What a wonderful world it would be...

Laura Hollis has a great piece up today on Townhall.com entitled Health Care Slaves? "Public Goods" vs Private Exchange. Hollis hits one out of the ballpark with this discussion clarifying some of the consequences of the mushy, muddleheaded thinking that people making the case for single payer health care have to employ. A little taste:

Having served on a well-attended panel entitled “Conservatism in Academe,” early on in the conference, I was fair game for anyone wanting to challenge conservative principles and policies. Later in the week, a colleague chatting with me over cocktails tried to defend single-payer health care. “I believe in having a civil society,” she explained pleasantly, “and in a civil society, I think health care should be a ‘public good.’”

Saying that health care is a “public good” sounds wonderful – the kind of statement with which no intelligent and compassionate person could disagree. But, as with so many blanket statements made by liberals, it does not hold up under scrutiny, and in fact the infrastructure necessary to deliver on such an apparently compassionate policy inevitably results in disappointment, failure, and – if the latter is not acknowledged – oppression by the very government it was hoped would be the solution to all human ills...

"...in a civil society...health care should be a 'public good'." You wonder if the person making that statement really thought it through, explored the consequences of it, and the basis for making it? In case she didn't, Hollis explores some of them. She doesn't have to go far down the slippery slope to get to the point that nobody "owns" another persons work, and in making that statement, Hollis's debating partner was endorsing indentured servitude. However, it gets worse because when a service is "free" then everyone demands more of it, eventually outstripping the capacity of the system to provide. Since the government can not supply an essentially unlimited demand, services must be rationed. Eventually (as it has in Canada) the government if forced to tell certain doctors where they can and can not live and practice. One wonders at what point certain students will be forced to go into medicine whether they want to or not, and whether they will be told what specialty they must go into. That, of course, is true slavery, and should be repugnant to all. And what of the quality of service, when people who really do not want to are forced against their will to perform medical services in places they really don't want to live? Do you think they will do their best work?

The basis for such thinking is the discredited "bee hive theory" of human society, for that is what Leftist notions boil down to when you remove all the "sophisticated" language. If only people were more like bees, selflessly performing their tasks for the betterment of all, what a wonderful world it would be (say, that would make a great line in a song.) Of course, bees do it because of genetic programming. The "queen" isn't really controlling the hive (sorry elitists.) A better way to look at it is that the colony-queen, drones, and workers-make up a single individual. None of the bees can survive on its own. The queen can't feed, forage, or take care of herself, the workers can't reproduce, and the drones are the male equivalent queen, unable to visit flowers or acquire nutrition without the workers. Interestingly, colonies do fight wars. When nectar and pollen become scarce, a larger colony will invade a weaker, kill the weaker colony and and steal the honey. But men are not bees, and pretending they are only leads to totalitarianism when they prove, yet again, to be men.