Roger’s Rules

August 9th, 2009 5:28 am

Get out of the way? Not likely.

So, the President of the United States wants critics of his plans to socialize American health care to “get out of the way.” His operatives urge you to turn in your friends and neighbors if they say “something fishy” about the administration. Confronted with spreading grassroots outrage, President Obama instructs his supporters “to punch back twice as hard.” Kenneth Gladney, the 38-year-old black conservative who was hospitalized by union goons, can testify that they are doing just that. (It’s what Obama once called “the Chicago way”: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he said.)

Why all the Sturm und Drang? What is it about the issue of health care, or, rather, the prospect of a government takeover of health care, that arouses such passions on both sides of the debate? Sure, there are important issues at stake. It is legitimate to ask whether the Democratic plan will lead to rationing of health care, especially for senior citizens. It is legitimate to ask whether it will limit choice, impede innovation, and lead to longer waiting times for various procedures. It is legitimate to ask about how the new system will be paid for.

But these concerns, while legitimate, do not really explain the level of passion that the prospect of government run health arouses. The real issue, I believe, concerns freedom. Back in March, the President warned in a televised forum that if “if we don’t tackle health care, then we’re going to break the bank.” At the time, I noted in this space, that his warning about the need for instant action on health care was reminiscent of his warning a few weeks earlier that if we didn’t give him $800,000,000,000 instantly, right now, today, forget about bothering to read the bill, then the result would be “catastrophe.” We gave him the dough. What happened? Let me repeat what I said in March:

Here’s how it works: the President tells you that we have a bad situation, which is true. He then says that spending huge sums of money–which he proposes to procure by extracting more money from (certain) citizens present and future — will solve the problem, which is false.

In the case of health care, the enthymeme is doubly painful, because not only will more government spending not be cure for government spending, but it will also do grave damage to what is still, despite the efforts of squadrons of government bureaucrats for decades, the greatest health care system in the world.

Obama has promised to change that, and judging by the warm fuzziness in evidence at his Potemkin forum on health care yesterday, I reckon he will succeed. What will we get instead? Obama talks about “universal” health care. He vowed to sign that into law before the end of his first term. If the Canadian experience — so much admired by the Left — is anything to go by, what that will mean is universal access to the government controlled waiting lists for health care. Not quite the same thing as universal health care.

Reflecting on the question of whether the Canadian economy should be a model for the American economy (the answer, by the way, is No), the Canadian journalist Mark Steyn observed that “if you have government health care, you not only annex a huge chunk of the economy, you also destroy a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher, and you make it very difficult ever to change back.”

Those are the depressing bits: the loss of freedom and the difficulty of ever getting it back. On all these government expropriations, what we have is essentially a one-way ratchet. Once the government sinks its teeth into you, it is extremely difficult to wiggle free. The income tax and social security tax, we tend to forget, were both instituted as temporary, emergency measures. That’s why 1895 is one of my favorite years in US history: in that banner year the Supreme Court ruled that the income tax was unconstitutional. Needless to say, the ruling didn’t last long.

Looking at the grinning rogues gallery of mountebanks yesterday — Ted “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy, Charlie “tax dodger” Rangel, and the rest — I thought of Ronald Reagan’s warning about how socialists so often use health care as a wedge to extract not only money but also freedom, including freedom of choice, from the citizenry. “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people,” Reagan observed, “has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.”

The name of that reluctance is compassion. Compassion is a noble human emotion. But it can be exploited by unscrupulous politicians and twisted into self-flagellating feelings of guilt, on one side, and the self-regarding emotion of virtue, on the other.

And this brings me to the even more frightening thing Obama said yesterday. There is, he said, “a moral imperative to health care.” Is there? What he meant was that if you agree with his proposal, you are an upstanding citizen who deserves the warm, self-regarding glow of moral infatuation. If you disagree with him, however, you are a greedy, selfish, unenlightened person who needs . . . well, the President hasn’t gotten around to that part of the scenario yet, except to note that anyone who is solvent can expect higher taxes.

