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 more people and places around the world than all other countries combined. Many of these billions go into funding the healthcare systems of many other countries across the world — 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 — 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 talk is pure tactic: a psycho-tactic specifically, which also goes by another name: propaganda.

The purpose of this 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 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 specific reason.

Don’t be duped. Don’t be bullied.

I’m about to show you 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 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 this push, America does not yet have full single-payer healthcare — and it’s a very good thing for the entire world that America doesn’t.

One of innumerable 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 — the healthcare industries are perpetually out of money. They all operate in the red. All of them without a single exception. They’re all in deep debt, and this is a simple fact that can be verified easily. 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.

America alone sends the money which prop these healthcare systems up, but it’s never enough– not even close. It could never be enough. Why?

Because in removing from every patient any and all financial responsibility for the medical treatment they’ve received creates instantaneously an unlimited demand. The lines of people only grow. The more money pumped into the healthcare system, the longer grow the lines of people.

There’s no way to stop the runaway debt except by means of one thing: abolish the practice of forcing people to pay for the healthcare of everyone, and abolish the entire concept of a third-party payer — no matter who that third-party is — which keeps us shielded from the true cost of healthcare, creating an endless inflationary process thereby.

In other words, do away with intermediaries and restore the doctor patient relationship to its proper state: a voluntary, mutually beneficial transaction between two free human-beings. Do that and watch healthcare quality increase, while simultaneously seeing the cost of healthcare plummet  — exactly as has happened across all sectors of cosmetic healthcare, which is generally not covered by health insurance (so-called — i.e. it’s not actual insurance, which is something you purchase in the unlikely event of a catastrophe, but pre-paid healthcare).

“It’s okay that all single-payer systems are in deeper and deeper debt,” people will reply, “because healthcare should not 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? And does that same law of nature also apply to you and the work you do?

The real answer, of course, is  “No, none and by no natural law or edict or premise.”

The reason this is the answer to those questions is that things cost money to produce — to make and manufacture and transport and fulfill and maintain and do — and even more fundamentally, 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 these homes. This material likewise does not come free. It costs money to produce and so costs money to have — 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 and 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 with 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 and immediate and constant 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?” And why isn’t shelter-care for all likewise “a basic human right”? What makes healthcare a basic human right but not food-care and shelter-care? Or are they? If they are, who pays the people who provide it? 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 the carpenters, therefore, are by right forced to labor away every day to feed and house the rest of us, who weren’t quite so foolish in our choice of occupations to choose indentured servitude? 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. They therefore cost money to purchase. These things, many of them, also require specialized knowledge to learn, and so require training and practice of an intensive nature to safely implement.

Money is merely a medium — a medium of exchange. It’s a facilitator. It is nothing more and nothing less.

Money drastically simplifies life for a conceptual species.

None of which touches upon the fact that for 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 over after the politicians and bureaucrats have gotten paid since their work is for unexplained reasons for profit?

Yes, actually, that’s precisely the answer you’ll receive.

This is why cost-controls are 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, and 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 full-time work, in industries where for some reason getting paid for your time and labor and expertise aren’t looked down upon or 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 — healthcare — people should by definition not be able to prosper by means of their 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, and so they must work two jobs (at least). It’s precisely what you’re told when you’re told that healthcare shouldn’t be for profit.

This is one of the many absurdities that emerge when societies come to regard healthcare as “a basic human right”:

The specialists who practice it are perforce slaves to the rest of us.

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 eye 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 is a fact that in all countries with universal healthcare, staff and medical personnel shortages are so widespread that people in all such systems routinely do wait in line to die. Usually, it’s the elderly. Which is one of the reasons you never hear about it.

And which 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 and destruction 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: 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 world of actual practice, as against the faux world of tendentious ideology, where reality doesn’t matter and where academics and so-called intellectuals are most at home, “universal healthcare” cannot avoid the constant need of control-measures — which in turn necessitates the need for more of them, which in turn necessitates the need for more of them and so on, which in the end requires someone (usually the bad ol’ United States America) to bail them out in order to prevent complete economic catastrophe. It’s one of the many consequence that can’t be avoided when any industry operates at a perpetual loss. All cost-control measures can only create higher costs, because all cost-control measures do what?

