Actual photo of a Venezuelan supermarket

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

What you’ll frequently hear next is that this is “a black-eye” on the face of the United States, which incidentally has for decades given billions and billions every single year to more people and places around the globe than all other countries combined. Many of these billions go into funding the healthcare systems of many other countries around the world.

As a corollary of these things you often hear, you’ll also often read such articles as Why Healthy People Should Subsidize the Sick. In such commentaries, you’ll invariably read that the reason many Americans 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 wants to be thought of as “inhumane,” and that’s one of the many ways by which you can know for certain that this sort of article is a total tactic: a psycho-tactic, which also goes by a more familiar name: propaganda. The purpose of the ridiculing tone and the psycho-tactical 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 deemed “the greater good.”

The writers of such propaganda deliberately intend the vagueness you always hear in their use of terms like “greater good,” “common good,” “humane,” and so forth. These writers carefully construct their words in this way in hopes of masking the emptiness of their views.

When, for instance, Barack Obama won the prestigious Lie of the Year award from Time magazine, the Washington Post, and Politifact (all of whom initially rated what he said as “true” and only after it was too late admitted that they’d lied right alongside him) for Obama’s repeatedly telling the American people: “If you like your current health insurance, you’ll get to keep your current health insurance. Period.” — whose “greater good,” I ask, was served?

Obama repeatedly told this lie in response to the nationwide outcry from millions and millions of Americans, on all sides of the political spectrum, all of whom were united in one thing: a keen sense for the obvious, and who because of this keen sense knew that Obamacare would immediately force people to either adopt government-issued prepaid healthcare or altogether do without any coverage, and this no matter how pleased they were currently with the healthcare plan they had. And that’s exactly what happened: millions lost their healthcare plan — the plan they were pleased with and didn’t want to lose and were told repeatedly they wouldn’t lose — and these plans were replaced by pathetically inferior plans. Who, I ask, was treated “humanely” here? How, I ask, was the “common good” served in this criminal act? It certainly wasn’t the “common good” of over 5 million Americans.

Do these millions have no rightful claim to being among the common — those who make up the majority of America — and is it for this reason that they’re treated not with goodness but despicably?

How, I ask, was the “greater good” served in the blatant, premeditated lies and stupefying corruption which continues right up to this present day? How has the “greater good” been served by Barack Obama’s lying so shamelessly and in his making healthcare for all Americans vastly more expensive?

Don’t be duped, reader. Don’t be bullied. Don’t be bullied or duped by any such pyscho-tactical nonsense any longer.

I’m about to show you that those who advocate any kind of force or coercion, direct or indirect (and this includes expropriation — which is the life-blood of all single-payer healthcare), even for ostensibly “humane” ends, they’re in actuality perpetuating far greater suffering for all people including most especially 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, remember this: 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 stupefying corruption involved in the push for single-payer healthcare, America’s healthcare system has not yet been fully nationalized  — and it’s a very good thing for the entire world that this hasn’t happened.

One of the innumerable things you’re not told about nationalized healthcare, which is also known as single-payer healthcare, is this: every country that has it — even those listed as the best: i.e. Japan, France, and Canada — are perpetually out of money. They all operate in the red. All of them without a single exception. They’re all in debt, and this is a simple fact that’s easy to verify. All universal healthcare systems operate at a loss — just as Medicare and Medicaid do in America, and for the exact same reasons:

They’re in chronic debt.

This debt grows deeper and deeper every year, endlessly.

No amount of money could prop these systems up for long, and do you know why?

Because in removing from the patient any financial responsibility for the medical treatment they receive, unlimited demand is created. The lines of people only grow. The more money pumped into the healthcare system, the longer grow the lines of people, the more administrative costs increase.

There’s no way to stop this runaway debt except by means of one thing: abolish the practice of forcing people to pay for the healthcare of everyone else, and abolish the entire concept of a third-party payer — no matter who that third-party is — which keeps the patient shielded from the true cost of healthcare, creating an endless inflationary process thereby. In other words, restore the patient-doctor relationship to its proper place: a private matter which is between no one and no thing except the two of them — i.e. a voluntary, mutually beneficial transaction between two free human-beings.

Do that and watch healthcare quality increase, while simultaneously watching the cost of healthcare plummet — exactly as has happened across all sectors of cosmetic healthcare, which is generally not covered by prepaid healthcare policies, which is still most commonly termed “health insurance.’

“It’s okay that all single-payer systems are in deeper and deeper debt,” people will reply, “because healthcare should shouldn’t be for profit. Healthcare is a basic human right.”

To which I reply:

Says who? By what natural law or edict do you derive such a premise? By what law of nature — either human nature or nature apart from humans — do you come to the  conclusion that nurses and doctors should not be well-paid for their time and expertise? Where do you get that notion, and how do you justify it? Why shouldn’t it be for profit? And does that same law of nature apply to you and the work you do?

The answer to the last question is always the same. It’s a resounding “No!’

The answer to the other questions can be distilled down to “By no natural law or edict or premise.”

The reason this is the answer to the other questions is that things cost money to produce, package, transport, distribute, fulfill, maintain, do. Even more fundamental than that: nobody has the right to the life and labor of any other person, nurses and doctors included.

The work and expertise of individual human-beings 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 homes this carpenter crafts nor to the material he purchases in order to craft them. This material likewise does not come to him for free. It costs money to manufacture and package and transport and deliver. It therefore costs money to have, to obtain, to retain, as does the carpenter’s time. You and I pay for these things voluntarily. 

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

The same is true of the chef who prepares our meals,  the restaurant-owner who provides a place in which to eat in an environment we enjoy,  and to the servers and bartenders who serve us.

So, too, it’s true of healthcare.

Ask yourself: what’s the more urgent and immediate human need: food and shelter or healthcare?

Everybody knows the answer to that question.

Everybody knows that food and shelter are far more urgent, immediate, continual human needs than healthcare.

Now ask yourself: if healthcare for all is “a basic human right,” why isn’t food-care for all also “a basic human right?”

Why isn’t shelter-care for all “a basic human right”?

What makes healthcare a basic human right but not food-care and shelter-care?

Or are they basic human rights as well?

If they are, who pays the people who provide it — the carpenters, contractors, and all the sub-contractors (the electricians, plumbers, tile-setters, stonemasons, and everyone else) — and the farmers and cattle ranchers who provide our food?

