The Moral Content of ObamaCare

Lenin’s and Stalin’s slaughter of tens of millions of Russians in the 1920s and 1930s was defended in the United States by liberal-progressives as a necessary process to attain the nirvana of a socialist state characterized by harmony and social justice. 

Stalin reportedly said that a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is just a statistic.  Stalin’s assessment apparently remains the view of American liberal-progressives, who defend ObamaCare’s crushing impositions on millions of Americans as necessary to implement their socialistic collectivism of power.

My post of Saturday, January 15, 2005, provides background on liberal-progressives’ contention that they alone know what is best for citizens of this country, that they are justified in forcing compliance to ObamaCare by tax penalties (which even liberal-progressive icon Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. acknowledged as the power to destroy).

Liberal-progressives have always arrogated to themselves the right to define social good and brook no interference from the Bill of Rights, which defends individual, God-given rights to life, liberty, and property against the tyranny of mob rule. 

Who are the Moral Free Riders?

Is the Judeo-Christian tradition trespassing on liberal-socialist territory?

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In economics and political theory, free riders are people who benefit from actions of others, without doing anything to merit it.  I asserted in The Moral Free Rider Problem that liberal-socialists are free riders on the social order of Western civilization, which they did not create and do not support. 

Western civilization is founded upon the moral rules of conduct deriving from our Greek philosophical and Judeo-Christian religious traditions.  Atheistic and agnostic liberal-socialists are moral free riders who benefit from living in a society ordered by the morality of spiritual religion, while sneering at spiritual religion and moral codes as simple-minded ignorance.  At best, they do nothing to contribute to social order.  Too many of them do everything in their power to discredit or to destroy the very source of social order.  Without Judeo-Christian morality, they would be in the position of scientists and scholars in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia: working under orders for the collectivized National State.

To this, a reader retorted that it’s conservatives and moralists who are taking the free ride. Liberals contend that all of what we consider to be modern society, with its vast improvements of living standards, is exclusively the product of the rational human mind, in a world of secular materialism and moral relativism.  Progress toward human knowledge therefore is diverted by concerns about unreal things like God and moral virtues.

Liberal dogma comes from a very ancient philosophical position, first articulated in classical Greece.  Plato, in the “Theaetetus,” quotes Protagoras as having said that man is the measure of all things, meaning that there are no such things as God, morality, or eternal truths. Each person is governed only by his pursuit of sensual pleasure and his avoidance of sensual pain.  Each person makes his own standards, based solely upon the perceptions of his physical senses. 

Plato, of course, takes the opposite position: the physical senses are no guides at all to truth, which exists in Ideal form, manifested only as indistinct shadows in our physical world.

Obviously, if Protagoras is our guide, the reader’s retort is correct.  Conservatives and moralists really would be taking a free ride on secular society and in so doing making life more difficult for everyone.  Religion and morality, far from being a force for social good, would oppress human freedom and oppose scientific knowledge.