Give Me Slavery or Give Me Death
May 12, 2011Henry Baum 1 Comment »Rand Paul is an idiot:
With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.
Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? — you’re basically saying you believe in slavery.
I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.
This is why I can’t be a libertarian. They take the absolute worst case scenario and describe it as an inevitability. That’s fine to do in fiction – shit, it’s everything that I write – but once you start ascribing this to reality, you’re veering away from facts into belief. It’s no different than believing a Biblical prophecy is “inevitable.” Sure, it’s possible, but it’s also possible that the military starts dropping bombs on American cities – therefore, we shouldn’t have a military.
Conspiracy theories like this are good for illustrating what we can avoid – in the same way that 1984 illustrates what we should avoid in state totalitarianism. But claiming this paranoid fantasy will occur in real life is weirdly Orwellian. On the one hand it’s describing an Orwellian nightmare. But more accurately, it’s using Orwellian language to explain imagined dangers: health care=slavery. This kind of rhetoric is dangerous – it will hurt people, because it speaks to the people who think everything the government does is dangerous, and who will rally against better health care because of some slave state that will never happen. For a doctor, this is particularly odious.
May 13th, 2011 at 1:23 pm
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