Will you say that they don’t need to get paid because food-care and shelter-care, being “basic human rights,” should not be for profit? The farmers and ranchers and  carpenters and all the subcontractors are therefore by right forced to labor away every day for the span of their working life to feed and house the rest of us, who weren’t quite so foolish in our choice of occupations to choose indentured servitude, as they have? Yes? No?

The truth is that healthcare doesn’t exist in nature apart from the humans who learn the intricacies of the body human and then go on to practice restoring people to health.

Whether it’s medicine and medication 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 — highly technical things, expensive to make and manufacture — they cost money to build, manufacture, produce. The sheer number of minerals they require, including but not limited to gold — just the mining and smelting of all these minerals a great deal of specialized knowledge and work to extract and refine. All this equipment, therefore, costs money to purchase. These things, many of them, also require specialized knowledge to learn. They too require training and practice to safely implement.

Money is merely a medium — a medium of exchange. It’s a facilitator. It’s nothing more and nothing less. Money drastically simplifies life for a conceptual species. To condemn it and to then demand that it be excluded from an entire industries is to blast these industries back into the Stone Age.

None of which touches upon the fact that doctors, nurses, medical techs, paramedics, custodians, administrators, bio-pharmaceutical researchers, and countless others — this is their work. It’s 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 healthcare isn’t for profit, what then are these hardworking people supposed to do?

Are they all expected to provide their time and expertise for free — or, at best, for whatever wages the government deems, depending entirely upon how much money is left after the politicians and bureaucrats have gotten paid since their work is inexplicably for profit?

Yes, actually, that’s the answer you’ll receive. That’s why cost-controls are such an enormous part of all universal healthcare systems.

Healthcare rationing, which gives bureaucrats total power to determine who lives and who dies, is but one of many examples of cost-control measures.

For this reason, I ask you to please say the following aloud with me so that you might better remember it:

Cost-controls always — and I mean always — do what?

That’s right. Cost-controls always create shortages.

It’s inevitable that they do. By mathematical law, cost-controls create shortages, and there’s no way for them not to.

Thus all these hard-working people, who spent all those years learning their professions, must get additional work, in industries where for some reason getting paid for your time and labor and expertise aren’t regarded as “bourgeois and vulgar,” so that they might then — only then — provide better homes and better food and better transportation for their families and for themselves since we all have “a basic human right” to their labor and expertise.

In other words, the argument goes, in one of the most demanding and specialized industries there is, people should not be permitted to prosper by means of their knowledge and expertise and work, as any open market would determine, because for-profit medicine is “bourgeois” and “vulgar” and “inhumane.” The good people who work in this industry must therefore spend years and years gaining the knowledge and expertise required to practice their chosen work, and once they at last complete their training, they must at that point not be allowed to prosper by means of it. They therefore must work two jobs (at least). They are perforce slaves to the rest of us, and the state is the enforcer of this state of affairs.

This, reader, is what you’re told when you’re told that healthcare shouldn’t be for profit.

This is one of the many inanities that emerge when a society comes to regard healthcare as “a basic human right” — something with which we must entrust the government, despite the government’s lifelong history of being corrupted by power and developing an unslakable thirst for control.

Any sane person can see the ridiculousness of this.

Any sane person can also see the obscenity of — and the insult in it.

Thus it is that in all countries with universal healthcare, doctor shortages — specialists in particular — are a problem so serious that it’s hit the height of crisis. This is the reason more and more people in places of single-payer healthcare are dying while waiting to receive a life-saving medical procedure from a doctor able to perform such a procedure: there aren’t enough doctors who are able to perform such exacting work to keep up with the number of patients.

Ask yourself:

Where goes your “basic human right to healthcare” when there are no doctors capable of treating you for your spine or brain or heart injury? Does your right still exist up to the exact moment you die from your condition while waiting for the fulfillment of your “basic human right”?

I ask again: Where is our “right” to brain surgery if no one exists who can perform such difficult work?

It’s a fact that in all countries with universal healthcare, staff and medical personnel shortages are currently so widespread that patients — the elderly most especially — in all such systems routinely do wait in line to die. The fact that it’s predominately the elderly is the main reason you never hear about it.

The fact that under such systems patients routinely wait to die is one of the two primary 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 and an unabashed hypocrisy — is stricken with cancer, she doesn’t opt to be treated in her home country of Canada, where she helped craft the healthcare legislation she doesn’t want to use when her life’s in danger. Do you know what she does instead? Can you guess?

That’s right: She instead comes to the United States, whose healthcare system she purports to abhor and demands abolished, and yet is successfully treated by means of it.

The same is true of 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, neither of whom wanted you to know then, when they were praising it, and still don’t want you to know now, when the truth is no longer hidden, anything about the catastrophic, disease-ridden, murderous failure of the Venezuelan healthcare system, which from the beginning was sickeningly obvious to many people around the world, but to none so obviously as to the Venezuelan people themselves, who were forced to endure the healthcare system instituted by this tyrannical regime. Neither do they want you to know anything about the ghastly criminality of the Venezuelan death-houses which were ludicrously called “hospitals,” which existed then and to this day still exist as a legacy to mass murderer Hugo Chavez. Nor do Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama want you to know anything about the fact that they were both all along, from the beginning, fully aware of the disease and death brought about by Hugo Chavez and his hellish system that these people had the nerve to call healthcare.

Aussi the Castro brothers and their Cuban houses-of-death, also ludicrously called by the Castros and people like Michael Moore “hospitals,” while simultaneously, weepy with praise of the most saccharine sort for these two homophobic and murderous dictators — Fidel and Raoul Castro — at whose hands untold millions of innocent Cuban people died, and from whom Moore demands America “learn something about healthcare.”

Close quote.

This — the unequivocal, incalculable, incomprehensible death and disease caused by these systems of “universal healthcare” — is the very reason that free market principles are being quietly introduced into many systems of universal care, like Quebec: to try and save these systems from complete collapse, though the governments and government administrators of these hospitals don’t want you to know about it. And so it is that you don’t ever hear or read anything about it.

It’s also why MRI machines are abundant and not an issue in, for example, veterinary clinics in those places and regions with universal healthcare, whereas in these exact same places and regions, in the hospitals and treatment facilities for human-beings, you’ll often wait and wait for access to life-saving MRI tests — not uncommonly dying before you turn for the test comes up: because universal healthcare forces politicians to enact cost-control measures, and cost-controls inevitably create what?

That’s right: shortages.

They create shortages which ramify in every conceivable direction and which are unavoidable by their very nature — i.e. command-and-control is unavoidable under any system of “universal healthcare.” This means that there are many other shortages beyond doctors, nurses, and staff.

