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Should Christian doctors be forced to act like atheists at work?

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The UK Telegraph has this interesting article.

Excerpt:

The General Medical Council is asking medics if it should “regulate doctors’ lives outside medicine” in a review of its guidelines on ethics.

Currently it would only be a disciplinary matter if behaviour after hours affected a doctor’s work or brought the profession into disrepute, or if they imposed their views on others.

Some respondents to an online consultation have already said they would be unhappy if health professionals “supported racist organisations” or those that “promote conflict”, or “advocated religious fundamentalism”.

[…]The GMC is to launch a full consultation on a review of its Good Medical Practice document in October.

It comes as the watchdog prepares to investigate the case of a GP in Margate, Dr Richard Scott, who is accused of upsetting a patient by offering to pray for them.

The GP says their conversation turned to religion after they had finished discussing medical options, and that he asked permission to raise his Christian beliefs with the patient, who is of another faith.

But the GMC sent him a warning letter, claiming his comments had “distressed” the patient and “did not meet with the standards required of a doctor”.

Dr Scott refused to accept a written warning, however, and so the GMC’s Investigation Committee will consider the case on Thursday and Friday, which could lead to a fitness to practise hearing.

A GMC statement on the case said: “The Committee will consider whether it is appropriate to issue Dr Scott with a warning in light of his alleged inappropriate expression of religious beliefs during a consultation, which distressed his patient.

“It is further alleged that Dr Scott subsequently confirmed, via national media, that he had sought to suggest his own faith had more to offer than that of the patient.

And this gets extended to cases where pro-life medical doctors and nurses are forced to perform abortions against their conscience. It’s not just evangelism that is threatened, it’s the freedom to not murder at the state’s bidding. This pressure to comply with the state doesn’t come out of nowhere – it occurs when the state is in control of an industry and there is nowhere else for Christians to go to find work. And it is stronger for those who work in government monopolies. Although the UK has protections for NHS doctors, things are worse in Canada and the US. Nurses in Calgary, Alberta and in New York, New York have had to perform abortions against their will.

If you are a doctor in a government-run single payer health care system, then you have a choice of one employer – the government. In the West, that government will likely be secular, and the main job of that government will be to get themselves re-elected. Conservative political parties will be able to get re-elected by delivering national security and economic growth. Even moderate conservatives like George W. Bush can deliver unemployment rates of 4.4% and 160 billion dollar deficits – so the voters re-elect conservatives because they have jobs and because they are safe. But liberal parties can’t produce jobs or balance a budget – like with Obama’s 9.5% unemployment rate and his 1.7 trillion dollar deficits. Liberals screw up the economy, and then they have to resort to bribing the electorate with government spending in order to be re-elected.

So what goodies do the liberal parties provide? Well, take health care. There is a block of voters who want to be able to engage in risky activities that make them feel good, and then get out of them by having the government take their neighbors’ money to pay for their medical bills. (Or, their neighbor’s children’s money, to be more precise, since it is much more politically acceptable to run up 1.7 trillion dollar debts than to embrace pro-growth economic policies that would lower the unemployment rate, as with Bush’s tax cuts). For example, may liberal voters want the government to provide things like taxpayer-funded abortions, so that they can engage in reckless premarital sex without being burdened by the consequences of their own choices. And the liberal party buys their votes by transferring wealth from other taxpayers to pay for these abortions.

Now, when these liberal parties go before the voters, they don’t talk about wanting to provide taxpayer-funded abortions to liberal voters. They tell sob stories about people who need medical treatment but who can’t afford it, or about hungry children who have less to eat than other children. Boo, hoo, hoo, they explain. They play on people’s fears and emotions, and, for some ignorant voters, that works. Even many Christians who decide who to vote for based on their emotions and peer pressure will fall for this – they are too busy watching “Dancing With the Stars” to read about reducing health care costs through consumer-driven health care or improving educational outcomes through school choice.

