the latest idiocy making the rounds of the left

[writerspleasure.livejournal.com]

so in 1798, the u.s. government mandated/provided certain health benefits to sailors sailing under the u.s. flag. for some time, advance agents of the left have cackled that this shows that obalosireidcare is something that the founding fathers would have been fine with. or something.

the article: http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/01/17/congress-passes-socialized-medicine-and-mandates-health-insurance-in-1798/

here is some rational response to this line of argument.

the article is disingenuous. socialized medicine, as the names suggests, is a species of socialism. socialism is government control over the means of production and trade for the purported benefit of all, or those lower in the social hierarchy. this was not that. it was an act of mercantilism, wherein the sailors were seen as agents of getting the nation rolling as a trading power. moreover, they sailed under u.s. charter/flag. it scores no points against sarah palin or rush limbaugh - the writer just sinks to or below their level. the writer would be better off making the equally disingenuous yet au courant argument that the "general welfare" clause justifies yet more statism. (which injures the general welfare anyway. as liberty declines, the well-doing of each person is inevitably undercut. as we see in the present economic mess.)

at best, the people who signed off on this 1798 made a pragmatic concession. at worst, they contradicted the constitution - which happened back then, too.

and, by the way, are we to believe the founders lived in a state of paradisaical harmony among themselves as personalities? the constitution itself was the product of battle among them. the principles and intent were forged by agreement that began in disagreement. jefferson himself at the very least bent the consitution, as with the loui. purchase. and slavery is so obviously contradictory to the principles they announced. this does not make everything they did constitutional, else why have judicial review at all? why even have a constitution?

and all of this is so irrelevant. we're supposed to live under a government of laws and not men, and this is - as usual from the partisans of statism - is all about personalities and not principles.

one can play the mockingbird game easily: some of those same politicians agreed that slavery was okay - therefore socialized medicine is tainted from its origin. (that last quip is not so off-base, considering that welfare statism took major first strides with napoleon and bismark.)

on the founders

[writerspleasure.livejournal.com]

it doesn't matter what the founders *as personalities* would have made of obalosireidcare. they had all manner of disagreements and were not a unified ideological body. even interpreting original intent does not take their personal opinions as gospel - it's a highly limited inquiry and is based upon logical elaboration of the scope and meaning of the laws or principles in the founding documents. if we admit personal opinions and hypothesized personal reactions, we admit chaos into the base of our law. and we do not want that. (again, those opinions were not consistent. so as a body they do not provide a logical base for interpretation. they're not even all recoverable.) the issue ungar evades is that sailors had made an affirmative act in sailing under the u.s. flag on ships chartered by the u.s. - which made them to a certain extent subordinate to the u.s. government. there's no parallel at all to the requirement that free citizens purchase insurance. ungar commits a fundamental category error.

it's worth noting that there was no proposal to expand such things into medicine outside of flag vessels, or to the economy as a whole. and to the extent that the u.s. economy was left free in the 19th century, it accomplished near-miracles. (sweden and norway were champions of economic freedom in the 19th c. and grew brilliantly until they went into statism.) our present mess is the result of government meddling in things it does not understand - no one can understand an entire economy enough to manage or "plan" it - von hayek called this "the fatal conceit" - and enormous damage has been done by said conceit. with regard to medicine, the damage began with medical licensing and state medical boards (which have a vested interest in contracting supply) and with the govermment's disastrous post-ww2 decision to encourage employers to provide medical coverage through employer-paid insurance. wrong. disastrously wrong. and the coils of control have grown and distorted american medicine since. this was, of course, only one part of government economic wrong-doing: the real trouble began with the fed, their overly-low interest rates in the 1920s leading to the crash, and then FDR's gold confiscation act, devaluation of the dollar, and directly-contrary-to-campaign-platform expansion of government, deficit spending, hostility to business, etc., which lengthened the depression by some years.