The thing you need to understand about socialized medicine is this:
If you don’t work then you don’t pay into the system
If you do work then you do pay into the system
If you are young and still voting, then you get treatment
If you are old and not still voting, then you get no treatment
So basically, if you collect welfare for your whole life, and choose to sleep with strangers, and then get an STD, then the abortion is FREEEE!
But, if you are old but have worked all your life, and get need surgery for a brain tumor, through no fault of your own, then you get DEAAADDDD!
That’s socialized medicine in a nutshell. And NO, you cannot pay for any treatment over the counter – in a single payer system the GOVERNMENT decides whether you will be treated and when. You pay into the system your whole life based on your income level, and the government treats other people who make free choices to indulge in risky lifestyle decisions. When you finally retire and get sick due to no fault of your own, you can get in line behind the people who want sex changes and IVF. Everyone has an equal life outcome regardless of their willingness to work or make responsible decisions about what is moral/immoral and safe/unsafe.
And what are the incentives in a socialized medicine system? There is no incentive to work. But there is an incentive to be irresponsible and risky with your health. People who spend the day working instead of skiing will pay for people who break their legs skiing instead of working. That’s socialized medicine. That’s “equality”. There is no personal responsibility or accountability in a socialist system.
Here’s an excellent review of Liberty and Tyranny in the American Spectator. (H/T Ensign Taiga)
Excerpt:
It’s the book that changed America.
And it isn’t often that a book — any book, even a popular, bestselling book like Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto — can be said to have changed the course of American politics and history. The phenomenon is rare, extremely rare, usually taking both the country and even the author by surprise.
Yet Levin’s book has done just that, saluted by Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann in an exclusive talk with The American Spectator as “providing [the] intellectual balance and foundation” of the Tea Party movement. A movement that stands triumphant this week in the wake of the conservative landslide that Levin himself believes can revitalize the conservative cause that Ronald Reagan once led to the White House.
The results of the 2010 revolt against the Obama Era are staggering. The success of the Tea Party; the defeat of over 60 of Nancy Pelosi’s House Democrats; the election of a half dozen U.S. senators, ten governors and almost 700 state legislators. What startles even more is that one campaign after another focused on the issues Levin featured in his book — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, statism, the dangers of a powerful central government.
Campaigns “motivated and inspired” specifically, says Bachmann, by Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny.
[…]Liberty and Tyranny‘s red, white, and blue flag-and-flame cover bearing Levin’s bearded visage was waved aloft at Tea Party rallies. Bachmann marvels that “it’s difficult to educate a nation” but says Tea Partiers made a point to “take copies of the book to town hall meetings” to grill House and Senate members on their knowledge of the Constitution they had taken an oath to obey. The book’s cover itself appeared in poster form. One memorable photo captured former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin at a rally seated next to a soldier, the Levin book clearly visible in her lap. While the Palin photo was both real and un-staged, there was the inevitable humorous photo shopping. North Korea’s Communist dictator Kim Jong Il — aka “The Great Leader” — was pictured brandishing a copy of the book written by the man his friends and fans call “The Great One.” Another Liberty and Tyranny fan went to work mocking Obama’s famous 2008 campaign poster, replacing Obama’s image with an iconic rendering of Levin, the caption changed from “Hope and Change” to read simply: “The Great One.”
Why do people trust Levin so much?
LEVIN IS, FAMOUSLY, a considerable talk radio star, ranked number four in the nation with eight and a half million listeners. He is as well the longtime head of the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation. A former Reagan aide, Justice Department lawyer (serving as chief of staff to Reagan attorney general Edwin Meese III, among other positions in the government) and conservative activist who began his march on liberalism as a precocious 13-year old, Levin is no recent entry into discussions of law, politics, or conservative principles. His friend Rush Limbaugh calls him “F. Lee Levin” in humorous reference to the great trial lawyer, but the humor alludes to Levin’s significant legal abilities that doubtless played a role in his ability to write a book that has stirred such consequence.
Skipping 12th grade to move on to Temple University, Levin graduated — at 19 — Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude, with membership in the university’s political science and history honor societies. By 22 he was already a lawyer, having graduated from Temple Law School — finding time along the way to get elected at 19 to his local suburban school board, making him the youngest elected school board member in the history of the state.
Says Bachmann simply: “Mark Levin is an intellectual powerhouse.”
How popular was the the book and what caused people to buy it?
Clearly, as with Paine, Stowe and Goldwater before him, Levin had struck a very American nerve. While the book manifested all the usual best seller symptoms (it was #1 on the New York Times list for three months, #1 on Amazon for all books for several months as well as #2 for all of 2009 on the Amazon hardcover non-fiction list etc.), there was obviously something else going on.
A very, very big something else.
IT’S REASONABLE TO ASK after all of this — why all the fuss over a book that defends the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? What is it that drives over 1.2 million books to sell like glasses of cold lemonade in the Sahara Desert? What kind of book gets over 2,000 reviews on Amazon, the book rated with five stars by all but a handful of readers? What kind of book sends Americans into the streets waving copies as if they’d uncovered the Holy Grail?
