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June 14, 2009

Mark Steyn on our retreat into apathy: 'A society of children cannot survive'

Topics: Political News and commentaries

If you haven't read Mark Steyn's piece yesterday at NRO titled "Retreat into Apathy," you need to do so now. Far too many Americans are more and more apathetic to the big government Barack Obama and the liberal Democrats in Congress are cramming down our throats - especially in regard to healthcare, and as Steyn notes, to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively "taking care" of our potential "vulnerabilities" is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable: A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny. And as his emails indicate, when folks see the price tag attached to Obama's plans, they'll get angry (although it will be too late). And, if Europe's a guide, at least as many people will retreat into apathy. Once big government's in place, it's very hard to go back.:

Heres a few excerpts:

When President Obama tells you he's "reforming" health care to "control costs," the point to remember is that the only way to "control costs" in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor, and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of "controlling costs" is to restrict the patient's access to treatment. In the Province of Quebec, patients with severe incontinence -- i.e., they're in the bathroom twelve times a night -- wait three years for a simple 30-minute procedure. True, Quebeckers have a year or two on Americans in the life-expectancy hit parade, but, if you're making twelve trips a night to the john 365 times a year for three years, in terms of life-spent-outside-the-bathroom expectancy, an uninsured Vermonter may actually come out ahead.

As Louis XV is said to have predicted, "Après moi, le deluge" -- which seems as incisive an observation as any on a world in which freeborn citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are content to rise from their beds every half-hour every night and traipse to the toilet for yet another flush simply because a government bureaucracy orders them to do so. "Health" is potentially a big-ticket item, but so's a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System -- or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.

More important, there is a cost to governmentalizing every responsibility of adulthood -- and it is, in Lord Whitelaw's phrase, the stirring up of apathy. If you wander round Liverpool or Antwerp, Hamburg or Lyons, the fatalism is palpable. In Britain, once the crucible of freedom, civic life is all but dead: In Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, some three-quarters of the economy is government spending; a malign alliance between state bureaucrats and state dependents has corroded democracy, perhaps irreparably. In England, the ground ceded to the worst sociopathic pathologies advances every day -- and the latest report on "the seven evils" afflicting an ever more unlovely land blames "poverty" and "individualism," failing to understand that if you remove the burdens of individual responsibility while loosening all restraint on individual hedonism the vaporization of the public space is all but inevitable. In Ontario, Christine Elliott, a candidate for the leadership of the so-called Conservative party, is praised by the media for offering a more emollient conservatism predicated on "the need to take care of vulnerable people."

Look, by historical standards, we're loaded: We have TVs and iPods and machines to wash our clothes and our dishes. We're the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: Every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we're "vulnerable": By definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively "taking care" of potential "vulnerabilities" is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.

Take the time to read it all.

Posted by Richard at June 14, 2009 7:52 AM

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