Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Objectivism

  • Individualism is the Foundation for Medical Care

    It is very understandable when citizens resist government force that compels them to violate their religious principles. If the teachings of, say, Zoroaster, are incompatible with Obamacare, we shouldn’t have to reassess our views of Zoroastrianism in order to maintain our health or our principles.

    But that misses the point. We have reached a very sorry state in America if the basis for preventing government intrusion in our decisions about our own health care is an appeal to religion.

    The writers of the United States and Bill of Rights did not expect or want Americans to share the same religious view. Based on the American experience, they expected the exact opposite, or there would have been no need to protect the practice of any religion — conventional or not. They required the government to stay out of decisions about religion and views on any subject expressed by speech or in the press.

    The value on which all of this was based is individualism. Our defense of freedom, religious or otherwise, must be based on this fundamental value.

    Individualism remains the best tool to deny government the power to force us to buy health insurance in general or forbid the purchase of the kind of health-care plan we prefer. Individualism is the basis on which to resist any government decree about the medical services or medications we must accept or those that must be forbidden.

    Individualism is the basis on which to deny state insurance commissioners the ability to forbid purchase of health insurance approved by insurance commissions in other states. (None of the state insurance commissioners trust the other commissioners, although the rest of us are forced to abide by the one in our state.) Individualism requires us to deny the power of those commissioners or Obamacare bureaucrats who require us to buy only policies with a long list of coverage requirements inserted by providers who have successfully lobbied politicians to force everyone to pay for their services.

    When government violates the principle of individualism, it harms everyone, including the religious. But when people defend their rights only on the basis of their religious views, they become targets for those who would otherwise leave them alone. Freedom of religion (or freedom of anything) enrages the collectivist, intellectual, political and journalist elites if it stands in the way of their control over every detail of our daily lives. That makes religion itself the target of this rage for reasons having nothing to do with the merits or faults of any particular religion, resulting in vicious attacks on the religious for political reasons. It distracts the public and media from the real issue, which is not whether particular religious ideas are true or false, wise or absurd, but the matter of who has the right to make such evaluations.

    Defending our rights on the basis of individualism forces these intellectual thugs to attack all of us who want to make our own decisions and manage our own lives — and exposes them for doing exactly that.

    All Americans can unite on the importance of the freedom of us all to make our own decisions about insurance and medical care, and of the freedom of all physicians to make medical decisions based on their own best judgment, without government intervention.

  • Why Illness Has Become a Crime

    Recently, Arizona governor Jan Brewer received a lot of media attention when she proposed fines and other financial punishment for overweight citizens and smokers on Medicaid. Others targeted by such programs include diabetics who fail to follow instructions from their physicians on treatment of their diseases. Other states are headed in the same direction.

    I remember a few years ago a network news anchor reading a story on the cost of obesity and the controls that must be imposed on those who inflict our medical system by being overweight. With a tone of scathing moral superiority, he declared that “the rest of us will have to pay for it.” A few weeks later, a diagnosis of lung cancer unfortunately forced him permanently off the air after decades of smoking. But he had voiced one of the two key propaganda tools by which the government destroys our individual rights in health care.

    The first tool is guilt. Patients must be morally disarmed by convincing them — not of their own responsibility for their health — but of their guilt. You may not make your own decisions because you eat too much, or too many trans-fats, or too much salt or too many sodas. You recklessly smoke, or drink alcohol or coffee or use drugs. You don’t exercise enough or drive safely. Therefore you must accept your guilt and do what you are told.

    That is the opposite of taking individual responsibility and facing consequences.

    The second tool is to disable your judgment and your mind. Neither you nor your physicians are capable of making correct medical decisions. Only the government knows the effective treatment and hence the drugs and medical equipment to permit. Who are you to know what is best? Politicians, not physicians, have become the ultimate source of wisdom in health care.

    The clear implication of such decrees is that physicians must become enforcers who turn in their patients to the government for failure to follow medical instructions.

    It must be said that there is considerable financial pressure on the states due to soaring Medicaid costs. Obamacare will push tens of millions of additional people into Medicaid — with the states forced to match spending (one of the more deceptive accounting tricks used to disguise the total cost of the legislation.) But that does not excuse the unleashing of the health-care police on American citizens.