That’s right. All cost-control measures create shortages, which 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 — by a gigantic bureau of planners, for whom getting paid isn’t for some unspecified reason “bourgeois and vulgar,” who must therefore be exorbitantly paid, these bloated, economically illiterate bureaucrats, for the non-work they do — which is why in all such systems of universal 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 then spend money and seek out new ideas, to discover and create and innovate and because of which leads the world by leaps and bounds in medical technologies, innovations, and medicines — 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 — the entire world. This is why our costs in America for the same medications 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 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 bankrupted every such system all across the globe. 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 adopt our system that you’ve been saving year in and year out — the same bankrupted healthcare systems of the developed world, which you alone propped up, 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 worth 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 common and most deceptive: by introducing into an industry previously free new control measures that create the initial problems, which politicians then try to solve by implementing deeper controls, which exacerbate the very problems the government sought to alleviate and which are the direct result and creation of the initial controls, which then causes politicians and their voters and the army of lobby groups to call for still deeper controls, which create still deeper problems — and on and on, endlessly — and, meanwhile, “laissez-faire” and the “free-market” are scapegoated and entirely blamed for the endlessly mushrooming problems the control measure created in the first place and then exacerbated, so that deeper controls can be implemented. When in actual fact, laissez-faire hasn’t existed for decades, which turns into a century, in that particular industry, even though al the while, it’s only laissez-faire principles (i.e. extirpating all government and its army of bureaucrats from the industry) that can permanently 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?

I’m not either. And neither are most people.

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 were left to suffer and die, and there were not such suffering people being kicked out of clinics and hospitals and left in the gutters.

In fact, it’s well-known that right now in America every ER accepts every patient who comes through the doors, and this is by law. But you know what almost nobody knows? That this very policy was the in place for the majority of hospitals across America long before laws made it mandatory (thereby driving up visits and therefore costs in astronomical fashion [see my automobile insurance example below]). This policy was adopted freely and voluntarily and under no threat of force or coercion. 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 or fundraising for the less advantaged will work to your advantage as a business? Why is it, then, that dental care isn’t in the crisis everyone imagines healthcare would be were the state relegated to its proper role — i.e. completely out? Why aren’t there people everywhere bleeding out the mouth and pounding on the doors of dental offices, clamoring to get in, yet are kept out by greedy, heartless gatekeepers? Or eye clinics whose parking lots and sidewalks teeming with myopic people who can’t afford eye tests and glasses?

Finally, 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, which I’ve posted near the end of this article: healthcare considered non-essential, like Lasik eye-correction or other cosmetic surgeries and procedures, which most insurance companies, including government insurance, won’t cover, in every such instance of which 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:

 

 

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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 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 been socialized, 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 that car-car gets more expensive since it entails, among many countless other things, that the government must hire thousands and thousands and thousands of administrators to administrate this new program. This means that all these thousands must get paid because in this sort of bureaucratic work getting pay — i.e. for-profit — is inexplicably not vulgar or bourgeois but absolutely non-negotiable, as 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 forced to pay (whether they use it or not, whether they want it or not), is not even close to enough, 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 for 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 interlinked. This means that pre-paid car-care costs go up higher still — astronomically — 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. This means more and more people sign up for prepaid car-care since it’s gotten astronomically more expensive to pay these skyrocketing costs out-of-pocket. 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, only get paid by means of complicated reimbursement mechanisms. This means that costs explode astronomically yet again, adding to the original cost of prepaid car-care 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 its 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, and this includes but isn’t limited to getting the mechanics and all providers of car-care paid (i.e. the oil workers and truck drivers and petroleum refinery workers and 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 no longer care at all about what it costs but only demand that our rights here be respected, and we get the prepaid car-care we deserve). This means that demand increases higher still. This means supply is curtailed more yet. This means cost-controls are state-implemented across all sectors of the car-care industry, including private insurers, who also now must employ complicated reimbursement mechanisms which pay all the truck drivers and mechanics and oil refinery worker and innumerable others who work in the industry. This means that more administrators are needed to process the cost-controls and all that cost-controls entail, including the complicated reimbursement mechanisms which siphon huge amounts of money that, 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. This means that as costs rise, employees make less. This means that many gas stations and auto-shops will no longer accept government-sponsored car-care “insurance” and some even stop accepting any and all forms of it, private and state-sponsored, which isn’t actually insurance at all — i.e. something you buy to be protectedd in the unlikely event of an emergency — but prepaid car-care, and they stop accepting it  because they’re unable to get reimbursed properly. 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 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 — i.e restoring the proper relationship between the customer who wants or requires something for her car and the provider who can fulfill that service — becomes absolutely essential or bankruptcy will result. This means that the more complex any society becomes, the more that laissez-faire — and not bureaucracy — is needed. This means it’s not the other way around.

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.