Often you’ll read or hear that, excepting for America, healthcare in all developed countries around the world is recognized as the “basic human right” that it actually is. You’ll often in the next breath hear that “America is the only civilized country in the world that doesn’t offer universal healthcare to its people.”

You’ll frequently hear next that this is “a black-eye” on the face of the United States, which incidentally has for decades given billions and billions more dollars, every single year, to people and places around the world, more than all countries combined. Many of these billions help fund the healthcare of people in other countries, and this includes America’s worldwide subsidization of pharmaceuticals, about which more in a moment.

As a corollary of what you’ll often hear, you’ll also often read such things as Why Healthy People Should Subsidize the Sick. In such commentaries as these you’ll invariably read that the reason many Americans (myself among them) oppose single-payer healthcare is that it “forces” people to be humane. The word “forces” will invariably be in scare quotes.

No caring or compassionate person — which is to say, most humans — want to be thought of as “inhumane,” and that’s how you know that this sort of talk is pure tactic: a tactic which is also known by another name: propaganda.

The purpose of this ridiculing tone and the scare quotes around “force” is the attempt to bully you into believing that force is perfectly acceptable when it’s for the sake of something “humane” or something that’s deemed “the greater good.”

The writers of such propaganda deliberately intend the vagueness you hear in their use of terms like “greater good,” “common good,” “humane,” and so forth.

These writers carefully construct their words in this way, and they do it for a very specific reason.

Don’t be duped.

Don’t be bullied.

I’ll show you here that those who advocate any kind of force or coercion, direct or indirect, which includes expropriation — which is the life-blood of all single-payer systems — even if it’s for ostensibly humane ends, are in actuality perpetuating much greater suffering on all people involved, including the sick and needy.

The only way to truly solve the healthcare crisis that plagues the world is through a policy of no force whatsoever.

First, last, and foremost, nobody has the right to the life and labor of any other human being — and this includes the life and labor of any and all nurses and doctors.

It’s true that despite the mighty push and the stupefying corruption involved in that push, America does not yet have universal healthcare — and it’s a very good thing for the sake of the entire world that America doesn’t.

One of the (many) things you’re not told about universal healthcare is this:

In every country that has it — even those listed as the best: i.e. Japan, France, and Canada — healthcare is perpetually out of money. They all operate in the red. All of them without a single exception. They’re all in deep deep debt and this is a fact. They operate at a loss — just as Medicare and Medicaid do in America, and for the exact same reasons. They’re in debt, and that debt grows deeper and deeper and deeper every year, endlessly. And there’s no way to stop it except one: abolish the practice of forcing people to pay for the healthcare of everyone.

It’s okay that all single-payer systems are in deeper and deeper debt, people will reply, because healthcare should not be for profit. To which I reply this:

Says who? By what natural law or edict do you derive such a mad premise? By what law of nature — either human nature or nature apart from humans — do you come to such a conclusion?

The answer to these questions: “None and no law.”

The reason this is the answer to those questions is that things cost money to produce — to make and to manufacture and to fulfill and to transport and to do.

The work and expertise of individual humans is a service provided. It’s not something free which others may lay claim to. Nobody has the right to the expertise and labor of a carpenter, neither to the products this carpenter crafts nor to the material she purchases to craft them. Those materials also cost money, as does the carpenter’s time and expertise. You and I pay for them voluntarily. 

The same is true of the farmer or hunter who through her or his labor produces food and then offers it to a marketplace for its sale. When you or I purchase their produce or game, we do so by choice, voluntarily.

The same is true of the chef who prepares a meal for us and the restaurant owners who provide a place in which to eat in an environment we enjoy and the servers and bartenders who serve us.

So it’s also true with healthcare. It doesn’t exist in nature apart from humans who learn its practice and then practice it.

Whether it’s aspirin and antibiotics or beds and examination rooms or oxygen tanks and their tubing or MRI machines and their computers or the almost endless number of other things besides this — it costs money to produce, and it costs money to purchase, and it requires specialized knowledge and expertise to learn their full functionality, and it requires specialized knowledge and expertise to provide others with the the services they want or need which these experts possess and provide.