    Those who accept that they have a “right” to health care which the government forces others to provide will gradually discover that they lose all freedom to decide what treatment they will actually receive. They will have surrendered their judgment and moral self respect to politicians. They will have to accept government punishment for not buying insurance, punishment for smoking, punishment for eating too much, punishment for drinking and punishment for deciding how they want to live their own lives. Physicians who follow their own best judgment instead of government protocols will be financially punished.

    A government that pays for the health care of our bodies will decide that it owns our bodies. Illness will be judged a result of our criminally irresponsible negligence.

    The only remaining choice will be to restore freedom to the practice of American medicine.

  • Hollyweird Takes a Crack at Objectivism

    So it looks like Hollyweird is making a film version of Atlas Shrugged (1957).

    The trailer of what is supposed to be the first part in a trilogy looks awesome. Now my issue is, can they make this not only true to the message that government has as much place in a free-market economy as a fox in the chicken house, but can they make it a lot less boring than the novel?

    I’d like to state at this point that I have a love/hate relationship with the works of Ayn Rand. I do happen to love the smaller government, “get the hell off my lawn” sentiment of her works. It is almost enough to overcome the preachiness of Atlas Shrugged and the questionable definition of “capital o” Objectivism. Which one to take on first? Well, who is John Galt? Let me try to answer the one I can in as few words as possible to begin with.

    My philosophy is a bit complex. Some would say it is flexible, others would say my philosophy is cobbled together with chewing gum and a sledgehammer. I would say I waiver between objectivism (note the lowercase “o”) and utilitarianism in that being what I do in my best interest and what I do to make myself happy. My ethics professor would say I’m an objectivist. Mostly in that if there is a way to make more money I’ll take it, and this is by and large true.

    Here is my issue with what Ayn Rand calls Objectivism: Let’s say there is a charity drive. I think it’s for a good cause and it will actually help some poor slob. I would want to give some money to this charity. Giving would make me feel good and feeling good is in my interest. According to the “lower case o” objectivist, what I’m doing is objectively right. A “capital o” Objectivist would state that giving money to the charity has no clear material gain to myself so what I’m going is objectively wrong.

    That’s where I disagree. By feeling better about myself, I can without hesitation go after the moneymaking opportunities that may present themselves to me because the nagging voice has been bound, gagged and beat over the head several times. Mind you, the voice wouldn’t be there in the first place, regardless of whether I’d given to charity or not.

    This is of course given to you by someone who has at best one semester of philosophy under his belt.

    As for my longer answer, it comes down to this: I don’t like being preached to. It is why I can’t sit through an entire episode of Rush Limbaugh’s or Glenn Beck’s. I know quite well that I’m right. It’s the same with people on the other side of the aisle. You’re wasting your time and mine telling me that I’m the cause of the world’s problems because I’m white and born to the middle class. Sorry buddy, I never owned a slave and I never beat or killed a Native American for no other reason than his race. There is no guilt here. Try around the corner.

    All right, back on target. I don’t need to be told the way I think is right. I have a deep down dislike for socialism and a burning hate of communism. And it is a matter of detail. I just seriously don’t want the government involved in my life be it personal or fiscal. I know that either one will tell me that they have no interest in my personal life, but once you have one you will get the other.

    I once listened to an audio version of Atlas Shrugged. It seemed not a single character could go without a page of philosophical diatribe.

    Don’t take this as me not liking Ayn Rand however. She also made things I didn’t hate or really disagree with. Her interview with Phil Donahue for example, that was a fun thing to watch as Donahue was trying to fight way above his intellectual class. It was like watching a 4’2″ drunk picking a fight with an in his prime Mike Tyson.

    And I loved The Fountainhead (1947) with Gary Cooper. One of the best movies I’ve seen. Since it was Rand herself who wrote the screenplay for the film, she is certainly capable of making something I like.

    And that is what I’m hoping from this movie — that it will be well made and faithful to the spirit of the book. I hope it will be entertaining as well as engaging and I hope that it will make people wonder, “Do we really need to have the government in our business?”

    I hope it but I doubt it. The chance of the film staying true to the novel is handicapped by the fact that Rand died in 1982 and therefore couldn’t write the screenplay. This makes me wonder if the screenwriter Brian Patrick O’Toole is up for the challenge. I haven’t seen anything written by him before but he was a co-producer of Dog Soldiers (2002) which I have seen and liked. It might have been a werewolf flick but it was a very well done werewolf flick.

