Free Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America by Matt Kibbe

“buy-cott.”
    PAGING DR. PAUL
    E VERYONE KNOWS R ON P AUL IS AN OUTSPOKEN LIBERTARIAN, BUT many aren’t aware that the Texas congressman is also a physician who has helped deliver 4,000 babies. Dr. Paul shares Mackey’s rejection of “health care as a right.” He also points out the silliness of the idea that a lack of government-promised care means that people should or would go without. At a Republican presidential candidates’ debate in 2011, Paul shared what would become a notorious exchange with moderator Wolf Blitzer of CNN. Blitzer asked a hypothetical question about a thirty-year-old man caught without health insurance when calamity hits, and he goes into a coma. “Who pays for that?”
    “In a society where you accept welfarism and socialism,” responds Paul, “he expects the government to take care of it.” Responding to multiple follow-up questions, Paul explains that what this hypothetical man “should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself. . . . That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks.”
    Blitzer: But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?
    Paul: No. I practiced medicine before we had Medicaid in the early 1960s when I got out of medical school. I practiced at Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio. And the churches took care of ’em. We never turned anybody away from the hospital. [ Loud applause. ] And we’ve given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves—our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it. This whole idea—that’s the reason the cost is so high. The cost is so high because we dump it on the government, it becomes a bureaucracy, it becomes special-interest, it kowtows to the insurance companies and the drug companies, and then on top of that you have the inflation. The inflation devalues the dollar. We have lack of competition. There’s no competition in medicine. 38
    This episode is a classic example of Bastiat’s “seen and unseen” in the debate over who gets what in the provision and allocation of health care services. Is “health care” an objective good that exists outside of the incentives to provide it, a fixed pie of treatments, medications, and services that can be reallocated, from the top down, by the smartest, most benevolent bureaucrats? Government promises, empty as they are, are seen as doing something for this hypothetical (and irresponsible) man in need of health services. What goes unseen is the destruction of the social contract between free people living in a community where you are expected not to hurt others and not to take their stuff. Free people support and help each other. Where health care is a government-imposed “right,” someone else will take care of it, so there is little responsibility for yourself or others in a bind. One thing that history teaches us is that a contrived right to everything in theory amounts to exactly nothing in practice.
    But a right to health care prompts key questions: What standard of care? Do you get access to the latest innovations and treatments? Will there be new innovations, or will the government deem them too expensive? Will a competent doctor be available when your government-imagined right to see him discourages young people from becoming doctors in the first place?
    Who decides these questions? In a government-run system, the patient certainly will not.
    The news stories of the Blitzer-Paul exchange focused exclusively on a single rude audience member who screamed “yeah” when the CNN reporter asked if “society should just let him die.” Who might have that individual have been? We will never know. Maybe Robert Reich slipped past security?
    THE UNSEEN
    A LL OUR SYSTEM’S PROBLEMS—INFLATION, JOB LOSS, EXCESSIVE PAPERWORK , 47 million uninsured—are symptoms of an underlying disease. The disease has a name: centralization. In the health care system, that’s