Over at DelawareLiberal, my favorite liberal blog, there is an interesting post on folks not wanting their tax dollars to go for health care. The author, who goes by DelawareDem, somewhat correctly notes that not wanting one’s tax dollars to pay for something means you disagree with what the taxes are paying for. He then launches into a rant which I find revealing – and which shows his fundamental misunderstanding of what such opposition means.

Alright. Touche. Two can play this game.

I don’t want my taxes paying for social security checks going to guys like him. Why should I my money support his welfare when he cares not for mine?

I don’t want my taxes paying for his medicare.

I don’t want my taxes paying for the upkeep and maintenance of the roads leading to his house. Fuck him. He can fix the potholes himself.

I don’t want my taxes educating his children and grandchildren. If he is so smart, he can pay for private education or teach them himself.

I don’t want my taxes to pay for the firetruck he may need when his house is burning down. Fuck him. He’s got a water hose, let him do it himself.

For that matter, he better never call the cops or 911. My taxes pay for that and I don’t want to save his miserable ass from whatever trouble he is in. And he better never use the court system, or the Post Office. My taxes pay for those things too. And only people who I agree with can use the services provided for by my hard earned dollars.
That is what this is about.

Clearly, DD doesn’t get it. The disagreement he talks about at the beginning of his post is very different from the disagreement in his mid-post rant. In the case of the disagreement he talks about at the beginning of the post, people are objecting to a policy they consider to be wrong – and even, perhaps, an unconstitutional (and therefore illegitimate) exercise of government power. But in his rant he is talking about programs that are certainly generally viewed as proper uses of government power. What he is doing is channeling his inner fascist, suggesting is that those who disagree with his public policy views should be denied the benefit of those proper government functions because of their disagreement. Two radically different things, at least in the mind of the rational.

We don’t exclude political dissenters from government programs. Indeed, that would be highly inappropriate. Could you imagine the outrage if, for example, the Bush Administration had decreed that opponents of the Iraq War were ineligible for Social Security, Medicare and unemployment benefits? If regulations were put in place that declare that roads near their houses would be denied routine maintenance, their homes denied police and fire protection, and their children denied an education? If it had been made illegal for them to use the postal service, the internet, or the broadcast media? And moreover, that those opponents of the administration policy would be denied access to the courts to challenge these facially unconstitutional actions by the totalitarian regime that put them in place? There would have been an uprising by the Left – supported by the Right – to put an end to both the restrictions and the administration that authored it.

In the case of the various permutations of ObamaCare, there are several principled bases for opposing the proposal.

First, there is the issue of cost – based upon our experience with the nearly bankrupt Medicare system, can we as a nation sustain a program of universal health insurance run by the government? And if we cannot sustain such costs, isn’t it implicit that cuts in funding will mean cuts in the care provided – which will bring with it the sort of problems we see today in Canada and the UK?

Second, there is the issue of form – is there a better way of ensuring better access to medical services than what has been proposed? Is more government – a lot more government, in fact – always the right answer?

Third, there is the issue of limited government – is it truly within the scope of a government supposedly limited by the Constitution to essentially take over one sixth of the economy? What of the issues of personal freedom and privacy that are intimately bound up with the adoption of such a system?

Fourth, there is the issue of permanence – once implemented, such programs become difficult to reform or repeal. In the case of Social Security, for example, it has become the third rail of American politics – untouchable because it would be impossible to close the program down without somehow funding it until current participants die because stripping those recipients of retirement benefits they have paid for their whole working lives would be unjust.

Fifth, there are those who simply disagree with the Obamunist premise that government funded health care is a right that the government is morally obligated to provide its people -- based upon competing philosophical notions of what constitutes a right.

And I could go on providing a host of logical, rational reasons for arguing that the sort of proposals that are being made – especially those with a “public option” that many on the Left are demanding – are simply wrong from a variety of perspectives. But notice that none of them are based upon the sort of selfish, “screw the other guy” mentality that DD ascribes to the bulk of opponents of ObamaCare. And indeed, most opponents of ObamaCare don’t hold to such selfish motivations. He is battling a strawman of his own creation.

In short, opponents of ObamaCare are not particularly selfish – and certainly no more selfish than those who are demanding benefits funded by the earnings of the most wealthy and productive Americans. The opponents hold instead to a vision of America in which government is more limited in scope – one more in keeping with the philosophy of government that dominated this country for the first 15 decades following its independence and which was abandoned, most would argue unwisely, by those who propagated the New Deal and the Great Society welfare state schemes.

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