The Totalitarian Ratchet Turns

By a charming coincidence, socialized medicine is claiming a famous victim at the very moment that its grip on the West’s last outpost of liberty is tightening. Together, the British government’s success in running out the clock on Charlie Gard and the U.S. Senate’s apparent progress toward paving the road to single-payer healthcare in America have symbolic value.

For years, we have spoken of the “progressive ratchet,” always turning the social mechanism one way, but never allowing any substantial motion in the opposite direction, such that each attempt to undo a progressive lurch only prepares the gear for another twist “forward.” In the two cases before us, we see the gear in action. 

Charlie Gard was forcibly removed from his parents’ control for no reason other than that he was sick. In other words, his severe illness, and the parents’ desire to try to save his life, triggered the State’s revelation of the real relationship between parents and children under socialism: Parents are merely proxies for the government who will be relieved of their duties whenever the child’s true guardian, the State, decides the parents’ services are no longer needed. To state this another way, the family is no longer, as was once assumed, the foundation of civil society, but rather only a useful tool of the government, like a babysitting service, to be dispensed with at the government’s discretion. Put simply, if children ultimately belong to the State, which they do under socialism, then the family becomes essentially meaningless and unnecessary — even, at times, a nuisance.

And the case of parents and children is, in turn, only a sub-category of the more general principle established by this instance and thousands of others occurring in hospitals all over the world: Government-run healthcare means government ownership of the individual human being. In the end (and at the end), you live at the whim of the State. 

What a perfect moment of clarity, then, for U.S. senators facing the task of following through on a longstanding promise to undo the damage done by Obamacare. And what are they proposing to do? To tweak Obamacare, at best to create a temporary workaround or parallel-systems approach that in the end will, of course, be blamed for “unfairness” and “rising premiums” and then abandoned, paving the road to the only real Obamacare reform Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republican Party establishment care about: the gradual introduction of a single-payer system.

(That’s why even those “conservative” senators playing footsie with the establishment on this, talking, like Ted Cruz, about “getting to yes” and the like, must be regarded with some suspicion. Surely someone as clever as Cruz can see what this “Repeal and Replace” nonsense portends — which is why he opposed that language so vehemently for years, until the past few months, when he has suddenly transformed himself into “Ted Cruz, Team Player Extraordinaire.”)

So there you have the progressive ratchet in a nutshell. Socialized medicine kidnaps and kills a baby, not by accident or incompetence, but by design and by force. And the American political party allegedly representing freedom, family, and individual rights is talking squish about “reducing premiums” and “making sure everyone can get insurance,” all the while preserving the mandates and regulations that they pretended to rail against — and theatrically voted against when they knew the vote would mean nothing — for years. 

One step “forward,” click, spin — and then another step “forward.”

You may also like...