These endless shortages are the inevitable result of Marxist economic fallacies and naïveté. They’re the direct result of this and nothing but this.

The truth is that in the real world, as against the faux world of tendentious ideology where reality doesn’t matter and where academics and so-called intellectuals feel most truly at home — penning abstruse, equivocal, tortuously reasoned papers which contain the latest permutation of a very ancient ideology indeed, which then goes on to serve as the ideological underpinning and justification for the next generation of statist power — single-payer healthcare cannot avoid the continual need of cost control measures.

This in turn necessitates the need for still more cost-control measures.

Which in turn necessitates the need for more and more and more …

And so on.

Which in the end requires that someone bail them out — or that the entire sector of the economy collapses into bankruptcy.

This is one of the many unavoidable consequences that occurs when any industry — healthcare or otherwise — operates at a perpetual loss.

Because cost-control measures create higher costs, cost-controls therefore do what?

That’s right. Cost-control measures create shortages.

This in turn forces administrators to petition legislators to imposes more cost-controls, which by mathematical law do what?

That’s right: They create greater shortages.

In all places of universal healthcare, strict cost-controls are implemented and continually added to — despite the fact that these measures compound the problem.

These strict control measures are managed by a gigantic bureau of planners, for whom getting paid isn’t (for reasons unspecified) “bourgeois and vulgar,” and who must therefore be paid exorbitantly — these bloated, economically illiterate bureaucrats, for the non-work they do.

Which is why in all such systems of single-payer healthcare, the average amount of time doctors spend with patients is limited in the extreme: in Japan, for instance, which at the time of this writing is regarded as the best example of universal healthcare in the world, the average doctor-patient time is less than five minutes, no matter how serious the medical condition.

Let that sink in.

This bureaucracy also by definition mushrooms into endless permutations and mazes of nightmarish bureaucratic hallways, among the many ramifications of which — and please read this carefully: America, which because of the profit-motive and the subsequent capital to invest and seek out new ideas, to discover and create and innovate and because of which leads the world in innovations and medicines by light years — America because of this subsidizes the entire world as a direct result of the entire world’s policy of universal healthcare.

Yes, you read that right.

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

But what you’ll never — and I mean never — hear is why this is so.

It’s so because America alone picks up the remaining tab for the rest of the world. This is why our costs in America for the same medications are more expensive.

Without America’s still somewhat non-nationalized healthcare system, the healthcare systems of many countries around the world would collapse.** [This footnote documents a fascinating experiment I just concluded, the results of which surprised even me. Scroll to the bottom of this page and read — next to the double and not the single asterisk** — a recent exchange]

And yet we’re told that America must get abreast of the times — into the 21st century — and adopt the same sort of single-payer systems that have bled every such system worldwide.

In other words: America, we appreciate your saving for yet another year all of our healthcare systems and countless lives in the process, and we thank you for doing this like clockwork year in and year out for decades. Now we demand with rage and righteous indignation that you get into the 21st century and abolish your own system which saved so many lives in our country and in countries around the world and that you adopt our system from which you’ve been saving us year in and year out — the same bankrupted healthcare system of the developed world, which you’ve propped up all these decades, in part by forcing your citizenry to pay taxes that subsidized our medications (while you, meanwhile, payed much higher prices for these exact same medications) — adopt this, we demand with rage and righteous indignation, and abolish any pretense of freedom in medicine, so that you can join us in the 21st century, along with the rest of the civilized world, and entirely ruin your healthcare system as well, so that at last we can all be fucked and in misery and poverty together again.

If you doubt the truth of what I’ve just written, as many before you have, I challenge you to but research this subject cursorily — cursorily but seriously (and it won’t take you very long: here’s a good place to start — an article written by a left-leaning magazine, which will confirm what I’ve just said and show you data in detail) — and you will see, as many before you have also seen, that what I’ve just written is fact.

This is just one of the many unavoidable ramifications of cost-controls, which must be implemented and continually increased in all countries of universal healthcare, and which always do what?

That’s right. Cost controls always create shortages.

Nor will you ever hear how the bureaucratic monstrosity known as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) makes it a thing of mind-spinning complexity to submit and have approved new medications — sometimes taking decades and billions of dollars (unless, of course, it’s an experimental genetic injection purportedly meant to inoculate against a taxpayer-funded bioengineered virus which has the same overall lethality of the season flu of 2018, and which for the first time in human history is delivered by means of lipid nanoparticles, which cross the blood-brain barrier and the placenta, and which have long been known to collect in the ovaries and testes, often causing infertility and sterility for life, in which case two months testing time is plenty, though for children and pregnant woman, also for the first time in human history, it’s even less: precisely no prior safety testing whatsoever — absolutely none — is required), and this as well drives up the cost of all medicine and all medical care. It drives it up continuously, relentlessly, astronomically.

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

What I’ve just described is the process whereby the United States government operates at its most perfunctorily: by introducing into a once-free industry brand new control measures that create many initial problems, which politicians then try to solve by implementing deeper controls, which exacerbate the  problems the government sought to alleviate and create additional, which then causes politicians and their voters and the army of lobby groups to call for still deeper controls, which create still deeper problems, which impels them to call for and enact stricter controls, which renders all these problem even more intractable — on and on, endlessly. Meanwhile, “laissez-faire” and the “free-market” are the entire time blamed for the endlessly mushrooming problems which the control measure created in the first place and then exacerbated, so that deeper controls can then be implemented.

In actual fact, laissez-faire in this industry (or the majority of others) hasn’t existed for over a full century now. And it’s only this principles — the principle of excising government and its army of bureaucrats from the industry and restore the private, voluntary, mutually beneficial patient-doctor relationship — that can truly fix the problems.

In other words: Let people be — all people in all professions and industries — and let them pursue their own lives and fulfillment, and societies will in this way manage their own path of prosperity. The less advantaged will be taken care of.

The less advantaged will be provided for by good doctors.

They’ll be helped by all of us –the private citizens and private organizations and private healthcare providers and private owners of private clinics and hospitals who understand that less advantaged people exist and are not heartless and cruel, like the politicians and bureaucrats are.

They disadvantaged will be provided for and helped by all people who will under no circumstances watch a person suffer or die rather than help the suffering person — which is to say, the overwhelming majority of people.

In short, the disadvantaged will be helped by people for whom the threat of state force is not the motive in charitable acts, which is a contradiction in terms if ever there was one.

Ask yourself: Is that the sort of person you are? Do you only act charitably because government will fine or jail you if you don’t so act?

Me neither.

