How easy!

Catering to the needs of the very people they crippled is job security for Democratic officeholders.

Republicans are no better. Rather than rejecting on principal the entire Democratic, socialist platform, Republicans sell out capitalism, too, offering socialism-lite. They call it “compassionate conservativism.” If socialism is poison, compassionate conservatism is slow poison. Either way, liberty is dead in the end if contemporary Democrats and Republicans continue to shape public policy in this country. Like European parliaments our Congress will be deliberating over teaspoons versus tablespoons of socialism.

The Republicans, like the Democrats, are collectivist-altruists and therefore can not come up with a good reason for keeping government out of the charity business. One good reason: Placing hundreds of billions of dollars in the hands of politicians who have produced nothing may have a corrupting influence on the political process. Another good reason: When people accept imagined rights like “the right to health care,” they forfeit actual rights, like the property rights of the individuals who are sacrificed to pay for the “free” health care. Probably the best reason for objecting to any quantity of socialist-poison: Capitalism—that is, an economy free from interference by politicians—works!

The most productive and inventive period in United State’s history occurred during the relatively laissez-faire decades following the Civil War. [To read the entire argument check out Andrew Bernstein’s The Capitalist Manifesto, UPA, 2005.] A parade of geniuses from this period may be sufficient to make my point: Thomas Edison, Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Graves, James J. Hill, Andrew Carnegie, J.D. Rockerfeller, William Jenny, John Roebling, Isaac Singer, Charles Goodyear, Cyrus Field, George Westinghouse, George Eastmen, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Willis Carrier, Robert Goddard, George Washington Carver, David Sarnoff…to name a few of the better known free-thinkers unleashed during this country’s brief experiment with laissez-faire capitalism.

Contemporary Republicans need votes, and for needy voters who haven’t the patience nor inclination to read history or to reason, the socialist message, however irrational and immoral, is very seductive. Nobody doesn’t like free stuff! More importantly, the socialists have convinced the voters they care more. Nobody likes to see humans suffering. The fact that the worst genocides in human history were perpetrated by socialist states in the name of “the collective good” is lost in the cloud of tears and feelings for those in need. Politicians of both parties forget the reason for their existence, [i.e. to protect individual rights] summon up their feelings and their legislative clubs, and deliver to those in need the products of the labor of other people. To the victims of this extortion, the productive, they offer a means through which to repent their “immoral” selfish success.

Republicans define compassion in the same way Christians define love: that it is a cause, not an effect; that it is a duty, not a choice. Like the Democrats, they force this “duty” on all of us. Dripping on about how much they care about the 40 million uninsured Americans, how this reality is unacceptable and how something—anything!—must be done about it, politicians ask their public to feel. And then they act on those feelings. Nobody calls for thinking: reason. Nobody mentions the solution: capitalism. Rather they brew more of the poison that made the mess in the first place: government intervention in the economy, sacrificing individual rights, growing their own power over us.

In every industry where the government refrains from interference [DVD players and fast food, for example], the number of producers grows, availability of the product goes up, and the price of the product goes down. Health care is no different.

Politicians of both parties club productive Americans in the name of compassion. They do their compassionate work with other people’s money! How easy.