The Two Faces of Obamacare- Neither is Pretty

By Bruce Frohnen

Have you seen the internet ads? “Get Covered America” is literally popping up everywhere with its smiling faces, its semi-anonymous endorsements for Obamacare, and its offers to “help you on your journey to get covered.” At least there is some honesty, there. Far from a point and click process, let alone the semi-automatic process promised when Obamacare was being peddled, signing up for government healthcare has proven too complicated for the vast majority of Americans. Uninsured Americans must find guidance for their “journey” through the maze of regulations, options, and tables of costs in order to find the government-crafted plan providing the “best” coverage for them. Still, the “non partisan” “Get Covered America” is presenting the friendly face of Obamacare—the “we are here to help” face of socialized medicine.

 The not-so-smiley-face of Obamacare has been more in shadow until quite recently. But it is beginning to come more into focus. For example, there is a recent article in the online journal Slate, titled “Canada has Death Panels—and that’s a good thing.” Here we learn about the Province of Ontario’s quasijudicial tribunal, the Consent and Capacity Board, which the Canadian Supreme Court recently confirmed has the authority to overrule close relatives of an incapacitated person, should the bureaucrats want to put that person to death—sorry, “end life support.” The author explicitly calls the Board a Death Panel, quite intentionally, in an attempt to get us used to the notion that “the question is no longer whether we can ‘play God,’ but when, how, and who should do so.” For the author, the answer is simple: “Experts” must decide. Who are the experts? Government appointed psychiatrists, lawyers, and “members of the general public” who presumably know what “justice” (the author’s term, here) demands when a person is helpless and viewed as a burden on the public purse. These “experts” must decide whenever the family has failed to get the message that those who are near death may need a little push. They see the issue as one of “justice” rather than compassion and human dignity because they operate within a system where the resources are doled out by the government, and must be shared according to common criteria, rather than accessed in different ways by different people exercising their own reason and conscience.

article continues at http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org

How to Read the Declaration: Reconsidering the Kendall Thesis

Our collective confusion about the American experience begins at the beginning. Most Americans who think about such questions imagine that they understand the Declaration of Independence, though many of them may be puzzled that it did not (and does not) produce the results one might expect from the commitments which they believe it makes. After much misleading, they take the task of interpreting it to be a belaboring of the obvious, even though they know very little about its text, its content, or the moment in history that produced it. For by the spokesmen for one tradition in American politics they have been carefully taught to apprehend the document in a certain selective way: that is, by the tradition usually acknowledged by press and electronic media, pulpit and textbook maker; the tradition which is perhaps too confident of itself, even though it has brought forward nothing in the way of proof for its favorite assumptions. So much is indeed self-evident truth.

But it is likewise true that for the first one hundred years of our national existence the Declaration of Independence was usually understood in another way, according to a theory that reads its commitment to government based on “the consent of the governed” and to the aboriginal sameness of all men in their right to a certain order of political experience as a statement about citizens in their corporate character, as they enter the social state. In this tradition “all men” is taken as a statement about human nature that is made specific by subsequent language concerning the Creator. Men are formed to live under the authority of a particular sort of government. Or so the Signers maintained. The Marquis de Chastellux observed that they meant by “all men” primarily “all citizens or property holders”—substantial persons who owned land and probably slaves. Or all nations of men. The Marquis was attempting with this formulation to explain why almost no one among the colonial leaders of American society argued that the Declaration of Independence required of their country an internal social and economic revolution. In his opinion, by the word “people” they meant nothing so universal as the “half philosophers” among his countrymen sometimes intended when they spoke of humanity in general. He was quite correct in observing that the purpose of the American Revolution was to preserve (or restore) a known felicity, not to create a new one: not to transform and elevate mankind “in general,” even though we might, after the fact of independence, congratulate ourselves for having done so. Certainly the forms taken by the declarations of rights adopted in most of the original thirteen states would seem to support his argument. For a majority of them speak of the status of men “once they enter into a state of society,” or (like South Carolina) refuse to speak of rights at all. The Virginia Declaration of Rights was drawn specifically so as to prevent misunderstanding about any disposition to free the slaves. Other documents are careful about the suffrage. But I believe there is a better way of deciding what is meant by “all men are created equal” than by falling back upon circumstantial paraphrase of an astute French observer. For I think the Declaration can be read according to the canons of formalist literary criticism, as a structure, as a literary artifact or system within which each component modifies and reinforces the implications of every other paragraph, phrase or word operating within the whole.

Continued (click here)

Thomas Jefferson and the American Declaration of Independence:

                 The Power and Natural Rights of a Free People

It is not accidental that the Greek word for history (historia) is a derivative of the verb meaning to narrate what one has learnt, for all history is, in some manner or other, the relating of tales about a people. Now as we all know some stories are more dramatic than others; some are more accurate; and some, dare we say it, are more important. The most important tales for any people are those told about the beginnings of their political society and the forming of the body politic, beginnings which are often blurred with the society's conception of virtue, piety, and the gods. Thus, Plato begins The Laws, his political treatise par excellence, with the old Athenian stranger asking his two interlocutors: "Tell me, gentlemen, to whom do you give the credit for establishing your codes of law? Is it a god, or a man?" Cleinias' response is very determined: "A god, sir, a god—and that's the honest truth."[1]