New School Politics

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill?
That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or of my patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors.
Men considered only the ‘welfare of the patients with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to chose, they said, only ‘to serve.’ That a man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my consciousness, to stifle my mind—yet what is it that they expect to depend on when they lie on an operating table under my hands?
Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of a man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

Contrary to the vague and baseless rhetoric casually tossed around by today’s politicians, health care is not a right. Indeed it is an abomination to what a right actually implies. A right is a substantial claim on ownership of something. It implies that it be earned—by means of production, voluntary exchange, or by virtue of existence (i.e. ownership of one’s body). Everyone has a right to their life, because they have ownership of their mind and body, and thus have the right to act in order to support their lives, and the right to the property their actions produce. But this does not mean they have the right to live without limitation, or to have their life saved, or to property which they did not earn. Any such claim justifies men using other men as means to their end–not by mutual agreement, but by force.
But just as every man is the owner of his mind and body and responsable for his course of action, “every man is an end in himself,” and no man has a rightful claim on the life of another. Because property is the substance required to support human life, no one may usurp the proprety of another, for it represents the circumvention of man’s ability to live in the most basic of ways.
Likewise, there is no right to healthcare if you do not earn the healthcare. The only ones who have a right to healthcare are the doctors who own the service and produce it in order to support their lives. They are the ones who produce it; without them there would be no healthcare in the first place. Anyone is justified in buying the service at a price the doctor agrees to, but no one is justified in taking the healthcare from them. Any claim that people have the right to take healthcare—the product of the world’s doctors—by force amounts to a claim on the lives the doctors. It is slavery over the mind, pure and simple. Medicine exists because men applied their minds to the practical problems of reality and were free to do so. In an environment of perpetual force using reason is not practical. Reason requires that man exercises their free will, but where there is force, no freedom—no amount of choice—is possible. Compulsion in the health care industry—an industry that demands innovation and technological advancement as much or more than any other—will not create more healthcare, it will not create better health care, it will only create a situation where achievement is penalized, coercion is rewarded, and the entire motive to produce is reversed.
Until and unless California, as well as the whole of the nation, realizes this, the condition of healthcare in America will only continue to diminish. The only state where man’s mind will be able to produce is that in which his virtue is rewarded and his right to his life is respected. Not only should the California legislature move to strike down Schwarzenegger’s proposal but they should set an example for the whole world, and in the face of socialization, move to restore freedom to an industry marred by the eternal specter of government coercion.