Only minutes after resuming my daily browsing from a holiday break, I stumble on this great read by Mark Stein.

“The greatest dangers to liberty,” wrote Justice Brandeis, “lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

Now who does that remind you of?

Ha! Trick question! Never mind Obama, it’s John McCain. He encroached on our liberties with the constitutional abomination of McCain-Feingold. Well-meaning but without understanding, he proposed that the federal government buy up all these junk mortgages so that people would be able to stay in “their” homes. And this is the “center-right” candidate? It’s hard for Republicans to hammer Obama as a socialist when their own party’s nationalizing the banks and its presidential nominee is denouncing the private sector for putting profits before patriotism. That’s why Joe the Plumber struck a chord: He briefly turned a one-and-a-half party election back into a two-party choice again.

‘Well meaning but without understanding’ is pragmatism.

If you went back to the end of the 19th century and suggested to, say, William McKinley that one day Americans would find themselves choosing between a candidate promising to guarantee your mortgage and a candidate promising to give “tax cuts” to millions of people who pay no taxes he would scoff at you for concocting some patently absurd H.G. Wells dystopian fantasy. Yet it happened. Slowly, remorselessly, government metastasized to the point where it now seems entirely normal for Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Fla., to vote for Obama because “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.”

It seems normal because our philosophical path has detoured through the candyland of collectivism where morality is a duty of gray drudgery, need is worshiped and individual sovereignty is a guilt ridden concept.

That is the ultimate goal of our anti-conceptual leaders, and to the extent that we’ll let them. As they attempt to work their way towards that goal, our standard of living will suffer in every aspect. One of the most intimidating venues is the socialization of medicine. Those in the medical field are already responding as any individual subjected to the threat of slavery would, resistance and avoidance.

In the last several months there have been reports in medical journals about an impending shortage of primary care physicians. This spring in the health policy journal Health Affairs, researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the federal Department of Health and Human Services published a study that projected a generalist physician shortage of 35,000 to 44,000 by the year 2025. The researchers based their figures on current physician usage patterns and did not take into account increases that might occur because of rising access to health care.

The news got worse in September, when The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study showing that just 2 percent of graduating medical students are choosing to enter general internal medicine. The students surveyed were concerned in part by what they perceived to be a more difficult personal and professional lifestyle, compared with other fields. They felt that the paperwork and charting required of primary care physicians were more onerous, and they were not eager to care for the chronically ill in a health care system that focuses on acute care. [emphasis mine]

This phase of typically oppressive red tape at all levels is only the very beginning of the collectivist vision of medicine. Not only are those currently in the field looking to escape, individuals aspiring to work in and around the medical field are considering other options. Pharmaceutical, medical equipment and biotechnology sales are fields that will see less growth as a result of regulatory stagnation.

Nearly half of them said they planned in the next three years to reduce the number of patients they see or to stop practicing altogether. While these doctors rated patient relationships as the most satisfying aspect of practice, over three-quarters felt they were at “full capacity” or “overextended and overworked.” [emphasis mine]

The reasons are simple. It’s in man’s nature to be free. His focus will gravitate towards the arena of return where he can most freely exercise choice. Conversely, short of tremendous potential for return, he’ll shy away from an environment where his volitional capacity is limited. So long as he respects the rights of other men to life, liberty and property, there is virtually no limit to his potential for productive return. Only when man has force initiated upon him do we see stagnation, shortages, depressions, credit crunches, famines, poverty and misery. What else, other than wholesale violation of rights via regulation, could create a shortage of human capital in what are arguably the most highly demanded industries?

Eventually the talented, the exceptional, the type of individual and mind one wants their life to depend on if needed, will be noticeably absent from the field of medicine. An independent and competent mind won’t submit to force, the type of mind that will won’t provide the quality of care that people demand. The result will be an abysmal circus of incompetency and regulation going through the motions of medicine while corpses pile up and citizens become desperate for other options. A black market for routine care will inevitably develop and many of us will have to choose to criminally act towards our survival or become a statistic in the collectivist death machine affectionately known as Universal Health Care.

All this because we’ve deluded ourselves into the poison that we are our “brother’s keepers”, and are willing to condone and implement force to sacrifice any individual for construction that deadly ideal.

Funny, but infuriating considering the underlying truth.

Ken Pool is making good money. On weekdays, he shows up at 7 a.m. at Ford Motor Co.’s Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne, signs in, and then starts working — on a crossword puzzle. Pool hates the monotony, but the pay is good: more than $31 an hour, plus benefits.