Let me say a few words more about this. Why do I find it frightening when Obama starts talking about there being “a moral imperative to health care”? Is it not an expression of benevolence? Indeed it is. But that is far from reassuring. Why? The Australian philosopher David Stove got to the heart of the problem when he noted that the combination of universal benevolence fired by uncompromising moralism was a toxic brew. “Either element on its own,” Stove observed,

is almost always comparatively harmless. A person who is convinced that he has a moral obligation to be benevolent, but who in fact ranks morality below fame (say), or ease; or again, a person who puts morality first, but is also convinced that the supreme moral obligation is, not to be benevolent, but to be holy (say), or wise, or creative: either of these people might turn out to be a scourge of his fellow humans, though in most cases he will not. But even at the worst, the misery which such a person causes will fall incomparably short of the misery caused by Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Ho-Chi-Minh, or Kim-Il-Sung, or Pol Pot, or Castro: persons convinced both of the supremacy of benevolence among moral obligations, and of the supremacy of morality among all things. It is this combination which is infallibly and enormously destructive of human happiness.

Of course, as Stove goes on to note, this “lethal combination” is by no means peculiar to Communists. It provides the emotional fuel for utopians from Robespierre on down. That is the really sobering thing about the emotional metabolism of abstract benevolence: that the capacity for evil so easily cohabits and feeds upon the emotion of virtue.

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31 Comments

1. Войска ПВО:

Roger writes:

“So, the President of the United States wants critics of his plans to socialize American health care to “get out of the way.””

Roger and readers, there is a marvelous deconstruction of the front end and the back end of this speech that bears viewing over on Hot Air entitled “The two faces of Obama”.

..a must see!

Aug 9, 2009 - 10:24 am 2. venividivici:

Eh, they bring a gun, I wear a bullet-proof vest and bring a bazooka.

Aug 9, 2009 - 10:45 am 3. Instapundit » Blog Archive » ROGER KIMBALL: Get Out Of The Way? Not Likely. “I doubt whether most of the people turning up at …:

[...] KIMBALL: Get Out Of The Way? Not Likely. “I doubt whether most of the people turning up at town hall meetings to express their dismay [...]

Aug 9, 2009 - 11:03 am 4. Calvin Ball:

That is the really sobering thing about the emotional metabolism of abstract benevolence: that the capacity for evil so easily cohabits and feeds upon the emotion of virtue.

That’s because the emotion of virtue is a Trojan Horse for the vanity of virtue. And evil is nourished by vanity. Concretely, these vanities are moral and intellectual. The two of them make an intoxicating combination that overwhelms any instinct to be honest with ones self. Who can resist fancying themselves altruistic and smart at the same time?

Of course, when that doesn’t work in an argument, they tell you you’re stupid not to take the government dough. So much for moral superiority…

Aug 9, 2009 - 11:44 am 5. Calvin Ball:

2, actually, the way this is going to play out is by bringing a camera to a gun fight. I don’t think we’ve seen the end of the violence, but at some point, somebody in the Hopenstasi is going to figure out that this “in their faces” strategy is a bad idea, when it can be recorded and plastered all over the internet in hours.

I don’t think they have a plan B.

Aug 9, 2009 - 11:49 am 6. maxwell jump:

Bring guns if they bring knives.

He means liberal guns, such as, calling opponents racists, or mean-spirited, nazis or obstructionists to reform, etc.

The knives they fear are facts, history, and truth.

Aug 9, 2009 - 11:55 am 7. cthulhu:

If there are three specific reasons that healthcare is a mess, the first is the universal obligation to treat, the second is employer-linked health insurance, and the third is the wide variation between the “rack rate” for medical services and the amount actually paid by government or insurance plans.

The first ensures that emergency rooms are full of the poor and undocumented looking for primary care. The second removes the link between costs and benefits in the mind of actual patients. The third subsidizes the most ineffective of plans by having Medicare underpay what services actually cost and making hospitals overcharge everyone else to keep their doors open.

