Posted on 04/23/2012 2:14:05 PM PDT by smoothsailing
April 23, 2012
The complexity of a proposed solution can suggest great intellect, but if the problem is summing one and one, only a mid-century German philosopher would suggest a sufficiently complex solution could get us to three. And so goes Obamacare, and with it much of the Left’s ideology.
The upcoming Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare cannot bury Leftism in a moment’s time; perhaps it will not even precipitate Barack Obama’s defeat. But do not ignore the potential: the expected plainspoken defeat of the Mandate — and the continuing current dialogue prior to the decision — constitutes the most significant national lesson in a century regarding the mathematical certainty of Natural Law.
A Court ruling against Obamacare would necessarily present the tenets of human rights as simply as arithmetic, which the tenets are: you have as many and as few rights as you can ever have. No mastermind or team of committed policymakers can define a new one, in 2700 pages or a billion. It cannot work, and further, a bill containing such an attempt unavoidably defines the bill’s advocates as limiters of freedom. Dictators or thieves.
Understandably, this reality — as much of it as each of the bill’s advocates has been able to stomach — presents for a disturbing session of logical reasoning for the left-leaning; a sweaty, horrific bleat from the Vietnamese jungle, if you will. Immediately following a day of the Court proceedings, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin proclaimed the Obama administration’s appearance a “train wreck.” Toobin appeared stunned, and likely was, considering his prior prediction of an 8-1 victory for Obamacare. Meanwhile, those aware of the definition of Rights — an immutable, inalienable definition — responded as Rush Limbaugh did: pleasant surprise, tempered with indignation that a middle school civics quiz just advanced to the Supreme Court.
Again: you cannot invent a right. The government attempted to do this, and found they could not do so without also violating a right.
Why? Because a “right” to a good or service necessitates a violation of the rights of the provider of that good or service or of whomever is chosen to be stuck with the bill, and further, as the citizen receiving the proposed new “right” is also subject to the violation in different time and circumstance, any new “right” is by definition a decrease in liberty for everyone, and might I add “duh.”
Elsewhere in the field of reality lies a perfect analogy for the Left’s century of affronts to Natural Law:
In all cases in which work is produced by the agency of heat, a quantity of heat is consumed which is proportional to the work done; and conversely, by the expenditure of an equal quantity of work an equal quantity of heat is produced.
This sentence, the First Law of Thermodynamics, represents the end of all inquiries into the creation of a perpetual motion generator. The First Law cannot tell you what form a proposed perpetual motion generator will take; it is, however, unfailingly predictive of the experiment’s conclusion in failure. Of course, that didn’t halt centuries of “mathematical leftists” from attempting to design and construct perpetual motion machines. The builders predating the First Law pursued knowledge in the best tradition of humanity; the builders following the Law belonged to one of three categories: they either refused to accept the Law; were ignorant of its discovery; or were charlatans who knew a great number of suckers resided in the other two categories.
“A right to health care” offers equivalent parallels to the First Law of Thermodynamics and its three categories of opposition: the deniers, the ignorants, and the common schmucks.
Unfortunately for the suddenly uncomfortable, the bigger problem for the left-leaning does not halt beyond Obamacare: can you name many Leftist proposals that do not either violate Natural Law or disdainfully tread on its boundaries? Any? How much of Leftist thought is, and should have been, dead on arrival? How many landmark bills, slogans, teachings, entire executive branch departments?
For the intellectually honest Leftist, today the pupils must widen, lest you mislead yourself and waste another day or life. The Constitution forbids Leftism. Further, Leftists cannot amend the sections of the Constitution forbidding Leftism, as those parts are based on incontrovertible arithmetic — they simply are, even if no law had been established. Choose to try anyway? Then you choose to spend your finite, sacred time on Earth forcefully restricting your neighbor’s, an act none can ever possess the right to do, and an act which the only possible just government — one founded in Natural Law — must condemn.
The left has spent over a century pursuing tyranny, mostly without self-awareness. Now a shrinking portion of the nation must, if their conscience demands it, confront the truth of a stricken Mandate: I am guilty, not them?
The horror.
David Steinberg is PJ Media's New York Editor.
A right is something that you can DO, which nobody else is allowed to interfere with, or penalize you for having done it. My right to free speech means that I may state my opinions and thoughts (with limitations regarding libelous false statements). It does not, however, convey any obligation that anybody listen, or that they provide me with facilities to communicate to a wide audience.
An entitlement is something that you own, or which another is under obligation to furnish you with. Thus one may say that the government has given the poor an entitlement to food and housing.
I agree that it's true in the case of a substantial portion of the public, but the author, in my view, clearly sees the difference.
I believe the author got it right, he just wrote it in a style that is confusing.
For the intellectually honest Leftist . . . .
I THINK THAT SPECIES HAS BEEN EXTINCT FOR MANY YEARS NOW.
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