Sapphire Sky

It has been touted by our comrade-in-chief that healthcare is a “right” that all people are entitled to. In that regard I assume he views healthcare in the same vein as the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. When one looks at those principles that are ascribed as rights, what is observed is that they are A) seen as God given liberties that can only be denied through tyranny (as with the declaration of Independence); B) seen as a protection guaranteeing individual liberty (as with the Bill of Rights); and C) revolve around freedoms that are intrinsic to an individual, but which do not deprive others of their liberties.

Regarding the last point, for example, the first amendment guarantees that I have the “right” to practice my religion without molestation by the government. It also guarantees that I have a right to express my point of view without fear of reprisal. The second amendment ensures that I have the “right” to bear arms and protect myself. These “rights” maintain liberty for a citizen but do not deprive another citizen of their rights in the process.

When I write this blog, my writing does not deprive another of their “rights.” When I purchase a fire-arm, I am, again, not depriving someone of their fundamental liberties. When I worship on Sunday I am not depriving someone of something. It appears that what we as a body politic have always viewed as valid rights, have always leaned in the direction of protecting the liberty of citizens, but never at the expense of others.

There seems to be a basic principle at work in our historical understanding and application of “rights”: basic rights never come at the expense of others. When this principle is applied to the “right” of healthcare it becomes evident that healthcare cannot be seen as a fundamental liberty as historically defined.

Obama has just passed the first step in guaranteeing healthcare as a basic right. His goal is to make it available at little, to no cost, to your average citizen. In order for this to be done, the government must control all costs, from the price of prescriptions to the salary of doctors and nurses. Unfortunately in seeking to give heathcare as a basic right, the government must reduce the liberties of those who have, through personal sacrifice and ingenuity, made the American health system what it is today.

The many people who enter the health care industry usually do so at great personal expense to themselves. Your average doctor spends twelve years in higher education and enters the work force with over a hundred-thousand dollars in debt. The average pharmaceutical company spends hundreds of millions of dollars to bring a single product to market.

For the government to artificially reduce the cost of their products and services means that it has to limit the income potential of everyone involved. In doing so the government must necessarily reduce the ability of the industry to produce, through innovation and research, the necessary services that benefit your average citizen. Hence, in order to “benefit” the patient, by guaranteeing a new “right,” the government must decrease the liberty of the entire medical field by limiting both their income potential as well as their ability to produce the needed goods and services. Further, in an ironic twist, in seeking to benefit the citizen with the “right” of healthcare, the government unwittingly reduces his ability to receive the best goods and services available. All are harmed in the long run!

Our healthcare industry is the best in the world because of the many brilliant people who have had the freedom to pursue their passions in a system that guaranteed them the freedom to do so. No one has the right to freely benefit from the ingenuity of others. In the past this has been called either charity or theft. While charity is good and desirable, and has its place, it cannot sustain an industry to produce the excellent services that benefit others.

Further, if I benefit from someone else’s hard work and ingenuity, then they have a right to be rewarded even as I have reaped the rewards of their hard work. This is the basis of capitalism and the reason our society has seen an exponential increase in the quality of life.

I want those in the health care industry to have the freedom to do what they do best – pursing excellence in medicine. Further, I want them to have the incentive to pursue excellence.

We have a medical field only because of the basic liberties that were guaranteed at the founding of our nation. The people were left unmolested to be creative and inventive. The results have been wonderful. To invent new rights that harm others in the making is only to reduce incentive, discourage ingenuity and lower the standard of living for everyone involved.

Our founding fathers were wise men. A single sentence of their wisdom outweighs all the sophism of our president and his puppets:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Welcome to the Socialist States of America (SSA)! After the vote tonight the IRS will become the new insurance police who is charged with A) making sure your insurance meets government approval and B) collecting all funds including levying all penalties for those who have not met the requisite standard approved by the new health czars. In the meantime the new health czars will be charged with deciding who gets what, when, where and how – never mind what the doctors think. In addition, all of our medical records and financial records will now be accessed by said czars and the IRS. Not only does our ability to choose become null and void, but our privacy is also swept away.

Of course, all this will not happen immediately. It will take time for the complete single payer system to evolve – but evolve it will. Tonight is the first step – check that, Obama’s presidential victory was the first step – in curtailing genuine American liberty. Not to sound too negative, but I believe we are watching not only the transformation of America but the end of its period as a genuine republic. Of course all such titanic historical shifts move somewhat slowly; yet there must always be a starting point that makes the change. And there’s that wonderful word! Remember the chant encouraging change, “Yes we Can!”

And so they are poised to do it. I remember my college days when I witnessed students under the influence of avowed communists declare that we need a revolution in our country. There is a wide segment of our society who has been led to believe that America is truly an evil nation. They believe we are responsible for most of the ills of the world, and therefore we have the responsibility to fix them. At least that’s the rhetoric.

Of course the truth is somewhat more sinister. What they really want is altogether different. America has always represented something greater than the people who make up the country. It represents an idea that freedom and liberty come from a divine source. All of our founding documents speak about our responsibilities to the principles that give rise to liberty. We may praise self-sufficiency, but only as a person’s ambitions are curtailed by personal responsibility to God’s laws. As a society we have historically held people accountable to standards, principles and laws that transcend our wants, desires and ambitions. This is the foundation of the rule of law (lex rex).

This idea that God governs the affairs of men, and that all people are free to live as they please, in-so-far as they do not run counter to God’s law, is the cornerstone of our society. Or at least it was. When the true, die-hard liberals who are behind the “change” that we so desperately need, got a hold of our higher education, media and now government, their goal is nothing short of the eradication of God’s influence on society. It may seem like a leap to suggest a health care bill is such a challenge, but when we consider the overarching and sweeping transformation it has the potential to bring to our society, the conclusion is plausible.

When we look to our European neighbors an obvious observation is that Christian influence has waned in proportion to escalated government growth. Why has Europe’s social-religious structure been so radically changed over the last six decades? Because as people depend less on God and His laws (as once did the American Republic) they are more inclined to need something to replace Him. God provides stability in one’s life. Socialism and communism provide a great opiate for those who have no transcendent foundation upon which to rest.

What an irony that the great hater of the Christian west, Karl Marx, remarked that religion was “an opiate for the masses.” History proves that religion is the foundation of all our liberties; and anti-God paradigms lead first to a loss of liberties, followed by possible tyranny before they collapse into a barbarism that unleashes the worst attributes of our fallen condition – ala the French revolution, the Soviet Empire, Nazi Germany, communist China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and the many African nations that have followed this path as well.

At the core of tonight’s vote is not a victory for the uninsured, but a giant leap in the direction of a society that no longer believes God governs our lives. It is the manifestation of a deep spiritual insecurity that seeks to assuage the existential anxiety that has resulted from our departure from God.

But it also represents a deep-seated belief that is a core tenant to all liberal philosophies; namely that all people are not sinners but instead have a native goodness upon which perfection can be attained. Another reason, then, that government becomes the answer to man’s problems is because it believes – against all evidence to the contrary – that man can fix his fallen condition. Sin, such thinking encourages, is a product of environment. Change the environment of man and you change his destiny.

All such attempts have only lead to greater calamity. In the end, what we are seeing play out before our eyes is the conflict that the psalmist wrote about millennia ago:

“Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us” (Psalm 2:1-3, ESV).