Oddly enough, each one of these was the result of government mandate.

And the solution is……more government?

What ever happened to “three strikes and you’re out”?

Aug 9, 2009 - 12:03 pm 8. Trotsky was still a commie:

Obamacare will destroy medical innovation and spending on high tech medical infrastructure. Look at Canada, they have a healthcare system the statists like Obama, Pelosi, Frank, Michael Moore et al. tell us we should envy. But that same healthcare system must send tens of thousands of patients each year to the US for treatments or CT/PET Scans that are unavailable in Canada, or are only available after a two month wait.

Everyone should watch the clip John Stossel did on Canada and see what “free” healthcare really looks like. You really do have to wait two months for a CT scan for a human, but you can get a CT scan for a dog in about an hour at a private veterinary CT scan.

Let’s reform the parts of our healthcare and insurance systems that need reforming, but let’s don’t embrace our genius president’s takeover of the healthcare system. There is a reason the SEIU and other unions favor this plan: the nurses and technicians all dream of working for the government as a public employee union member and the unions dream of taking over one sixth of the economy. Look at what these vampires did for California and ask yourself if that is what you want your next visit to the hospital to look like.

Aug 9, 2009 - 12:36 pm 9. Smith:

Obama and the democrats are the ones who need to “get out of the way”.

Aug 9, 2009 - 12:36 pm 10. Smileyfaceddictator:

Just as Bill Clinton said, we are seeing the instincts of a street thug coming through.
People warned that Obama was a wantabe dictator and now we’re seeing the the signs of the Barack “Il Duce” Mussolini Obama.

Aug 9, 2009 - 12:46 pm 11. David Thomson:

It is disturbing to see how many so-called reputable people still give Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. Bill O’Reilly in today’s “Parade” is lavishly praising him. Here take a look:

http://www.parade.com/news/2009/08/09-what-obama-can-teach-americas-kids.html

Is it race guilt? Is somebody like O’Reilly gong too much out his way to prove he fair and balanced? Whatever, it is both senseless and dangerous.

Aug 9, 2009 - 12:50 pm 12. rulisteningnow:

Get out of my way? This little punk was part of the 2006 majority in congress that worked with the likes of George Soros/Moveon (We own the Democrat Party) that conspired against the country. Working with the “leadership” on an agenda to “cause as much misery on the American citizen” in order to “pick up seats” and “win back the White House”. This isn’t politics, this is TREASON!

Aug 9, 2009 - 12:55 pm 13. Tully:

[ ... ]Here’s how it works: the President tells you that we have a bad situation, which is true. He then says that spending huge sums of money–which he proposes to procure by extracting more money from (certain) citizens present and future — will solve the problem, which is false. [ ... ]

It was an old scam when “Professor” Harold Hill ran it on River City….

Aug 9, 2009 - 1:01 pm 14. Mickey 1776:

I have an idea – before a new drug can be sold to the public it must pass clinical trials to be sure it doesn’t harm or kill people and that it cures the disease. Given that basic requirement from the FDA, I believe the same basics should be applied to this “public option”. I suggest that a small sampling, say…the unions and Democrats pushing this plan. Let’s try it out for a year and see how it works. There, a simple solution that should work to save money for the taxpayers…that “end of life counseling” (if followed by those senior citizen, corrupt congress cons) will have a true benefit of real “term limits”.

Aug 9, 2009 - 1:08 pm 15. The Healthcare Bill – What you need to ponder… « Katia the Conservative Dachshund:

[...] [...]

Aug 9, 2009 - 1:28 pm 16. ~Paules:

The only reason I need to oppose health care reform is that socialists never reveal their true agenda. Every piece of legislation they offer is a Trojan horse of some kind. Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas said as much: “The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.” So there. You have it from the horse’s mouth so to speak.

Aug 9, 2009 - 1:41 pm 17. Newsom:

This is about our freedom. Brits and Canadians are willing to meekly turn their lives,deaths and health over to the State. I think we are better than that. We have a long history of fighting for our liberty. It would be a betrayal of all who fought, and who died for the liberty we have to give in to Obama and all he stands for. We must continue to remind our representatives that WW2 will have been fought in vain if we allow the State to control our lives. We are not cowards.

