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Psycyopolitics of Health Care Reform-Update-

On Wednesday, President Obama told a group of religious leaders that we need to implement his health care reform plan because it’s our “moral obligation” to take care of one another.  OK, this provides me with an irresistible opportunity to, once again, delineate for folks (including the President) the difference between societal obligations and governmental obligations.  As someone who has extensively studied how people behave (Ph.D., psychology), when and how people’s behavior should be regulated (J.D., law), and how to get people to be their most productive (M.B.A., business), I’m an expert in this (much more so than the President), so here goes:  Most people agree that we have a moral obligation to look out for those who can’t look out for themselves, and some (including the President) even feel that we have a moral obligation to also look out for those who choose not to look out for themselves, but either way, that’s not what we established a government for.  The public education system has been utterly failing, for the past few decades, to teach Americans the purposes of having a government, which must be limited to prevent eventual tyranny.  A society made up of free people forms a government — a rule-making body to which they subject themselves, each giving up some of his/her individual liberty — because they’re actually more free with it than without it.  It gives them two things:  security (the threat of coordinated group force to defend individuals and their property from enemies, both inside and outside of the group) and an infrastructure in which they can maximize their potentials as human beings (accomplishes things that individuals couldn’t accomplish on their own, like building systems of roads, creating a reliable currency, etc., which enable them to get around and work and trade with one another and meet each other’s needs at much higher levels than could be achieved if it were every man/woman for him/herself).  Governmental obligations then are simple and straightforward:  provide security from threats and build/maintain the infrastructure in which free individuals can live and be productive among and for each other.  A society made up of free people does not form a government in order to meet each individual’s day-to-day needs.  The members of the society are supposed to do that.  The obligation to help those who are incapable of meeting their own day-to-day needs (which, thankfully, is a relatively small portion of the human population) is a societal obligation, not a governmental obligation.  It’s for moral members of the society at large (which, thankfully, is most members) to do, voluntarily, individually and/or by joining/supporting organizations of individuals who freely associate for that purpose.  Continually expanding the “obligations” of government beyond the provision of security and infrastructure is a pathway to both economic stagnation (because it keeps requiring more and more of people’s productivity to be confiscated through taxation and/or debt to be paid through future taxation) and tyranny (because it keeps increasing the roles and power of the government in people’s lives).  As President Gerald Ford said, “a government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have.”  Americans (including the President) have got to start understanding the legitimate purposes of a government and the difference between societal obligations and governmental obligations, or our days as the world’s leading nation are numbered.  (There are some legitimate things that the government can do to improve people’s access to health care in America, like passing legislation to allow people to purchase coverage from companies located anywhere in the 50 states, which would greatly increase competition among insurers.

By Dr. Brian Russell

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