Matt Damon’s Search for the Truth

At times, you have to feel sorry for Hollywood advocates of Big Government socialist programs. They become so confused, when their own ideological premises turn against them.

Consider the following dilemma of celebrity and actor Matt Damon.

Matt Damon recently sat down with The Guardian to promote his sci-fi social justice thriller Elysium. The article notes that Damon ‘has been a passionate public supporter of Barack Obama and is confident that his healthcare reforms will rescue America from the iniquities Elysium dramatises.’

But at the time of the interview, Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations had just emerged and Damon experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance as he tried to absorb the fact that his beloved liberal president was spying on American citizens and perhaps infringing on civil liberties. ‘It just seems to have taken this weird, Orwellian turn. It’s surreal. I don’t know where we are now.’ Damon is probably a bit edgy about the NSA sniffing around his phone records. (Paula Bolyard, writing at pjmedia.com 8/9/13)

According to the article, Damon goes on to psychologize that Obama doesn’t feel like a man, because he never served in the military, and so he’s overcompensating by pushing Americans around through spying on them.

Damon’s premise is wrong. His premise is that Obama’s infringement on civil liberties is inconsistent with Obamacare. Obamacare is itself an infringement on individual liberty.

Obamacare nationalizes American health care. It literally takes over the physical well-being of Americans. Is it any wonder that a President who takes over the business of health would take over the business of the mind, as well?

Granted, the trend towards full nationalization of health care was in progress for decades, starting primarily with Medicare. Once Medicare passed in the 1960s, the stage was set for disruption and distortion in the private health care market, particularly private health insurance.

The existence of Medicare also justified, in principle, the implementation of government directives for controlling medical care—for the elderly. ‘He who pays the bills sets the terms.’ It was just a matter of time before the government eventually extended this directive to everyone, and Obama finally cashed in on that inevitability.

Nationalization of health care did not begin with Obama, but it was consolidated under his watch. Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which decides the health care ‘priorities’ for millions of Americans for generations to come—Soviet-style—is the most graphic implementation of this principle. You’ll become very familiar with the IPAB as it sets collective goals for health care spending (translation: rationing) in the years to come. And if you think medical goals set by the government will have nothing to do with preferential politics, I have some federally protected swampland to sell you. Rest assured that Matt Damon’s and Barack Obama’s families will always have access to the best and brightest doctors, and won’t have to worry about the rationing.

Given Obama’s advocacy of the idea that our health care—and by implication, our bodies—belong to the government, why is it any surprise to find government snooping into the modern equivalent of our mail and closets—i.e., computers and phone records?

Aside from Damon’s confusion on the subject, the silence of pro-Obama Hollywood celebrities on the NSA spying scandal has not been surprising. They want dictatorship, even if they won’t call it that. And they want dictatorship if it’s by one of their guys. They want dictatorship if it’s implemented in the name of ‘caring,’ by someone who signs off on gay marriage and abortion rights. Consequently, they support Obamacare for its dictatorship over the body, while likewise tolerating Obama’s extra-Constitutional violations of boundaries into our thoughts, ideas and private emotions (i.e., computers and phone conversations). It all makes sense, in its own twisted way.

Poor Matt Damon suffers from cognitive dissonance. He apparently assumes that Obamacare means liberation and freedom. Like a lot of wrong-headed people, he believes that doctors and insurance companies who make a profit at curing people’s illnesses are greedy and immoral for doing so. (Why he doesn’t apply the same attitude towards money-making in movies and television is the more intriguing psychological question.)

To Damon, it’s an inconsistency for Obama to champion socialized medicine, on the one side, and then act like a Communist or Nazi dictator waiting in the wings, on the other. As a result, he resorts to the cheapest form of armchair psychologizing about Obama’s motives.

But if you see Obamacare for what it is—nationalization of one of the most important endeavors of human activity—then it’s not a leap at all to his NSA and IRS policies of spying and harassing private citizens.

In other words: He who will control our medical care—because we allow him—will gladly control everything else. The Constitution and individual rights be damned.

 

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