Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

If you happen to be old enough, did you notice, back in the days when the Soviet Union was breaking into pieces and the Berlin Wall was coming down, just how rapidly all of the world’s joyous shouting about freedom was smudged by the treacherous left-wing media into maundering about democracy?

They are not at all the same, you know. Freedom versus democracy. Nobody tells anybody what to do. Everybody tells everybody else what to do. George Washington was chosen by an elite oligarchy. Adolf Hitler was elected by the people And over the past twenty-eight years (Bush Sr. through Obama), brain-slammed by public education, Americans have voted, again and again, to put Western Civilization out of its misery. The real significance of the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s is that they saw the collapse of the world’s largest, most oppressive, and deadliest dictatorship.

A generation earlier, in the 1970s, the urgent moral and military necessity to get the hell out of Vietnam was masturbated into a “phased withdrawal” which consumed another smoke- and flame-filled decade and tens of thousands of lives on both sides, proving once and for all that "justice delayed is justice denied". Civil Rights were like that, too: “Whah we cain’t give these heah people what they have a raght to, all at once, raght now!”

Now that we have managed (just barely) to alter, however slightly, the death-course that those who believe they own us have had in mind for us for the last century, this kind of linguistic shell-game is becoming increasingly common. Its latest incarnation is manifest in the way that scrubbing the alien presence of socialized medicine out of our country has been magically transformed into “repealnreplace”. As Lucy Kropotkin would have put it, “Frogsnot!”. What America needs, for its physical and economic well-being, is not some old-fangled bureaucratic medical mess, some surrealistic mixture of fake healthcare and the real thing, but a completely private “system” (actually no system at all) regulated only by those laws and customs that govern the manufacture of rubber bands. Or flashlights. Or nail-files.

We are being conned, once again, by the same old fat-assed, power- drunken establishment that is no more interested in listening to what the people really want than they were before the election that should have changed their minds about everything. And why should they be? There’s gold in them thar ills! A health market based on privacy and freedom, as it should be, offers nothing in terms of money and power to politicians, bureaucrats, and corporatists. It is the dreaded “solved problem” that they fear and loathe so much. The most personal, the most individual, the most intimate relationship in the world short of marriage—that of a doctor and a patient—must be twisted around and tortured, at all costs in their view, into some sort of mass-produced, regimented, one-size- fits-all ant-dance.

Stick with me here for a minute: libertarians know that government can only behave the way that we all try to teach our children not to. It is an institution (speaking charitably) that is invariably and inescapably rooted in extortion and theft. It is the ultimate nasty-tempered bully. Like the military (and for many of the same reasons), it can only break things and kill people. The goal of any rational human being should be to limit its effect, and it makes sense that medicine (perhaps second only to education) is the place to start.

Encouraged by corrupt politicians and corrupter media, many “grassroots” individuals are gathering together to holler that the healthcare ball is rolling along too slowly. On the contrary, it is rolling far too fast. In the short time that remains to us, we must address Rand Paul (the poor man’s Ron Paul) and others like him directly.

We must stand on his toes.

We must grab him by the lapels.

We must scream up his nostrils:

“TOTAL SEPARATION OF MEDICINE AND STATE!!!”