Great Quote

"Anyone who can't be trusted with a gun can't be trusted without a custodian."

David Codrea - A wanted man and 'a true success story'

Cleveland Gun Rights Examiner

 

 

Technorati Tags: Guns,Politics,Freedoms

A bit about 'universal' health care

 

Regarding my prior post 'Yeah, what they said';

 

The original post at Ranting's of a Sandmonkey, moving towards a divided world - I had to post this in the comments.

 

Slippery slope it is indeed.

 

Adam said: “…public healthcare is free at the expense of tax-payers (something most of us consider a good thing,…”

Well, no, most of us don’t consider it a good thing. There are several problems with state sponsored health care. One of which is that taking the profit motive out of health care effectively stops the advances of medical science. Worldwide socialized medicine treats it’s subjects using techniques, pharmaceuticals and equipment developed by profit based medicine (primarily the U.S.). I suppose it’s great that the rest of the world can take advantage of the gift of life given to it by the U.S., but that doesn’t mean that state health care is the best thing since sliced bread.

 

The other problem is the placing of ones health as a burden on society, and therefore subject to government control as the prior commentators talk of. If one’s body is subject to control by the state it is nothing less than a loss of liberty. Couching it in terms like ‘responsibility’, ‘duty’ or ‘obligation’, while making it more palatable does not negate the loss of freedom entailed.

 

In a society where the people have already traded their freedoms in order to be cared for, this conversation is really moot. The deed is done and all that is left is the rationalizing we see here.

 

But a society that is still nominally free must guard against the encroaching tide of state sponsored guardianship in the name of equity. Following that path leads to a uniformity of will that is as oppressive as a jail cell.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Healthcare,Medicine,Freedoms,Liberty,Health

Yeah, what they said

Found this over at Ranting's of a Sandmonkey

 

Moving towards a divided world

 

An excerpt;

You know, in 10 years or so I can totally see this world divided up into two very different worlds: One, where the citizens of the  so called advanced and civilized nations get to have their full political rights and freedom (freedom pf speech, democracy, blah blah), but won't have the right or freedom to do much else, because "it's bad for them"; and the other, made up of "less advanced nations", where you won't really have your full- or any- political rights, but you could do whatever you damn well please otherwise.

 

A nice bit of back and forth in the comments as well.  I thought it went well with my earlier post "A Liberal Dichotomy" although I don't think I expressed myself as well as I wanted to.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Freedoms,Libertarian,Liberty,Smoking,Conservative,Liberals

A Liberal Dichotomy

With all the hub-bub over the recent passage of California's proposition 8, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a friend of my sister during the last holiday season.

No Smoking

The conversation started innocently enough, the group was talking of sundry things when 'Elle' said that she would be glad when the new law banning smoking in bars took effect in the upcoming year.

Now, I'm an ex-smoker, but unlike many reformed smokers I am not militant about people not smoking. Further, I have a bit of a philosophical opposition to...well, let's say government involvement into many things. I don't know what prompted me to open my mouth to make Elle's statement the beginning point of the nights' fireworks, but I did indeed open it.

I asked why she thought it was necessary to pass a law banning smoking in bars. She said that it would be nice to go to a bar and not come home smelling of smoke. I then said that there were plenty of bars that were already voluntarily non-smoking establishments and asked why she needed to ban smoking in every bar. She said that people who don't smoke would like to go to all the bars. I then said if there were that many people who wanted to go to non-smoking bars then there would be, because of the laws of economics, more non-smoking bars already.

Ban it all

At this point she changed tack on me and brought out the liberal argument that smoking is unhealthy and should be banned. Now this immediately threw my nanny-state alarm into overdrive and of course got me a bit worked up. I said there are a lot of things that are unhealthy, but that people should have a personal choice as to what risks they are willing to take. She said that of course it's a free country, but smokers add to the cost of health care for everybody. This prompted a small sidetrack of the argument (yes it had turned to that by this time) where we debated the costs of private businesses (insurance companies and hospitals) and their correlation to limiting personal freedoms. (That itself is a good subject for a future post)

Back on topic we went back and forth about several subjects that are unhealthy and/or risky. Seatbelt laws, motorcycle helmet laws, bicycle helmet laws - she's all for them. I asked if she was in favor of laws against unhealthy food. Sure thing, she is. I asked if she ever ate unhealthy foods. Yes, she says, and she would still be willing to ban them.

Flabbergasted

Elle's 'ban everything' attitude flabbergasted me. Never had I run into somebody who was so willing to give up her freedoms. Normally, such people are more than happy to ban things they don't like, but not those freedoms that they do like. I needed to up the ante and try to make a point that hit her where it hurt.

I must at this time reveal that Elle is gay. Her homosexuality doesn't 'bother' me, I'm not anti-gay. She just is, and I accept it, just as I accept that my sister is gay. The reference to her sexual preference is brought up only as a point of argument and not as a judgement. Elle and I had this argument because she is a liberal, not because she is gay.

So I asked Elle how a person who's sexual orientation put them in a class of people who so recently had themselves been discriminated against, marginalized and in essence been banned by the masses, how could she so willingly wish to restrict the lives of others. She got a bit defensive on that point, and said that homosexuality was not unhealthy.

Unhealthy lifestyle

Of course it is, I said. Gays of both sexes are statistically more likely to engage in high risk behaviors than hetero's. Gays have more one night stands, more overall sex partners, more unprotected sex, more sex with strangers and more multiple sex partners than straights. Gays are also more likely to contract a STD, become a victim of domestic violence and gays have a higher rate of suicide.

This is when the argument ended, she stormed away after calling me a homophobic nazi.

The Dichotomy

So, how is it that liberals can harp on and on about the freedom of choice, as long as it's the choices that they are for? Heck, I support people's freedoms, even when I don't agree with what they choose to do with them.

Technorati Tags: Freedoms,Gays,Liberals,Proposition 8