While at my second job at Gamerz Depot I watched the Tuesday night debate via streaming. Most of the debate was pure drek, torturous to actually watch and pay attention to.
But one thing struck me like ringing a bell.
Tom Brokaw asked the two candidates a question: “Health care. Is it a privilege, a right or a responsibility?”
Obama answered that health care is a right. A right. Funny, I never thought of something like that is a right. A responsibility, like what McCain said. But never a right.
Let’s talk about rights. First of all, the Bill of Rights in the American Constitution do not delineate rights as something that come from the government. The Bill of Rights tell the government that these rights come from our Creator, and you better damn well keep your grubby fingers off of them! The right of expression, assembly, to worship as we please, to protect ourselves not only from foreign invaders but an overbearing American government first, to be secure in our homes and papers and so on.
Those are Rights. To believe that the advanced health care that we enjoy in the U.S. is a right can only lead to disaster. I can easily point to the Tennessee experiment into socialized health care, known as TennCare. For the first couple of years, everything was wonderful, until the bills started rolling in. Then tens of thousands were cut from the program, including my wife and son. Simply because TennCare had a champagne taste on a beer budget.
To believe anything else is to be ignorant of the facts.
When we start believing that Rights come from the government then we are in severe trouble. The biggest lie that I can think of is I’m from the Government and I’m here to help you. Ronald Reagan said that “Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem.” To believe anything else is naive and foolish.
No other country can claim immigrants from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. No other country can say that people board rickety rafts to cross 90 miles of ocean, cross miles of desolate deserts on foot, or even shut themselves into a shipping container for two months with a handcranked flashlight for illumination and a bucket for a toilet to get to their country. People in the poorest countries still believe that America’s streets are paved with gold.
But why do people want to come here? What drives the human spirit to risk life and limb? It certainly isn’t the discount we get at Sam’s, that’s for sure. Bill Whittle, from his blog Eject! Eject! Eject! said the following. I quote, simply because he expressed it much better than I could.

From the essay Trinity:
Get this through your heads, you socialist ninnies! There is not a big, limited pot of wealth that is filled with the Magic Sweat of Authentic Third World Laborers, that America uses its military to steal from when we run out of wealth here at home.
Here’s something even the dimmest hippy protester / poet should be able to wrap his mind around:
You buy a legal pad: $1.29
You steal a Bic pen from the counter at Kinko’s: free.
You write the script for Weekend at Bernies 3: Bernie’s Revenge!: free.
You hire someone to type it: $30.00
You have Kinko’s print 5 copies: $62.20
You mail the 5 copies: $7.82
5 idiots in Hollywood love the idea: free
They enter a bidding war: free
You get a check for: one… million… dollars!
So let’s see… that’s $1,000,000, minus the $101.30 in expenses… uh… that means… You, the village idiot, have just raised the Gross Domestic Product by, uh, one million freaking dollars, and have made a personal profit of $999,898 dollars and 69 cents.
Where did the $999,898.69 come from? It came from thin air! You created it, out of nothing. You added value to the stock of paper and ink you started with. From the monumental talent you possess, the gift of intellect, the pen that made Shakespeare weep with envy, you have created WB3. You’ve given millions of people two hours of side-splitting hilarity, for which they will part with $8.00… and you have created wealth.

That’s what people come to this country for. For the chance that if they work hard enough, long enough and smart enough they can end up being filthy, stinking rich.
There is a difference between broke and poor. Broke means you’re having a temporary cash flow situation. You lost your entire net worth and you’re having to start all over again, on your way to a multiple million dollar net worth. Poor is a negative mindset that you tell yourself that you will never get ahead no matter how hard you try, so why even try? There are times when I have been broke in my life, including now, but I have never, ever been poor.
So what does this have anything to do with the belief that health care is a right? It’s the same mindset as broke vs. poor. If we admit that health care is a right, granted by the government, then we have had a major paradigm shift in how we view Freedom. If we begin to think that Freedom comes from the government, then the government can take our freedoms away any time they want to. And they will, under the expeditiousness of security.