Congresswoman Bachmann thinks she knows the answer. The book, she says simply, was a “gift to our nation.”
In a manner that Levin could not possibly have foreseen, his arguments defending individual freedoms and liberty from what Alexis de Tocqueville called “soft tyranny” — the supremacy of the state suddenly took on a vivid, personal meaning for Americans. As the new Obama administration and its allies on Capitol Hill began rapidly expanding the size and scope of the federal government almost exponentially, jamming a government takeover of health care through a Congress besieged by constituents shouting — sometimes literally — not to do this, millions of Americans were provoked from stunned amazement to outrage. On top of a staggering so-called stimulus plan that cost almost $1 trillion plus government takeovers and bailouts of everything from car companies to financial institutions, the realization dawned on many Americans that Levin was right: the long march of collectivism had suddenly turned into a sprint.
The answers to this interview are too awesome to quote here. So I will quote some of the questions, and you should click through and read the WHOLE THING.
Questions:
LOPEZ: Why was the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference “so formative an influence on Obama’s political career”?
LOPEZ: What actual evidence do you have that Obama attended the annual Socialist Scholars Conferences in New York between 1983 and 1985?
LOPEZ: What is socialism? What is socialism to Barack Obama? How has that changed since 1983? How has it stayed the same?
LOPEZ: How important is black liberation theology to understanding Barack Obama? And where does Jeremiah Wright fit in here?
LOPEZ: Was Bill Ayers his mentor or not?
LOPEZ: How important is ACORN to understanding Barack Obama and the Democratic party today? Is ACORN still a factor?
LOPEZ: Barack Obama wrote in Dreams from My Father: “Political discussions, the kind that at Occidental had once seemed so intense and purposeful, came to take on the flavor of the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union or the African cultural fairs that took place in Harlem and Brooklyn during the summers — a few of the many diversions New York had to offer, like going to a foreign film or ice-skating at Rockefeller Center.” You read a lot into “diversions.” How? Why? Is he really that smart?
LOPEZ: So is Saul Alinsky really, truly important to understanding our president?
LOPEZ: What does the Midwest Academy have to do with the milestone health-care legislation the president signed this March?
LOPEZ: Do you have insights into what exactly Barack Obama makes of the abortion debate and where that fits into a full picture of him? Despite a radicalism there, he’s been stealth about it, somewhat consistently, in his national career.
OK, here is an excerpt from the interview.
LOPEZ: What actual evidence do you have that Obama attended the annual Socialist Scholars Conferences in New York between 1983 and 1985?
KURTZ: Obama tells us himself in Dreams from My Father that he attended socialist conferences at the Cooper Union. Detailed evidence from socialist archives shows that there was only one socialist conference at the Cooper Union, and that was the Socialist Scholars Conference of 1983. Obama’s name also appears on a list of pre-registrants for the 1984 Socialist Scholars Conference. There is less evidence that he attended the Socialist Scholars Conference of 1985, although I think it’s likely that he did. Not only did Obama attend the previous two conferences, evidence indicates that in 1985 he was studying the writings of Harry Boyte, an important theorist of community organizing who spoke at the 1985 conference. Boyte, by the way, advised Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. I carefully dissect the evidence for Obama’s conference attendance in the book.
LOPEZ: What is socialism? What is socialism to Barack Obama? How has that changed since 1983? How has it stayed the same?
KURTZ: These are the big questions. In the 1980s, the failure of Sixties and Seventies radicalism and the ascent of Ronald Reagan forced America’s socialists to take another tack. They de-emphasized strategies of nationalization and focused instead on local organizing as the way to move the country toward socialism. Now, instead of nationalizing a company, the idea was to get community organizers onto boards of directors, or to force banks to run loans through groups like ACORN. This was socialism “from below,” and it is the strategy that captivated Obama.
Obama’s socialist community-organizing colleagues followed French Marxist theorist André Gorz. Gorz advocated a strategy he called “non-reformist reforms,” proposing a series of seemingly minor tweaks to the system that were in fact designed to undermine capitalism and usher in socialism over time. This led Obama’s socialist mentors to devise an early version of the “public option,” although at the time they applied the idea to the energy sector, not health care. The socialism of Obama’s mentors was incremental and intentionally disguised. In the book, I argue that Obama follows many of his socialist mentors’ ideas to this day.
OK, here is ONE MORE answer at the end of the interview.
LOPEZ: If there’s one thing you could drive home to Americans about the president, what would it be?
KURTZ: He hasn’t been telling us the truth about his political convictions.
We need to start to understand Democrats by looking at their voting records, the policies they push, their positions, their past affiliations, and their life experiences. You don’t know anything about Barack Obama until you read books like these that go beyond the mainstream media puff pieces and Comedy Central slapstick interviews. You need to delve into who the man really is and what he intends to do to this country. The prosperity, liberty and security of your children depends on your diligence today. Inform yourself and persuade others.
WINTERY KNIGHT 