Why so shocked? ObamaCare ruling just continues 70-year American tradition
Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Institute* explains why we may be saddened but should not be shocked by the ObamaCare ruling:
There’s this illusion that I think a lot of people have that we had this private free-market system and then President Obama came along and ruined it all with ObamaCare. That is not at all the truth. The fact is, we’ve had systematic intervention in the health care system for the last 70 years or so. . . . This is part of this larger growing trend of government intervention.
He explains one trick that Statists use to build their vast tyrannies:
The reason that we’ve allowed this trend to go on is that it’s always been in these small steps. Sometimes the steps are bigger than others . . . but it’s by a series of small compromises, and what those compromises hide is that there’s a fundamental issue at stake.
First it was for the “truly genuinely needy,” but then “once you conceded the principle that government should be controlling health care, then a whole bunch of other people step up to the plate and say ‘Hey, I’m worthy of free care, too.’”
So then we got further steps like SCHIP, emergency room mandates, the prescription drug benefit under President Bush, and now ObamaCare.
Watkins sums it up: “Compromised capitalism is the path to Statism. . . . If you want to fight this trend, you really have to take a principled stand for freedom in healthcare.” This means we must fight it across the board: get the government out, completely. Get it out of Medicare, Medicaid, and even challenge the existence of the FDA.
[AVNews does not necessarily endorse all of the teachings of Ayn Rand or the Institute bearing her name.]