What happened the last time the government gave a “right” to the People? I’m glad you asked. It started back in the mid 90′s, under President Clinton.
Clinton had the idea that owning a house was a Right, and while he didn’t come out and actually say that, he instituted programs, initiatives and mandates to get anybody who wanted a house into one. So what happened? Reverse racial profiling. There’s no other way to say it. If banks didn’t lend to poor minorities, despite their inability to repay the loan, then you were going to be investigated to the nth degree. “Burn ‘em out” Reno is quoted as saying that.
So what did banks do? What the government made them do. Issue mortgages to those people who did not have the means to support such a payment. So we learned new terms, such as subprime, interest only, balloon mortgages. Woe be unto the family that had all of those.
Families were sold too big a house. The initial interest rate was low, even for the subprime mortgages. But all those interest rates could do is go up. If you had an interest only loan, you were not making any progress on paying down the debt at all. And if you bought a big enough house that you needed a 5 year balloon, then you were sitting on a ticking time bomb.
All of these loans were issued based on the ASS-U-MEtion that house prices would go up, forever and ever, amen. And of course, they didn’t.
So now we have a cascade effect. Housing prices topped out and began to decline because they were artificially supported. Adjustable rate mortgages adjusted upwards, boosting the monthly payment out of the range of budgets already stretched to the breaking point. Houses were suddenly worth less than what the owners owed on them. So they couldn’t sell the house, couldn’t keep it and ended up in bankruptcy, or simply walking away from the house.
And so we end up with the government having to buy Billions of dollars worth of defaulted loans in order to “save” the economy. In the stroke of a pen, we instantly added 12% onto our already $10,000,000,000,000.00 debt. That’s how many zeros you have in ten Trillion dollars.
So this disaster comes from the rather idiotic idea that housing is a right. What will happen when we decide that health care is a right? That absolute destruction of everything we have come to hold dear in our lives. We will lose our freedom, we will become a socialist country, and we will put out the beacon that used to be the shining city on the hill.
Everything will be rosy for the first couple of years, then start falling apart when Obama is up for reelection. The government will start raising taxes faster and faster, printing more and more money, the economy will slowdown, decreasing tax revenues, which will lead to even higher taxes to offset the initial decline, which will cause another ripple and so on. Can you say Hyperinflation? Can you say Weimar Republic?
Listen. When it comes down to one man vs. the world, you have no rights, other than to lay naked in a field and hope the fleas, ticks and mosquitoes don’t drain all of your blood. You want rights? Get up off your lazy ass and earn them.
Our forefathers put their lives on the line back in 1776. When they signed the Declaration of Independence, they put themselves in a fight or die situation. If the American Revolution had been put down, every one of the men who signed the Declaration would have been hanged by the neck until they were dead. They backed up their words with steel.
They earned the right to assembly, of the press, of freedom of religion and to bear arms. They would be ashamed of us today, trying to say that health care is a right, and given by the government at that.
Read my former post. Read about how I said cancer was a death sentence in the 60′s. It’s not today, but you have to have the money to pay for the treatments. Just because it’s there does not make it free. Many people must be paid for their time and equipment, for the offices and hospitals you receive treatment in, for the drugs themselves. I’m sorry that you have cancer and you can’t pay for it. I have a wife that has no quality of life because if her disabilities and I can’t get her any help either. That’s just a fact of life.
Now, I could go against my principles and root for universal, single payer health care, but at what cost? Not only my integrity, but my country as well. My wife suffers daily, but I don’t know if she could take getting kicked off health care again. And kicked off she will because this center cannot hold.
And so I close on this note. For as bad as this mortgage bailout is, health care run by the government will be an order of magnitude worse when the chickens finally come home to roost.
We must draw the line here and say, “NO MORE!”