Is National Health Care Anti-american

Is National Health Care Anti-American? by Michael S. Rozeff Very few Americans will agree with me when I say that national government health care is antiAmerican. One purpose of this article is to explain several lines of reasoning behind this position. A deeper purpose is to bring to consciousness the reality in which we are living, which is an important loss of liberty and a substantial replacement of liberty by domination. Americans are experiencing a movement toward and into an uncivilized totalitarian society in which their personal control over their lives is greatly diminished, and that control is assumed by the State. National health care is one instance of this trend. Another example is the loss of financial liberty as Americans are forced into saving and investing through complicated retirement plans with arcane rules. Furthermore, the content of many important products such as automobiles, appliances, lightbulbs, toilets, toys, and so on is now to a significant degree controlled by Congressional dictates and the State’s bureaucrats. In light of these cases and many more like them, it should be obvious that liberty is being replaced by State control. The basic argument I make is that liberty is the basic American value, and so if that liberty is being legislated away by Congress with the approval of the Supreme Court, then their actions are at root anti-American. I realize the confusion such a position may arouse, since many of today’s Americans may regard the State’s control as being very American and very much to their liking. My response is simply that there is a fixed and basic American value, which is liberty, and that today’s America no longer is sponsoring and supporting this value. In that sense, America has drifted far from its root value and is behaving in an anti-American fashion. I will argue that national health care is both unlawful according to the basic law of the land, which is the Constitution, and unrightful, according to the Declaration of Independence. These arguments assume acceptance of the State, as most persons do. The purpose is the limited one of an accurate understanding of the kind of State we have. Other writings of mine that go more deeply into the nature of liberty and the State raise deeper questions about the rightness and acceptance of the Constitution itself and the State. (A few articles from my archive are here and here and here.) I am not adopting that view here. I think there is merit in also looking at matters in a more limited way. Most Americans have long since stopped asking whether a program like Medicaid is lawful and right. They merely debate the benefits and costs, and they seek to impose their visions on others by getting enough votes in Congress. In my opinion, this may go on until the negative personal, social, and financial effects of such redistributions, which appear in the long run, are so overwhelming that the system falls of its own weight. But this forecast is not the issue. Even if Americans accept these programs and even if their attributes never cause the republic to fall, the issue of lawfulness will not disappear. I stress law and right for a reason. If we and our government do not adhere to our most basic laws, then we decivilize ourselves. We descend into a free-for-all in which power and privilege and many other such factors determine who gets what and who takes from whom. Under such

conditions, our nation is bound to go downhill. Power, force, and domination are decivilizing when they are extended far beyond their appropriate realm of defense against criminality and protection of rights. Implicit in this view is the contrasting idea that liberty is a civilizing value. I define an anti-American policy as an action that goes against the basic principles of America. Those principles are contained in America’s founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They contain the enduring legal as well as rightful principles of the nation. They do not and cannot change with the times unless the amendment procedure within the Constitution is used. They indicate the basic rights of Americans and they provide the basic law of the land. Just because Americans today have national health care does not make it legal or rightful in terms of the nation’s founding principles, which comprise the law that was peculiarly and originally American at the outset of the republic’s founding and thus the law that defines the notion of the unique American political arrangement. Just because legislatures and courts make rulings that make national health care the supposed “law of the land” does not make them legally and rightfully consistent with those founding principles. The Constitution is the law of the land. It is the supreme law. Any law that is passed and enforced that is inconsistent with it is no law at all. Its legality can be rejected out of hand by “We the People.” Legislative laws can and do go directly against the basic principles, no matter what the Supreme Court says. It does not have the last word, even though it claims to. It may have power, but it does not always have right or even the Constitution on its side. Those principles have indeed been overturned through time. They indeed have been subverted. American government has indeed been subverted and radically altered. Just because many people accept and applaud these changes does not change the fact that this alteration in government has happened. It obviously has happened. The term “anti-American” is a charged term. It goes back to the days when rooting out communists was causing a big stir in America. To be communist was to be anti-American. The sense of the term at that time was that communists were seeking to overturn the American form of government. I’m using this charged term on purpose to make my point. I use the term in a different way than in the Cold War. I’m referring to laws passed by American governments that go against American principles that form the legal and rightful foundation of what America is and what it stands for. There is a very lively debate going on concerning the extension of the system of national health care that is already in place. The debate is not over the system itself, which is the point raised here. But sometimes the debate enters that more basic ground, if only briefly. Congressman Lloyd Doggett recently attended the opening of a health care clinic in Austin, Texas. He was met with peaceful protest against HR 3200. The newspaper article quoted one

