Paul Hsieh’s latest column for Pajamas Media correctly points out that both spring from the same elitist paternalism:
Both the gun control statists and the health care statists believe that we are fundamentally irrational creatures incapable of managing our lives. Hence, the government must restrict our freedoms for our own good.
This paternalism is the source of Donald Berwick’s love of Great Britain’s NHS and disdain for the free market:
I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do.
In other words, we’re just too dumb to make our own health care choices. And the gun control people?
Supporters of shall-issue licensing laws implicitly believe that a person’s character and actions do not fundamentally change merely because he has a tool at hand with which he can more perfectly and readily act on his fleeting impulses and desires.
In other words, we cannot control our “fleeting impulses and desires” well enough to be trusted with firearms.
This contempt for the intelligence and judgement of the people forms the foundation of modern progressivism.
We can’t manage our own lives, and thus we can’t be free. Liberty, apparently, is only for “leaders.”
Comments 4
Yeah right - guns in the US are such a public health success aren’t they - only 32,000 killed a year and 110,000 shot.
Posted 24 Jul 2010 at 1:05 am ¶@marc, There are many activities and products that contribute to far more deaths than guns do. Pools kill more children. Cars driven by drunks kill 40,000 people a year but no one is trying to outlaw cars.
Posted 25 Jul 2010 at 8:52 am ¶In country where guns are illegal, the government and criminals murder more people with gun. Guns are illegal in Mexico and we read every day how successful that is in reducing murder.
In England, criminals just knock on the door and wait for the owner to open the door.
Legally owned guns saves thousands of lives every year in the US. Legally owned guns kept foreign enemies from just waltzing in.
Get your fact straight before you argue against a constitutional right.
Well fishydude, the fact that people die of other things does not make any one major cause of death, suffering and cost to the country any less valid as a topic for public health control. The US has lost more than a million Americans to guns since the late 1960s. That’s not a price worth paying for some imaginary boogie men.
Posted 25 Jul 2010 at 4:18 pm ¶If we were to outlaw guns, then criminals would find other means to kill — say knives. So then, let’s say knives become outlawed. What then? Outlaw knives? Okay, so we outlaw them. But then it’s baseball bats . . . then bows and arrows . . . then on, and on. It would have no end. So instead of trying to fix a symptom, let’s back up and look at the problem.
The problem is, most people are not taught respect, responsibility, discipline, and general morality at all. In fact, such concepts are ridiculed. However, if everyone were taught these things from an early age, they could be trusted to make rational, sound judgment with everything from nuclear warheads to guns to their own life decisions (namely, health care).
This is just another liberal/progressive/socialist attempt to slap a bandaid over the boo-boo instead of applying antiseptic. And that bandaid usually comes along with a ball and chain.
Posted 25 Jul 2010 at 5:15 pm ¶Post a Comment