Maggie's Farm

Steyn on medical care and the nanny state. Great piece. One quote:

...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.

What's my view? I am in favor of providing help with medical costs for the poorest and most helpless, but we already have that. It's called Medicaid. Furthermore, the charity clinic I work in one day a week will see anyone who makes under $50,000/yr and who lacks insurance, on a sliding fee scale. We will see nobody for nothing, though: that would be degrading both to patient and to the docs. (Such clinics are a good example of "civic life.")

I know there seem to be more people around today who long for a parental State than there were 20 or 30 years ago. I worry that they do not know that they are selling their freedom, dignity, and can-do spirit - literally their American birthright - for a bowl of lentils.