Thursday, December 31, 2009

Why Wait? Put Me in Jail Now

So, on Christmas Eve, at a time when most people were paying no attention to the shenanigans going on in Washington, DC, the Senate of the United States of America pushed forward with its health care agenda that puts the health care of America in the hands of politicians rather than physicians. No surprise there. It seems to me that most really terrible, tyrannical, intrusive big government collectivist legislation is passed in the dark of night on the sly with as little fanfare as possible, like the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. Either that, or legislative monstrosities are rushed through after a horrific event while the people are still in shock like the Patriot Act was. Either way, these bills are more and more often hundreds or thousands of pages long, intrusive, and unpopular and so the congress critters that want them passed for the benefit of their high level friends rather than for the people try to pass them with as little publicized dissent as possible.

So it is with the health care bill. Who knows what little secretive controls have been put into this tome they call a law? Do you remember the Patriot Act, how many freedom violating usurpations were written into it? Do you remember the bailouts, how much control was taken from private hands and handed to government? It’s not enough for the authoritarians at the top of the government hierarchy to control the major industries and banks in this country. It’s not enough for them to create the ability to know every little electronic communiqué the ordinary folk send to each other. They must also control the way we go about seeking health care. They must make certain that each and every one of us pays their fair share to the health insurance industry so that Caesar can more easily collect his tribute. They want to be certain that no longer can a patient pay his doctor directly without a third party connected to government getting their hands in on what should be private business. They will go so far as to make it a crime for anyone to seek health care without insurance.

I remember growing up and learning that one thing that made America such a great place as compared to other nations was its lack of political prisoners. That’s simply not true anymore. We are all political prisoners. We are prisoners of a system that doesn’t care. Certainly those who rot in prisons and jails across this nation of ours who were sent there for victimless crimes are political prisoners. Those who refused to pay the extortionists the taxes they demanded, those who decided to use a medicinal plant that was not on the AMA approved list, those who simply refused to obey a police officer’s unlawful command, these people did not harm anyone nor did they damage or steal anyone’s property. They did not violate another’s rights, and yet they have their own rights violated by the state. They are imprisoned for defending their inalienable rights and therefore they are political prisoners. The United States of America is no longer a nation of free men. The United States of America has become that which it used to fear.

As the federal government continues trouncing more and more of our natural human rights, as it hides behind the iron security curtain to excuse itself when arresting and silencing those whose only crimes were to question the legitimacy of federal law, how long before they start to arrest even the most unobtrusive blogger for having an opinion? They need not wait until 2014 when I still won’t buy their crappy health insurance to arrest me. They don’t need to wait until 2014 to start letting everyone know that they are in charge and we will do as they say, buy and sell as they want, or else. It is already happening. Instead of passing “health care reform” that puts yet another economic sector in total government control, why not just start arresting everyone who disagrees with government mandates right now and be done with it? Why not just declare unending economic and security crises and use those as excuses for complete and total government takeover of all human activity?

Of course, the corporate political elite want to do this as stealthily as possible. They want to keep people from thinking for themselves, just as they’d like to keep them from conducting their own business when it comes to health care, or anything else for that matter. They strive to create an entitlement mentality in the populace and they’ve been quite successful at promoting this mindset, at least during my lifetime. The more people who are dependent on the federal government, the more power the federal government can laud over the public, the better off the corporate political elite are. The less people think for themselves, the more they let the federal government regulate their day to day lives and businesses, the more dependent on the corporate elite they become. It’s a vicious circle and if they move too quickly the people may suddenly be forced to think for themselves and the circle will be broken. That’s why so many of the corporate political elite feed the monstrous entitlement mentality of the public.

It was Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Md) who said a couple weeks back that she felt it was immoral to vote against the current health care reform we are presently being burdened with. Who is this woman to talk about morality? Indeed, on close examination it becomes obvious that it is immoral to vote for this reform, as well as for so many other bills that have been forced through congress the last few decades. It is never moral to forcefully redistribute wealth. It is never moral to force one group of people to work for another group. Free people conduct business on a voluntary basis with each other and decide for themselves where to spend their money. Free people can determine on their own what products and services are worth and how much time and effort should be put into acquiring said products and services. If one has to mandate certain aspects of a business and force people to engage in that business under the threat of imprisonment than the true value of the product or service cannot be known.

The immorality of Senator Mikulski and all who voted for this “health care reform” becomes even more obvious when one realizes there were free market reforms that could have been enacted which would have lowered the cost of health care insurance for all and helped remove the hand of government from the industry. After all, nowhere in the Constitution has the congress been granted power to regulate health care. That would be left to state governments under the tenth amendment. The simplest answer to the problem of the cost of health insurance would have been to allow the citizens of one state to buy health insurance from another state and we would have seen the cost of insurance go down and the quality go up as the insurance companies were forced to compete with each other for business and the states were forced to ease regulations to keep the insurance businesses in their jurisdiction. But these reforms wouldn’t have allowed the federal government to grow and so they weren’t considered by the control freak leaders of the corporate power elite.

The charade of government health care control becomes even more evident when we look back at even recent history. It was the free markets that gave this nation a health care system that was the envy of the world. It wasn’t until regulations were put in place that the system began to falter. It was the regulations themselves that have brought the system to its knees and created the crisis (if indeed there is a crisis) that we experience at present. More government is not the answer to our nation’s health care woes, it will be the cause of more and greater woes. The immorality of voting for such socialistic health reform becomes even more egregious when considering such trends.

This health care bill has failed to address neither the concerns of those in favor of personal liberty and free markets nor the concerns of those who wish a total collectivist scheme to ensure access to health care by those least able to afford it. Instead, politicians have tried to compromise and as such have given more power to those who caused the problems in the first place. That seems to be what government does best, cause a problem, then take freedom from those who can fix the problem and give more power to those who caused it so they can cause bigger problems. Security failed on 911 and we gave the security industrial complex more power with the Patriot Act, and they continue to fail. The Economy failed in 2008 and we gave the banks more power with the bailouts and they continue to fail. Now the claim is made that the health insurance industry is failing and the answer is to give the health insurance companies more power by legislating into a law a monopolistic health care system paid for by higher taxes and backed by the threat of fines and imprisonment? When are we going to learn?

I don’t plan on taking part in this charade anymore, so they may as well arrest me now. I know of at least one doctor who plans on leaving the country if this bill passes and moving to Poland, of all places. She has her choice of the US, Canada or Poland, she’s a citizen of all three, and for now she chooses to live and work in the US, but if this bill becomes law she will chose to move to Poland. That should make you think. I don’t know how many other doctors feel like her, but I hope that for those trapped in the US the spirit of civil disobedience and non cooperation rises. Bad law does not need to be obeyed. Perhaps when they are forced to arrest good, decent people for not buying health insurance the masses will be shaken from their slumber. If that is what it takes to restore this nation’s founding principles, then so be it, though I do hope that this drive toward socialism is reversed long before 2014. I do pray that mass civil disobedience begins soon, before the power of the central planners is consolidated.

No comments: