Yet more evidence of the failure of Socialism
So last week the supreme court of Canada ruled that a Quebec law preventing insurance companies from insuring Quebec residences against things that were already covered by Canadian Medicare was unconstitutional under Section 2 of our Constitution. In their ruling they were very careful in what they said but the newspapers and TV News all got the message and have (rightly, as I’ve read the first 20 or so pages of this monster decision) reported that the supreme court said that because of the horrendous wait times in Canadian hospitals people are actually dying waiting for treatment because they can’t go anywhere else as a result of state enforced Medicare. As a result, the Supreme Court said, the law was unconstitutional.
1. So if Medicare wasn’t killing people, it would be ok to violate section 2 of our constitution?
2. People are dying on waiting lists and that limitation of freedom is being enforced by the government of Canada. (this is what the supreme court said, so there is no question of fact here) Translation: The government of Canada (and its provinces) are wilfully murdering people in the name of a socialist value called free health care for all.
Yes, I said MURDER. “Wilfully acting to cause the death of another.”
I can remember another period in history where people were killed in the name of the greater good. It’s called “Soviet Russia” and the man in charge was named Joseph Stalin. He murdered 50 million people in the name of the greater good. Even before Stalin a book was written about this very topic. It is called “We The Living” (Ayn Rand). The outcome is not coincidently the same as it was in Soviet Russia.
The death of (probably) hundreds (benefit of the doubt) of people on waiting lists that have doubled in length in the last 10 years isn’t good enough. The Prime Minister and the Premiere of Quebec have both said that they won’t rule out using the “not withstanding clause” of the constitution. For everyone that isn’t a Canadian and for all of you Canadians that don’t know your own constitution, someone in 1981-82 decided that we couldn’t have unconditional freedom (I believe this was put in to try and convince Quebec to sign the constitution… jokes on them, Quebec never signed it). The government had to have the power to override individual freedom if it needed to (thus completely undoing the whole thing). It’s only been used once, and that’s in Quebec to make sure that there are never any English signs for businesses. In typical Capitalist fashion however, businesses got around the law by trade marking the English version, and using that loophole to put up “Wal-Mart” signs everywhere. (And closed stores that tried to unionize (Go Wal-mart!)
When are we going to learn? Socialism in any form is a complete and utter failure. The Canadian healthcare system revered by socialists in the US and hailed as the most wonderful thing since sliced bread is about to fall apart at the seems in Canada, and in the process it’s killing people. Why? Because it is based on the assumption that there is any justification for taking away an individual’s rights in the name of the greater good. And keep in mind, in Canada, when you argue with a Socialist about socialism, they will dredge out our health care system as proof that socialism can work. In fact it’s their only example that they have. Jokes on them: It’s a failure too. Not only is it a failure, it’s murdering people.
When will people understand? A society, a civilization, is a group of individuals. If you sacrifice the individuals, you have no society. When you punish greatness you have mediocrity. When you prevent people from failing, you ensure that those same people never experience success. When you make excuses for losers and failure, you have death.
Want more proof? Subsidized housing. This wonderful bastion of making sure people have somewhere to live. Ironic, that since it was invented the number of homeless and people unable to buy a house and unable to rent an apartment has increased by several thousand fold. It’s right up there with forcing landlords to follow all kinds of ridiculous rules about sanity etc. Tip: Poor people will take a rat infested hell-hole over a sidewalk any day. Does that mean that the rat infested hell hole is a good thing? Not really, but it does mean that it serves a purpose. And capitalism has this habit of making those rat infested hell holes cheaper and cheaper, and everything else gets cheaper and cheaper so those same people that could only afford the rat infested hell-hole can now upgrade to something else and the other people on the street can now have a roof over their head, even if there are rats chewing at the walls.
It’s not coincidence that the one segment of our economy that has been essentially untouched by any form of socialism (unions and legislation) is the one area of the economy that continually experiences deflation. The computer industry cuts the price of all of its goods in half (or more) every six months. Yes, the latest and greatest video card might even be more money, but if you compare the same graphics card from six months ago to now, the price will be roughly half. This is the natural state of a purely capitalistic society. The result is that people that could never afford a computer can now go to Wal-Mart and for $300 buy a computer. Even now that the computer industry has temporarily hit a wall (I have a 3 year old P4 3.2 ghz computer that is still pretty close to the fastest computer out there, whereas the Pentium 200 I bought in 1996 was 1/3 as fast as the fastest computer out there by 1998.) the prices are still dropping. Chips are getting cheaper, computers are still getting cheaper, newer and better things are coming out, while not faster, are cheaper and cheaper, technologies like wireless that wasn’t affordable a few years ago is affordable now even though nothing faster has come out to drive the prices down. (So strike that argument off the table)
Contrast that with the car industry which is one of the most socialist controlled markets in North America. Chrysler has already been bought out by Mercedes, and not a moment too soon because they were going bankrupt. Ford and GM have been downgraded to junk bond status and GM just cut tens of thousands of jobs. Ford is on death’s door from what I hear from people that I know close to Ford and GM isn’t doing much better. The natural state of the car industry is huge inflation. I drive a 2003 Acura CL. It cost me $38,000 Cdn when I leased it in 2003. To get the same quality of car with the same features (nothing new) it’s going to cost me ~$50,000 in two years when my lease is up. That’s $300 a month more for the same car essentially. Not to mention the heavily socialist regulated insurance companies and the inflation from them….