Money is only a symbol of production, a medium — a medium of exchange. Money is a facilitator, and as such it drastically simplifies life for a conceptual species.

All of that is to say nothing of the fact that doctors, nurses, medical techs, paramedics, custodians, administrators, bio-pharmaceutical researchers, and many more — this is their work. It is their livelihood. It’s what they do. It’s what they do for a living. It’s how they provide for themselves and their families. If, therefore, healthcare isn’t for profit, what then? All these people — all these workers and all this staff — is expected to provide it for free? Or at best for whatever wages the government deems? Yes, actually: that’s precisely the answer you’ll receive. And that’s why cost controls are an enormous part of all universal healthcare systems. And cost controls always do what? Yes: they always and inevitably create shortages. By mathematical law, cost controls will always  create shortages, inevitably.

All these hard-working people, then, who spent all those years in school learning their professions, must therefore — because it’s “bourgeois and vulgar” to regard healthcare and healthcare services as something at which you make money — get other full-time work, in industries where for some reason getting paid for your knowledge and expertise isn’t looked down upon as “bourgeois and vulgar,” so that they might then provide homes and put more food on their tables and support their families and their chosen lifestyles in a higher-quality way, and have money to travel and for leisure and everything else, like the rest of us? Since we have a “right” to their labor and expertise?

In other words, the argument goes, in one of the most demanding and specialized industries there is — healthcare — people should by definition not be able to support themselves by their work, as a open-market would determine, because for-profit medicine is “bourgeois and vulgar” and “inhumane,” and thus the people who spend years and years gaining the knowledge and the expertise required to practice their chosen work must not be allowed to support themselves by means of it, and so they must work two jobs (at least) instead.

Any sane person sees the absurdity of this — the obscenity and insult of it.

It’s for this exact reason that in all countries with universal healthcare — i.e. all developed countries except America — doctor shortages, especially the most accomplished specialists, are an exceptionally serious problem. Where goes your “right” to care then, when there are no doctors capable of treating you for your spine or brain or eye or heart surgery? Does that right still exist right up to the moment you die from your condition while waiting for your “right” to be delivered to you and fulfilled?Where, I ask again, is the “right” to brain surgery if no one exists with the expertise required to perform such difficult and exacting work?

In all countries with universal healthcare, staff and medical personnel shortages are a chronic and interminable. This is one of the reasons that when somebody like Canadian politician Belinda Stronich — who’s good friends with Hilary and Bill Clinton and who, like them, supports universal healthcare with a full-throat — when she’s stricken with cancer, she doesn’t opt to be treated in her home country of Canada, where she helps craft the healthcare laws, but instead comes to the United States for treatment.

Aussi communist dictator Hugo Chavez, whose socialist healthcare system in Venezuela was lauded with fulsome praise — by Chavez himself and by western elites beyond number, all across the world — Bernie Sanders, for instance, and Illinois senator Barack Obama, who didn’t want you to know then and still don’t want you to know today the catastrophic, disease-ridden, murderous failure of the Venezuelan healthcare system, which from the beginning was so obvious to so many, nor do they want you to know of the ghastly criminality of the Venezuelan death-houses called hospitals, which exist to this day as a legacy to mass murderer Hugo Chavez, and of which Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama were from the beginning both aware.

Aussi the Castro brothers and their Cuban houses of death, which people like Michael Moore call hospitals, while at the same time weepy with praise of the most saccharine sort for two homophobic and murderous dictators — Fidel and Raoul Castro — at whose hands the untold deaths of millions of innocent Cuban people took place.

This is the very reason, in fact, that free market principles are being quietly introduced into many systems of universal care — to save them from completely collapsing — though the governments and government administrators of these places don’t  want you to know about that.

It’s also why MRI machines are abundant and not at all an issue in, for example, veterinarian clinics in places with universal healthcare for humans, whereas in hospitals and other places of care for humans, you will often wait and wait and wait for access to life-saving MRI tests: because universal healthcare creates so many other shortages beyond doctors, nurses, and other staff.

These endless shortages are a direct result of still more Marxist economic fallacies and naïveté. They’re the direct result of this and nothing else.

