TruPolitics

This post was written by guest author Edward Mahee. Mr. Mahee has an extensive legal background, and is an emerging conservative thinker. This is his eighth posting for the site.

Since the beginning of the Progressive Movement, adherents to the Liberal philosophy have held themselves to be kind-hearted, open-minded and compassionate defenders of the rights of the little guy.  While conceding that may be true for particular individuals, Liberalism as a whole remains concerned, first and foremost, with the accumulation of power to control society at the expense of the rights and the dignity of individuals.  To illustrate this, one need look no further than the effort by Liberals to implement policies concerning climate change and healthcare reform.

First, looking at healthcare reform, we are admonished by Liberals that we need to reform healthcare so as to ensure access to quality and affordable care for all.  The plans put forward by members of Congress, with the support of President Obama, all have several key things in common: They substantially increase taxes; they set up systems by which the private insurance market will be strangled to death; and they have the effect of dramatically increasing the government’s role in the distribution of healthcare resources.  As the Wall Street Journal stated on November 16, “The various health bills stipulate that Congress will arbitrarily decide how much to spend on health care for seniors every year—and then invest an unelected board with extraordinary powers to dictate what is covered and how it will be paid for. White House budget director Peter Orszag calls this Medicare commission ‘critical to our fiscal future’ and ‘one of the most potent reforms.’”

And it won’t just stop with seniors.  When the government is in charge of health care, we will no longer be able to get the medical care we want from whom we want without government interference.  Consider the recent findings of a government panel stating that women under the age of 50 without special risk factors no longer need regular mammography to detect breast cancer. Currently, it is recommended that women over 40 receive regular mammography, and since that became standard practice in the early 1990’s, breast cancer deaths among American women have fallen by 30%.  Given that, why would the government panel recommend a change in a practice which is evidently effective in preventing cancer deaths?  The reason is that the panel (which included no oncologists or radiologists) decided that the change was more cost effective. 

While such findings by government bureaucrats are currently of no real import, under a Liberal healthcare regime, they would be binding.  So, a 42 year-old woman with no risk factors for breast cancer will have to wait until she can feel the lump in her breast to get treatment, because that is what the government decided was cost effective.  What she wants notwithstanding.

The Liberal elite in this country want to control the health care system because that is the most comprehensive way they can control the individual.  Health care reform is not about compassion or equality.  Health care reform, as Liberals envision it and hope to implement it, is about them establishing power over you; your rights notwithstanding. 

The same desire to control is exhibited with the Liberal desire to deal with climate change in the form of Cap-and-Trade legislation.  The direct cost to each American family under the proposed Cap-and-Trade legislation (a/k/a American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009) is estimated to be between $1,000 and $1,500 annually.  The indirect costs on the American economy would be staggering, in the form of lost jobs, lost productivity, and additional debt in the trillions of dollars.  To what purpose?  According to climatologist Chip Knappenberger, Cap-and-Trade would moderate temperatures by only hundredths of a degree in 2050 and no more than two-tenths of a degree at the end of the century. 

The odd contradiction of Cap-and-Trade and healthcare reform is this: Liberal healthcare reform institutes policies under which the government will not expend money to save certain lives because such expenses may not be cost-effective; and yet, under Cap-and-Trade, the government is willing to spend enormous amounts of money in the hope that we can make the planet slightly cooler in 90 years.  In both cases the rights of individuals mean nothing.  Rather, we are all expected to toil in the vain hope that Liberals can remake the world according to their designs. 

What Liberal health care reform and Cap-and-Trade show us is the soul of Liberalism: The desire to remake the world and to control the lives of ordinary people in the effort.  The rights, dreams and desires of those people, to the extent they conflict with the Liberal agenda, must be set aside and done away with—and all for the “greater good.”

-Edward Mahee for TruPolitics.net