    I guess we’ll see on April 15, Tax Day in America, if this film is up to snuff. I expect reviews to be mixed and moviegoers to be divided based on their personal views. But if the film is as grand as the trailers then I shall be overjoyed. If it isn’t, I’ll always have The Incredibles (2004). It’s like Atlas Shrugged for five year olds.

  • Apple, AT&T and Antitrust

    In California, a federal judge has ruled that an antitrust class action suit can proceed against Apple and AT&T. What have those companies done to warrant being hauled into court? Basically, they agreed to sell only “locked” iPhones. A locked phone is one that works only on a specific mobile network — in this case, AT&T’s network.

    So, let’s get this straight. Both Apple and AT&T want to make money. Apple makes money by creating cool mobile devices like the iPhone — creating, as in designing and manufacturing phones that didn’t exist before Apple’s brilliant designers and engineers thought of them. AT&T makes money by creating a mobile phone network–creating, as in erecting a complex array of electronic equipment capable of transmitting messages from handheld phones, a network that didn’t exist before AT&T created it.

    Then Apple and AT&T decide to make money by working together. Although details of their deal aren’t public, it’s clear that AT&T saw an opportunity to increase its subscriber base by becoming the only retailer of iPhones. Apple, for its part, looked forward to receiving payments from AT&T based on a percentage of every iPhone subscriber’s monthly bill. Was this collaboration a good idea? You be the judge: consumers have bought 50 million iPhones in three years.

    Let’s pause at this point to remind ourselves that the Apple-AT&T agreement does not interfere with anyone else’s smartphones or networks. The makers of Blackberry or Palm phones can choose to sell phones locked or unlocked. Networks such as Verizon and Sprint can choose whether to enter into exclusive contracts as AT&T did with Apple. In short, every other firm in the industry is free to make as much money as they can competing with Apple and AT&T.

    So far, does this sound like conduct that should be illegal? Let’s look at what the plaintiffs are complaining about. According to reports, their lawsuit charges that the locked phone agreement “hurt competition and drove up prices for consumers.”

    “Hurt competition?” This is competition. Apple and AT&T are competing with other makers of smartphones and with other mobile networks — and those other makers and networks are competing right back. In a free market, everyone else in the universe is at liberty to enter the market and offer a product that is better, cheaper, or both. No competitor can forcibly prevent another’s efforts.

    “Drove up prices for consumers?” There was no price for an iPhone before Apple created and sold it. There was no price for an AT&T iPhone subscription until AT&T offered it. Those prices were not “driven up” from some arbitrary level that the plaintiffs would have wished to see. The prices were set by the owners of the goods and services being sold. Consumers were free to buy or to wait for some competitor to offer an equally attractive, unlocked phone.

    As this suit progresses, observers should look closely at what conduct is illegal under this nation’s antitrust laws, and whether it should remain so.

    This story first appeared on Voices for Reason, July 14, 2010.

  • Obamacare’s Assault on Individual Rights

    We’re told that Obamacare aims to make health care more affordable to more people, but in fact it threatens the rights of everyone involved in health care — doctors, patients, and health insurers — and thus the future of the industry.

    Before Congress greases up yet another ramp on the already slippery slope toward socialized medicine, let’s pause to identify those endangered rights and some of the destructive consequences.

    • Insurance companies are profit-making businesses, not social welfare agencies. They have the right to charge premiums that reflect actual risk. But Obamacare would force them to cover almost every American — no matter how sick they already are, no matter how bad their health habits, no matter how high the cost of their exotic treatments — and to raise everyone’s premiums accordingly.
    • Doctors are morally entitled to regard themselves as profit-making professionals, not public servants. They have the right to charge fees that reflect the value received by all parties to the transaction. But Obamacare, by driving down permissible fees, will force physicians into a deadly conflict of interest: Either lose money by doing everything necessary to meet patients’ needs, or make money by satisfying some minimum bureaucratic standard.
    • Patients are sovereign individuals, not particles in a social organism. They have the right to buy all the health care they deem necessary and can afford, without apologizing to those who can’t afford it. But under Obamacare, patients will have the moral status of beggars at a soup kitchen who must uncomplainingly accept whatever gruel from the health-care pot happens to land in their dish.

    Let Obamacare be seen for what it is: yet another offensive in the long-running assault on individual rights in medicine.

    This story first appeared on Voices for Reason, March 19, 2010.