The truth is that the real world and in actual practice, so-called universal healthcare since it by definition operates at a perpetual loss requires constant measures and more measures to prevent it from complete economic collapse, and all these measures can by definition only create higher costs, which in turn causes administrators to petition legislators to imposes more cost controls, which always and inevitably do what?

Yes, that’s right. Cost controls always and inevitably creates shortages.

In all places of universal healthcare, strict cost-controls are implemented and constantly added to — by a gigantic bureau of planners, for whom getting paid isn’t “bourgeois and vulgar,” and who must get exorbitantly paid for the mindless work they do — which is why in all such systems the average amount of time doctors spend with patients is drastically limited: in Japan, for instance, which is often regarded as one of the best universal healthcare examples in the world, the average doctor-patient time is less than five minutes.

Let that sink in.

This bureaucracy also by definition mushrooms into endless permutations and red-tape mazes, among the many ramifications of which — please listen: America, which because of the profit-motive leads the world overall in medical technologies, innovations, and medicines, subsidizes the entire world because of the policy of universal healthcare.

Yes, you read that right.

In other words, you’ll often hear, for example, how inexpensive the same medications are in places with universal healthcare compared with America. And this is true: medications and drugs often are dramatically less expensive in such places.

But what you won’t ever hear — and I mean ever — is why this is so: because America alone must pick up the remaining tab for the rest of the world. This is why our costs in America are more expensive. Without America’s still somewhat non-nationized healthcare system, the healthcare systems of many, many countries around the world would collapse. And yet America must get abreast of the times — into the 21st century — and adopt a single-payer system, like the rest of the civilized world.

If you doubt the truth of what I’ve just written, as many people before you have, I challenge you to research it seriously — it won’t take you very long — and you’ll see, as many people before you have also seen, that what I’ve just written is absolutely true.

This is one of the many, many ramifications of cost controls, which must be implemented and continually increased in all countries with universal healthcare.

Nor will you hear how the bureaucratic monstrosity known as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) makes it mind-bogglingly complex for new medications to be created and approved — sometimes taking decades — and this as well drives up the cost of medicine and all medical care, and drives it up astronomically.

It’s also another textbook example of how socialism loathes laissez-faire even while it relies upon it entirely for its own existence.*

What I’ve just described (in paragraphs before the one above this) is also another textbook example of how government controls create problems which politicians try to solve by implementing more controls, which worsens the problems, which calls for deeper controls et cetera ad infinitum — and then “laissez-faire” and the “free-market,” which in actuality haven’t existed in a century or more, gets blamed for the problems the control measure created, so that still deeper control measure can be implemented. And so it goes.

All the while, it’s only actual laissez-faire principles that can permanently fix the problem.

Another thing you’ll see in all countries with universal healthcare is healthcare rationing. This includes but is not limited to death-panels: government bureaus deciding who receives care and who doesn’t, who lives and who dies.

Rationing is part and parcel of universal healthcare because it’s necessary in preventing total collapse of any and all universal healthcare systems.

I am well-aware, of course, that proponents do not like to call it by its proper name — rationing — and so they use any number of different terms (i.e. “limited funds,” “over-use of medical care”), but no serious person of whom I know, even those in militantly favor, deny that under conditions of universal care, bureaus ultimately determine who gets what care — including, of course, who lives and dies, as Obama’s medical advisor famously made no secret of.

As the Alfie Evans case recently demonstrated to the world so starkly and horrifyingly.

I ask you in all sincerity to, at least for a moment, think of this issue in the following way:

Maybe you don’t in theory like “for-profit healthcare,” but under such a system, can you deny that at the very least your health is not determined by governments or governmental bureaus? You may have other arguments and objections, but you cannot, I will argue, seriously deny that.

Remember this also and never forget it — it is of utmost importance: American medicine is already over half socialized and has been for over half a century, and this one fact alone — the socialization of American medicine — has created the staggering inflations and any number of other insoluble issues which we in America endure today.

