Zoo Animals Have Great Health Care Benefits

Mark Steyn points out that, sadly, the main argument against Obama's government health care takeover is pragmatic--it would cost too much. Rather, the argument should be a principled defense of liberty. Someone reminded me last night that the predominant theme of Reagan's speeches prior to becoming President was liberty, not prosperity. Prosperity is a natural and happy consequence of liberty, but it is not the noblest aspiration of the human heart. It is beneath contempt to choose comfortable slavery over precarious liberty.

Steyn draws from his Canadian experience of both government health insurance and doughnuts to make his point.

You can make the “controlling costs” argument about anything: After all, it’s no surprise that millions of free people freely choosing how they spend their own money will spend it in different ways than government bureaucrats would be willing to license on their behalf. America spends more per capita on food than Zimbabwe. America spends more on vacations than North Korea. America spends more on lap-dancing than Saudi Arabia (well, officially). Canada spends more per capita on doughnuts than America — and, given comparative girths, Canucks are clearly not getting as much bang for the buck. Why doesn’t Ottawa introduce a National Doughnut Licensing Agency? You’d still see your general dispenser for simple procedures like a lightly sugared cruller, but he’d refer you to a specialist if you needed, say, a maple-frosted custard — and it would only be a six-month wait, at the end of which you’d receive a stale cinnamon roll. Under government regulation, eventually every doughnut would be all hole and no doughnut, and the problem would be solved. Even if the hole costs $1.6 trillion.

How did the health-care debate decay to the point where we think it entirely natural for the central government to fix a collective figure for what 300 million freeborn citizens ought to be spending on something as basic to individual liberty as their own bodies?

Read the whole article: "A Liberty Issue." (Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone.)

Zoo animals have great health care benefits. Does that life look attractive? Are you having trouble? Trying singing "Born Free" once or twice through. Maybe that will help you with your freedom vs comfortable, government captivity decision?