A while back I pointed out a great piece in Reason Magazine about the increasing use of the public health bludgeon to regulate and constrain individual liberties. That article wasn’t available online at the time, but now you can read it here. I don’t care if you’re a right-wing theocrat hater or a left-wing free-everything-for-everyone hippy moonbat, the one thing we can probably all agree on is that we hate the idea of government telling us what to do w/ our own health (note I say ‘our own’ health; we all know there are plenty of authoritarian fuckwits who are happy to have the government tell others what to do, but we universally hate being forced to do things we don’t want to do already).

It’s bad enough a huge swath of natural and synthetic compounds have been declared ‘narcotics’ and thus enemy number one in the Global War on Drugs. It sucks quite a bit that smoking is regulated almost to death. Just imagine the kind of lifestyle regulation to come out of a government that pays for all healthcare, and (in a few years) will be desperately trying to keep healthcare expenditures from eating the economy alive.

Maybe it pisses you off when governments try to ban abortion. Presumably you’d be just as pissed off (if not more) if governments mandated it (think: Red China). What about limits on alcohol, outright ban on tobacco products, restrictions on fat content in foods, mandatory medical procedures, required exercise regimens, etc? Think I’m a hyperbolic libertarian crank? Read the article, then read this, pointed out to me by my father.

In a nutshell, John ‘Not a Woman or Black’ Edwards, like most (all?) of the Democratic field for President, has a top-down single-payer socialized healthcare scheme, under which all children will receive healthcare, lollipops, and a kitten thanks to the ‘rich’ now paying their ‘fair share’ of confiscatory taxes.

Sounds great, I know, but what if you don’t want to go to the doctor this year? Maybe you feel fine, you’re busy, you want to save now-rationed medical resources for those who truly need it. You don’t have to belong to the right-wing neocon Zionist cabal to prefer to avoid doctors whenever possible. Tough shit, according to Edwards. You have to go. It’s for your own good, you see:

If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK

“But John,” you think, “I’m in my 20s, healthy, active, I don’t smoke (though not because you told me not to, you authoritarian pig), and I only drink to excess when I watch the presidential debates. Surely I don’t need to be checked out…”

Apparently, the answer is “BOLLOX”. It’s not clear how this would be enforced. Certainly the withholding of absolute-human-right healthcare isn’t an option, since it’s, you know, a human right. Maybe a new force of JBTs, the Community Healthcare Enforcement Agency, using federal sanctions and automatic weapons to keep the community healthy, whether it likes it or not. Perhaps additional tax penalties to reflect your additional burden on the healthcare system. Heck, asset forfeiture can’t be taken off the table either. But whatever it is, be assured it’s bad and you don’t want it.

This, boys and girls, is yet another example of why strong central governments suck. It’s not the good things they use their power for that makes them bad; it’s the inevitable bad things they do. Humanity has found only one way to prevent abuse of power, and that is lack of power. Maybe someday in the distant future we’ll figure out how to hack our own nature such that a President of the World office can be created that won’t necessarily result in millions dead and billions enslaved and oppressed, but that day has not come yet, nor will be it be here by 2008.

We’ll have socialized medicine eventually, and when we do I’ll link back to this post (possibly from a prison for healthcare felons?) and say ‘I told you so!’.