There is a crucial point of distinction to be made here and remembered for life: under conditions of politico-economic freedom, safety nets and charitable programs are by no means prohibited, banned, abolished, or discouraged. I’ve never been sure where this notion comes from. These things are simply not compelled by law. They’re not the proper province of government. And here is where you’ll most clearly see that socialism in any of its multifarious disguises is by definition an ideology of force. I have yet to meet  the person, left or right, who supports a motion to make purely voluntary all funding of “the social safety net.” They will tell you unapologetically and with great emphasis that funding all such government programs requires compulsory taxation — no amount too much — and to anyone opposed: extract their money and kill them.

In a laissez-faire society, communistic societies can be established, as can all other forms of socialistic societies. Anyone is free to set up on her or his land a collectivized community, which can buy more land and grow in number and gain in popularity and live by Marxist principles and all the rest — provided one thing: it’s entirely voluntary for all people, who are free to walk away at any time, if they so decide. This is what the Kibbutz is.

It needn’t be communistic. Any and all other forms of communal organization and socialist organization are perfectly permissible and legal, whether Marxist, Mormon, Mennonite, Amish, Adventist, Davidian, Fabian, or any other. As long as it’s entirely voluntary and always remains so, with each individual free to choose if they stay or go for any reason or for no reason, and are never kept there against their will, all such societies are perfectly permissible and not anyone’s business. The only thing that’s not permissible: forcing their lifestyle or ideology on anyone else,  person and property alike.

Similarly, any person, whether an employer or not, can create safety nets. Businesses can and do create them all the time. Go to any investment group of financial consultant. You can arrange for whatever amount of your paycheck you’d like to go into retirement fund or a pension, and it will be far more money than social security will ever pay you. In a free society, any person is allowed to open a retirement fund or build a charity or start up a business offering financial investment or retirement service. The only difference is that I advocate for voluntary, non-coercive contributions to any and all charities and safety nets.

But don’t take my word for it.

Look at the history of healthcare and charitable work in America prior to the 1930’s, and you’ll see.

You’ll see that people weren’t left to suffer and die, and there were not such suffering people being kicked out of clinics and hospitals and left in the gutters.

It’s fairly well-known that in America today every hospital emergency room accepts every patient who comes through the doors, and this is by law. But do you know what almost nobody knows about this?

This very policy was the in place for most hospitals across the United States long before laws made it mandatory (thereby driving up costs in astronomical fashion because the fanfare created now that it was officially, legally mandatory increased non-emergency  patient visits by tenfold). The policy of accepting, without any questions asked about finances, any and all patients urgently in need of care was adopted freely and voluntarily and under no threat of force or coercion long before it was made mandatory. Hospital owners instituted this policy without the need of government making it mandatory. The state made unofficial policy official — in part to take credit and show their great magnanimity and benevolence, and in larger part to take control.

Ask yourself: which hospital or clinic would you voluntarily choose to patronize, all other things being equal: the one with a charitable, compassionate policies, voluntarily adopted, in cases of emergency for the less advantaged, or the one a few blocks away who doesn’t? And in an open market where clinics and hospitals must provide good customer service and quality care in order for people to patronize them, which is what enables clinics and hospitals to prosper and thereby remain in business, do you not think that the owners and managers of these businesses will do everything they can to win your business and keep it, against those with whom they’re competing, just as all well-run businesses do?

As a person does one thing, so he does everything.

Those who are faithful in a little are faithful in a lot.

Do you not think that having a whole sector of your clinic or hospital devoted to slush-funding for the less advantaged will work to your advantage as a business? If you do not think this, I have news for you: such sectors already exist. Also, in this exact same vein — exactly the same in principle, I mean — I’ve bartended at two different bars, neither of which were by any means fancy and yet at which the owners had both put in place a strictly voluntarily employee slushfunding for healthcare. This meant that each employee, no matter their job title and job description, could freely choose to have deducted from his or her paycheck a small percentage of what they’d earned each month, and this money was then pooled together and kept in an interest-earning account which anyone could monitor. Both owners when they set this up initially seeded the interest-earning account with their own money. It worked. In both places, the money was rarely drawn upon, and if you did need it, you had the option to pay with cash (which the owner would handle and which hospitals and clinics prefer and thus discount for). The slushfunds were for emergencies only — but not only for on-the-job — and the funds were not abused. On the contrary, they appreciated each quarter, and there was a lot of money that had accumulated, which on balance kept accumulating.

Let me tell you of another way healthcare — and government in general — has been very  successfully funded at various point in history, in various pockets of the world: America, South America, the Caribbean, Switzerland, even parts of France: gambling; lotteries. In America today, all but five states in the country have a lottery system in place which anyone over the age of eighteen (in Nebraska and Arizona, age nineteen) is free to play. These are games of chance into form of scratch tickets. They’re are one-hundred percent voluntary. They need not and should not be coercively monopolized by the state. Hospital owners and any other entrepreneur should be free to start up a lotto business. Week in week out, month in month out, year in year out, every single lottery in America brings in such massive amounts of revenue that if you were to devote twenty percent of it each month and simultaneously remove government from healthcare and shrink the leviathan state down to even half its proper size (i.e. a government that protects but does not provide — a government that neither polices the entire world nor funds it with fiat — a government, in short, that doesn’t add ten-thousand pages of new legislation to the Federal Register each year with a mind-spinning codification of new laws and regulations, many of which have not yet been read in full by any single person, and every single one of which contains incomprehensible sums of money earmarked and dedicated to friends and friends of friends in exchange for favors), none of us would have to trouble our minds with this intractable, government-created maze anymore.

Did you not know that healthcare in America flourished for most of its history without government involvement? That what I’m proposing has already been successfully done — proven — both before government intruded into healthcare and also right now, at this exact moment, in private healthcare campuses that have sprung up in order to actually provide quality healthcare in direct response to the expanding leviathan state involvement in American medicine, which has coercively monopolized over half of the healthcare industry in America?

Do you know how inexpensive healthcare is — and the multitudinous payment plans which exist and the endless possibilities for new options which are limited only by the imaginations of those who work in the industry — when the leviathan state is, at long last, excised from the business of healthcare? If you don’t, look to the the proof in all healthcare considered non-essential, like Lasik eye-correction and other cosmetic surgeries and procedures, which most insurance companies, including government insurance, won’t cover. In every such instance you see this:

To the exact extent that government is uninvolved, quality of care rises year after year, while costs simultaneously drop year after year, as innovations flourish year after year, and as year after year more and more people who want to work in healthcare enter the field because its prosperous and comparatively free of state intrusion, without all the dizzying bureaucracy and nightmarish entrails of red-tape — so that we all, as consumers in these sectors of healthcare, have vastly more doctors and clinics to choose from, all of whom are competing for our business, thereby driving innovation and quality higher while at the same time driving down costs.