protester: “‘Essentially their goal is to create a dependent American class where they can control our resources through taxation and redistribute to us,’ said James Vandike who opposes HR 3200. ‘When they tax us to pay for other people's health care, they take away my ability to buy my own health insurance.’” These remarks are accurate, and they tread upon the fundamental ground of whether any national care is rightful. The first sentence refers to practical consequences, not principles: Federal health legislation creates dependency. Let us only briefly mention this in passing so as to provide a feel for the importance of the subject. The Wall Street Journal reported that 59 million Americans use Medicaid, for example. Older reputable sources report 49 to 53 million. Whatever the exact number is, close to 20 percent of Americans depend on this one federally-mandated and taxsupported program. In 1970, shortly after Medicaid began, the federal cost was $5.5 billion and the program had a 1977 target of covering 10 million Americans. How quaint this now seems. Now the program costs $200 billion plus and continues to grow at an unsustainable rate. Bills to increase coverage are still appearing in Congress despite the costs. Medicaid is indeed a wealth redistribution program. And the taxation does indeed impair the ability of persons to buy their own health insurance or medical services. Those arguments in the quotation go more to the legal and rightful aspects of national health care. Can the government, if it follows American principles, be acting rightly and lawfully if it takes one person’s property and gives it to another person, whether for medical services or anything else? Is that a proper use of taxation? Mind you, this is not a matter of taxation without representation. We have representation. It is a matter of the limits placed upon the uses of taxes. What are these limits according to American ideas? What is it lawful for our representatives to be able to do? The actual consequences of national health care are terribly important, but that is a different debate. That does not settle the issue of lawfulness and rightfulness. The bureaucracies that favor and administer programs like Medicaid can and do produce dozens of studies claiming to show how beneficial such programs are. They claim all sorts of savings from these programs. They impressively propound the many benefits. They sell Medicaid as being pro-people, and pro-poor people, and pro-affordable health for those who cannot afford it. The opponents produce many arguments concerning the ill-effects of these programs. No matter how serious the abuses and illeffects of such programs are, these programs continue to expand. None of this debate is pertinent to the main questions. Even if Medicaid could be shown to do a lot of good, or produce more benefits than what it costs, the questions would remain: Is the program lawful? Is it what our system allows? Is it consistent with the rights that the Founding Fathers declared are our rights as Americans? Let us not fool ourselves. When we abandon the Constitution and let it be re-interpreted and misinterpreted at the will of the powers-that-be, the entire game becomes one of power. We bury America as a concept of liberty and justice as long as we continue to play such a game. It should be obvious that Medicaid and national health care are fundamentally anti-liberty and fundamentally pro-state; but we are so far past that point of common sense and observation that it

