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Daily Dose of Reason -
Health Care Reform
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Written by Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D.
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Monday, 15 February 2010 00:00 |
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 There are two schools of thought about ObamaCare's fate. One is that a minority has no right to force a bill on the majority that a majority do not want. It's clear that about a third of the country wants Obama’s version of socialized medicine while two-thirds do not. According to this argument, ObamaCare is wrong because a majority is opposed to it.
The second view is that when something is right, it should be passed whether a majority agree with it, or not. This is the Obama-Pelosi view. So what if a majority of Americans are against socialized medicine, they ask. It's morally and economically right either way, they claim. Therefore, it should be passed and it WILL be passed come hell or high water. If it must be passed through the unorthodox and unprecedented method of budget reconciliation (requiring only 51 votes in the Senate), then so be it.
Neither view addresses the issue from the standpoint of individual rights. From this standpoint, no government has the right to initiate force against even one member of society. You read that right: not even one. Just as it would be morally wrong and politically unconstitutional for the Obama-Pelosi government to execute even one citizen for disagreeing with them, or jailing one citizen for protesting their policies, it's equally wrong to force even one individual to pay for health care he does not need or want, but is being forced to provide for another.
Force is the principle at stake here, and force is an individual matter.
In actual fact, with socialized medicine we are talking about a bill that will force about 90 percent of the population to have diminished or even no health care so that the 10 percent who are thought to benefit from this bill can gain coverage. It's true that the socialized medicine bill is wrong even on its own terms—the terms of collective rights rather than individual rights. But the fact remains: Individual rights and individual freedom are the sole reason for opposing it. Neither the liberal socialists nor their lightweight opponents in the Republican Party recognize or care about individual rights. America's founders did. |
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Daily Dose of Reason -
Psychology & Self-Improvement
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Written by Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D.
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Sunday, 14 February 2010 00:00 |
 Negative self-talk consists of the belief that reality is basically unfriendly to you personally, while it’s basically friendly to others. But reality doesn’t have a will and consciousness of its own. Reality doesn’t arbitrarily and unjustly pick out some people to attain happiness and others to be denied it. People who believe in supernaturalism DO believe this, and they project it on to “God.” People who believe in social determinism (socialists, liberals, psychotherapists) DO believe this and they project it on to society, or some equivalent force. But if you reject all that, and put reason above falsehoods, then you say, “Reality is neither for me, nor against me."
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Daily Dose of Reason -
Society & Culture
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Written by Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D.
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Saturday, 13 February 2010 00:00 |
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 William Shatner has a great new talk show called "Raw Nerve." Unlike Oprah, Shatner is an interviewer, not a flatterer (although Orpah only flatters those she likes). Recently, Shatner interviewed the talk show host Jerry Springer. Jerry Springer is that rarest of liberals--a conscientious and articulate one. I think he's wrong about essentially everything political, but because he's conceptual and articulate, unlike most liberals nowadays, at least you can see his chain of reasoning and identify his errors. In the interview (and I'm quoting from memory here), Springer said he supports socialism because "life is 99 percent about luck." He cites his own experience as the son of Holocaust survivors and, later, the wealthy beneficiary of "a silly talk show" as evidence that most success is about luck.
Now think about this for a minute. Springer is saying that he has nothing to do with his own success. He's implying that he finds his own television show disgusting (as many of us do). Instead of blaming this on the poor taste of willfully ignorant people, and at least giving himself credit for finding a way to make a profit during a comparatively depraved time in cultural history, he blames his self-loathing on the nature of reality itself. Reality, he insists, is all about luck. "Luck" is the secular liberal's term for "God." I have no more respect for a liberal than I do a religious person screaming platitudes about God's will and other imagined nonsense. Based on Springer's logic, it's not fair that some have more than others since nobody in any way earned what they have, or what they produced. It follows, at least to Springer, that government must redistribute everything equally since nobody owns it anyway. He calls it "progressivism," as all Obamaists do, rather than socialism, but we all know it's socialism. Springer is more candid than most liberal politicians in that he openly admits he does not believe there's such a thing as productive effort and honestly earned success--not for himself, and not for others. |
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Daily Dose of Reason -
Psychology & Self-Improvement
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Written by Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D.
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Friday, 12 February 2010 00:00 |
 To love someone, you must love them as they are. You have to honestly and sincerely love them as they are. If you honestly can’t, then you can’t force it or fake it. Appeals to duty or rationalization (“Well, I married him, so I should love him”) won’t work either, no matter how hard or long they’re tried. One, two, ten, twenty or fifty years will not change the situation. You either love the person as he is—his full personality, the “whole package”—or you don’t. Love is very absolute in that sense. |
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