So many people vote to expand and empower government to fix problems, instead of relying on the free market. They forget about how Wal-Mart provides goods to poor families, and how Amazon.com provides a huge variety of goods to consumers at low prices. Having the government shuffle money around just seems to make more sense for them – it’s much simpler for them to understand than complicated things like Adam Smith. Wealth redistribution calms their fears and makes them feel “compassionate” – even though they are using other people’s money to solve problems instead of solving problems themselves with charity. But to be able to ensure that hospitals perform abortions free of charge for the whiny voters, government has to be big enough to have oversight over the daily operations of health care providers.

How do Christians fare in a health care system that is run by a secular government? Well, in the private sector, if a Christian doctor loses his job, he can find another job. But for Christian doctors in a government-run single-payer health care system, there is nowhere to run – you have to leave the country entirely. So many Christians will feel pressured to just settle with the secularists and perform the abortions. And the ones who resist are just crushed by the state.

And this is exactly what happens in Canadian hospitals, in their single-payer health care system, which liberal politicians and voters admire so much.

Many Christians vote for single-payer health care, or its precursor “Obamacare”, without knowing where this leads. But if Christians vote for bigger government, then they will find themselves losing the freedom to profess Christianity in public, as government grows to regulate and control the economy. When the secular government controls everything, anything in Christianity that they disagree with becomes a target. Again, we have already seen this in Canada. A secular government is good for Christians, and we support that, but it needs to be limited and respectful of human rights and human liberties, including the right to own property and the right to express your religion in public.

Helping people isn’t the government’s job, it’s your job. Stop trying to resolve your fears and uncertainties about life by making the government into God. Government shouldn’t have that power. It’s not their job to help others – it’s your job. It’s not their job to provide you with happiness in this life by taking your neighbor’s money, either.

A very good book to read about this is “The Road to Serfdom”, by F.A. Hayek. There is a free abridged version of “The Road to Serfdom” here, and it is number one on the list of books that all conservatives should read, according to the conservative Human Events.

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What is the future of the European Union?

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From the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

In 1965, government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged 28% in Western Europe. Today it hovers just under 50%. In 1965, the fertility rate in Germany was a healthy 2.5 children per mother. Today it is a catastrophic 1.35. During the postwar years, annual GDP growth in Europe averaged 5.5%. After 1973, it rarely exceeded 2.3%. In 1973, Europeans worked 102 hours for every 100 worked by an American. By 2004 they worked just 82 hours for every 100 American ones.

[…]What is now happening in Europe isn’t so much a crisis as it is an exposure: a Madoff-type event rather than a Lehman one. The shock is that it’s a shock. Greece was never going to be bailed out and will, sooner or later, default. The banks holding Greek debt will, sooner or later, be recapitalized. The recapitalization will be borne by German taxpayers, and it will bring them—sooner rather than later—to the outer limit of their forbearance. The Chinese will not ride to the rescue: They know not to throw good money after bad.

And then Italy will go Greek. Europe’s crisis will lap on U.S. shores, and America’s economic woes will lap on Europe’s—a two-way tsunami.

America will survive this because America is a state. But as Bismarck once remarked, “Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong. Europe is a geographical expression.” The “fiscal union” that’s being mooted will never come to pass: German voters won’t stand for it, and neither will any other country that wants to retain fiscal independence—which is to say, the core attribute of democratic sovereignty.

What comes next is the explosion of the European project. Given what European leaders have made of that project over the past 30-odd years, it’s not an altogether bad thing. But it will come at a massive cost. The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Parties of the fringe will gain greater sway. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued. Countries will choose decay over reform. It’s a long, likely parade of horribles.

Wow… things really are bad in Europe. And here, too.

Check out this editorial in the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

[A] congressional report released last week added another layer of explanation for the abject failure of Obamanomics since 2009. Along with the explosion of federal spending, Obama directed his appointees at key federal departments and agencies to embark on an unprecedented expansion of bureaucratic regulation. Thousands of new bureaucrats were hired at places like the Department of Heath and Human Services and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and legions of costly new regulations soon poured forth.

