The Joys Of National Health Care

But Jacques Chaoulli, a French Canadian physician decided to challenge that, according to Anthony Dick. He argued in court that it was illegal to refuse medical care by putting people on waiting lists and at the same time to prevent people from seeking their own remedy by paying for needed medical procedures out of their own pockets.

Eventually, the Canadian Supreme Court agreed.

The question is, however, why ordinary people are so enamoured of a system that denies them the right to spend their own money to save their lives if the state won�t do it for them? Dick wonders about this too. The Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper recently went out of his way to argue against any private provision of health care.

�There will be no private, parallel system,� he recently promised at a rally in Winnipeg.

This longstanding hostility to private health-care alternatives cannot be explained away simply by noting that most Canadians have bought into the Left�s premise that taxpayers have an obligation to pick up the hospital bills of every citizen who ever gets sick. Something further is required to explain why some Canadians think sick people should be actively prevented from using their own money to purchase health care from private companies that deliver service better and faster than the government.

I believe that the reason is a dark and shameful one. People like the moral and financial cop-out of government health care. That way they never have to make the decision to spend their entire savings on a medical procedure to stay alive. They can just submit to the government system, and avoid the moral decision: Is my life worth more than my money? (Or is Aunt Millie�s life worth more than my money?) The French Canadian movie The Barbarian Invasions takes a brilliant look at this moral universe.

It should not be surprising that people want to escape difficult decisions. We are human, after all. But should we really live in a society that forbids people from spending their own money on lifesaving medical procedures? What, as the left likes to say, does that say about us and about our society?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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