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The March of the Medical Morons
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

Distribute Freely and Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

I've been listening to conservative talk radio the past week, not just to Rush Limbaugh, but to some of the others, as well. Along the way, I've noticed that one element is astonishingly absent from their arguments against the plans of Barack Obama and his Marxist cohorts to regiment medical practice—and, through that, everything else—in America.

That element is individualism.

All the arguments I've been hearing from conservatives have been utilitarian and collectivist in character. Socialized medicine is bad for the economy. Socialized medicine is bad for society. Socialized medicine is bad for families. Socialized medicine is bad for doctors and nurses. Socialized medicine is bad for small business. Socialized medicine is bad for hypothetical Grandma in her steam punk iron lung and Cousin Wilbur whose elevator never quite made it to the top of the building. I guess it shouldn't surprise me. Thanks to Robert LeFevre, I've been calling conservatives by their right name—right-wing socialists—for decades. But it does surprise me, and makes me a bit sad.

The first mistake conservatives make (and they always make it) is that they accept the enemy's premises and vocabulary, giving up half the battle before it's fought. It is not "socialized medicine" we're up against here—to many that makes it sound warm and fuzzy—but government control, through brute force or the threat of brute force, of the ultimately personal, private acts of seeking and giving medical attention.

Conservatives are in a poor position to comprehend, let alone enunciate this point. After all, it was their guy, Robert Bork, who informed us that there's no guarantee of privacy in the Bill of Rights.

To his credit, Limbaugh did make the point (over and over, which I don't hold against him—it's necessary sometimes) that there's no significant difference between what Obama wants in this connection, and what Hitler—whom Limbaugh correctly identified as a socialist, a "man of the left"—established in Nazi Germany. I've even heard Rush say "statist" over the past few days. I wonder what he thinks he is.

Medicalized Marxism is wrong if for no other reason than that it violates my unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human rights.

Don't let anybody overcomplicate it, and above all, don't fall for the common socialist tactic of burying you in details. The "euthanize Aunt Tilly" section may have been taken out, but you can bet it'll be back.

Medicalized Marxism is wrong simply because it forces me to do things I don't want to do, and keeps me from doing things I do want to do.

Medicalized Marxism denies me (and you, and everybody else) the uncountable advantages of acts of capitalism between consenting adults.

Medicalized Marxism imposes customs and duties on me I don't want imposed.

Get it?

If you take nothing else from this article, then take this: left wing socialists hate you because they hate themselves even worse, and project their self-loathing and self-contempt onto everything and everybody else around them. Every day, they scrabble desperately for control of the world and everybody in it because they can't control themselves.

Occasionally some assert that a possibility exists for strictly voluntary collectives within a libertarian culture. Certainly no real libertarian would ever attempt to prevent their establishment. But the fundamental assumptions of socialism and anti-socialism with regard to the individual, to the group, and to the relationship between them are antithetical.

The Obamas and Pelosis of the world don't give a rusty fuck about your wellbeing. The last thing they want is for you to be happy and healthy for as long a time as possible. What they want is for you and me and Grandma and Cousin Wilbur and Aunt Tilly to have to beg for our lives.

They want the power to say no.

I'd bet my last farthing that they would just love to be in a position to deny medical attention to global warming "deniers" and other dissenters. That's probably the one thing they want from it most.

These are the same sociopathic scumbags who hate the private automobile, not because it fails to take you from exactly where you are to exactly where you want to go, in privacy and comfort, but because it succeeds. No matter how slickly they're advertised, the cars they plan to force you into won't be the cars you want to drive because that—and that alone—would spoil the entire exercise for them.

Their real object is to control you and deny you joy.

These are the same moral and ethical cripples who persecute smokers simply because that's one more group they can vilify and terrorize.

These are the same antiConstitutional oath-breaking criminals who have fought for a century or more to stamp out the Second Amendment, partly because they are frightened by people with guns (and rightly so; people with guns are so much harder to control), partly because they can see that people derive enjoyment from their guns and that must be stopped at any cost, and partly because they know they can't trust themselves with guns and project that uncertainty onto everybody else.

These are the specimens, for the most part, who not only dislike red meat themselves, but demand the power, employing any of a dozen transparently phony excuses, to make everybody else stop eating it, too.

And now these rapidly devolving simpletons have decided they hate the greatest gift ever bestowed upon humankind, the incandescent lightbulb.

The oddest fact (possibly not germane here) is that most of the things that so-called "progressives" hate—and they are a bunch of haters, after all, aren't they?—and soulfully desire to deprive the rest us of, seem to involve the use of fire, as if they were a mob of frightened proto-Neanderthals who had just heard about the stuff, were terrified of it, and had decided to disapprove. You can read more about this notion in my essay, "Prometheus Bound—And Gagged" deep down in the dusty archives dungeon of Ye Olde Libertarian Enterprife at:

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of more than 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel Pallas is currently running as a free weekly serial at www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/?page_id=53

Neil is presently at work on Ares, the middle volume of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Where We Stand: Libertarian Policy in a Time of Crisis with his daughter, Rylla.

See stunning full-color graphic-novelizations of The Probability Broach and Roswell, Texas which feature the art of Scott Bieser at www.BigHeadPress.com Dead-tree versions may be had through the publisher, or at www.Amazon.com where you will also find Phoenix Pick editions of some of Neil's earlier novels. Links to Neil's books at Amazon.com are on his website

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