becomes necessary for people like me to point out the obvious. It should be clear that love of liberty has been replaced by love of state. HR 3200 is obviously anti-American. And the basic reason for these statements is that national health care collectivizes health care. It takes away rights from individuals. It takes away decision-making from individuals. It takes away choice from individuals. It replaces these with forced taxes that create one pool of wealth which is then redistributed to various persons according to bureaucratic rules and decisions made from centralized sources. This entire collectivizing process has no constitutional basis when it comes to health care. The critics of HR 3200 are correct to label its proponents as fascist and socialist, but American socialists, fascists, and politicians hate these terms and deny them. At the Austin protest, one such defender said of the protesters: “‘I think that they are uninformed, and they are afraid of what they don't know and don't understand. And the republican party is doing it's best to promote that kind of ignorant propaganda that keeps people in fear,’ said Dr. Nancy Binford. ‘We are not socialists. We are not fascists. We are Americans.’” This is the statement that I will focus on to unlock what I think is its real meaning. I’d like to ask “What is really anti-American?” I do not claim that what I am about to say is Dr. Binford’s thinking. She has clearly said nothing explicitly whatsoever along the lines of what follows. I merely want to use her words as a jumping off point. It is the thinking that lies beneath and beyond her remarks that I wish to get at. I want to bring out the deeper nature of the conflict between the ideas hidden behind those words of the good doctor and the complaints of the protesters at that event. Let us dispense with the superficial portion of her remarks. It is pure baloney to claim that those against HR 3200 do not understand the bill. They understand it all too well. Sure, the bureaucrats would prefer to do their dirty work in the dark and leave the people out of it. They’d like to paint critics as being mistaken and unnecessarily fearful and ignorant. This "argument," if you can call it that, as much as says “Listen, you stupid clowns, you don’t know anything. Shut up. This bill is good for you." We can safely dismiss this display of arrogance. Let us leave aside her retort that republicans are being political. It’s meaningless in the context of the constitutional issue because both major parties do not question the lawfulness of national health care. They merely argue about how much of it to impose on Americans. The whole battle is political. Federal laws on health care do not and cannot rise above politics. Social issues dealt with through the political system can’t be divorced from politics. To get their way, bureaucrats like to make out that their services are essential and lie above politics. They don’t sell their goods and services in the market. People do not willingly subscribe to them, so they necessarily employ rhetoric, the arts of persuasion, and fancy studies in order to generate tolerance and support for the taxes and the programs. They want us to think that nothing but good comes from what they impose on society, and that to criticize their marvelous efforts is low-down and dirty – partisan politics. This kind of argument can safely be dismissed. It’s superficial. It simply diverts from more essential considerations.

This leaves us with “We are not socialists. We are not fascists. We are Americans.” This is much deeper, although it is a terse statement. The "We are Americans" tries to wrap the HR 3200 in a cloak of respectability, namely, that of the political process. It is saying that this is the system, and it should be accepted. You vote for us (or politicians), and we decide, and we give you what is best for you, and that is the American way. This presumption is where the rubber meets the road. The whole issue is wrapped up in this phrase. Once it is admitted that national health care is part and parcel of the American way, there is nothing left to argue about except how much of it shall be imposed. And so it is necessary to ask: Is national health care the American way or is it anti-American? Are we all acting as “Americans”, or are many of us actually not acting as Americans? Are the legislators and bureaucrats who carry out their will acting as Americans when they impose such measures? Or are they the anti-Americans? If they have taken to themselves the powers to control your health and wealth, is that American? Or is it fascist and socialist? The deep problem with saying “We are Americans” is that it mixes up actions that are American in nature (that value liberty) with actions that are anti-American in nature (that support domination.) Of course we are all Americans in the simple sense that we are citizens who are debating these matters and are under one government, but the whole point here is that such a phrase and argument short-circuits thinking about the basic issue, which is whether or not national health care is in accord with American values or not. The question is not whether or not we are Americans, it is whether or not we are supporting the core American value. The powers-that-be act as if your not having your liberty is within their rightful power; they act as if they have a rightful power to control your lives in this way and other such ways. Everything they say or do is based upon this presumption. Naturally, they do not question their own power, and they defend against any attacks against it. They act as if the system of power is an unquestioned given. They do not want to engage in philosophical discussions that might lead to a disruption of their power. They sense and know when such dangerous arguments are appearing. They know enough to marginalize and dismiss any such fundamental critics. They know threats to their positions when they see them. This jealous guarding and defense of their own powers, their attempts to expand them, and their shunting aside of any questioning or debate of their powers, these all show the consistent anti-liberty and pro-state actions of those elected to office. Regardless of their defenses, which only indicate the precarious nature of the foundations of their position, we can question their powers under the Constitution firmly and persistently as one way to begin to prevent and mitigate the evident descent into a land of power and not law. The basic conflict is whether or not government has a lawful and rightful power to act upon your life in this health care matter and all such other matters. Does the society have a right to have a state that does this to you? What is your lawful and rightful realm of action and what is that of the society in which you are embedded? The general answer is straightforward. Your lawful and rightful realm is your life, liberty, and