“We just go in and play crossword puzzles, watch videos that someone brings in or read the newspaper,” he says. “Otherwise, I’ve just sat.”

Pool is one of more than 12,000 American autoworkers who, instead of installing windshields or bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs bank set up by Detroit automakers and Delphi Corp. as part of an extraordinary job security agreement with the United Auto Workers union.

The jobs bank programs were the price the industry paid in the 1980s to win UAW support for controversial efforts to boost productivity through increased automation and more flexible manufacturing.

As part of its restructuring under bankruptcy, Delphi is actively pressing the union to give up the program.

With Wall Street wondering how automakers can afford to pay thousands of workers to do nothing as their market share withers, the union is likely to hear a similar message from the Big Three when their contracts with the UAW expire in 2007 — if not sooner. [emphasis mine]

We know at least one way they can afford it. If a company wants to waste money by paying someone for idleness, that’s their choice, but to do so and then beg to be bailed with looted wealth is a tremendous feat of evil.

Through confiscation at gunpoint is the only way these companies will ever receive a penny from me.

And, apparently Ben Stein has tricked people into considering his economic perspectives, which are as flimsy as his “scientific” ones.

Why not be smart about it and NOT LET AMERICANS GET UNEMPLOYED IN THE FIRST PLACE? (Please pardon the shouting.) There are millions of Americans already hard at work making great American made cars and trucks. Why not keep them on the job? Wouldn’t that be smarter than allowing the whole upper Midwest to fall into oblivion and then rescue it over a fifty year period?

And what’s his moral justification?

Let’s stop the Depression before it starts. Let’s show some fairness and good faith to our own. Let’s bail out the Big Three, help them slim down, shape up, and keep making great cars and trucks. The Big Three are us and if we cannot help ourselves, who can we help?

Until this passage, I dismissed him as a pragmatist willing to compromise his principles for the sake of the moment, but here he reveals the opposite. These are his principles.

Ben is an altruist, his morality is vested (at least partially) in sacrificing himself for others. He is a collectivist, he has no issues with extending and enforcing his altruism (by force) on others, condoning their sacrifice on behalf of the collective. Therefore, Ben thinks it’s fair, by his altruistic-collectivist standards, for government to tax me at gunpoint and handout the loot to a crumbing company rank with incompetence and infested with professional moochers, or to a lazy, freeloading vagrant, or to an elderly person with no savings to live off of because they evaded financial planning for a lifetime. As long as someone’s needs, any needs, are nurtured, the ends justify the means for Ben.

Something is very wrong here.

Indeed.

Unless a principled stance is taken, unless man’s rational and natural rights to life, liberty, and property are defended consistently, this is exactly what will come to America:

I am very concerned this will happen here, not in an isolated sense, but because a ban on weapons will expedite further erosion of our freedoms.

This threat is only a symptom of the underlying issue, our failure to properly regard individual rights. Despite a large segment of our population who’ll resist, the reason organizations such as the NRA will prove to be impotent in the long term is that they don’t crusade on consistent principles, and they’re really only fighting to rearrange Titanic Deck Chairs.

What value is there in a right to a firearm (a specific piece of property) if individual construction is criminal and oppressive regulation and taxes eliminate manufacturing of such property? Many of the same people who’ll boldly proclaim their right to firearms will waffle on (or concede) the “right” to health care, minimum wage, education, or any other phony privilege based on force. Failing to abstract, they won’t object on principle to government intrusion into private business, but fail to see how such injustice threatens them when used for ends they disagree with.

Those who seek to destroy this country, seek to disarm it—intellectually and physically. - Philosophy: Who Needs It

I’m most intimidated by gun bans because a government that would ban and confiscate weapons is far enough down the road to tyranny that economic stagnation, and the desperation and violence which accompany it, can’t be far behind.

Desperate and violent times are when I want to be able to defend my family and myself the most.

An excellent post by GVH explores the next ring in the chain of America’s tyrannical noose. Staying true to the cause of trampling rights, specifically the right of Employers to set their own terms with Employees, our Dictators strive to restrict Hospitals from taking disciplinary action against workers who refuse to participate in any procedure they find morally objectionable. Since morality is subjective and arbitrary for a large percentage of people, virtually any action can be refused on moral grounds - and Hospitals can’t take any punitive measures! Because there probably won’t be any repercussions for such negligence starting in the near future, we can only hope in the event of a medical need that the ER attending can’t imagine any arbitrary reason to object to our aid on moral grounds.

