My best-loved professor once told me a story of a farmer who was trying to get ahead in life. He worked hard on his farm, and he had two mules to help him. Since he controlled the mules’ freedom and food supply, he gradually took advantage of them, without regard for their need for rest, or their general well being. He reached a point of equilibrium, where he gave the mules just enough food and rest to enable them to do the work he wrung out of them by force and blows. One day, he had hitched the mules to an overloaded wagon, to take his harvest to market, but the exhausted mules stopped on an incline, too spent to go further. Despite his whip, they would not budge, so he got out and built a fire under the mules’ bellies. That induced them to begin hauling again; they hauled the wagon just far enough that it rested above the fire, and the wagon and the farmer’s produce burned up.
It is past time for us to realize that the major obsession, regardless of its named excuse, among all the petty bureaucracies, the municipalities large and small, and the many branches of the Federal government, as well as quasi-governmental bodies, is to extend power over us in all our life activities. In considering these matters, I had recourse to Alexis de Tocqueville, whose masterpiece I had never read. He foresaw the kind of oppression with which democratic peoples are threatened:
…[A]n immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power, if, like that, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of free will from each citizen…
Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.2
Tamzin A. Rosenwasser, M.D., is board certified in internal medicine and dermatology and now practices dermatology. She serves as president of AAPS [Association of American Physcians and Surgerons - http://www.aapsonline.org/ ) Contact: juperbeatrix@aol.com.
REFERENCES 1 Dante Alighieri. Divine Comedy 2 Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America Mansfield HC,Winthrop D., ed., trans. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press; 2002:663
I don't think Tamzin Rosenwasser is using Hilery Clinton as the "main target" of her article at all, Clinton is just the current presidential candidate who has the longest history of letting it be known that she knows best how and when people should obtain health care in the US.
Please note near the end before Dr Rossenwasser's quote from Alexis de Tocqueville that she wrote:
"It is past time for us to realize that the major obsession, regardless of its named excuse, among all the petty bureaucracies, the municipalities large and small, and the many branches of the Federal government, as well as quasi-governmental bodies, is to extend power over us in all our life activities." [emphasis added]
I interpret that this most definitely would include the Department of Homeland Security. (I find myself gagging with disgust everytime I read, and worse yet have to write, the name of that government entity....) You can read my comments on the DHS to an article here at OEN at the end of March - "Only Boobs, Idiots and the Common Senseless Need Apply at TSA" (specifically my 2nd comment to that article)
I've passed this link on to Dr Rosenwasser; maybe she'll have a reply of her own to make to your comment.
**Kitty Antonik Wakfer
MoreLife for the rational - http://morelife.org Reality based tools for more life in quantity and quality Self-Sovereign Individual Project - http://selfsip.org Self-sovereignty, rational pursuit of optimal lifetime happiness, individual responsibility, social preferencing & social contracting
by
Kitty Antonik Wakfer (14 articles, 3 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 101 comments)
on Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 12:18:37 AM
America DOES NOT have "the best health care in the world." Those countries that have a single payer system have both cheaper and higher quality health care. The fact that their health care is higher quality is demonstrated by lower death rates and longer life spans.
Robert Halfhill
by
rhalfhill (3 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 270 comments)
on Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 9:47:08 AM