property. That is basic Americanism 101. It is declared in our founding documents. It is the principle upon which the entire nation is supposed to be a nation. This is what it means to be American – the pursuit of one’s own happiness in one’s own way, the control over one’s own life, and having the necessary liberty to accomplish that. And it means that every person has these rights, which implies that one has no right to invade or violently attack another person’s life, liberty, and property, or their pursuit of happiness. That much is in the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Bill of Rights. The very limited powers of Congress are also declared in our founding documents, and they do not comprehend Medicare and Medicaid or the content of HR 3200. To justify my assertion, we have to look at Section 8 or Article I of the Constitution which lists the eighteen powers of Congress. Eight of these are directed at defense as a collective or common endeavor. From this I conclude that a common defense was the main reason for the Constitution. The next most important reason, judging from the enumerated powers, was regulation of commerce as seven powers deal with commercial matters. The other three powers deal with courts, jurisdiction, and law-making needed to carry out the other listed powers. None of the eighteen powers are even remotely directed at collective health care. In order to justify such an activity from the Constitution, one has to invoke and somehow broadly interpret the general welfare wording in this Article which says: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States...” Any such broad interpretation reads into the Constitution that which is simply not there. The narrowest interpretation of this statement is that Congress was given the taxing power so that it could make good on war debts, at that time and as might be incurred in the future, and provide for the common defense, and that such a taxing power is the means to produce a viable central state that can produce defense, that state being called the United States. That is what it means to have a taxing power that secures the general Welfare of the United States government. It means to have a power that creates a viable government. A somewhat broader interpretation is that the general Welfare of the United States means an activity that pertains to each and every state in the Union known as the United States. In this case, United States may not exactly mean the national government. It may mean the individual states in a united capacity. It refers to an activity that cannot be accomplished except by being done in a united way and for a set of states united along certain lines and not others into a body, which is why the clause restricts the activity to being one done for the general Welfare. The very nature of this clause is restrictive, not expansive. And this is the reason why the enumerated powers listed immediately thereafter are all powers that are meant to and do apply equally and generally to every individual state in the union. An activity of the Congress must apply to each

and all and must conduce to the welfare of all, that is, it cannot be an activity aimed at helping one particular group or state, but it must be aimed at helping all. Examples are provided by the enumerated powers of Congress listed directly after the preamble. They include regulating commerce with the Indian tribes, presumably in a uniform way. They include uniform laws of naturalization and bankruptcy; a single coinage for the country; an army for the nation; a navy for the nation; and certain powers to amalgamate the Militia of the states. Besides not being in any way an enumerated category of Congressional power, Medicare and Medicaid fail these general welfare criteria. They tax some people and provide benefits to other people. Younger and healthier people pay in more, while older and poorer people receive benefits. The welfare of some is injured and the welfare of others is enhanced. There is no obvious raising of the general welfare. There is not even any obvious necessity why health has to be done in a united fashion. Indeed, the matter of national health care has always been and still is contentious. Large numbers of people always protest it. Evidently they expect their welfare to be diminished. Second, the program only survives because force is used to extract its funding. Third, one’s health is exactly that, one’s own health. It does not belong to others. Undoubtedly, the supporters of national health care can and do argue that the health of citizens of the State is important for the State’s survival. This argument presumes that the State must exist and take precedence over the people who have formed it, or that the Union’s existence is paramount in and of itself. It says that the United States is not formed to certain specific ends that redound to the benefit of its citizens, but once formed is an organization that can assume whatever powers it regards as necessary for its own perpetuation, even if they diminish the rights of the citizens and even if they harm those citizens. This argument presumes that people are not stewards of their own lives and health, and that their lives belong to the State, which has a right to control their lives and health. This is upside down Americanism or anti-Americanism. Instead of the person being sovereign and coming first, and instead of government serving the people, the anti-American conception is that the State comes first and people belong to it and serve it. Under this view, the State can ban tobacco or alcohol. It can tax fruit drinks. It can make everyone who is overweight go on diets. It can make everyone walk to work in order to get exercise. It is extremely dangerous when people support “rights” to health care, supplied by the taxation of others. This implicitly means that the State controls health care. It means that the person has no rights. The rhetoric of saying that government control is a “right” undercuts the meaning of rights altogether. It is grotesque to lose one’s liberty and be told that one is free because one is enrolled in a government health care plan. If the only argument for any Congressional action is that its benefits exceed its costs so as to lift the overall welfare, this is not enough. This is not what the Constitution demands. It does not say that taxes are legal if welfare is incremented. Congress can only lay taxes to promote an activity in order to provide for the general Welfare, and that means an inclusive, broad, and universal welfare is to be attained. It means that the activity cannot be attained otherwise than by a central government because the activity is itself something that cuts across all the component states of the union.

