Health Care Reform is Unconstitutional

JBS.org

Written by Art Thompson



Friday, 05 March 2010 09:49

One gets tired of the obvious never being spoken. Nothing can be more apparent in this regard than the current debate on health care.


At the onset of the debate you could see and hear a few saying that it was un-constitutional. Now you would be hard pressed to find anyone saying so. At least anyone that the media allows on the air and in print.

All we see is a back and forth debate on whether it is affordable and who will pay for it. The bottom line is that the average citizen will pay for it in one form or another of direct or indirect taxation. That is the way everything works.

You can talk all you want about soaking the rich or sticking it to the big businesses, but where do they get their money? From those to whom they sell a product and or a service ― you and me. It’s that simple. Goods and services will go up in price to pay for every tax or fee the government gets from anyone.

Recently, I watched the ninth episode of Band of Brothers, the series that Tom Hanks co-produced following the magnificent record of Easy Company, a unit of the 101st Airborne. In one scene, a member of Easy Company was shouting at the surrendered Germans how stupid and servile they were to have followed the Nazi leadership and brought war to all of Europe, disrupting their lives and causing so much death.


Yet most people do not know just how the German people became so servile. It reached a point where there was little they could do because the German people had no understanding of what got them there in the first place. They did not go from freedom to servitude in one day or even a year. It was a process.

The process is not so different down through history and that history is what our Founders studied extensively before they drew up our Constitution: the Law, a contract between the people and our government that in essence limits government and prevents it from becoming a totalitarian state. The Law is imposed on those in government, binding them down from mischief — as long as the people understand its purpose and adhere to the oath to the Law when accepting citizenship or the responsibility of a civil or military nature.

Responsibility is a moral obligation. It takes guts, determination, and resolve to carry out one’s responsibilities. It can get difficult. Politicians know this and are constantly garnering votes to put the responsibility on the shoulders of government rather than the person responsible — for retirement, for medical care, and on and on.

But with each little thing, the easing of responsibility on the individual becomes a bureaucracy that begins to control the individual and then to rule them — in the worst sense.

And this is what happened to the German people and it is happening to us. Healthcare, as an example, was provided to the Germans and they had reached the point where they depended on it. Once dependent and taxed to death for it, the Nazis knew they could use the system to convince the Germans that the infirm, both mentally and physically, should be eliminated, for the good of the people by easing taxes, for the good of the state to spend the money elsewhere, and for the good of the race by getting rid of inferior genes out of the gene pool.

That sounds nuts today, but when one studies the eugenics program of the Nazis, one discovers that it was based on the system that we already had in the United States and Hitler wrote letters to Americans thanking them for starting the program.

Thankfully we have retreated from such things on one level, but we’ve accelerated them on another. This is a story for another time, for the point here is how something that can look innocent can become the instrument of control and death.

Lenin, the brutal communist leader of Russia, said: “Socialized medicine is the keystone in the arch of the socialist state.” He used a system of terror and socialized medicine to woo and then control his citizens.

Our founders put in the Constitution what government could and could not do, ending with the wonderful Tenth Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In other words, if we didn’t mention it, you can’t do it — unless you amend the Constitution. Remember, it is a contract.

We see a number of things that have come along that the federal government has undertaken in violation of this Amendment, and others. This has happened because the people who vote for politicians who promise to take care of us do not understand that one day this care will turn into control and then dictatorship, one step at a time. This for no other reason than that embodied in the famous words of Lord Acton: Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Government control of the health care system is unconstitutional and will be used as sure as night follows day to help subjugate the American people if allowed to go forward.

This is what is not being discussed by the Republicans. The reason? They want to have a smaller boa constrictor rather than an anaconda. Either way, they are still interested in squeezing the American people.

Art Thompson is CEO of The John Birch Society.


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