Invidia
Health care so-called reform has passed in the Senate, voting along strictly partisan lines, the Dems halted a Republican filibuster. In an after-Midnight session, sometime in the dark hours of Monday morning, your government, O Americans, decided to increase taxes, to increase the health care premiums paid by independently insured parties, to increase the premiums paid by unions in their plans, to fund Abortions (prenatal infanticide) from your tax money, and to lower the salaries of Insurance company members, and to restrict the return on investment of citizens holding stock in Insurance companies, and to otherwise dictate what hitherto had been private matters determined peaceably between rational men by negotiation.
The bill creates 112 new bureaus and offices, and no actual health care will be provided to anyone until five or nine years have passed, albeit the taxes and other impositions go into effect immediately. There is apparently no "public option" which means the poor still will not get any more or better or different coverage.
The bill is upwards of 9 trillion dollars over a ten year period. This, during a depression.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, at paragraph 2243:
Armed resistance to oppression by political authority is not legitimate, unless all the following conditions are met: 1) there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; 2) all other means of redress have been exhausted; 3) such resistance will not provoke worse disorders; 4) there is well-founded hope of success; and 5) it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution.
Of these criterion, not all have been met.
When autopsies are performed on the American Republic, historians (assuming the Chinese or the Mohammedans will have what we call historians, a doubtful proposition) will regard this moment as our version of the Athenian vote to invade Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War–a moment of absurd overreach and arrogance, prompted partly by malice, partly by hubris, partly by ignorance.
They just think money comes from nowhere for no reason, much like the Cargo Cultists, who thought the white man’s goods were bestowed without effort by the gods, and stolen by the white man. According to Cargo Cultist economics, prosperity comes from stealing back the prosperity that the gods for no reason and out of nowhere have made. You just take it, and somewhere, somehow, someone will make more for you. Just print up more paper currency to pay for it.
Most Leftists of my acquaintance, or whose words I have read, seem to live in a world entirely made of emotional images, not facts, not reality, not reason, and whatever the loudest or most alluring emotional images is that persists in their brains, that is how they deem reality (to them, a flexible and plaint substance, like clay) can be molded.
The act is symbolic: none of them have read the bill, not even the people who voted for it. I suspect each part was written by a lobbyist in the pay of the Insurance company concerned with whatever particular advantaged them–and even they did not read the entirety. Passing this bill is merely voodoo, like sticking a pin in a wax doll, an action done to satisfy an emotional image, nor a reasoned response to an alleged political economic inequity.
It is not that they know nothing of the basics of economics, it is that they reject that knowledge as unpalatable, and accuse you of suffering a moral or mental defect if you possess knowledge. They think the law of supply and demand can simply be defied, provided only we try hard enough, work hard enough, don’t question authority, and have enough draconian laws to punish class-saboteurs.
I had an eye-opening and disheartening discussion with a Leftist, a young lady of whom I have always been fond, and she told me the real reason for the Left pressure for health reform. "Have you ever met a poor doctor?" she sneered.
She went on to say that she had a moral right, nay, a duty, to take tax money from those who objected to abortions and use it to fund killing children in the womb.
Words cannot express my shock. The purity of the malice involved in that question "Have you ever met a poor doctor?" is without compare in my experience. I had never seen the like.
Every time I give the loyal opposition the benefit of the doubt, and begin to believe they actually have some argument or some reasoning worth discovering, I merely stumble across some emotional image made of nonsense phrases that floats in a twilight zone disconnected from any reality, fact, or first principles. Because doctors get remunerated what the free market will bear for their long years of extremely difficult study and work at the rate the free market values, ergo doctors who do a valuable service receive a valuable reward, therefore Catholics should pay a mother to kill her own killing innocent, helpless and unbaptized child in the womb. QED.
I have met poor doctors, in fact, one of whom was almost driven out of practice by a malicious lawsuit for millions of dollars. I have also apparently met Leviathan, the demon from hell in charge of the mortal sin called envy or invidia. It is a demon who wears a smiling mask, and from the mouth-hole comes words of compassion, and beneath the mask are the greenish features of a corpse, covered with maggots and stinking.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
