[Below is my reply to a comment posted on Paul Mulshine’s column My generation is kidding itself about Medicare]
VoiceofDemocracy posted:
Medicare, like Social Security, is part of a generational compact that unites all Americans as citizens in a common effort to support and sustain the American experience, that inspirational example of freedom and humanity to the world that still acts as a beacon to the world's dispossessed and motivated visionaries more than two centuries later.
[E]xpanding [Medicare] coverage to include all Americans . . . would spread the risk, cost and benefits among all 300+ million Americans and tie us all together as a society sharing the future together.
Despite what Ayn Rand wrote she . . . too used Medicare and collected Social Security. . . .
I have a hunch Paul [Mulshine], that you will beg, plead and take any handout possible to delay the grim reaper for every possible minute and at whatever cost to those taxpayers your opinion piece claims to represent. . . . Every conservative I have every known has used every liberal mechanism to get whatever they can get, the public be damned. (sic)
My reply:
A classic trick statists employ to impose subservience on a once-free people is to force every individual into a government program by law—i.e., at gunpoint—and then hold the promised benefits their taxes paid for over their heads as a means to silence dissenters without debate or overt censorship.
But the moral shoe is on the other foot.
I am 65 and on Medicare and Social Security. Since I “paid in” all 46 years of my working life, I have a moral right to collect the promised benefits for the same reason the victim of an armed robbery has a right to have his stolen property returned to him. By collecting on SS and Medicare, I don’t forfeit my moral right to speak out against them. I am an outspoken opponent of these immoral, youth-draining programs who believes they should be phased out. By asserting that collecting those benefits makes me a hypocrite, VoiceofDemocracy and others of his ilk expose themselves as moral extortionists, effectively holding me hostage by means of my own money—which the government seized from me against my will to support these programs—as a means of moral censorship.
“Spread the risk, cost and benefits among all 300+ million Americans and tie us all together as a society sharing the future together?”
As every collectivist regime from [Soviet Communist] Russia to [Nazi] Germany to [Fascist] Italy et al over the past century has proven, there is only one way to accomplish “a generational compact” of that kind—chains. The snide attack on Ayn Rand and Paul Mulshine re their SS and Medicare benefits demonstrates the exact [moral roots] of those chains. We’re not fully there yet, but the direction is unmistakable.
The only moral and just kind of “tieing us all together” is through a social compact based on mutual recognition and respect for each others’ inalienable right to live his life by his own judgement, neither parasitically living off of the taxes of others, nor being forced into tax slavery for “society”. Any program that forces Americans into unchosen obligations to foot the bill for others’ needs in exchange for being put in the position of a parasite later in life is un-American and immoral on its face. The benefit promises to older Americans must be honored, as they organized their lives around these programs they paid for. But the young just starting out should be freed from the coercive 15.3% “Entitlement” payroll [tax] burden and allowed to use their money in service to their own lives and futures. Anyone who would continue to deny the young this liberty, cannot claim concern for “the people”.
“VoiceofDemocracy” is a fitting screen name. Democracy is a manifestation of collectivist totalitarianism. Real freedom means liberation from the tyranny of the mob under a constitutionally limited republic based on individual rights—the original American system born of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
People who level the hypocrisy charge against opponents of the welfare state are only trying to hide the fact that what they support is morally corrupt; they thus destroy their own credibility. They evade the fact that their whole position hinges on the starting point of all welfare schemes—legalized theft and the denial of liberty to the theft victims. This is the fallacy that destroys them: The very act of accusatory hypocrisy exposes their own and nullifies the very charge of hypocrisy they’re attempting to level against beneficiary opponents.
Worse still, they are setting us up for something far worse than a welfare state. Under the guise of freedom—or as VoiceofDemocracy puts it, “ that inspirational example of freedom and humanity”—welfare statists are setting the legal table for the next Stalinist, Hitlerite, or Castroite gangster to come along and establish rule over another nation; this time America. This could be the legacy of the American welfare statists, just as Nazism was the ultimate legacy of the Bismarck's German welfare state.
Worse still, they are setting us up for something far worse than a welfare state. Under the guise of freedom—or as VoiceofDemocracy puts it, “ that inspirational example of freedom and humanity”—welfare statists are setting the legal table for the next Stalinist, Hitlerite, or Castroite gangster to come along and establish rule over another nation; this time America. This could be the legacy of the American welfare statists, just as Nazism was the ultimate legacy of the Bismarck's German welfare state.
Related Reading:
Social Security is Much Worse Than a Ponzi Scheme - and Here's How to End It—Richard M. Salsman
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