Who wants to be a slavemaster?

The unspoken assumption is “everyone should have equal access to all health care procedures, regardless of cost.”

Really? Why? Do we all have equal access to all food? Housing? Clothes? Cars? Entertainment?

Actually, yes, all Americans in fact do have equal access to all of those things–what we don’t have is equal ability to pay for those things. We don’t have an equal allocation of resources. The poor and powerless have fewer options than the rich and powerful.

Here’s the cold, hard truth: That will NEVER change. There will always be the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless–those who can afford the best of everything, and those who just scrape by–and some few who can’t even do that.

Bitter experience has shown the human race that “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” while maybe an admirable sentiment in the abstract, has in practice over and over throughout history brought out the very, very, very worst in human nature. All the “steal from the rich and give to the poor” sentiment does is change who the “haves” are from those who earn their status, wealth, and power though free enterprise, to those who seize their power through political maneuverings–or through outright violence and war. At its extreme, the philosophy of Marx and Robin Hood is a recipe for oppression, terror, slavery, and the ruthless crushing of the human spirit.

Maybe it’s not such an admirable idea at all.

Life isn’t fair. It never has been, and it never will be. Efforts to make the outcome of life equal for every person will always fail. It simply is not within the power of the human animal to change the basic nature of economics. It is arrogance to think so, a fatal conceit.

This doesn’t mean we should not act to make our fellows’ life better. It is a virtue to do so. There are organizations dedicated to feeding the poor, clothing the naked, providing for those in need. They don’t use the force of government to get money–people give of their own free will, because there are a great number of relatively well-off people who want to help those less fortunate. We should have more charitable organizations. We should support them better than we do. But the virtue in this is precisely that it is voluntary charity.

There is no virtue in pointing a gun at someone and demanding money. We usually call that armed robbery, unless the person with the gun is from the government. Then we call it “taxes.” We tolerate some level of this government gun-pointing as the price for a civil and orderly society. But once you begin expanding the list of things for which the government shakes down its citizens beyond the physical safety and security their persons and property, you begin the slide down the proverbial slippery slope at the bottom of which is serfdom, or in slavery.

That’s what you are advocating if you’re for a greater government role in health care. You want us to move closer to serfdom, or to outright slavery.

There is no way to argue out of that box. You either think it’s OK to force other people to work to pay for other’s needs, and/or to force people to directly provide those needs, or you don’t. And you’re willing to use the guns and courts of government to make your opinion of who should give, and who should get be the final word. The word for this, if you are wondering, is, exactly, “oppression.”

If you believe that, I disagree vehemently with you.

Don’t even try to pretend you have the moral high ground here. You don’t. You want serfdom. You want slavery.

And YOU want to be the master, don’t you?