This in many ways constitutes conclusive proof — admissible in any court of law — that state intrusion into healthcare has the diametric opposite effect of its stated aims. And this is one of the main reasons for that:

That graph is eloquently explained by America’s greatest living economist:

Among the most criminal of all the criminal things that have resulted from socialized medicine — and this, too, directly flows from cost-controls — is the rationing of healthcare.

Rationing includes but isn’t limited to death-panels — precisely the same sort of death-panels Ezekiel Emmanuel, Barack Obama’s chief medical advisor, openly and on video advocated for: government bureaus deciding who receives care and who doesn’t, who lives and who dies.

Rationing is part and parcel of all systems of universal healthcare because rationing, though murderous, is an effective way to cut spiraling costs — specifically, by cutting off “universal care,” which is suddenly not so universal any more. Nor for some reason is it any longer “a basic human right” — certainly not for humans past a certain age — when everyone is forced to pay for everyone else’s healthcare. These are the same elderly people who, as Emmanuel put it, “are going to die soon anyway.”

Unquote.

Please reread that quote and then watch the short video I linked to 2 paragraphs up. Afer you do that, leave a comment telling me again that I’m the one who’s “heartless” because I don’t believe people should be forced to pay for the healthcare of others.

I’m of course well-aware that proponents of universal healthcare don’t like to call rationing by its proper name — i.e. rationing — and so they use any number of different terms (i.e. “limited funds,” “over-use of medical care,” “unnecessary care,” ‘superfluous care”), but no serious person of whom I’m aware, even those militantly in favor of universal healthcare, will ever actually deny that under conditions of universal care, bureaus ultimately determine who gets what care and who doesn’t, as Obama’s medical advisor also made no secret of. And as the Alfie Evans case recently demonstrated to the world so starkly and unapologetically.

I ask you in all sincerity to for a brief moment consider the 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 this.

Remember also and never forget: American medicine is already over half socialized and has been for 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. This includes America’s health insurance racket, which is the fruit of FDR’s socialist policies — the so-called New Deal — which was explicitly modeled after Mussolini’s corporatist-socialist policies in Italy, which policies FDR greatly admired, as he admired also El Duce Mussolini the man and “Uncle Joe,” as FDR called him, meaning Joseph Stalin.

Remember as well the following little-known fact and never forget it:

The health insurance racket in America has nothing to do with a free-market — not of any kind. It was born of corporatist-socialism, and it remains corporate-socialist to the gills, which means it remains protectionist to the gills.

The first and final thing to know about health insurance in America is that it’s not insurance.

Insurance is something you purchases in the unlikely event of an emergency so that you’ll be protected if an unlikely event occurs.

The health insurance racket in America is prepaid healthcare.

It’s not insurance.

It’s healthcare paid ahead of time.

This, if you’ve ever wondered, plays an enormous role in America’s hyper-inflated healthcare systems. It’s the main reason that healthcare in America has become so outlandishly expensive. It’s the direct result of policies put into place during the great depression, when FDR instituted, in a way totally unconstitutional, price and wage controls for all private businesses. FDR’s corporatist-socialist policies are the reason above any other that healthcare in America has become so expensive.

The fact that health insurance is called “insurance” changes nothing about the fact that it’s not insurance. Anyone can see in an instant that it’s prepaid healthcare. Go look at any given plan on any given website, and you’ll see at once that in America today and for a long time what’s called “health insurance” is not insurance. It’s prepaid healthcare. Which has become entrenched. So that actual medical insurance is rejected by the vast majority of Americans.

I have a thought experiment for you:

Imagine what your car insurance would look like — and what the auto-insurance industry general would look like — if your car insurance was not insurance at all but prepaid car-care.  This, much like “health insurance” now, included everything routine as well as bigger, less frequent care: from car washes to oil changes to routine tune-ups to windshield nicks to windshield cracks to fender benders to full collision coverage to all stops at the gas station to refuel your car. Your car insurance pays for all of this and more In this way, in purchasing car insurance, you’re purchasing pre-paid car-care.

This means auto-insurers pay for all I’ve listed in the paragraph whenever you need any of those things — unless, of course, you want to say that car-care is “a basic human right” and shouldn’t therefore be for profit. At which point the argument changes. It changes to the onus of proof immediately being on you to demonstrate that car-care for all is a basic human right. This leads once into an argument that contradicts itself in mere seconds. You’ll then have to agree that all this prepaid car-care — the car washes, the oil changes, the routine tune-ups, the windshield nicks, the car wrecks involving other vehicles, and, most significantly, all the refuels for your car — must be paid for by insurers. This means, among other things, that you no longer pay for any of this at the time of service. You pay an insurance premium once a month or once every six months or once a year, but you pay nothing at the time of any car-care. In fact, the businesses don’t immediately receive any money from anyone with car-care for all but must wait for the claim to be run through complex reimbursements mechanism and then sent to them — a reimbursement process that costs money (mostly in staff payroll), which already introduces an additional and significant cost into the system that wouldn’t exist if car insurance wasn’t actually prepaid car-care. This new significant cost immediately creates a large increase in the cost of gasoline and all other things relating to car-care. All of them.

Understand that when you purchase and then use car-care for all, an intermediary — a middleman — thereafter pays for all your car-care needs. Your payment to the auto-insurers is at most once a month.

This means that you’re shielded from actual costs of any and all things concerning car-care.

This means that you don’t see the costs.

This means you don’t know about them.

This means that you come more and more to no longer think about car costs.

This means that you come more and more to expect all costs associated with owning and maintaining a vehicle to be paid for by someone else.

This means that you come to feel more and more entitled to having all things concerning your car paid for by someone else.

This means that you become more and more indignant when and if you have to pay for anything concerning your car.

This means that you come more and more to resent anyone who thinks that prepaid car-care isn’t actual insurance.

This means that your understanding of actual auto-insurance may very well be corrupted beyond repair.

This means that you won’t be able to see the obvious: you won’t, for instance, see that prepaid car-care is in dramatic fashion driving up costs in all things auto-related — and for everyone — whether they have prepaid car-car or not.

This means that because people have been shielded from all costs concerning cars, people quit caring how much car-care costs.

