“I think universal healthcare should be a right!”

I was sitting across the table from one of my 29-year-old clients near the end of the recent healthcare annual enrollment season as I heard these words. With the Democrat Presidential Primaries in full force and candidates such as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders spouting such lines, it wasn’t hard to imagine where the lad had picked up that idea.

As a financial advisor, my busiest season of the year in the healthcare annual enrollment season which starts around October 15th and runs to December 15th. I help my clients ensure their investments are not drained by an unexpectedhealth problem that could lead to extensive medical bills.

 

 
Go back and read the list of rights protected in the famed “Bill of Rights” the founding fathers ratified with the U.S. Constitution in 1791. All of the rights the founders spoke of were restrictions on the civil government’s interference with aspects of our lives! They were all about the government leaving us alone, not giving us something they coercively took from somebody else. Just look in summary:

• Amendment 1: Restriction on Congress interfering with citizens’ freedom of religion, association, and expression.
• Amendment 2: Restriction on the civil government interfering with a citizen’s right to bear arms.
• Amendment 3: Restriction on the military quartering troops in a private citizens private property.
• Amendment 4: Restriction on the civil government spying on its citizen or otherwise invading their privacy without a warrant supported by probable cause indicating criminal activity.
• Amendment 5: Restriction on the federal government condemning a citizen without a trial involving due process of law and restricting the civil government from stealing.
• Amendment 6: More restrictions on the federal government condemning or otherwise inconveniencing a citizen in a trial without due process of law with a jury.
• Amendment 7: Restrictions on the federal courts reviewing lawsuits without a jury or otherwise being arbitrary in its judgments.
• Amendment 8: Restriction on the civil government imposing excessive bail and fines or torturing or excessively humiliating citizens.
• Amendment 9: Restriction on the federal government assuming that it was not restricted from doing anything else not specifically restricted in this list of restrictions.
• Amendment 10: Restriction on the federal government assuming any powers not explicitly granted to it in the U.S. Constitution, and reserving all other powers to the state and to the citizens.

A study of the history of Western civilization leading up to the War of American Independence, including particularly the persecutions surrounding the Reformation and the English Civil Wars with King Charles I & II and Oliver Cromwell, give a lot of the context for why the Founding Fathers specified these rights in the Bill of Rights.

 

2. Marxist policies such as these are immoral.

The founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence separated from the King of England because, as they wrote, he had violated “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

The idea is that no civil government is above this transcendent moral Law, and may not with moral authority impose policies that violate that Law.

In the Bible, God declares: “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not covet.”

Socialistic policies such as universal healthcare violate these transcendent moral principles as they seek to forcibly take from one group of people to give to another group. To be sure, God expresses repeatedly in the Bible a call to compassion and giving, but this is a voluntary giving from the heart, not by compulsion. Indeed, the Bible says that “God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Cor. 9:7).

We appreciate many fellow Christians who are involved in politics who are fighting for the family and against evils such as abortion. But sadly many of these same people wrongly categorize those issues as “moral” while not seeing socialism as also being equally a moral issue because it violates these moral principles from “nature’s God.”

 

3.Marxist policies such as these are impractical.

Numerous scholars have provided us with extensive research and studies from history and economics that demonstrate why these kinds of socialistic policies simply do not work in the long-run. One could start by reading H.A. Hayek’s book The Road to Serdom. The Mises Institute has provided a world of data and analysis on this point. U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) even just this week published a book entitled The Case Against Socialism that was reviewed by The National Review here.

As some illustrations of this impracticality, nations that have adopted universal healthcare have seen the quality of healthcare decline in the extreme. They lead to long waiting periods to receive care, triage panels that decide who gets care and can live and who doesn’t. Meanwhile “the rich” (which becomes a much smaller group of people under this system) are the only ones who can still afford to buy quality healthcare on demand.

As it stands right now, the federal government is already spending more money than it takes in and it is well documented that all the money from the wealthiest in America would not be sufficient to pay for all of these kinds of programs. Just do the math.

Conclusion

We have only began to touch on the basic problems with these kinds of socialistic policies such as universal healthcare. So many of our youth are being deceived into believing in them. If you are an American citizen, I would urge you to take the time to study the problems inherent with this line of thinking and not contribute to a movement that is taking us back to the same kind of Big Government system our founders fought so dearly to escape. If you are a parent, I would urge you to take the time to explain to your children these problems.

When we get back to an understanding of our “rights” that values voluntary compassionate giving (rather than coercively forced stealing), then will we be able to fully appreciate the meaning of special days of remembrance like this one with gratefulness for all the freedoms and blessings that we enjoy rather than approaching these occasions with an “entitlement” mentality when enough is never enough.

To learn how you can become a member of the GRA, check out the web site http://www.georgiara.com/.

As our national anthem says, God shed His grace on you.

Merry Christmas!

T. Nathaniel Darnell, JD, CLTC
Chairman of the Cobb County Republican Assembly