 There is a game of semantics going on in the healthcare debate that needs to be uncovered and dealt with. Everyone deserves healthcare, we are told — from the least to the greatest. Everyone deserves free abortions, free birth control, free hip replacements, free mental health checkups and counseling, etc.
Everyone deserves “Cadillac health care.”
That’s one side of the story. The other side of the story is that we can’t afford the health care we want, the health care we deserve. Even if we had every person in the United States in the health care business, there still wouldn’t be enough doctors, nurses, and pharmacists.
Clearly these two points must contradict one another. When we get down to reality, health care must be rationed. So the only real question in healthcare is, how do we ration? The entire healthcare debate comes down to this single point.
On one side, we have those who believe the state should do the rationing, because the state is the only “rational actor,” in the game. The state, having a full view of the quality of life issues, a full view of the advance of medical technology, and a full view of the needs of the society at large, should decide who receives what care. The state, in other words, should decide who lives, and who dies. For those who hold this view, their opponents say, “the market should decide.” Whoever is richer, more successful, or lucky enough to be born into a wealthy family, should get better care — the poor be damned.
This is a straw man.
There are other institutions in our society who stand between each of us as an individual and the great gulf of death.
Our churches, for instance, can support those who have medical needs they cannot afford.
Our families, for instance, can come together to care for those within, to decide when it’s more compassionate to sell a house to cover a medical expense, or more compassionate to keep the family home and allow a loved one to slip away.
These are hard decisions, for certain, but that’s all the more reason to make them within the environment of a group of loving individuals, rather than in the “cold light of a government study on quality of life issues.”
By slipping between the pragmatic and the moral, the purveyors of universal health care have sold our Country a lie. Health care cannot be universal, it can only be apportioned differently. The only real question is, “who does the apportioning?” According to the supporters of the state, there is only the government, or the wealthy, and there is nothing in between. Here is one more instance of the modern state’s desire to make each individual stand naked before the state itself, to put before us the false dichotomy of state verses business so we throw ourselves on the mercies (and never satisfied lust for power) of the state itself.
We should reject this false dichotomy, and the vision it represents. Families mean something. Churches mean something.
People mean something.
I’m blogging through a worldview class I’m teaching for our homeschool coop through the next year in this series of posts. Each week I’ll post a class outline and notes.
This week, in our final SEEK worldview class, we went through a short overview of apologetics, and discussed the idea of a worldview apologetic. We considered how the worldview apologetic is really a subset of the combined case apologetic.
This class serves as a small taste of the apologetics class we’re planning for next year.
  You really don’t think we’re all evil, do you? Even me? I’ve never killed anyone, I’ve never stolen (at least anything big”, I’ve never intentionally hurt someone else. How can you call me evil?
I wonder how many times I’ve heard this since I became “serious,” about my Christianity? How many times have did I accept this line of reasoning before that time? People are basically good, right? Especially those who are trying their best to follow the moral law, those who follow God, those who give their lives in the service of others — right? Who could call Mother Theresa evil, after all?
Or, let’s go farther back: each and every one of the Apostles of Christ gave up their lives for what they believed to be true. Not only in terms of death by martyrdom, but even in terms of what we “moderns” (as if its wonderful to be “modern”), would call “quality of life.” Peter gave up the family fishing business. James, the family carpentry business. Matthew gave up the lucrative life of a Roman tax collector.
These men, surely, were good. Among all the men on the face of the Earth, no matter what time, or what place, we should be able to look at these men and say, “you are a good person.”
Before we get too far, though, let’s look at what Jesus actually said to these very same men.
Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! -Matthew 7:9-11
“You, being evil…”
No, Matthew, Mark, John, and Peter were not “good men.” They were, at heart, evil. They did good things, and their sin was covered in the blood of Christ, but in their natural state, they were not good. Nor did everything they do turn to the good, even after they’d been taught, in person, by God himself.
