Sunday, January 25, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: A 'right' to someone else's labor?

In response to a recent Review-Journal editorial ridiculing the notion of a "universal" government takeover of the medical industry, asking why we don't go all the way and introduce monopoly government food distribution as well, the socialists have been out parading in their full May Day regalia.

One letter writer opined that, "For essential products, the market dynamics of free competition do not work. ... Once it is accepted that, in extremis, health care is a basic right, market dynamics fly out the window. ... "

The next day, another local collectivist even embraced the idea we had set forth on this page as a joke, a parody: that being a complete government takeover of the agriculture and grocery industries, with the federals providing us all with "free" food.

"Giving away food isn't a bad idea," the second fledgling Keynesian wrote. "I remember a study years ago that concluded giving away free food made economic sense -- it was cheaper than storing the food, administering food stamps and similar programs, and dolling out" (we changed it to "doling," for publication) "farm subsidies."

Well, the lady is free to buy and give away all the food she likes, of course. She doesn't have to wait for anyone to approve her "program." But in fact there is no "free food," and never can be. I doubt the lady really believes all this "free food" will come off the Magic Beanstalks.

Rather, what I suspect she means is that men with guns and sweat stains under the armpits of their uniforms should continue to rassle away something approaching half your earnings and mine under threat of bankruptcy and prison, the better to act on her "philanthropic" instincts.

For what does it mean to impose some system other than "the free market"? The "free market" describes a circumstance in which willing buyers and sellers are free to exchange their goods and services at mutually agreed upon prices -- or not to sell if they don't like what they're offered.

The only way to stop people from engaging in this inconvenient behavior is to use coercion -- occasionally, you will actually have to jail or shoot someone to prove you're serious -- to require doctors or farmers or grocers or whomever to deliver their services when and where and at such a price as you, the new Commissar of Food and Health Care Fairness, may decree.

The first letter-writer uses the example of a woman about to go into labor. "No one will condone, for instance, letting a woman in labor pains deliver her baby unassisted because she does not have the means to pay for obstetrical care," he moos.

This is the oldest trick of the socialists -- using our own admirable instinct for interpersonal micro-compassion and generosity in order to disguise what they really mean to do, which is neither compassionate nor generous.

Of course helping a woman in labor is admirable -- assuming one knows how. But we esteem and admire the fellow who does this for only one reason -- because he remains perfectly free to not do so. It can't be in any way "admirable" to do something you're forced to do at gunpoint. Nor is it an admirable act of "charity" to hold a gun to the doctor's head and force him to "donate" his services, without paying him his fee. (And make no mistake, that's what all this "I have a right to your services" stuff is about -- paying less than the fee at which the doctor would gladly sell you his services without coercion.)

What does it mean, precisely, to have a "right" to someone else's services? How does this differ from slavery, barred by the 13th Amendment in 1866?

If I have a "right" to the services of a doctor whose rates I don't want to pay, how is that "right" to be enforced, in the end, but by a uniformed government thug holding a gun to his head and requiring him to come and deliver my wife's child, thereupon assuring him, "In 90 days or so you'll receive a check for whatever the government decides this service was worth, and you should count yourself lucky to get it, comrade."

If by becoming a doctor, a gifted student knew he or she was volunteering to be dragooned into a government labor battalion, to be sent where the government willed, ordered to treat whomsoever the government wished, and to be granted only such compensation (ever shrinking, since the "demand" for free care expands infinitely beyond resources) as the government deemed fitting, why would a bright boy or girl become a doctor in the first place?

So long as these lunatic clowns have not yet discovered a "right to electrical engineering," why wouldn't the bright students instead become electrical engineers, more or less still free to work where they wanted, and to negotiate however high a salary the market would bear?

This is not a merely theoretical formulation. American doctors today have little more freedom to set their own prices and withhold their services at will, once they "volunteer" to accept Medicare and Medicaid patients. And now the collectivists cheerfully tell us they want to make that system "universal."

Will doctors have any right to "opt out" of accepting patients under our "universal single-payer" collectivized and government-run medical monopoly? Of course they will -- but only by putting down their stethoscopes, retiring and opening a live bait store down by the lake.

In the Soviet Union this really came to pass. Next time: Boris Yeltsin's heart surgery.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega." His Web site is www.privacyalert.us.