Aug 9, 2009 - 1:49 pm 18. Lesley:

Gladney wasn’t hospitalized as you put it. The ambulance wouldn’t take him to the hospital. He took himself. Furthermore, he’s now asking for donations to cover his medical expenses because he has no health insurance. Now that’s irony for you, right there.

The Youtube video doesn’t show a beating. It’s extremely vague. It opens with a union member on the ground with no explanation of how he got there. The tussle (such as it was) lasted all of two seconds but it’s not clear who did what to whom and who started it.

The right has jumped all over this and embellished it without having any facts. Because right wing pundits have been calling Obama Hitler, accusing him of engineering a “final solution” for the elderly, and encouraging people to carry guns with them to town halls, I don’t trust a single thing the right wing says. I’m waiting for the facts to come in. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to read that the right wing staged a phoney attack or attacked the unionists first.

If only you could be honest for once in your life, you might have some credibility with the American public. But you are so consistently loony and dishonest.

Aug 9, 2009 - 2:05 pm 19. Sandy P:

I want to throw something else out there.

I’m in IL and it seems to me the poor/uninsured are making the risk/reward choice as to not having insurance.

they know they can go to ERs

they know their kids will get what’s needed at very little/no cost to them especially in meeting school vaccination requirements.

just got this in the mail:

2009/2010 Student Accident benefits from your school.

This School Time protection is provided, at no cost to you, as a benefit of your local school distric’s membership in the Workers’ Compensation Self-Insurance Trust. this protects your K-12 child against excess medical expenses for an accidental injury that may occur while attending academic classes during the regular school session. This School time protection includes your child’s travel time directly to and from your residence to attend regular academic school sessions, up to one hour before and one hour after regular classes.

this is supposed to fill in the gaps in coverage left by deductibles or coinsurance payments.

WTHELL?

and it offers more “protection” 24-hour optional coverage @ $60 per school year for outside of school time protection up to $25K

& $110 for grades 9-12 tackle football optional coverage.

Aug 9, 2009 - 2:10 pm 20. adam:

Friedrich Hayek made a brilliant argument in favor of principle and against “pragmatism” that we would do well to remember these days. According to Hayek, it is always tempting to make compromises with our freedom, because what we are promised in exchange is always tangible and claims to solve some immediate problem. Meanwhile, all that we could have done with that lost freedom is unknowable–we can’t even imagine it, because it is in the nature of freedom to do what you couldn’t have previously imagined. So, the only way to resist such compromises is to “absolutely” and “dogmatically” refuse them in the name of freedom. Once we descend to the level of haggling over the best way to “solve” the “problem” (like, say, “high costs” of health care) we are already lost. And I would add that if we hold firm to freedom, other solutions, that we also couldn’t have imagined, will emerge out of our free interactions.

Aug 9, 2009 - 2:24 pm 21. goy:

If BHO truly is an adherent to the “Chicago Way”, as famously and brilliantly enumerated by Sean Connery years ago, then this past week’s nascent violence portends a reckoning.

Because as the lecture continues…

They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That’s* the *Chicago* way!

Aug 9, 2009 - 2:37 pm 22. Jack Okie:

Oh, cut the crap, Lesley. The video I saw was pretty clear, including the big white SEIU thug walking away looking for more trouble. Plus Gladney’s lawyer saw the whole thing. If his testimony in court doesn’t match his description today, they you might have a point.

Would you care to comment on the other Obot violence, such as the lady getting her camera shoved in her face, the man being slapped by the woman obot, the obot in Denver ripping up the anti-Obamacare sign? It’s pretty clear you libs are used to having things your own way. Not any more. Put on some Bob Dylan – The Times They Are a’Changin’.

