A few days ago, while driving to lunch, I had an interesting idea bubble to the top of my consciousness that had been floating around rather ephemerally for a while and I was finally able to put words to it. I wrote it up and sent it over to Matt to look over and give me some feedback on and he suggested that it’d be a good piece for All Things Policy so I put it on hold until a space opened up in ATP’s publishing schedule which, as fate may have it, was today!
Essentially it’s a look at how a move to socialized medicine means, quite necessarily, a reduction in personal freedoms and how the changed dynamic of a social system like that could slowly ease a country — even a western democracy like the US — into a police-state-like form of government, just waiting for a villian to come and misuse it.
By a rather conservative and simplistic view, the role of government is to protect our rights from being trampled by both internal entities like other citizens and external entities like other countries. People on that side of the political spectrum tend to believe that the government shouldn’t get involved except to protect our rights. This means staying out of our personal affairs and allowing us to do whatever stupid thing we want, so long as we’re not hurting anyone else in the process. This philosophy can be analyzed to death, and one can trace vectors from any one action through to an effect on pretty much anyone else on the planet.We see this with the rationale offered for seatbelt laws from those who try to argue that it’s not just you that you’re hurting if you don’t wear your seatbelt. Except in rare circumstances, like when one becomes a projectile into another vehicle, the links between seatbelt non-use and impact on society at large exist, but are tenuous at best. After all, an accident might be made more severe or life-threatening on account of seatbelt non-use and, as a result, cause a longer traffic tie-up which might make 100 commuters a few minutes later for work, costing their company (and, hence, the global economy) upwards of a thousand dollars!
This sort of logic alone, however, is not sufficient to evolve a police state. The public would tire of the increasingly contrived and tenuous rationale and begin to move in a different direction. This is especially true when factual evidence and convincing studies to support the rationale is lacking, as it tends to be once a certain point is reached.
You an read the entire thing here.