I ask you to please consider the following, as well. It is also of inexpressible significance:

Imagine if food and shelter — both which are far more urgent and regular human needs than medicine — imagine if these vital human needs were deemed “too important” to be left to “open-market and unbridled laissez-faire,” and therefore government must provide universal food coverage, food care for all, and shelter for all. This is not purely hypothetical, by the way. It’s exactly the philosophy behind the American Indian Reservations and virtually all other strains of socialist ideology, and I invite you to observe exactly how they’ve all played out in any number of different countries and Reservations — ranging from North Korea and Cuba, to the USSR and Pol Pot’s Cambodia to of course Communist China to all but two of America’s Indian Reservations, which have the highest poverty rates, diabetes rates, cardiac-event rates, illiteracy rates, suicide rates, rape rates and other such ignominious things in the country.

Under such systems as these, governmental agents assume control of food production and food distribution and housing, and do you know what happens as a direct and demonstrable result?

Many, many, many things — none of which are good:

Everything from lack of food diversity to government telling you what you may and may not grow to eat, or cultivate or milk or raise, to starving people waiting hours in breadlines for stale bread and then, after waiting all day in the bitter cold, being told that the bread rationing for the day is done, and so you must leave empty-handed and still starving.

Houses old, cold, and crumbling.

Which is why Nikita Kruschev and Boris Yeltsin simply did not believe their eyes when for the first time they saw an American supermarket: the sheer abundance and diversity that laissez-faire creates, with no shortages even imagined — this was beyond anything their socialized systems (and brains) could conceive. (To his great credit, Boris Yeltsin completely changed his way of thinking.)

The exact same principle applies to medicine and healthcare.

I promise you what I’m telling you is accurate.

Most insidious of all: once such systems are enacted, no matter how dismal, abysmal, and inefficient they actually are, in a very short time, people cannot imagine life without government and government agents providing these things. In fact, this is the very situation we find ourselves in today with “universal healthcare.” This one thing above all others is the most challenging thing to overcome in demonstrating to people why universal healthcare does not and cannot work — ever: the notion has already become so entrenched that people simply cannot conceive government not providing at least some measure of it.

This same thing would happen in less than five years if people got used to food-care for all and shelter-care for all.

Entrenchment is in this very way a form of indoctrination.

I urge you to begin thinking of healthcare in a slightly different fashion. Think of it, even if it’s just for a moment, like this:

Think of it as food in America.

Think of it as shelter in America.

Think of it as dentistry already is in America.

Think of it as veterinary medicine already is, and Lasik and other cosmetic procedures.

Think of it like your eye-glass clinic or optometry shop.

In thinking of it this way, I ask you to observe the sheer number and variety and quality of vet clinics and dentists and optometrists and grocery stores and restaurants and missions and foodbanks and places-for-rent you have to choose from right now in America — precisely because those industries have been left comparatively free (though it is also significant to note that no industry has been left untouched by the horrid hand of government, and to the precise extent that it’s been infiltrated and meddled with, it is inflated and warped out of recognizable proportion, and would be even less expensive and with better care and more options had it all been left entirely alone).

Observe, for instance, how many dental practitioners or orthodontists or optometrists you have to choose from — their payment plans, the actual insurance — as against pre-paid healthcare — you may (or may not: it’s up to each individual) purchase.

Observe the generosity and charity of providers and clinics.

(Though I’m not a fan of Ron Paul or his equally religious son Rand Paul, they are both MD’s — and by all accounts they are good MD’s — and they make the following point articulately and eloquently, no matter the smears from both rightwingers and left: under conditions of freedom, in cases of emergency, medical practitioners don’t heartlessly let people die, as the government-lovers never tire of trying to persuade you. Also, before government got so involved in healthcare, many, many, many private charities — both religious and non-religious — as well as actual insurance, existed for emergency and catastrophic care, which works astronomically better than political care.)

Observe how today in America people are not bleeding from the mouths in the streets for lack of dental care, with nowhere to go. Such a thing is not a crisis — not remotely. It’s strikes you and me as absurd to even think of. Dentists and dental offices are everywhere, and practitioners are not heartless humans.

Nor are animals in America dying everywhere in the streets for want of veterinary care. Vet clinics (24 hour included) are everywhere — with excellent, affordable payment options and plans. Private organizations and charities are also everywhere for pets.

