The socialism of universal health care is not compatible with the American concepts of freedom and exceptionalism
As our nation’s representatives and senators returned from their Capitol Hill bunkers to their not-so-friendly home districts many of them were met with harsh verbal volleys and open threats to make them unemployed in the midterm elections of 2010.
The media-labeled “right wing mob,” the self-proclaimed tea party activists who responsibly and rightfully took their seats at town hall meetings strongly but at times angrily demonstrated their disgust with the prospects of a massive, government-run health care system.
n the midst of one of the coolest summers in the last decade, the intensely hot debate over health care reform turned the moderately pleasant days of summer into days of scorching attacks and overheated rhetoric.
What these clearly upset people were trying to express (independent of the media’s attempts to portray them as backwoods nuts and vitriolic racists) was that America, in its political tradition and historical background, is incompatible with implementing and being run by a system similar to the socialist government machinery that operates in Europe and Canada.
It is important to recognize that our health care system, though flawed and in need of correction, is a manifestation of American exceptionalism—in other words, it is a product of the ways in which Europe and Canada are fundamentally different from us culturally, politically and historically.
From the time of the American Revolution to the era of Obama, the fundamental American attitude toward government is one of suspicion rooted in a sense of self-reliance.
In Europe and Canada, one only has to look at the amazing architecture of public buildings to see how these nations glorify the state and consider above all public servants as the most virtuous members of the citizenry. In America, with the exception of the grandeur and marble verbosity of Washington, D.C., most public servants do not serve in two century-old Imperial-style palaces but instead work in your regular, cookie-cutter office building.
Being part of the French civil service is held to be of much more intrinsic value than nearly any other occupation in the nation. Whereas European politicians and bureaucrats are given more room for deference and afforded more public respect, Americans can be very unforgiving and almost resentful of the work of their public servants.
The modern civil service apparatus in France, Canada and Britain in many ways has taken over the role and responsibilities once held by the monarch, a figurehead of the state who was afforded public reverence and trust. From the founding of the country, Americans worked to end the oppressive tyranny of a British monarch overlord, King George III, and eventually ended up with a natural hostility and weariness to central authority.
Transmitted over the course of the nation’s history, Americans’ general lack of trust in a strong, activist national government has led to the nation to deliberate and corrective attempts at providing all citizens with the blessings of full and civil rights afforded in the Constitution.
The American federalist system, granting shared powers between national and state governments, allowed the nation to industrialize, reap the benefits of a strong capitalist economy and allow American individualism, entrepreneurship and work ethic to thrive.
What has thus separated the American model from Europe and Canada is that America continues to hold a Lockean philosophy on ruling in that the rights of the citizenry are not supposed to be infringed upon by government.
Alternatively, Europe and Canada have subscribed to a Roussean idea of governance and rights in that government is a reflection of the General Will. So as Rush Limbaugh’s so-called right wing mob expressed their discontent with calls for health care system run in the always efficient and well-oiled apparatuses of national government machinery, they were really giving us yet another expression of the American exceptionalism that must be considered crucial to today’s health care debate.
President Obama and the left are continuing to work against the historical fabric and mold of the American model in order to once and for all change the fundamental American attitude toward government. At the crossroads of this movement to align America with her socialist European friends, is the issue of health care.
Democrats have misleadingly called their campaign health care reform, when they have tried not to reform (that is, correct the flawed aspects of a flawed system) but have tried to fundamentally change the role and nature of American government.
We are led to believe, through the one-sided health care reform debate, that the American system of governance can be economically and responsibly molded into European socialism. The complexities of an American federal system, a truly free market and large heterogeneous population are apparently issues to be ignored as they relate to health care.
Instead, the remedy is not taking a scalpel to correct the systemic flaws of America’s health care system but Obama and the left are trying to convince us that it requires the surgical wonders of European socialism to mend it.
Instead of scraping away inefficiencies in our current system, Obama and the Democrats are using health care to lead the nation on a long march to European socialism. By ramming a public option through Congress, Obamacare threatens not to mitigate but to multiply our national deficit, eventually giving us less choice and lower quality care.
However, if that is not enough change for the nation, Obamacare is just the opening act in what seems to be a long fight to fundamentally convince the American people that American exceptionalism is not only silly but dead.
Obama said in an early October weekly address, “Now is the time to come together as Americans. Now is the time to meet our responsibilities to ourselves and to our children, and secure a better, healthier future for generations to come.”
Mr. President, European socialism has never been and should never be the solution America descends to search for.
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How much money did each player start with?