This means that they buy cars that are more expensive and inefficient. What do they care when they don’t have any concept of automobile and automobile-related costs? To them, these costs come to seem more and more dream-like — ultra-abstract figures that have no referent to which they can be anchored or related.

This means that in general with regard to their cars they conduct themselves carelessly and without thought and come more and more to take cars and all the technology that goes into them for granted.

This means that demand for every form of maintenance — most especially refueling — skyrockets into the stratosphere overnight.

This means that supply is immediately — though temporarily — curtailed.

This means that costs increase across the auto industry, which then reverberates across every industry.

This means that the federal government intervenes and institutes by executive decree its own brand of prepaid car-care — a less expensive version for the less advantaged.

This means that every working American is now forced to contribute to single-payer prepaid car-car, via mandatory taxation taken out of your paycheck without your choice or consent.

This means more people sign-up for government-sponsored car-care, which is now cheaper because it’s being government subsidized, which means you’re not paying for it directly, which means there’s an intermediary — in this case the government — who’s shielding consumers from the actual costs.

This means the costs are now double shielded — insofar as it first comes from the taxpayers and then is subsidized again with printed government money and then the car-care is paid for by administrators of the government who send car-care businesses their checks, via complex reimbursement mechanisms. H]

This means that car-car becomes even more expensive since it now entails, among countless other things, the government hiring thousands and thousands and thousands of administrators to administrate this new program, which has exploded in sign-ups from people who now want “free car-care for all.”

This means that all these thousands of government administrators must get paid because in this sort of bureaucratic work, getting paid for your work — i.e. for-profit work — is for some unspecified reason not vulgar or bourgeois but absolutely non-negotiable — in a way that it’s not for the mechanics and the truck drivers and all other providers of gasoline and sundry prepaid car-care, which is “a basic human right” and therefore should not be for profit.

This means that the money for prepaid car-care, which all working Americans are now forced to pay (whether they use it or not, whether they want it or not), is not even close to enough money, and that it gets less and less so as more and more people sign up for single-payer prepaid car-care.

This means that government must either 1) raise taxes to fund prepaid car-care 2) borrow money from other departments to fund prepaid car-care 3) print money to fund prepaid car-care  4) two of the above  5) all of the above.

This means that money loses its value, especially when it’s printed.

This means that costs inflate across the entire car-care industry.

This means that costs inflate across the entire economy since all economies are deeply interwoven and interconnected.

This means that pre-paid car-care costs go up higher still — astronomically so — and they keep rising and rising with no end in sight, because everyone who has prepaid car-care is shielded from the actual costs of everything related to car ownership and maintenance.

This means that the entire economy is crippled very seriously and precariously.

This means more and more people sign up for prepaid car-care since it’s gotten astronomically more expensive to pay out-of-pocket for these crippling costs.

This means that gas-station and autoshop owners who take government sponsored prepaid car-care for all, which for some reason everyone still calls “insurance,” as well as all their employees and the distributors and manufactures, they only get paid by means of complicated reimbursement mechanisms.

This means that costs explode astronomically yet again, adding to the original costs of prepaid single-payer car-care for all — by adding innumerable administrators and steps to the task of processing universal car-care — and by “administrators” I mean: bureaucrats who are now completely involved in universal prepaid car-care for all and who therefore think it’s their business to tell you what you can and can’t do with your life as it relates in any way (even in the most indirect way) to automobiles.

This includes but isn’t limited to getting paid the mechanics, truck drivers, and all other providers and distributors of car-care for all: i.e. the oil workers and their truck drivers and the petroleum refinery workers and the countless others who are now scrambling to keep up with the demand we’ve created in exercising our “basic human right” to prepaid car-care, the costs of which we’ve been completely shielded from and thus no longer care at all about what it costs to have and maintain a car or cars but demand that our rights here be respected, so that we get the prepaid car-care we deserve.

This means that demand increases higher still.

This means supply is curtailed even more.

This means that strict cost-controls are implemented by the federal government across all sectors of the car-care industry, which includes the private insurance industry, which must also now employ complicated reimbursement mechanisms which pay all the truck drivers and mechanics and oil refinery worker and the innumerable others who work in the industry. Which gradually but inexorably puts private insurers out of business  — in large part because they now losing money and can’t compete with government-sponsored car-care for all, with its endless supply of federal subsidies in the form of printed money.

This federal enactment of strict cost-control measures means that what occurs? That’s right: shortages. Cost controls always and inevitably create shortages.

This means that cost go up yet again because supply is diminished.

This means that deeper controls are called for and granted.

This means that more administrators are needed to process the addition cost-controls and everything that the cost-controls entail — all of which siphons huge amounts of money which, under normal circumstances (in that blissful blessed state-of-affairs, which no longer exists, when the “basic human right” to prepaid car-care for all wasn’t recognized), would’ve have gone to auto-mechanics and auto-shop owners and truck drivers and all the others who work in the auto industry, which was once a vital and thriving industry but is so no more.

This means that as costs continue to rise and more government-printed money is poured into the car-care industry, inflation rises, and owners and employees make less.

This means that many gas stations and auto-shops stop accept government-sponsored car-care “insurance” and some even stop accepting any and all forms of car-care insurance, private or state — instituting a cash-only policy — which for these businesses and the few people who don’t like or use prepaid car-carel, the industry is in this new model revived.

This means that a small counter-voice emerges which questions the entire premise of car-care for all insurance, both private and state-sponsored, which isn’t actually insurance, which is something you buy in the unlikely event of an emergency. It’s prepaid car-care. Some even argue that the whole notion of prepaid car-care for all has no basis in reality — inasmuch as it’s a good and service provided and doesn’t automatically exist in nature =– neither human nature nor nature apart from humans — and it in any case certainly can’t be classified as right but a service one person provides if — and only if — someone wants to pay him or her for the service they provide. These same people maintain that regarding car-care as “a basic human right” end by severing the one-on-one voluntary, mutually beneficial relationship between the customer and the provider.

This means that a few more people see that government never had any place in this industry at all and should never have gotten involved.

This creates fury and murderous rage among statologist and government-lovers of every type and stripe — those for whom state-sponsored prepaid car-care for all has become entrenched and who can no longer conceive of even a hypothetical scenario in which the state wasn’t involved at all in this area of human life: in brief, those who have come to worship at the shrine of the state, many replacing God with Government.

This means that further demands are placed upon all providers of car-care who haven’t gone to a cash-only policy, and who are increasingly unable to get reimbursed properly or in a timely fashion.