Historically, the national government did not gain broader powers to tax and legislate in such matters as health care until a 1936 Supreme Court decision allowed a broader interpretation of the general welfare clause. This occurred in United States v. Butler,56 S. Ct. 312, 297 U.S. 1, 80 L. Ed. 477. For 150 years, the Constitution had been interpreted narrowly as I have suggested above. This lengthy period during which the national government had no power to tax and legislate on national health care provides strong support to my position. Surely the authorities for all those years did not misinterpret the Constitution. Surely they knew what it allowed and did not allow. It was under the pressures of the Great Depression and the Roosevelt administration that the Court re-interpreted the Constitution. The Supreme Court’s new interpretation does not mean that the subsequent national policies that use the general welfare clause as justification are lawful. How can they be if the Court departed so greatly from the meaning of the basic law of the land? It means that the Court allowed the Congress to take and enforce actions that are unconstitutional. Being unconstitutional, they are not lawful. They are anti-American. Health care is not a general welfare activity. It is highly specific to personal circumstances and decisions. It depends on genetics, family, and countless other causes. It is something that every person has charge of too and heavily influences by his own behavior. One’s health or lack of it result in part from one’s own choices. Health is intimately connected to almost every act and thought of a person. We control the stresses we feel, how we treat others and they treat us, how we work and play and eat and exercise, and the risks we expose ourselves to. The health of persons is part of their own lives. Your life does not belong to the society around you. It's your property. We know for sure that one’s property in one’s own life has been decided by our founding principles and documents. Can a legislature lawfully alter what that property is according to its own will? It may have to address thorny issues at times, but to maintain an American approach, it at all times must defer to the basic general principle (which is our fundamental American law in the real meaning of the term) that your life, your liberty, and your property are yours and yours alone. The answer is clear. A legislature cannot rightfully and lawfully alter what property is at its own discretion and will. And if it does, then it is acting in an anti-American way. If it does, then it can destroy what is yours, which is exactly what legislatures have done and are doing again and again, with the blessing of the Supreme Court. A health care bill of this -- and any sort -- is beyond the lawful and rightful realm of a truly American federal government. It is unconstitutional and extinguishes rights. Health issues may be claimed by local governments that have police powers as to sanitation, but even they have limited powers over health insurance and much more that they also claim as within their province. “We are not socialists. We are not fascists. We are Americans.” This statement suggests that to be socialist and fascist is to be anti-American. This is absolutely true. The American principle of life, liberty, and property belonging to the individual does not comprehend that they belong to society organized along any collective lines, be they socialist, fascist, or democratic. A defender and supporter of HR 3200 is undeniably supporting an extremely collective approach. This too is

the nature of the existing health system, and it is the system contemplated under this bill, which extends it further. Who is really anti-American, those who protest collective control over health decisions or those who support them? The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other founding documents are as unambiguous as any such documents of that era can reasonably be expected to be. They provide the core American principles that make up what is lawful and what is not lawful for America and Americans. They tell us what is rightful and what is not rightful. The answer to this question is unambiguous. Our federal government through most of its actions going back for 75 years and more has now become an alien and anti-American institution that is trending in the anti-liberty direction of domination and totalitarianism. September 30, 2009