Sometime before Thanksgiving, the Congress may finish work on a nifty new prescription-drug benefit for the Gimme Generation – the Medicare “why should I be responsible for paying for my own prescription drugs” crowd.
Let’s set aside all of the sad and pathetic stories, most of which are untrue, about wizened citizens eating bugs and cat food so they can afford their prescription drugs. Cat food is certainly no more disgusting than fois gras, and if Angelina Jolie can eat roaches and like it, then so can Grandma, especially if I’m picking up the check.
Let’s think for a moment about what Congress – with the eager and willing participation of President Bush – is doing here. These politicians are going to assign the rights to yet another portion of your life to some pensioner in Peoria who can afford a cell phone, a golf-club membership, an annual trip to Las Vegas to play the slots and a new Buick – but who can’t afford his psoriasis prescription.
So, how many days out of the standard 365 that you get every year are you going to owe to pay for these drugs? It occurs to me that the list of liens on my life is starting to get a bit lengthy. The government has decreed that some portion of my daily allotment of 1,440 minutes is owed to every woman who makes the decision to have a baby out of wedlock that she can’t afford to raise.
I’ve also lost a few of those minutes to every person who has discovered their ability to use the police power of government to supplement their rent, pad their income, cover their medical bills and cover their retirement expenses. Now, it will be a few more minutes to cover the cost of prescription pills for the wealthiest segment of our society, the exalted and oh-so-demanding elderly.
Pardon me for being so selfish, but I think I’ve just about reached the point where I’m not all that anxious to give up any more of these daily minutes. I can’t make any more of them, you see, and every one that government takes from me is gone forever. The government, thus far, hasn’t been willing to set an absolute limit on the number of my minutes it can steal, so it looks like its going to be up to me.
Currently I’m reading Jim Powell’s excellent book “The Triumph of Liberty.” At the very beginning of this book, Powell writes of a higher law – a higher law that exists above the level of government. Powell writes: “During the English Revolution, a number of thinkers developed [higher law] into the modern doctrine that each individual owns himself or herself and has the inalienable right to life, liberty and property – and the right to rebel against rulers who deny those rights.”
In the same section, Powell quotes Josiah Warren, a 19th-century inventor and writer: “Liberty is the sovereignty of the individual.”
Consider those two quotes and suddenly you understand why the left has been engaged in a war against individuality since before the time of Lenin. You can see why Ted Kennedy bragged of a “war against individualism” while praising the team accomplishment of the New England Patriots, and why Nikita Khrushchev told the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 that “… we must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.” Kennedy and Khrushchev had something in common: the desire to seize a portion of the life of each and every individual over which they exercised control for what they wanted you to believe was the good of the collective … the common good.
Could you, dear reader, cite an example of one single elderly person who has died in this country because they were denied prescription drugs because they couldn’t pay for them? Virtually every drug company out there has lifeline programs whereby drugs are provided free of charge for those in need and absent resources. Virtually every city of any size at all in this country has private charitable concerns that will step up to help when drug costs are an issue for anyone, let alone wizened citizens.
The problem here is that politicians can neither claim credit for nor gain power through private charitable acts. To enhance political power, they must find more ways to give those whose votes they desire additional liens on the lives of the masses. The dumb masses don’t realize their individual sovereignty is being assaulted, and the recipients of the largess willingly show their gratitude at the polls.
In the upcoming political season, I would like to see just one free-spending politician respond candidly to the question, “Senator, what do you believe to be the absolute maximum number of minutes of any person’s life the government should seize during any 24-hour period?
And for you, this question: Who owns you? And if your answer is “me,” when are you going to challenge those who would answer “the government”?