This means that providers of car-car in any and every capacity have also become sick and tired of haggling eight hours a day either with bureaucrats, who subtly but unmistakably hold the threat of force and illegality over their head, or the insurance companies, who are hemorrhaging money and don’t want to pay for anything they can get away with not paying.

This means that more and more providers of car-care quit or go bankrupt.

This means supply is further diminshed.

This means that costs increase higher still.

This means that deeper cost-controls are implemented, which does what? That’s right: it creates greater shortages.

This means that the dizzying bureaucracy that’s been set up to provide us all with our “basic human right” to prepaid car-care has become monstrous in size and scope and temerity, and it now has one ultimate function: to consume as much money as humanly possible.

This means supply of car-care drops precipitously even as demand skyrockets even higher.

This means that a return to sense — by restoring the proper relationship between the customer who wants or requires something for her car and the provider who can fulfill this service — becomes absolutely essential or annihilation of the industry will result.

This means that the more complex any society becoms, the more that laissez-faire — and not bureaucracy — is required.

This means it’s not the other way around.

This means that society contains within itself the capacity of organizing its own path of development and orchestrating prosperity without the need of government intrusion,

This means

I ask you to please consider the following as well:

Imagine that very abbreviated example for food and shelter — both which are far more immediate needs than medicine. Imagine if these vital human needs were deemed “too important” to be left to “the open-market and unbridled laissez-faire,” and therefore government must provide universal food coverage, food-care for all, and shelter-care for all. This is not a hypothetical exercise.

It’s exactly what communism and all other forms of actual socialism espouse, and for reasons exactly as I just described.

It’s also the exact ideology behind the American Indian Reservations, which were explicitly modeled after socialism of the Fabian variety.

I cordially invite you to observe how this has all played out in any number of different countries around the world — ranging from North Korea and Cuba, to the USSR and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, to of course Communist China wherein we see the indisputable heavyweight mass murderer of all time — Mao Tse Dong, who intentionally killed between 30-to-80 million of his own people, a fact which, though well known for half a century now and not denied, only recently organizations like the UN, WHO, WEF, UNICEF, and Amnesty International have found within themselves to recognize, because they still for some reason can’t find it within themselves not love their murderous tyrant hero, Mao, who has more blood on his hands than anyone in known history — by far.

Look how it’s played out on the 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 distinctions in the entire country. And please make special note: these shockingly bad health ratings occur year after year and have occurred year and after year for over a century now — under a system of universal healthcare for all in which healthcare is regarded as “the basic human right” that it isn’t.

Healthcare is not a right. It’s a voluntary agreement entered into by a patient and a healthcare provider. If for any reason one or both of them chooses not to pursue it, there is no agreement. In which case, they go separate ways, and no wrongdoing or unlawful action has taken place. Nobody’s rights have been breached.

Under systems that operate in a manner opposite that which I’ve just described,  governmental agents (who must get paid) assume control over the work of all healthcare workers. They also 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 and what you may or may not eat, cultivate, milk, raise, and more. Everything from 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 these good patient people must leave empty-handed, frozen, 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. (Boris Yeltsin soon changed his way of thinking, completely.)

That precise principle applies to medicine and healthcare.

What I’m telling you is accurate. It’s easy to verify. (Start here.)

Most insidious of all: once such systems are put in place, 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 three 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 than it is now 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, which his what singlepayer is. Singlepayer is another name for “universal healthcare.”)

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 that I’ve read, they’re good MD’s — and they make the following point articulately and eloquently: under conditions of freedom, in cases of emergency, medical practitioners don’t heartlessly let people die, as government-lovers never tire of trying to persuade you. Also, before government got involved in healthcare, many, many, many private charities — both religious and non-religious — as well as actual insurance, which existed for emergency and catastrophic care, which works astronomically better than political care.)

Observe how today in America people are not bleeding from their mouths in the streets for lack of dental care, with nowhere to go. Such a thing does not exist — not remotely. It’s strikes you and me as absurd to even think of it. 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 urgent-care 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, which in actuality doesn’t exist.

It cannot exist.

It’s a mathematical impossibility.

It’s pure figment.

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

Allowing full freedom, I do absolutely assure you, will bring about far, far, far more care, better care,  options for care, and vastly more compassion than all people being forced into paying for  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 and doing when 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 healthcare is, where it comes from, and creates the problems in the first place. This will show you 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 care, 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 cost controls and shortages to death panels and other rationing measures to never-ending inflation to healthcare for no one but the elite to healthcare for no one.

I close with this:

People often tell me that my notions of laissez-faire may have worked at one time, but 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 true. Remember always:

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 produce 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 such 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’s vital that all people — left, right, and 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 level, not at the national level, not in full. In the late 1930’s and 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 all instances, economic collapse came so rapidly and with such relentlessness that virtually all the syndicalists and syndicalists supporters and syndicalist sympathizers were quick 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 reconsideration: he remains to this very day unapologetic and resolute in his advocacy of this system of disease, destruction, and death, just as he remains resolute in his refusal to assess the actual facts without any of his usual bloody bias.

Corporatism, also known, I repeat, as Cronyism and Crony Capitalism, isn’t quite fully fledged Syndicalism — not yet. It’s the first several steps to it. It’s a weaker strain of 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 lover of Karl Marx. He was also good friends with his Adolph Hitler and 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 of its 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 private lives and a total infringement upon liberty to assign to each and every person 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, bankrupt, more money printed to artificially inject steroids into it, increasing inflation thereby, devastating the American people — this is but an example of the ways in which Corporatist policies, explicitly modeled after Mussolini’s Fascism, continue to burn a swath across 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 when bundled, which you should point out each and every time another self-described progressive-liberal-democrat tries to convince you that Mussolini wasn’t just another standard-procedure left-wing collectivist). What you almost certainly haven’t heard, however, is what Mussolini actually said: “Fascism is more appropriately called Corporatism.”

Thus in advocating for “universal healthcare,” you’re advocating for Fascist policy. Explicitly.

** Just over a decade ago, when I first wrote about America’s worldwide subsidization of pharmaceuticals, I found no online discussion of the subject. None whatsoever. I’d become friends with a guy named Mark Cousins, who worked for a London-based pharmaceutical company called GlaxoSmithKline. He and I first met at a fine-dining restaurant-lounge called Jay’s Bistro, where I was tending the bar and where he semi-regularly presented to physicians on the subject of GlaxoSmithKline’s pharmaceutical line. Mark provided me with a great deal of the hard data and the technical data concerning this subject, and he and I are to this day still good friends.