Name any socialist program, or initiative and I will show you a corrupt organization on the brink of collapse. They all fail. Every single one of them. Socialism is a death warrant. It can’t succeed because it kills the very locomotion that drives the society that it puts first.
Any man or woman that believes that they have the right to take away the freedoms of another based on their own value system is by definition evil. Whether it be your religious beliefs that say that gay marriage is wrong and thus gays should be infringed upon because your morals say that it’s wrong. Or that you want everyone to have affordable health care, so you think that it’s right to prevent anyone from partaking from private health care or buying private health insurance. The result is still the same. You have decided that your values are more important than another’s and thus have started down the road of Hitler and Stalin and every other Tyrant in history.
Dirty little secret: Eventually someone else will apply their values against you and you’ll be at the wrong end of your freedoms being taken away. And the oppression will have come full circle.
You are free the practice your own beliefs. You’re not free to apply them to anyone else save but to choose not to associate with them. To put it another way for socialists: Charity is not charity of it’s forced upon someone by another. (And don’t even get me going about charities! What a scam. A very few make a ton of money, and the rest? Well 70% overhead speaks for itself.) To put it another way religious people: Someday the Muslims will rule the world and it won’t just be Jews that are oppressed. So get comfortable in that black burka you see on the streets of Saudi Arabia out in the sun. If we apply your values, to everyone, sooner or later your wife and daughter are going to be wearing one.
It’s ironic that people are so afraid of Islam and terrorists that the response is to re-embrace Christianity. Tip: Islam is wrong and terrifying for the same reason that Christianity is. And Tip: All 3 major religions have bread terrorists in the past. Why do you think that historically Jews are so hated? The invented the terrorist bomber. Religion’s greatest evil is that it tells you that you not only have the right to oppress others with your value system, but that you must do so. The end result is always something like the Crusades, or the Spanish Inquisition, or WWI or WWII or female circumcision and on and on and on. They all happen for the same reason. Someone believes that they are justified in forcing their values on others.
Try believing what ever you want, but also having the strength of your convictions to allow everyone else to believe whatever they wish whether or not you agree with them or not. Try allowing them to decide if they support your position or not. Try allowing them to spend their money the way they want, and choose the charities that they wish to give to instead of forcing it through the force of arms of the government.
This is what the United States of America was built upon. This very simple concept: Freedom of self-determination. To put it another way: You’re free to do whatever you wish, so long as you don’t physically harm another. And that includes completely and utterly screwing up your life by my value system. I have no right to force you to do things “right” by my definition. Does this sound like I just contradicted Rand’s position that there is truth, it’s universal and we can all know it? Probably, but that’s because you’re not understanding what I’m saying. People don’t have to do the right thing. You may recognize the TRUTH and you are entitled to act upon it and you’re even entitled to tell others about it, and even entitled to tell that guy that is going to walk off a building that he going to hit the pavement really hard because of this universal thing called GRAVITY. What you don’t have the right to do, is to prevent the guy walking off the building from walking off the building if he so chooses even after he knows the TRUTH. (Gravity’s a bitch!) This is the key: Everyone has the right to screw up their lives. They have the right to ignore reality. They have the right to ignore your values, no matter how much truth they are based upon. They have the right to destroy their lives. What they don’t have the right to do is to ignore the consequences of reality (Terry Goodkind’s Sixth Rule paraphrased). But that’s between them and physics and has absolutely nothing to do with you.
Yes, it becomes much harder to solve the world’s problems. Homelessness becomes a really hard issue to solve, because you can’t just take someone else’s money and throw it at the problem, you have to be creative and work at it, and persuade others that your plan is right and get them to help you of their own free will. But that’s the key! Socialism and all of its offshoots (and religion too) are lazy. They take the easy way out. It’s always easier to force someone else to live for you then living for yourself. It’s even easier to force someone else to live for another instead of allowing them to live or die by their own choice.
Self-determination. Right or wrong, you still get to be the captain of your own ship. It is the most important freedom of all, and it is the one that is so largely ignored. And it’s a shame that we’re ok with that. I for one am not.
To those of you that believe as I do congratulations. Fight every day as I do not to take the easy way out. It’s a very hard battle. It is like the death of the ad verb in the English language. I constantly find myself correcting myself, reminding myself that it’s REALLY hard to do something and not REAL hard. But it’s worth it. Because without the rules of language there can be no communication, and without communication invention stops, and humanity goes back to caves and bananas. Without self-determination man falls back into the dark ages, under the rule of men that have no problem subjugating you to line their own pockets in the name of power over men’s very souls. Only when you demand the right to self-determination, and further, demand that everyone else has the right to self-determination will we be free from oppression. Only when each and every one of you is willing to stand up and fight, and die and even more important, kill for that right will the price of freedom be paid. And as you all know, you can’t get something for nothing.
Thank you to all of those men and women in Iraq, Afghanistan and everywhere else. You might not know it, and President Bush might not be doing it for this reason, but you’re there fighting for the very future of all civilization. You’re fighting to teach each and every Iraqi, Muslim and anyone else, that it’s not ok to inflict your values on another. Please keep that in mind while you go about your jobs fighting the evil that plagues the streets of Baghdad and Iraq. You’re there to teach freedom. To show them the possibilities of freedom. You’re not there to give it to them. They must fight and die, and more to the point kill for it themselves. Show them just how very much it’s worth. Show them that it’s the most precious thing in the world. Maybe by teaching Iraqis this very important lesson, you’ll be able to re-teach Americans the very same thing before it’s too late.