Why is this a surprise to anyone?
Take any good or service, regulate or prohibit it* and you will end up with the "criminal" element providing, for a price, that which the government can not or will not. From alcohol prohibition to prostitution, marijuana and soon MRI's...
When you think of it though, what this woman has done is not so far removed from what has been going on for years. Those with the money have been skirting the system by travelling to other countries for treatment, its the new millennium's version of crossing the border for a drink. Now they have just found an easier way, good old-fashioned bribery.
How perverted and absurd is it that supposedly free people have to resort to breaking the law in order to have the possibility of saving their own lives, or the lives of their loved ones?
What this country needs is free (unregulated) health care.
* In the case of medical services in Canada they have done both - it is regulated in the sense that the government controls nearly all aspects of our actual physical health care and it is prohibited because anyone providing health care outside of the system is breaking the law.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Destroyer.
I haven't been writing much lately, and although the new job has something to do with that I'm beginning to recognize the other main contributing factor, and that is what I'm focusing on today.
Basically I'm feeling politically disenfranchised, which is to say that the harder I look at society, the accepted system of morality and state of government the more it upsets, disgusts and alienates me.
As much as I believe that a properly constrained government is achievable, I am more sure each and every day that such a thing can not be created within or upon the current framework of any western democratic state. The Keynesian economic morass, corrupt political principles, moral bankruptcy and culture of entitlement both within these governments and within the general population makes the dream of building a laissez faire "purse" out of this "sows ear" a practical impossibility.
The whole mess needs to be destroyed, wholly and utterly destroyed. But more than the real and actual act of destruction is required, it must all be tied explicitly to the flawed premises that predicate the need for destruction.
In economics the boom and bust of our Keynesian economies must be explicitly tied to the idiocy of fiat currency and deficit spending, while at the same time the strength and self-correcting nature of a free market must be championed. The lunacy of handing economic control to elected but clueless officials or government bureaucrats should be writ large in the blood and sweat of the failures of that system. The businessman should take his rightful spot as the champion of the economic world and the politician and the bureaucrat should be relegated to purely political issues.
In politics we must kill the idea that government is an institution responsible for providing anything except a framework within which our individual rights (life, liberty and property) are protected from the initiation of force. It can not accomplish that goal by promising to serve any but the interest of the singular individual. No man, no group and no interest, however seemingly noble can ever be championed over the individual. There can be no law upholding the "rights" of women, or gays or consumers or blacks, or the poor, as each and every one of these demographic groups is explicitly consumed by the term "individual" and to rule in the favour of a single group is to destroy the rights of every individual outside of that group.
Our morality needs to be tied to this world, to our lives and to our purpose. This world is where we need our morality and what we need our morality for is living, not some absurd promise of an afterlife, or as some cosmic balancing act. Once that simple principle is recognized it is quite easy to see that the moral object of our lives is in the living, and that living with joy, and purpose is the good. All moral acts are those that serve us individually in the true achievement of our own happiness and our own goals and our own purpose.
Morality is not a floating abstraction that can be summarized in a few simplistic edicts. We exist as thinking rational individuals and as a result our morality must be based on the situations we find ourselves in. To declare "thou shall not kill" as a moral imperative, is an abuse of thought that demands that every moral man submit and become subservient to any immoral brute.
Perhaps the cornerstone of all of this is the need to recognize that the mere act of mortal existence, which is to say, drawing a breath as a human being entitles us to nothing. Even the unalienable rights of life, liberty and property must be secured somehow. Nature does not grant the right to live, only the ability to seek to live, nature will not give us liberty, only the ability to create liberty and nature will not bestow upon us property of any sort, only the will to create it in our own name for our own use.
The world as it is, as we have made it (thus far) is one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase with reason, nature and the facts of reality. Our current societies (all of them) are a perversion of misguided morality, incorrect economic theory, corrupt politics and undeserved rewards. It all needs to be destroyed. It must be destroyed, before it can be replaced with;
Basically I'm feeling politically disenfranchised, which is to say that the harder I look at society, the accepted system of morality and state of government the more it upsets, disgusts and alienates me.
As much as I believe that a properly constrained government is achievable, I am more sure each and every day that such a thing can not be created within or upon the current framework of any western democratic state. The Keynesian economic morass, corrupt political principles, moral bankruptcy and culture of entitlement both within these governments and within the general population makes the dream of building a laissez faire "purse" out of this "sows ear" a practical impossibility.
The whole mess needs to be destroyed, wholly and utterly destroyed. But more than the real and actual act of destruction is required, it must all be tied explicitly to the flawed premises that predicate the need for destruction.
In economics the boom and bust of our Keynesian economies must be explicitly tied to the idiocy of fiat currency and deficit spending, while at the same time the strength and self-correcting nature of a free market must be championed. The lunacy of handing economic control to elected but clueless officials or government bureaucrats should be writ large in the blood and sweat of the failures of that system. The businessman should take his rightful spot as the champion of the economic world and the politician and the bureaucrat should be relegated to purely political issues.
In politics we must kill the idea that government is an institution responsible for providing anything except a framework within which our individual rights (life, liberty and property) are protected from the initiation of force. It can not accomplish that goal by promising to serve any but the interest of the singular individual. No man, no group and no interest, however seemingly noble can ever be championed over the individual. There can be no law upholding the "rights" of women, or gays or consumers or blacks, or the poor, as each and every one of these demographic groups is explicitly consumed by the term "individual" and to rule in the favour of a single group is to destroy the rights of every individual outside of that group.
Our morality needs to be tied to this world, to our lives and to our purpose. This world is where we need our morality and what we need our morality for is living, not some absurd promise of an afterlife, or as some cosmic balancing act. Once that simple principle is recognized it is quite easy to see that the moral object of our lives is in the living, and that living with joy, and purpose is the good. All moral acts are those that serve us individually in the true achievement of our own happiness and our own goals and our own purpose.
Morality is not a floating abstraction that can be summarized in a few simplistic edicts. We exist as thinking rational individuals and as a result our morality must be based on the situations we find ourselves in. To declare "thou shall not kill" as a moral imperative, is an abuse of thought that demands that every moral man submit and become subservient to any immoral brute.
Perhaps the cornerstone of all of this is the need to recognize that the mere act of mortal existence, which is to say, drawing a breath as a human being entitles us to nothing. Even the unalienable rights of life, liberty and property must be secured somehow. Nature does not grant the right to live, only the ability to seek to live, nature will not give us liberty, only the ability to create liberty and nature will not bestow upon us property of any sort, only the will to create it in our own name for our own use.
The world as it is, as we have made it (thus far) is one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase with reason, nature and the facts of reality. Our current societies (all of them) are a perversion of misguided morality, incorrect economic theory, corrupt politics and undeserved rewards. It all needs to be destroyed. It must be destroyed, before it can be replaced with;
- a moral code based on mans life and the living of it,
- an economic system based on and working in coordination with markets and market forces,
- politics based on and in service to individual rights and only individual rights and,
- the rational and selfish rejection of entitlement in favour of self-reliance and productive effort in all aspects of our individual lives, whatever our ability.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Objectivist Round Up # 173
The new job is keeping me quite busy so I've not been blogging (or much of anything else this week), however, my friends have been and this weeks Round Up is having a ball over at The Playful Spirit... Give it a whirl!
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