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The Campaign For Liberty promotes and defends the great

American principles of individual liberty, constitutional

government, sound money, free markets, and a

non-interventionist foreign policy, by means of educational and

political activity.

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Dr. Leviathan Will See You Now

By William Norman Grigg 03/24/2010

Will Grigg writes thePro Libertate blog. He is the author ofLiberty in Eclipse: The

War on Terror and the Rise of the Homeland Security State.

"I observe a benevolent feeling here.... There is also tenderness.... But, beware, tender hearts! Don'tyou know where tenderness leads? To the gas chambers....

"Never in the history of the world have there been so many civilized, tenderhearted souls as havelived in this [twentieth] century. Never in the history of the world have so many people been killed.More people have been killed in this century by tender-hearted souls than by cruel barbarians in allother centuries put together....

"My brothers, let me tell you where tenderness leads -- To the gas chambers...."

Father Smith's sermon, from Walker Percy's monitory novel The Thanatos Syndrome

Rejoice and be glad, Americans!

Owing entirely to the visionary compassion of the Dear Leader and his party, the same regime thathas slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, that poured trillions of dollars into thecoffers of Wall Street kleptocrats, that brought its unique healing touch to victims of the post-Katrinadisaster in New Orleans, and that routinely commits similar acts of divine charity, will now relieveyou of the burden of making your own health care decisions.

This point was made -- albeit unintentionally -- in a widely syndicated "news analysis" intended tocelebrate this development.

"Rarely does the government, that big, clumsy, poorly regarded oaf, pull off anything short of warthat touches all lives with one act, one stroke of a president's pen," observed AP commentatorCalvin Woodward. "Such a moment has come." (Emphasis added.)

War requires the domestic regimentation of all private life and the confiscation of private property toaccomplish the mass destruction of foreign property and the mass annihilation of foreign lives. Massmurder is the only undertaking in which government consistently out-performs its private sector

competition. Yet we are supposed to believe that this engine of destruction can also serve as aninstrument of compassionate healing.

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Despite the best efforts of its servants to swaddle it within layer after layer of tender-heartedrhetoric, the State remains as Nietzsche described it: "the coldest of all cold monsters.... Everythingit says, it lies; and whatever it has it has stolen." It "bites with stolen teeth, and it bites often...."

Bearing that last maxim in mind, we can discern the true intentions behind "Obamacare" in the factthat it includes the largest expansion of the IRS -- both in terms of power and personnel -- since thereign of FDR, America's first fascist President-For-Life.

"Reform" will mean fewer doctors and more tax collectors. Those are the priorities of an entity builtto consume life, not to preserve it.

"Coldly it lies," Nietzsche wrote of the State "and this lie slips from its mouth: 'I, the State, am thepeople.'"

"We proved that this government -- a government of the people by the people -- still works for thepeople," lied the Dear Leader himself -- seemingly determined to validate Nietzsche's analysis downto the details -- following the party-line vote in the House.

"Community organizers" of Mr. Obama's ilk see the "people" as an undifferentiated mass to bemobilized in pursuit of collectivist objectives. They likewise assume that only those thus enlisted inthe cause of collectivism qualify as "the people." That perspective is pregnant with terrible portentsregarding the treatment of tens of millions of Americans -- including the author of these words -- whowill not participate in the Regime's system of regimented, rationed health care.

The good news here is that the governments of 38 states -- beginning with my home state of Idaho-- are preparing acts of legal interposition against the Regime's individual health insurancemandates.

Perhaps it could also be regarded as ambivalently good news that the Regime's expanded effort to

cartelize health care will inevitably create a black market in which fee-for-service treatment willflourish. This assumes, of course, that anybody retains sufficient wealth to pay for medical care asthe omnivorous Regime devours everything within its sphere of influence.

Both Obama and his allies admit that the measure that passed yesterday -- call it "EnhancedCartelization" of the health industry -- is merely another step toward undisguised government controlof health care. Before Sunday's vote, our nation was more than halfway there. As Calvin Woodwardadmits: "Federal and state programs now cover half the cost of health care purchased in the countryand were expected to go over 50 percent in the next year or two even absent Obama's plan."

What this means, of course, is that the federal government -- the world's largest medical"insurance" provider -- created the very market distortions now being invoked to justify furtherfederal control over health care. The same can be said of the "two-tier system" execrated by thosewho seek to create a uniform, government-run medical service.

In the 1930s, writes Woodward, "the American Medical Association denounced proposals fororganized medical services as an 'incitement to revolution' at the hands of 'Medical Soviets.' Andthat wasn't even about government-run health care. The AMA's fierce opposition to collectivismincluded objections to private insurance, the norm today, and the pooling of doctors into whatbecame health maintenance organizations decades later."

