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Back in 1980, just as America was making its political turn to the right, Milton Friedman lent his voice to the change with the famous TV series "Free to Choose." In episode after episode, the genial economist identified laissez-faire economics with personal choice and empowerment, an upbeat vision that would be echoed and amplified by Ronald Reagan.
But that was then. Today, "free to choose" has become "free to die."
I'm referring, as you might guess, to what happened during Monday's G.O.P. presidential debate. CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, "That's what freedom is all about - taking your own risks." Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether "society should just let him die."
And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of "Yeah!"
The incident highlighted something that I don't think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.
Now, there are two things you should know about the Blitzer-Paul exchange. The first is that after the crowd weighed in, Mr. Paul basically tried to evade the question, asserting that warm-hearted doctors and charitable individuals would always make sure that people received the care they needed - or at least they would if they hadn't been corrupted by the welfare state. Sorry, but that's a fantasy.
People who can't afford essential medical care often fail to get it, and always have - and sometimes they die as a result.The second is that very few of those who die from lack of medical care look like Mr. Blitzer's hypothetical individual who could and should have bought insurance. In reality, most uninsured Americans either have low incomes and cannot afford insurance, or are rejected by insurers because they have chronic conditions.
So would people on the right be willing to let those who are uninsured through no fault of their own die from lack of care? The answer, based on recent history, is a resounding "Yeah!"
Think, in particular, of the children.
The day after the debate, the Census Bureau released its latest estimates on income, poverty and health insurance. The overall picture was terrible: the weak economy continues to wreak havoc on American lives. One relatively bright spot, however, was health care for children: the percentage of children without health coverage was lower in 2010 than before the recession, largely thanks to the 2009 expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or S-chip.
And the reason S-chip was expanded in 2009 but not earlier was, of course, that former President George W. Bush blocked earlier attempts to cover more children - to the cheers of many on the right. Did I mention that one in six children in Texas lacks health insurance, the second-highest rate in the nation?
So the freedom to die extends, in practice, to children and the unlucky as well as the improvident. And the right's embrace of that notion signals an important shift in the nature of American politics.
In the past, conservatives accepted the need for a government-provided safety net on humanitarian grounds. Don't take it from me, take it from Friedrich Hayek, the conservative intellectual hero, who specifically declared in
The Road to Serfdom his support for "a comprehensive system of social insurance" to protect citizens against "the common hazards of life," and singled out health in particular.
Given the agreed-upon desirability of protecting citizens against the worst, the question then became one of costs and benefits - and health care was one of those areas where even conservatives used to be willing to accept government intervention in the name of compassion, given the clear evidence that covering the uninsured would not, in fact, cost very much money. As many observers have pointed out, the Obama health care plan was largely based on past Republican plans, and is virtually identical to Mitt Romney's health reform in Massachusetts.
Now, however, compassion is out of fashion - indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.'s base.
And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we've had for the past three generations - that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the "common hazards of life" through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.
Are voters ready to embrace such a radical rejection of the kind of America we've all grown up in? I guess we'll find out next year.
I don't think this is what is happening.
The morality of letting a fellow human being die in front of you, or be dragged off by police to be killed where you can't see it is a little more convoluted than this for any but the totally amoral.
There has to be a reason established for why that person "deserves to die." Almost anyone who falls to below 2.0 (antagonism) on the tone scale, and thus feels like killing someone, must first discover a reason why his target deserves to die before he will attempt to kill the person, or allow someone else to do so. All except the amoral demand this of themselves. This invented reason is called the "motivator." The murder, or the agreement with it, is called the "overt."
Most people will simply refuse to kill or to agree to it unless a convincing motivator is provided to them. Those who desire that people spend as much time as possible killing each other (the truly amoral) specialize in providing the general public with as many of these motivators as they can think up. These motivators are seldom, if ever, true. The amoral believe in falsehood as a way of life, as the only hope for survival.
At the particular debate discussed in the article, methinks the audience was "stacked." But be that as it may, sufficiently attractive motivators must exist for an individual or group to agree to murder.
Motivators attractive to those considered "conservative" or perhaps "christian fanatics" include: 1) He is possessed by the Devil; 2) He is genetically inferior; 3) He is a terrorist (per our definition); 4) He is some other dangerous enemy, like a communist or maybe even a socialist.
Motivators for left-leaning persons have been more difficult to invent. Real liberals are above 2.0 and thus have no interest in harming others. However, there have always been violent people who pretended to be "liberal" and it is not that hard to depress a person down the tone scale temporarily to the point (usually 1.5, anger) where he will agree to use violence against others. For this purpose "enemy of democracy" has worked well in the past. We also have "corporate pig" "fascist" or "nazi." "Criminal" will also work on many liberals. The Right thinks that left-wing motivators include "freedom of choice," but that's another subject.
People will then argue about which motivators are "better," never realizing that they were all made up by a third party who is just trying to figure out how to get people to spend as much time as possible killing each other.
And that's what I think is really going on.