The report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee headed by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., took aim at Obama’s “regulatory tsunami” and concluded that the pace and scale of new regulations threatens the ability of the government to fulfill even its most basic regulatory functions. Here’s how the congressional panel summarized its conclusions:

“The Obama Administration has created a regulatory environment that is suffocating America’s entrepreneurs’ ability to create jobs and grow businesses, … This regulatory tsunami has caused job creators to lock down at a time when we need them to expand. The committee has found that the problems created by this regulatory tsunami goes far beyond the cost of the regulations themselves, but also include breakdowns in the regulatory process itself that is having a severe impact on large and small businesses alike.”

Specifically, the panel found at least 219 “economically significant regulations in the pipeline, which if finalized, will impose costs of $100 million or more annually on the economy.” That’s a minimum of $219 billion in added costs to do business in this country over the next decade. Even worse, the panel found the Obama bureaucrats have already imposed 75 major new regulations that are projected to add another $380 billion in costs.

The Issa panel concluded that, as a result of this flood of new rules, “the regulatory process is broken” and that it is “being manipulated and exploited in an effort to reward allies of the Obama administration such as environmental groups, trial lawyers and unions.”

All we have to do to screw up this economy is do what the Europeans are doing – and we are.

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How Obama’s tax increases affect private charity and non-profit organizations

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The Washington Examiner takes a closer look at President Obama’s latest stimulus bill.

Excerpt:

A significant portion – $400 billion over 10 years – of President Obama’s jobs bill is apparently funded through the limitation of itemized deductions for the “wealthy.”

This proposal would create a perfecta of unintended public policy consequences.

First, taxes for wealthy philanthropists would go up while taxes for wealthy Scrooges, those who make no charitable contributions, would remain virtually the same.

Second, if the philanthropists decide to reduce their philanthropy because of the additional taxes due, charities would have less revenues and would need to contract their charitable missions. Not good.

Over the years, the Internal Revenue Code has been amended and amended again. These amendments have severely reduced or eliminated the availability of most itemized deductions for the “wealthy.”

The article explains how the current tax code limits the wealthy from claiming most tax credits that are available to lower and middle income earners. The only tax credits that the wealthy can use are the mortgage interest deduction and the charity deduction. Whatever taxes that Obama wants to raise before he can raise the income tax brackets will have to come out of those two credits.

The article continues:

The home mortgage deduction is currently limited to the interest on a $1 million mortgage. With interest rates at 5% or so, the maximum tax increase related to home interest for any individual taxpayer from the proposed limitation on itemized deductions would approximate only $3500.

Therefore, the expected increase of $40 billion dollars a year in federal revenues for the next decade must be funded from “wealthy” individuals losing a portion of their itemized tax deduction resulting from their charitable contributions.

Consequently, we get to this unusual social result. If a “wealthy” philanthropist donates $1 million dollars to the Red Cross in 2012 and then does so again in 2013, his or her taxes would increase by $70,000 in 2013 over 2012.

If the “wealthy” next-door neighbor, Scrooge, made no charitable donations in 2012 and continued that pattern in 2013, Scrooge’s taxes would not increase in 2013. Now there is a piece of public policy – let’s raise taxes only on the good guys!

Most ‘wealthy’ individuals donate to charity only after determining how much they can afford in after-tax dollars. One has to think that the practical result here is that many, if not most, “wealthy” taxpayers would reduce their contributions to achieve the same after-tax cost of their charity.

So, by raising the taxes on the “wealthy” philanthropist, the proposed bill would very likely punish the poor by reducing the funds received by the local food bank etc. as large charitable donations decline. It is odd public policy, in troubled times, to propose a jobs bill that would hurt charities and therefore the poor.

This policy of Obama’s will result in a massive cut in funding for private charities and non-profits, including churches. Including churches. But that is exactly what a secular leftist like Obama wants. The state has to be everything, and all rivals to the state must fade away. The family has to be destroyed, and the church, too.