Aug 9, 2009 - 3:05 pm 23. newsfromflyovercountry:

I agree with David Thomson:

As far as I’m concerned, O’Reilly has become star struck by “the one”!
I have noticed that O’Reilly defends Obama because he got an interview on the most important night of the Republican Convention.

I don’t think it’s race guilt, after all, Obama is 50% white and 44% black Arab with roots that go back five generations of communists. It was the black Arab tribes that captured and sold slaves and yet his biggest fans are the African American’s. Pretty pathetic!

BO, like the another “useful idiots” (as Stalin would have called them) in the media have failed to investigate and vet the most dangerous enemy this country could have…a poser president front man for the Muslims, African jihad against America.

Analysis and investigation is way beyond the talking heads – these blowhard fools couldn’t analyze their way out of a paper sack!

Aug 9, 2009 - 4:07 pm 24. AST:

I figured that Obama would turn out to be another Jimmy Carter, but he’s also turning out to be another FDR, but without the political cunning and instincts. If he keeps up like this, he’ll set the Democratic Party back 50 years or more. Their dictatorial streak was never supposed to become this public.

They can throw that epithet around, but they can’t stand being exposed as what they routinely call Republicans.

Aug 9, 2009 - 5:53 pm 25. Deborah:

“Get out of the way?” Obama wants all of us to sing like Tony Bennett. I need a bumper sticker that says, “I’m not Tony Bennett.”

Aug 9, 2009 - 9:08 pm 26. RUliseningnow?:

You know, people kept on telling me to give Obama a chance. They didn’t think I was serious when I warned of his associations and support for and of terrorists. They thought the stories about Obama’s communist parents and five generation of communists just couldn’t be possible…how could he ever be running for president if that were the case? I told them about Raila Odinga, the communist, who has the support of the muslims who are killing people in Kenya- is Obama’s cousinhis communist cousin who used the same “hope” and “change” mantra and sold them out to Sharia,Islamic law…

Aug 9, 2009 - 9:18 pm 27. biblio44:

‘So, the President of the United States wants critics of his plans to socialize American health care to “get out of the way.” His operatives urge you to turn in your friends and neighbors if they say “something fishy” about the administration. Confronted with spreading grassroots outrage, President Obama instructs his supporters “to punch back twice as hard.”’

Typical Kimball: 3 sentences, 3 lies.
1) There are no plans to socialize US health care.
2) “turn in your friends”? Hardly. Rather, report the ridiculous rumors circulating on the web (including sites like this one) so they can be answered.
3) “grassroots outrage.” Sorry, Roger, someone leaked the FreedomWorks memo. These attempts to shut down open town meetings (in the name of free speech, perhaps?) are as grassroots as the Republican rent-a-riot that shut down the Florida recount in 2000.

Aug 10, 2009 - 10:15 am 28. polemicscat:

ObamaCare: It’s all about power versus liberty. Just look at the mandates throughout the versions in Congress. Note that those seeking the power have exempted themselves from the plan. The choices are stripped from everyone else.
Anyone attempting to fix the real problems with health care in the US would be trying to fix just the problems—not creating a one-size-fits-all mandated plan.

Aug 11, 2009 - 5:52 am 29. Morning Report, August 11th « Evangelical Gateway:

[...] [...]

Aug 11, 2009 - 6:52 am 30. biblio440defunct:

Barack Obama isn’t the thug; but his White House henchmen are. Instead, Obama is like the prissy queen-bee at a child’s birthday party, dictating who can be his friend, who are the losers, and just being capriciously bossy. Enough with the officious lectures! Let us see a President. Let us him visit some emergency rooms and VA hospitals. Let him donate some blue blood.

Aug 11, 2009 - 7:00 am 31. Jeff Perren:

“The real issue, I believe, concerns freedom.” Roger Kimball.

As it is for the entire litany of disasters of the past ~~year~~ century.

“More and more people are waking up to the fact that statism is what lurks behind (and not very far behind) the Democratic plans for health care.” Roger Kimball

And nearly every other Democrat (and, too often, Republican) proposal of the past ~~year~~ century.

Aug 11, 2009 - 10:30 am