Whether you agree with that or not (I happen to think it’s undeniable), Rush was also making a larger point that is not only fair argument but essential argument. There is a trajectory of socialism, regardless of the good intentions of many socialists. As he framed it, you take things such as health care, things that are traditionally understood as within the ambit of individual liberty and free choice; you move such things into the ambit of state responsibility as the welfare state emerges and grows, on the theory that it is government’s responsibility to provide for everyone’s needs (by redistributing resources); as more things are moved from private to public control, the state by definition becomes totalitarian; and, inexorably, the totalitarian state gets bad leaders and the society comes to reflect the policy choices of those leaders.There it is. At what point does a society made up of truly free men and women 200 years ago become enslaved? When a man can only buy what the State says he can buy, that person is a slave to the State. A free man can purchase whatever he can afford. When a man has to beg the State for medical care, because he can not get it on his own, he is a slave. A free man is able to see any doctor he can afford. If the State starts telling him what he can and cannot eat, what he may, and may not drink, whether he can smoke or not, and a thousand other things because it has deemed these things to cause health expenditures that are too high, that man is a slave. A free man can eat, drink, and do what he pleases and take the consequences thereof.
It is a given that we can not allow them to have health care reform. We can not even allow them to have something they call health care reform and claim victory. But beyond that, we must begin rolling back the New Deal. We can no longer debate the left on their terms, but must debate on the principles on which this country was founded, natural rights, civil rights, and the Constitution.
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