When Jordan Peterson hit the scene his message was obvious: rights cannot exist without personal responsibility. “Clean your room” became the rallying cry of thousands of young men across the world. Theaters were being packed with a generation desperate for the fatherly advice Peterson delivered in his speeches and books. He was quickly labeled a misogynist, bigot, racist, and even a NAZI. To the segment of the population obsessed with positive rights this message and its popularity was a threat to their power and control over society; especially the economy.
The economy of positive rights is an utopia in which you’re entitled, by simply existing, to programs provided to you by society. Universal, or state run, healthcare, welfare, Universal Basic Income (UBI), fire departments, police, military, postal services, food stamps, WIC, the EPA, the IRS, social security; every government run program falls into this category. You’ve not earned the assistance of these bureaucratic agencies and institutions. They are “human rights” that exist to secure your worth as a living human, available to all in order to create a high standard of living and dignity to everyone, including those that are not inclined to act on their own behalf. This outsourcing of personal responsibility in providing and caring for yourself necessarily leads to misappropriation, abuse, and inefficiency.
In the case of universal healthcare the paternal instincts of the positive rights crowd insists that despite tgovernment involvement creating the catastrophic healthcare system the only solution to solving the problems of healthcare is more government involvement in the healthcare system. They point to countries with existing universal healthcare like the Netherlands, Britain, and New Zealand to prove its successes. If you counter their ideals with an argument about government being able to control who, when, why, and how patients receive treatment they turn to their emotion filled responses about how many people don’t have healthcare and insist it’s your responsibility to ensure those without healthcare receive the care they desire or need.
This is the point of the conversation where you’re accused of wanting people to die or lacking compassion. You could point out the hundreds of millions of people killed by their own governments and how increasing the power of government in any arena may be deadly for millions, but the positive rights advocates are no longer listening. They don’t care about facts, history, or dangers. The hypocrisy of giving control of healthcare to a system they claim is racist or genocidal doesn’t penetrate the hard calloused flesh of their feels, and you’re wasting time comparing Medicare for all to the local DMV. Their interest is virtue signaling, not results and you’re only frustrating yourself at this point.
The reality is that there’s no evidence universal healthcare will operate efficiently. When government involves itself in any aspect of the economy that portion of the market is inundated with price controls and perverted incentives. Big pharma, existing health insurance companies, doctors, nurses, hospitals, and the public are struggling against each other for control and benefits creating a corporatist system benefiting those that are willing and able to lobby government officials for preferential treatment. This leaves choice, research and development, and, most importantly, the health of the patient out of the equation.
Recently our family has encountered this all too familiar struggle. My brother-in-law, a resident of New Zealand has been diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer that typically afflicts children, DIPG, and no cure or surgery is approved by the government health system. The expected lifespan after diagnosis is approximately one year, but, as one could imagine, a married man with a young child and his wife are not ready to call it quits. He wants to provide for his family, see his son play sports, go on his first date, graduate high school, and start a family. They’re desperate, searching for any treatment with the slightest possibility of extending his life, and struggling to get by in a foreign nation.
As recent as last week my sister-in-law stumbled across an experimental treatment that government healthcare refuses to fund. This last hope treatment is TBL-12, which is a blend of Sea Cucumber, Sea Sponge, Shark Fin, and Sea Urchin (animals that live in the Pacific Ocean) as well as Sargassum (a plant that lives in the Pacific Ocean). The few studies conducted are hopeful. TBL-12 has been used to treat the brain cancer in a few children and has extended the life of many patients by nearly a decade. This is not a guaranteed cure. This is a Hail-Mary with 5 seconds left in the SuperBowl. The treatment costs $600 NZ a month, and our family members are all pitching in given that there are no working members of the household since the diagnosis. If you feel inclined to help please don’t hesitate to PayPal or contact me with any information you may have about DIPG or TBL-12.
Thank all of you for sticking with us, and anything you can do to help us appreciated. I promise I will not turn this substack into an infomercial. I just felt like this is too important not to ask.