It is a weird time to be a Libertarian. In the last year or so a lot conservative refugees from the tarnished Republican brand have started calling themselves Libertarians, and at the same time the crazy-brigade that has been disgracing the name of Libertarianism since forever has found new platforms for its tinfoil-hatted paranoia. If you’re somebody who genuinely believes in limiting government to its proper, narrowly defined role … well, it’s been a while since anybody listened to you.
Now, people are listening. Now, just maybe, we’ve got a little bit of power. And maybe we can use it, for the first time in history, to pursue the agenda of freedom that we’ve stuck by doggedly despite cycle-after-cycle of politicians who borrow our rhetoric for the stump and then forget it once they get elected. It’s a weird time to be a Libertarian, but it should be an exciting time too. We can do this. We can make something important happen. We can finally create public health insurance.
I’ll give the wannabes a moment to leave the room. If you call yourself a conservative or a Libertarian, but what you really like is playing the ol’ partisan game of arbitrary left versus arbitrary right, this message ain’t for you. If you believe in freedom only for people you agree with, if your support for liberty goes no further than a convenient talking-point, don’t waste your time – your philosophy of government is so shallow that if an actual idea fell into it it wouldn’t even make a splash. All gone? Okay then: real conservatives, real Libertarians, principled defenders of the sacred rights of American citizens, lock the doors. It’s time to go to work.
So, do we want government-run health care? Do we want government hospitals full of government doctors, practicing medicine to a bureaucrat’s tune? Hell no. No way, no how, not a chance. Not in my America.
So, now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s look at something completely different: health insurance. If you don’t know the difference, go get an actuary to take out your appendix for you. Then join me in calling on the men and women in Washington who represent the citizens of these United States to stop doing all those things that aren’t their job, and do something that is their job for a change. Create a public health insurance program.
That’s right, this is their job. They should have done it long ago, and if true conservative Libertarians had power they would have. See, we have an advantage when it comes to figuring out what our government should and should not do. That’s because we don’t just have a big grab-bag of pet issues, we have a philosophy of government that says exactly what is and what isn’t the government’s business. The list of things that Washington shouldn’t be doing is too long to go into here, but the list of things it should do is blessedly short. At the top of that list: make the decisions that private individuals don’t have the power to make for themselves and don’t have the right to make for each other.
That’s right. We’re a society of laws, a democracy. That doesn’t mean we’re going to give up our guns, but we put aside the option of using them against our fellow citizens whenever we feel like it. To our government we give the responsibility of protecting us from foreign enemies. To our government we give the responsibility of policing our streets. We are a free people, and we are a lawful people, and we acknowledge that in our society it’s not up to us as individuals to take these matters into our own hands. We don’t lynch – justice belongs to all, and the system that administers it we hold in common. That’s the ONE THING that we as Libertarians can all agree on about the role of government: we do not, as individuals, have the right to say who lives and who dies.
Right?
Right.
It is not okay for you to decide to put a rope around someone’s neck and deprive them of oxygen. And if you decide to withhold from someone the medical treatment they need to keep breathing, you’re killing them just as surely. Hold on now, am I saying that healthcare is a right? No, I’m not, and it isn’t, it’s a commodity just like milk and eggs, and like milk and eggs you can’t have any unless you pay someone who knows how to produce it. But once again, I’m not talking about healthcare. I’m talking about health insurance. It’s not the doctors who are seizing control of that life-or-death decision, it’s the insurance companies. Decisions about the lives of American citizens – the kind of decisions that we would only entrust to a quorum of legislators or a panel of duly appointed jurors, are being made every day by private citizens. And it’s not a terrorist or a murderer whose life hangs in the balance. It’s mine.
Mine. My life, a life that belongs to me. We understand the sanctity of private property, and we will not surrender same except by lawful act of the government we elect. Nobody puts me in jail but a policeman with a badge that says he works for the American people. Am I going to hold the person who decides whether I live or die to a lower standard?
Now, I just mentioned private property, and it’s important to remember how fundamental that concept is to who we are and what we stand for. Remember, we’re not kleptocrats who think that property is whatever you can stuff in your pockets. We believe in true capitalism, the creation of wealth through the creation of value. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, you only earn what you produce. So what exactly do insurance companies produce? Now let me be clear, I’m not in any way denigrating either our nation’s insurance companies or the people that work for them. They’re good people, and they provide an essential service – god knows somebody has to, and so far our government hasn’t stepped up to the plate. But it is important to remember that insurance companies do not produce a commodity. They do not manufacture what they sell on the assembly line, they do not grow it in the fields or dig it out of the ground. What they sell is risk – your risk, my risk. And where do they get it from?
Nowhere, it’s universal, it’s a natural phenomenon. Health risk can be harvested without leaving your desk. That’s fine, that’s all well and good. But now consider that in any given state, access to that infinitely public resource is wholly monopolized by only a handful of private companies! As a staunch believer in private property and free enterprise, I might find myself supporting a corporation that owned an absolute monopoly on the air we breathe, but I simply cannot justify supporting corporate hegemony over a generally-available class of decision-making that I wouldn’t normally allow to anyone not elected by and accountable to the American people.
We don’t do lynch-mobs. We don’t let private security firms declare war on other countries. Because we are conservative Libertarians, we make decisions for ourselves – and for those life-or-death decisions that citizens of a lawful society can’t make for themselves, we put them in the hands of a government that we elected.
Now, we hear a lot of arguments for a public insurance option that just leave us shaking our heads. We hear that healthcare is a human right, we hear that we have a social responsibility, we hear that we are our brothers’ keepers. But hey, we’re Libertarians, we’re used to having embarrassing political allies. Just remember – a grown-up doesn’t change his or her beliefs just out of spite for somebody else’s. We hold fast to our principles even if others stumble across the same conclusions by accident. Remember this: the public health insurance option is not about the poor and the downtrodden. It’s about me. Or, in your case, you.
In a society of laws, I can’t own every decision that might be made about my life – but by God, I can own the person who makes that decision.
Demand liberty. Demand your rights as an American and as a human being. Demand public health insurance.