Like other statist stenographers, Woodward either doesn't recognize or will not admit that the AMA'scritique of "Medical Soviets" has been entirely vindicated.



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As Dr. Miguel Faria, a Cuban-born neurosurgeon and health freedom activist, summarizes:

"Although proponents of socialized medicine delight in scoring rhetorical points against free marketmedicine by reciting horror stories about HMOs, the managed care/managed competition philosophyshould not be considered free market medicine, but rather a form of collusion between privateentities and government."

It is true, as proponents of Obama's "reform" proposals contend, that we already have a de facto

system of health care rationing. But as Dr. Faria notes, this is "largely a product of federalintervention"; furthermore, "while under a 'single-payer' system coverage would be universal, accessto care would be rationed by the central government or its agents."

In his victory speech, Obama pointedly observed that the new "reform" framework reflects theefforts of collectivists from both sides of the narrow partisan divide.

While the State-centric media tirelessly linked Obama's name with those of FDR and LBJ, his mostimportant antecedent was actually the much-reviled Richard M. Nixon, during whose reign the Fedscreated the corporatist health care cartel whose power will be dramatically enhanced under thecurrent "reform" measure.

In a prescient analysis published more than a decade ago, Dr. Faria recounted the relevant history:

"The emergence of HMOs began in the years 197174, during which time President Richard Nixonopenly embraced Keynesian economics and enacted such measures as wage and price controls.The imposition of the managed care/managed competition ideology on our health care system ispart of the same package of government interventions. The mechanics of managed competitionwere carefully worked out with the diligent cooperation of President Nixon and Senator TedKennedy.... Working in collaboration with private sector interests, the Nixon/Kennedy axis createdthe template for a fascist health system in which government-approved entities -- HMOs and similar

health care provider networks -- would deliver medical care under government supervision."

In that system, physicians "employed by HMOs are required to practice a form of rationing, called'cost-effective analysis' or 'data credentialing,'" continued Dr. Faria. "HMO administrators, in turn,employ utilization review data to assess doctor performance in terms of financial impact rather thansound medical judgment or patient needs. Physicians who are deemed cost-ineffective, includingthose who incur expenses by treating the sickest patients and dealing with the most difficult cases,confront ... the possible loss of their membership status in hospitals and health care networks."

During my own recent hospitalization, several physicians with whom I spoke confirmed elements ofDr. Faria's analysis and expressed severe frustrations over the burdens and limitations of thecorporatist health care system. One of them confided to me that his favorite time to work isChristmas Day, since he is freed from the oversight of bureaucratic administrators "and so I'mactually free to practice medicine."

What Dr. Faria describes is a post-Hippocratic medical system in which the physician is required toact on behalf of the collective, rather than the interests of the individual patient. This same perverseethic was enshrined in the post-Bismarck German social welfare state, with consequences asfamiliar as they are horrifying.

When medical care is collectivized, the system operates in the supposed interests of "the people,"

rather than for the benefit of any individual person -- with special exceptions made for those whobelong to the presiding oligarchy, of course.

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It must not be forgotten that the State creates nothing. This means that, in economic terms,rationing -- the allocation of resources on a political basis -- is all that it does.

During the two world wars, America was shackled in a system of economic central planning thatincluded rationing of practically every worthwhile consumer good. Thisis what government will dowhenever it is given a pretext in the form of a suitable crisis. Apply that model to the delivery ofhealth care and you'll get a good idea -- to paraphrase the Blessed One Himself -- of what "changewill look like."

Writing last week on the eve of the House vote, Dr. Faria pointed out that within the medicaltreatment and research community, "the word is out that 'more care is not necessarily better'....

[This is because] health care gurus see the imminent U.S. government takeover of Americanmedicine, and this ... will mean not only increased taxation on the horizon, but also massiverationing and the drastic curtailment of medical services...."

Government disruption of the market leads to scarcity, which leads to demands for even greaterinterventions -- thereby creating a self-sustaining cycle that ends only when the "official" economy isdestroyed and the productive are driven underground, where they are pursued as "economiccriminals."

Nietzsche described those who preside over the State and enforce its decrees as "destroyers" who"lay snares for the many ... they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them." Subservience tothe state is "slow suicide," he warned, since it is an all-devouring idol from which arises theincessant stench of countless human sacrifices.

Dispensing death is what government does. We should expect business to pick up really soon.

Copyright 2010 William Norman Grigg

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