If these men were called evil by God himself, then surely you and I fall into the same category. Surely I am evil, too. I might not intend it, I might not want it, but the essence of my actions are evil. That doesn’t mean I can’t do good things, it means that the results of the things I do, whether I intend it or not, is ultimately evil. We want to believe that good intentions make good actions; any honest evaluation of history should show us the lie of that line of thinking.
This is a harsh reality we just don’t want to face in our day and age. We’d rather think of ourselves as good people who make some mistakes, not as evil people who do some good things — although the latter characterization is much closer to the truth of the matter.
I’m blogging through a worldview class I’m teaching for our homeschool coop through the next year in this series of posts. Each week I’ll post a class outline and notes.
In this, the next to the last week of our class, we discussed entertainment, including the importance of struggling what what is “good entertainment,” and how the importance of entertainment goes beyond “bad words,” in songs and movies. We considered several movies and songs, trying to get at and understand the worldview represented in each.
Here comes the puzzle of religious liberty, at least as it has played out for us. The subtraction of beliefs leaves, as a remainder, “no one’s religious beliefs,” or more accurately, non-belief. Non-belief thereby becomes the established state worldview. Secularism takes the place of an established religion. Secularism is not neutral. It is a quite definite worldview, with its own version of the cosmos and the place of human beings in it, one in which God has been subtracted. The state-sponsored subtraction of religious beliefs in the name of religious freedom ends up establishing a worldview based upon the subtraction of God from the cosmos. -Catholic World Report
Our founding fathers enshrined religious liberty as our first right because while we should render that which is Caesar’s to Caesar, we must render to God that which is God’s. Caesar will never like this, for it implies that Caesar isn’t God—that there are obligations higher than those to the state; that the state is necessarily limited. When we claim to be one nation under God, we’re saying we’re a nation under God’s judgment. Man is not the measure of all things. -Public Discourse
I’ve come to realize after the Sandy Hook shooting that the reason we can’t have a rational gun debate is because the anti-gun side pre-supposes that their pro-gun opponents must first accept that guns are bad in order to have a discussion about guns in the first place. Before we even start the conversation, we’re the bad guys and we have to admit it. Without accepting that guns are bad and supplicating themselves to the anti-gunner, the pro-gunner can’t get a word in edgewise, and is quickly reduced to being called a murderer, or a low, immoral and horrible human being. -Iowa State Daily
“In all 50 states, two people of the same sex can live with each other and love each other, they can go to a liberal church and have a wedding ceremony performed, they can work for a liberal business and have marriage benefits, if the church wants to and if the business wants to,” he said. “It’s very much live and let live.” But that’s not what those who want to redefine marriage are asking for. “What they’re asking is for the Supreme Court to redefine marriage, and then have government use the coercive power of law to force people like you and me and our religious communities and our businesses to recognize a same-sex relationship as if it’s a marriage,” he said. -Heritage
America prides itself in being “the land of the free.” But as it turns out, liberty is not free itself. It comes at a cost. Part of that cost was paid by the precious lives of Americans who sacrificed everything for their country. But in times of peace, citizens must also foot the bill by being responsible and virtuous. A free society does not just magically work. It requires a people who are willing to cooperate with each other and selflessly care for one another. If we love liberty, we must also love justice, kindness, mercy and charity. Otherwise, the liberty that we dearly love will disappear, and the America that we call exceptional may join the ranks of failed experiments in democracy. -Values & Capitalism
Conservatism opposes universal, outsourced collective responsibility with engaged, personal community responsibility. When a liberal claims that as a society we owe each member access to health care, the conservative responds not that we owe each other nothing, but that we all long to belong to communities where we care for each other. The conservative solution is a community fundraiser put on by a sick man’s friends and family, neither bureaucracy nor autonomy. We are born with responsibilities not only to ourselves, but our families. Our families sustain us selflessly for years before we can even pretend to be self-sustaining individuals. The stable social soil of a family and community create the bounded realm of liberty within which one can attempt to grow into a good person. -Intercollegiate Review
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The problem with experts is they are expert in their own experience. Not yours.
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