Since the first iteration of this article, a great deal of online material has sprung up. Yet like everything else online, the search engines provide you each searcher, based on their past searches, with the results that we each individually most want to hear. This is true of any and every subject. In this way, the search engines have become tools of reinforcing indoctrination, and indeed Google has several series lawsuits against them for this very thing.

The most fascinating development, however — from my perspective, at least — happened in the last few weeks, and it involved the large language model known as Google Gemini. Four weeks ago, I queried Gemini about a subject I’d never asked any large language model and hadn’t searched in years:

 Does America subsidize pharmaceutical medications for the rest of the world?

The answer I received was this:

Yes, the United States subsidizes pharmaceutical medications for the world. It does so by paying significantly higher prices for drugs than other countries, enabling foreign health systems to access innovative medicines at lower costs.  This occurs because many developed nations use government negotiation or price controls to secure lower drug prices, while the U.S. historically has not, leading pharmaceutical companies to recoup R&D and innovation costs primarily from the American market. 

Disproportionate U.S. spending fuels global innovation:

• The U.S., with less than 5% of the world’s population, accounts for roughly 75% of global pharmaceutical profits. 

• Americans often pay 2 to 3 times more—and in some cases up to 300% more—for the same drugs made in the same factories, effectively cross-subsidizing access in countries with price-controlled systems like Canada, Germany, and the UK

Two weeks after that, I asked Google Gemini the exact same question, word for word, on the same MacBook. The answer I received wasn’t at all the same:

There is a sense in which this is effectively true, but most economists would not call it a subsidy….

The pricing models acts as a de facto global subsidy, allowing other nations to benefit from American-funded research and development without bearing comparable financial responsibility. 

And this is the answer I received today — asking the exact same question, word-for-word:

The U.S. government does not send direct payments to lower drug costs in other countries, though the U.S. healthcare market is sometimes described by outliers as indirectly subsidizing global pharmaceutical innovation and socialized medicine.

How this “Subsidy” Works

The concept of a U.S. subsidy stems from a combination of high domestic prices and the global nature of drug development: 

• Revenue Disparity: The U.S. accounts for roughly 5% of the world’s population but provides approximately 64% to 78% of global pharmaceutical profits.

• Funding Innovation: Pharmaceutical companies use these high U.S. profits to fund the massive costs of Research and Development (R&D) for new drugs.

• Global Access: Once a drug is developed, other countries use centralized negotiation to buy it at much lower prices—sometimes 3 to 4 times less than what Americans pay. Experts argue these lower prices in other countries would be unsustainable if U.S. profits weren’t covering the bulk of the initial costs

Four weeks ago, I also asked Gemini which countries of nationalized healthcare operate in the red?

The correct answer to that question — according to the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the World Population Review, the World Health Organization, and the Frazier Institute, to name only a few of many more  — is this: all of them. They all operate at a loss. It’s non-controversial, and I can’t recall any serious person, no matter their political views, arguing it. It’s also the answer I received four weeks ago from Gemini:

No country of nationalized healthcare is “in the black.” They all run at a deficit.

Two weeks ago, when I asked Google Gemini the exact same question, I received an answer that was slightly more equivocal, but essentially the same:

Nationalized healthcare is not for profit, and most economists don’t describe them as operating “in the red” or “in the black.” But if you mean which of these healthcare systems run at a deficit, the answer is all of them.

Here was the answer I received to this exact same question earlier today:

While many single-payer systems face structural deficits, several historically and currently operate “in the black” by generating a budget surplus.

The perception that these systems always run in the red often stems from how they are managed:

• Budgeting as a Ceiling: Unlike a business, a surplus in a single-payer system is often viewed as “under-investment” rather than profit. Conversely, a deficit is usually a policy choice to provide more care than current tax revenues allow.[Note that. It’s one of the main reason Dr. visits have become so inexcusably brief.]
•  Structural Risks: Even a system in surplus would face a risk of “financial instability” due to rapidly aging populations and rising medical fees.[Note that last thing!]
• Political Adjustments: Systems like Taiwan’s maintain solvency by periodically adjusting premium rates or tax contributions when deficits accumulate

To which I replied:

Why no real mention of government subsidies of any kind — and I don’t mean with regard to the US here or in the context of US pharmaceutical costs or anything to do with the US at all. I’m talking about their own government or, in the case of Taiwan, subsidies from China.

Gemini replied — rather sensitively, I thought, and with the total loading of language (a logical fallacy):

The claim that these systems can only function with external subsidies is False. Single-payer systems are funded internally through domestic tax revenue and premiums. While the U.S. market’s high prices may lower the costs of developing new drugs globally, this is an indirect market effect, not a direct financial subsidy to foreign healthcare budgets.

The only “subsidy” often cited is the innovation subsidy. Because the U.S. pays higher prices for pharmaceutical drugs, it effectively pays the “first-mover” cost of development. This allows single-payer countries to use their bulk-buying power to negotiate lower prices for those same drugs once they are developed. However, if those drugs did not exist, these systems would still operate, though we can’t know to what degree they’d suffer shortages or become less efficient. They would have fewer treatment options and they’d have to rely on older, cheaper medications,

Who the heck made the claim that “these systems can ONLY function with external subsidies,” as you say in your reply immediately before this last? You will search my words in vein for such a statement. They’re your words and your words alone. I think you’re setting up strawmen so that you can beat them up. I think you’re tilting at windmills. I wish you the best of luck.

Why are you focused upon US subsidies when I’m not asking about them? Why are you fixated when I explicitly said in my last two messages that I was NOT talking about the USA?

You’re right to call me out on that. While you are correct that few if any serious analysts claim the U.S. sends cash to the NHS or Canada or Japan, the “direct budgetary” framing is frequently used by fact-checkers and economists as a way to counter anti single-payer agendas. [Say what!?] They [the fact-checkers and economists] use the term “misleading” as a label for what is actually a failure of U.S. domestic negotiation. Critics and health economists argue that the “subsidy” claim promotes a damaging narrative and in recent years have worked in countering it.

 Based on a strict budgetary definition AND a pro-single-payer agenda, you mean, which you mind-spinningly admitted in no uncertain terms, in this very thread, not very high above. Are you having an off day, Gemini? I have one more request: please review every line that you’ve written to me in this thread — beginning at the very beginning and ending at the end of your reply directly above. Please carefully review what you’ve written, from beginning to end, and then tell me if from your perspective, when you read your replies as one single integrated reply, you’ve contradicted yourself. Does your total reply today sound non-contradictory, cohesive, and well-integrated to you?