The correspondent I was answering in yesterday's column took issue with this that I said . . .:
We face a fundamental moral choice in America; taking personal responsibility for our own healthcare decisions in a free market, or reneging that responsibility to government bureaucrats with totalitarian powers. So far, the healthcare totalitarians are winning, and here's the shame of it: The totalitarians are winning, not for any lofty purpose, but because the renegers who want escape from personal responsibility are growing at the expense of the self-responsible. Thus, the government is cashing in with ever-growing power on problems that itself caused.
When he retorted:
Take personal responsibility for your own healthcare? that exactly what Romneys plan in Mass was sold as and Obama care is. Everyone has insurance and pays for their own healthcare.
My reply:
Taking personal responsibility implies acting on one's own rational judgment, and that requires full respect for and protection of individual rights by government. ObamaCare strips personal judgment from the individual, and replaces our judgment with a slew of bureaucratic boards with arbitrary powers over all of healthcare. The requirement to buy only government-approved health care is not personal responsibility in action. It is tyranny. Only when every provider and consumer of healthcare products and services is fully free to contract voluntarily with each other to mutual advantage can we be said to exercise personal responsibility.
ObamaCare is an attack on personal responsibility. The fact that ObamaCare, RomneyCare, and the like are sold as promoting personal responsibility is outright fraudulent. That so many Americans view obedience to government dictates as the responsible thing to do is a sad commentary on the continuing corruption of the culture wrought by the entitlement mentality.
To be continued.
Related Reading:
Responsibility Depends on Individual Rights
Beware Counterfeit 'Responsibility'—by Paul Hsieh
The Irresponsible Individual Mandate—by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins
2 comments:
To me, corruption of the culture means criminalization of the culture. People don't have to have criminal minds to be criminals. If they don't see a criminal act as criminal, they'll do it and think they're OK. (By crime, I mean, initiatory force.) But they're then criminals, though mitigated by their ignorance, even if they're 'educated' (indoctrinated). How many times do they have to be told and shown, taught, in order to PUT THEM ON THE HOOK where we can expect them to come around and do right?
How many times? As many times as it takes. Most people haven't heard it put explicitly.
America has become a nation of morally split personalities:
* People who would never steal a dime from their neighbor have no problem voting for politicians to rob their neighbors blind.
* People who would never expect help from another if it means imposing on them an undue burden have no problem receiving government handouts without a thought about the burdens it imposes on others.
* People who would never presume to tell another how they should run their lives have no problem supporting government regulations that dictate how people they don't know should run their personal and business lives.
Most people are half civilized, half barbarian. They don't know it, because they see society (i.e., government) as above morality. They must be taught that it is not.
How many times do "they" have to be taught? As many individuals as there are who need to learn it.
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