Postby dolfan » September 16th, 2009, 4:01 am
Dawgs, with all respect, I think you're taking a position that is, by definition, socialist, and is, by perspective, naive and pollyanna-ish.
Health care finance is not the concern of the federal government. Our Constitution does not empower Congress to police public health, nor does it empower Congress to regulate the private relationships between citizens and their health care providers of choice. Health care regulation is not an inherent, necessary aspect of governance. If it was, then even municipalities all over the nation would be doing it. (I know a relatively few municipalities are governed by leftists and do regulate health care to some degree; that is the exception, not the rule.) The federal government lacks the authority to do what it proposes to do. It has the power because it WILL do it, to some extent, and the people will not stop it, but it lacks the constitutional authority, an authority that it cannot legitimately gain by negative implication that the government might assert simply because the people, in fact, don't stop it.
Because health care finance is not an inherent, necessary aspect of governance, and because it is the natural right of every individual to regulate his or her own health care by choosing whether to purchase insurance, whether to self-finance, whether to be in debt, whether to even seek care at all --- and because there is no legal duty of the public to help individuals make harder choices easier in this regard --- the only remaining option to define the actual exercise of power by government to regulate health care and health care finance is socialism.
Why? Because to accomplish it, government must confiscate the fruits of my production that I produce for my own self, my own family, my own use and convert its use to fund the machinery of government and the machinery of health care finance. This taking occurs without my consent, and against my opposition. There is no more basic, bedrock example of socialist policy.
Now, as to the naivete of your view, it is no answer to the criticisms of Obama that his critics were not also critics of President Bush. It is a stone cold fact that George W. Bush grew the federal government to unprecedented levels. Yet, they were not geometric in scale, as is the level of growth in both scope and sheer dollars under the Obama presidency. That Bush and Obama stand in some measure of relief to one another in terms of foreign policy, and that Obama's critics supported Bush in those policies, is also no answer to the criticisms of Obama. It is a rhetorical retort, not a substantive one. But, to soothe the savage breast that rages in you about Bush, I acknowledge that George W. Bush was guilty of growing the scope of federal executive power and that it was and remains bad for America. However, Obama is building on that foundation, not removing it.
Your gripe about health care finance is that working people "deserve" a bigger piece of the pie that is earned by "greedy" corporations. You base your argument on what you view as a moral proposition that there ought to be some fairness in the playing field of American society, some fairness in the distribution of resources. Well, fine. Everyone's entitled to their opinion. But, the bottom line is that there is no moral "ought" that American wealth should be distributed in any other manner than what is preferred by those who create that wealth at their own risk.
Each person's "deal" in life is their own responsibility under our civil structure. No one is responsible for the choices, the opportunities, the lack of opportunties or the health and wealth of others. That is especially true in the case of employers and employees. It strikes me that you should cite Jesus' commandment to do unto others as you would have done unto you, as if that has anything to say to this situation. Here's why I say that.
Jesus said nothing to any governmental leader about how government should be or could be better. Nothing. The record is wholly absent. It wasn't His concern. But, He did precisely speak to the notion of "fairness" in the distribution of wealth, the relationships between the wealth-creator and the employee.
In Matthew, Jesus told the famous "parable of the laborers". You know the story. Workers appear before a vineyard master at various times in the course of a day, each makes their own deal to work for him, some guys wind up working a whole day and some only a short part of a day, but at the end he pays them all the same. One of the laborers objects --- he says, "Whoa! This isn't fair. I worked all day and you paid me only as much as you paid this guy who just got here and hardly broke a sweat."
Jesus' vineyard master in the parable didn't respond, "I did this because everyone deserves to be treated equally and there is no one in my vineyard who will get an advantage over another." That's exactly NOT what His point was. Instead, here's what the parable's master said: "Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?"
The vineyard belongs to the one that owns it. The government is not the owner of America's vineyard. Private Americans, the ones with the money, do. If there is a lesson to be learned from the New Testament about how things are to be ordered in this regard, it is that the one to whom a resource belongs gets to choose what he does with it. That is a moral teaching from Jesus Himself.
Now, as believers, we do everything as unto the Lord. But, our Constitution does not countenance that. Our civil government is not constituted on any order of doing government as unto God. Living unto the Lord is constitutionally a matter of liberty, choice, and individual self-determination. There is no advice that the Bible offers to government. It offers advice to people, to the ekklesia of God, to the unbelievers, but not to civil governments as such.
However, in speaking to people about the relationship between the God who owns it all and the people in His service, He made the specific point, using normal, everyday people in normal everyday business, that the wealth owner/creator is free to do with his wealth as he chooses. As God is free to do that, Jesus acknowledged, we are also free to do it ---- and there's nothing immoral about it. The take-away from that is that there is no immorality to inequality of wealth, inequality of access, inequality of opportunity. Each of us is responsible for his own "deal", as that responsibility relates to the role of civil government.
Human government bears the same relation to hell as the church bears to heaven. (David Lipscomb, On Civil Government, 72).
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