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.