such words, by amending the document to suit their totalitarian aims or through various other means, but of utmost importance are those last four words - "or to the people". The individual is the final arbiter of his own fate. Each man and woman is responsible for their own decisions and well-being, each citizenâ??s natural rights limited only by the most basic needs of living within a society.
Itâ??s all so simple and so elegant. An entire society built on the premise of the supremacy of the rights of the individual, with government as nothing more than a loose web that ties the entire thing together and protects its integrity. For over two centuries we have complicated our existence and, with each complication, have bound ourselves more firmly to a bureaucracy intent on turning those gossamer strings to chains. The individual has been replaced by special interest groups, government has experienced unbridled growth in both size and power, and our own greed threatens to enslave us to a nanny-state from which there is no release. The ballot box has become a lie as our servants in government blithely push forward their own agendas, regardless of the wishes of their constituents, and the population has become complacent in the myth of our superiority. We have become blind to the basic premise that each man, as an individual, holds sole responsibility for his fate.
Now we are faced with the prospect of another leap in the size and power of the ever growing bureaucracy, governmentâ??s annexation of another segment of the free market which is the domain of the individual. Instead of sensible and equitably enforced regulation, many would have us jump head first into a government monopoly of this sizeable chunk of our economy. Instead of allowing a market determined by the people to adjust a haywire industry, our well stoked fears of evil corporations and big business are guiding us into another trap to limit our options and further embolden the totalitarian tendencies of the governmental monster. After all, what industry can compete with an entity that has no need to show a profit and finds a nearly unlimited source of capital in the pockets of its taxpayers? Whether we want to admit it or not, those corporate entities we take such pleasure in denigrating are made up of the individuals our government is pledged to protect and those businesses are the outcome of the effort and risk of individuals attempting to fill a need within our society. To sweep all that away and replace it with a government monopoly runs contrary to the concepts of liberty this country was founded to defend.
Of course there have been abuses within such a complex and far reaching industry. The concept of greed is far from foreign to humanity, but it is a part of governmentâ??s duty to see that the greed of one does not infringe on the rights of another. Instead of guarding the society from that greed, we find that our representatives have been complicit at most every step and now that the mess they have helped create has become critical, they are conveniently there with plans that can only further reduce our freedom of choice and indebt us to the not so tender care of the nanny-state. We should not be so blind as to excuse the part these political animals have played by handing them even more control over our daily lives.