Observe how many clinics there are of all kinds, walk-in and otherwise: observe how they’ve sprung up under conditions of freedom and the corollary freedom to make money providing these services.

You must not allow yourself to be intimidated, bullied, or brainwashed into believing that you’re “inhumane” if you don’t believe in the vague and totally untenable notion of universal care. It doesn’t exist.

It cannot.

It is a mathematical impossibility.

It is a figment.

In places of purported universal healthcare, humans will ultimately, in the end, wait in line to die.

Allowing full freedom, I absolutely assure you, will bring about far, far, far more care, better care, more options for care, and vastly more compassion than all people being forced into providing medical care for everyone, and this is not just speculation.

The system I demand will also instantly abolish all the impossible-to-negotiate red-tape and bureaucracy — including (very significantly) the crony insurance system, as well as everyone’s concern with what her or his neighbors are eating and drinking and smoking since we’re all paying for each other.

If you truly want to solve the healthcare crisis — and I mean truly — you must change your thinking about what creates the problems in the first place, and also what the proper solution is.

What creates and maintains the best care?

Government bureaus?

Or conditions of freedom?

To further help answer that, I urge you again to think for a moment about dental care, orthodontics, veterinary clinics, Lasik, optometry.

If you can get past all the dogma and the propaganda behind the dogma that you’ve been hammered with your entire life, you’ll see that the evidence is overwhelming.

At the very minimum, I urge you not to fall for the ridiculing tactics that you’re “inhumane” if you don’t believe in being forced to provide healthcare for everyone else. Such policies, even if they sound good and humane in theory, have dire practical consequences in how they play out: from shortages, to cost controls, to death panels and other rationing measures, to neverending inflation.

I leave you with this:

People often tell me that my notions of laissez-faire may have worked at one time, and yet now the world is “far too complex,” as one person recently put it, “for such a system of hands-off.”

The paradox of such fatuous statements and the actual truth of the matter is that just the opposite is the case:

The more complex a society becomes, the less equipped and able centralized-planning committees are to manage that complexity.

One of the best illustrations of this — best because it’s demonstrated in such a way that virtually anyone, no matter their political leaning or their level of economic understanding, can see the inherent logic of it — is in how pencils are made.

Another example is in observing how a sandwich is made:

Andy George tried to experience the production of a sandwich from scratch. He made a sandwich by using as little trade and processed products as possible. He had to grow vegetables, produce cheese, make bread, all himself. Of course, he ‘cheated’ a little by using kitchen tools and other ‘capital goods’ which would have been unavailable in a total autarkic economy. But even with this, he spent $1,500 and six months of his life to obtain one sandwich.

Today, it costs a few dollars and mere minutes to buy a sandwich in a supermarket. Free trade is precisely what allows us to obtain an ever more optimal division of labor when it is enabled on a large scale. This division of labor allows us to save time while reducing poverty.

That, mind you, is one sandwich, and he didn’t, of course, manufacture any of the machines or equipment he needed to make all the ingredients — nor does it even touch upon all the transportation required.

That, in brief, illustrates the impossibility of trying to manage socio-economic complexity. It cannot be done.

Concerning complexity also and the impossibility of centralized-planning bureaus able to manage this complexity, there’s also the very closely related and insurmountable calculation problem.

Even if you hate economics, a sentiment with which I completely sympathize, I nonetheless believe it is vital that all people — left, right, or middle — grasp this very basic issue, which is not really hard to grasp: economic calculation.

It is bedrock. It is a crux. And it is in many ways all that really needs to be said.

I repeat:

The more complex any given society, the more impossible it is for any planning committees or bureaus, no matter how brilliant its members, no matter how vast their numbers, to manage for any length of time.

Whereas upon the other hand laissez-faire, through its legal recognition of person and full property rights (including the right to trade products and services and to earn money), organizes all this complexity voluntarily, consensually, seamlessly, elegantly, peacefully, and in a way beneficial to all.

And this is why so-called universal healthcare creates a healthcare system that is in actuality not universal at all — not any more than it is compassionate or humane.

