During the President’s speech last night on health care, I was amazed by two little words that were unleashed; no, I’m not referring to Representative Joe Wilson’s outburst of, “You lie,” which, while maybe deserved, was indeed a breach of protocol.
You can contribute to Wilson’s now up-hill battle against the Statists here. You would think that after nearly six weeks of raucous town hall meetings, nobody in that chamber would have been surprised to hear the echoing of American sentiment from one of 535 Congressmembers, but nay, it shocked (shocked!) the left, most visibly Madame Pelosi, and they’re calling for action against Representative Wilson.
No, those two words, “You lied,” weren’t the two words that shocked me last night. After plain distortions and covert deceptions, the President actually used the words “social justice.” During a moving evocation of a letter written by the late Senator Ted Kennedy, the President read from his teleprompter:
He expressed confidence that this would be the year that health care reform — “that great unfinished business of our society,” he called it — would finally pass. He repeated the truth that health care is decisive for our future prosperity, but he also reminded me that “it concerns more than material things.” “What we face,” he wrote, “is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.”
My shock over this issue should not subsequently shock you; it wasn’t two days ago that I wrote on my last post, “I have never believed in social justice.” What do I mean by that? As we work towards a just society, what’s so bad about social justice?
Social justice is an endorsement of social and class warfare, and is today disguised as reform. Again, please, don’t believe me. The sainted Wikipedia defines “social justice” thusly: “The term ’social justice’ is often employed as a euphemism by the political left to describe a society with a greater degree of economic egalitarianism, which may be achieved through progressive taxation, income redistribution, or even property redistribution, policies aimed toward achieving that which developmental economists refer to as equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.” Now; are you shocked? How have we gone so wrong to prefer social justice over just society?
A Destructive Agenda
In his classic The Republic, Plato coined the famous adage, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” I would offer that in a prosperous, capitalist society, Want qualifies as the surrogate mother of invention. Whatever a person could want or need is developed, produced, and traded freely for the benefit of all parties involved. The opulence of the parties involved has always irked the left; it’s simply not ‘fair’ that some succeed while some fail. They do not contend that equal opportunity, a goal on the left and the right, renders a wide range of results, based on the efforts and talents of those parties involved. They believe trade should be fair, not free, because free trade rewards some, and not all.
These sentiments heightened recently to scary levels in the wake of our economic crisis. Public opinion prompted a strong disdain for capitalism, as we know it, in America. The slow destruction of our system now comes from within, and serves as testament that our society lacks any real, fundamental wants, or for that matter, any foundational needs. Our age of prosperity lifted all classes, to the point where Escalades sit parked outside Section 8 housing, and the homeless in food lines have Smartphones.
Our government refuses to address the underlying source of our current economic situation, which is our lack of Homeland Production. Due in large part to lofty corporate taxes and a federal standard for wages, we sublet labor to China and India, who now hold much of our debt. No, instead, the current regime has decided to demonize the very industries that provide for the Wants and Needs of this country, in particular energy and health insurance companies. Immediately lowering corporate taxes would provide an incentive for industries to move back home, where jobs are scarce.
Do not be confused: The proposed reforms are not about energy security, improved education, or health care at all. The agenda of the left is about control: energy control, education control, and health control, not unlike the agendas of other leftist regimes before them, littered throughout world history.
Historical data on state-run health care lends credence to the claims of potential rationing and “death panels” within the bill. Think about this: Mrs. Palin’s two little words, “death panels,” incited a firestorm of criticism. Why? Because they rang true. A quick glance at the practices of the University of Chicago Hospital, First Lady Michelle Obama’s former employer, to divert patients in order to cut costs, support such concerns. Palin’s dissent rang true, and that’s why Representative Joe Wilson’s words resonated today. Since many feel the President is lying to them, as a representative, Wilson spoke up. Now, under this regime, he faces an unknown future.
So what is Obama’s ultimate agenda on health care? He admitted he supported a single payer system in 2003, and waaay back in 2007, he tipped his hand on how to get there:
I think that we’re going to have to have some system where people can buy into a larger pool. Right now their pool typically is the employer, but there are other ways of doing it. I would like to — I would hope that we could set up a system that allows those who can go through their employer to access a federal system or a state pool of some sort. But I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out where we’ve got a much more portable system.
I believe the public option, a policy proposal unheard of until this year, is a Trojan Horse for the kind of single payer system Obama supports. Through such means, the federal government would assume control of sixteen percent of the economy, with the public sector taking money out of the private sector to do so, redistributed, dollar for dollar.
How is justice rendered, then, if not through the reallocation of wealth? Well, Article III of the Constitution leaves it to Supreme Court to administer blind justice based on the fairness in a transaction, regardless of its outcome. Contrary to the theories of President Obama’s fellow professor John Rawls‘, “Equal Justice Under the Law,” implicit in the Fourteenth Amendment, is not apathetic to the parties involved, and thusly free and fair trade is guaranteed.
Likewise, contrary to President Obama’s beliefs stated here, waaay back in 2001, the Constitution should not be addressed on the basis of what “government must do on your behalf,” nor should the Supreme Court “venture into the issues of redistribution of wealth.” Equal justice, when properly rendered, ignores upshot, and leaves social justice a theory banished to the far, far left. Hereunto, proper reform of our health care system depends on abandoning these ideas.
“How can limited government and fiscal restraint be equated with lack of compassion for the poor? How can a tax break that puts a little more money in the weekly paychecks of working people be seen as an attack on the needy? Since when do we in America believe that our society is made up of two diametrically opposed classes — one rich, one poor — both in a permanent state of conflict and neither able to get ahead except at the expense of the other? Since when do we in America accept this alien and discredited theory of social and class warfare? Since when do we in America endorse the politics of envy and division?”
~ President Ronald Reagan