Two areas of interest here: the broad offense of mingling religion and Government, and the interference by Government in the private terms between two individuals (employer and employee) - both violations of rights by the supposed protector of rights. The first represents a blatant protest for why this country was founded, and the second, which underlies a tremendous record of economic strangling, has become so mainstream that most people don’t even question it.

Employers and employees are individuals acting in voluntary agreement. So long as no force is involved, either party is able to abandon the relationship on any grounds they deem appropriate. If an employee wants the job, they’ll concede to the terms of the employer. If the employer allows duty exemptions based on personal moral objections, they do - if they don’t they don’t. It’s their right as the property owning agent to set their terms as they see fit. For Government to intervene by trumping such terms is a violation of their rights to life, liberty and property. The employer’s livelihood depends on their ability to remain profitable by conducting their business in a way that consumers pay them for services. In order to scale their business, they must hire competent individuals that add at least as much value as they cost. To achieve such gains, the employer has the right to set the terms of employment lend themselves accordingly. They also have the right to dictate the terms for another individuals presence on their property.

When Government interferes with the Employer’s rightful discretion regarding employment terms, not only are they violating property rights by negating the employers ability to set the terms for another individuals presence on their property, they are also interfering with their ability to manage their employees, a violation of their right to act freely in their best interest which effectively limits their ability to scale their business, which directly affects their livelihood.

Whether we’re talking about forcing an employer to pay wages based on metrics other than they choose, forcing them to allow individuals on their property with firearms regardless of their discretion, or forcing them to make exemptions in their terms of employment based on arbitrary religious whims - all are violating the employers rights.

People that condone such intrusive power by Government usually fail to think beyond the concrete terms relating to their specific moral compass. Never mind the fact that a proper Government doesn’t initiate force, many Christians are fine with injecting religion into Law (or education), but fail to consider (by abstraction) the threat which such authority would impose if any other religion or standard of morality were plugged into the same power template. Likewise, collectivists are fine with the idea of trumping rights as long as it’s their moral code which is the guiding agent. Once a Government has the overall authority to force, the restricting stipulations will vary with consensus. Those who don’t hesitate to use Government to force their beliefs on others, in doing so they’re also establishing the precedent and plumbing for such force to be diverted to a cause they wouldn’t dare condone. They don’t mind giving the key to their front door to a neighbor for purposes they approve, but in doing so they’ve granted him the means to betray their terms. Now that he has it, he may come in at will and wreak any havoc he chooses, or copy the key a thousand times so every thug in town can also help themselves. Such is the risk of failure to abstract.

As stated by Gus…

If leftists really didn’t want to be under the knife of fundamentalist doctors, they would support freeing all medical care from government control, and then take advantage of that freedom to boycott such physicians. Likewise, if conservatives really valued freedom of conscience for physicians, they, too, would begin working to get the government out of medicine. They could have whole hospitals that didn’t practice abortion! (But then, they would have to give up on their dream of forcing everyone else to abide by their arbitrary dicta.)

Our freedom is eroding from both sides of the isle because both fail to properly regard the individual. Not only must we abandon any law that tramples an employers right to set their own terms with employees, so we must abolish any legal tenet that violates an individuals rights to life, liberty or property.

Ford has an extremely efficient and productive manufacturing facility on the eastern coast of Brazil.

They’ve actually integrated members of their supply chain to operate within the same facility leading to an entirely different approach to building cars. Here in the US, the UAW won’t allow such a setup. Also different is the attitudes of their employees.

At Ford Motor Co.’s factory here, a group of Visteon Corp. workers connect the wiring in a dashboard module for a Ford EcoSport. Next to them, Lear Corp. employees are building seats for the same vehicle. A few feet away, Ford’s Diede Silva dos Santos applies trim to a Fiesta subcompact. She’s mastered seven jobs at the plant and is working on an eighth.

“If you do different jobs, it’s more interesting,” said Silva dos Santos, 24. “It gives me a chance to expand my knowledge. (It) makes me a more valuable employee, too, so that I will have a future here.”

All of them exemplify a different kind of worker in a different kind of plant for a Detroit automaker.

Contrast that mentality with the typical US union vibe where workers long for any type of leverage to keep their job other than adding value.

The subjective law that grants Unions their power must be abolished.