*Cronyism, which is also known as crony capitalism, which is also called Corporatism, isn’t laissez-faire. It’s the opposite. This point is painfully obvious and simple to prove, and this is why it’s such a mighty mystery that so many equate cronyism and laissez-faire — otherwise intelligent people, who commit this error, ostensibly in good faith, not partisans and propagandists.

Cronyism is what you’re seeing when you see, for instance, drug companies obtaining government favors and privileges (and always a great deal of taxpayer-funded money, as well, with which these drug companies like to play) from Barack Obama or George W. Bush. Or the state-enforced blocking of all competition and competitors from across state lines in the health insurance market. Or  the 100 million taxpayer-funded dollars Barack Obama gifted pharmaceutical companies in his so-called “stimulus package,” which not a single person read in full before that 2000-plus page legislation was hammered through procedure in record time. And all of this is  in exchange for what? It’s in exchange for votes. It’s in exchange for exorbitant sums of money at the expense of taxpayers. It’s in exchange for the support of many unionized workers, all one million of them. And it’s in exchange for continued sums of money — vast sums of money — at the expense of the taxpayer.

Cronyism is not nor ever was laissez-faire. Cronyism is a species of socialism. Its actual name is Corporatism, which is a type of Syndicalism — a system whereby the “syndicate” (i.e. unions) assumes control over all employment and all industry and over all economic activity. Syndicalism has never been put into full practice — not even close — not at the state, not at the national level, not in full. In the late 1930’s or early 1940’s, Spain experimented with it at the municipal level, as the city of Detroit and General Motors did under Obama in 2009. In both instances, economic collapse came so rapidly and with such relentlessness that virtually all the syndicalists and syndicalists supporters and syndicalist sympathizers were quickly to abandon the experiment and reevaluate and reconsider the vision and very premises of Syndicalism. The once great city of Detroit, Michigan, has to this day not recovered, which is why some 17 years after Barack Obama permitted this crime of cronyism to take place, huge sections of Detroit still look like downtown Beruit: blasted to smithereens, looted, and then completely abandoned. Noam Chomsky, a self-described “anarcho-syndicalist” and “civil libertarian,” was a notable exception to syndicalist reevaluation and reconsider: he remains to this very moment unapologetic and resolute in his

Corporatism, also knows as Cronyism and Crony Capitalism, isn’t fully fledged Syndicalism. It’s a modified strain of it, a variation on it. Prior to today, Cronyism reached its peak under the despot who invented and popularized it: Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was a life-long socialist and reader of Karl Marx. He was also good friends with his American counterpart Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), who, in turn, all his Presidential life worshipped at the shrine of Benito Mussolini and his Fascist economic system. This is the reason that FDR explicitly modeled his New Deal after Italian Fascism, and that’s why the New Deal was such a disastrous failure and the ramifications and destructive precedents and policies are still felt to this day in America — in every economic sector and industry. Social Security and Social Security numbers, for instance, which were both instituted as “temporary measures” to last no more than a few years and which nearly a full century later have never been repealed, and both of which are totally illegal and always have been illegal — a total invasion of privacy and a total infringement upon liberty to assign to each and every person in America a number, which we must keep for life … or else; and a total violation of property to expropriate without choice or consent from all American taxpayers and pay that expropriated money out to others, draining the American economy more and more each year that passes, the Social Security coffers devastated, depleted, bankrupcy officially declared, more money printed to artificially inject it steroids and increasing inflation thereby, devastating the American people…. This is but an example of the ways in which FDR’s Fascist policies, explicitly modeled after Mussolini’s Fascism, continue to burn a swath through America today.

Corporatism is what Barack Obama instituted when he bailed out General Motors and subsidized Solyndra. It’s what George W. Bush instituted when he bailed out the Freddy and Fanny banks.

Mussolini, as you may have heard, coined the term “Fascism” (from the Latin fasces meaning “bundle of sticks” — i.e. individuals sticks become a collective, which you should point out each and every time another self-described progressive-liberal-democrat tries to convince you that Mussolini wasn’t a garden-variety left-wing collectivist).  What you almost certainly haven’t heard, however, is what Mussolini said not long after that: “Fascism is more properly called Corporatism.”