I recently finished the second book in Allen Steele\u2019s Coyote series, 2004\u2019s \u201cCoyote Rising.\u201d<\/p>\n
We\u2019re eight pages from the end of this 382-page science fiction novel. The outnumbered space colonists have managed to defeat and ship home the invading earth army that tried to impose communism on the planet Coyote. Guerrilla leader-turned-president Carlos Montero walks the streets during the fireworks celebration of the first \u201cFirst Landing Day\u201d since the successful revolution, musing to himself:<\/p>\n
\u201cHow far they\u2019d come. Clean streets, no more trash along the sides of the road. … A long row of wind turbines just outside Shuttlefield providing electrical power to everyone. A new infirmary, with free medical care guaranteed for all. A schoolhouse was going up soon. …\u201d<\/p>\n
Is it unfair for me to pick on Mr. Steele? His \u201cCoyote\u201d series is diverting, reasonably action packed, filled with interesting characters. Presumably economic and political rigor are not high on the list of what makes for popular science fiction, these days.<\/p>\n
So I was willing to overlook Mr. Steele\u2019s pathetic if trendy hysteria over earth becoming virtually uninhabitable a few decades from now due to \u201cglobal warming,\u201d as well as the clever notion that a Dixie-based fascist dictatorship will soon arise in America under an outfit called the \u201cLiberty Party\u201d which will give its space ships names like \u201cthe Jesse Helms\u201d and \u201cThe Newt Gingrich,\u201d from an author whose characters repeatedly \u201cshove a cartridge\u201d into their rifles and then race outside to cut down enemy soldiers with three-shot bursts.<\/p>\n
(In other words, Mr. Steele uses the word \u201ccartridge\u201d when he means \u201cmagazine,\u201d at least three times, while often telegraphing that minor characters are bad people because they choose to carry guns … on a planet crawling with predatory six-foot flightless birds that can and will rip off your head in seconds. Mr. Steele decided to write a book featuring lots of gunplay without asking anyone what you call that removable box-shaped thing that carries those little cylinders of brass and lead.)<\/p>\n
Author Steele does have a partial excuse. Mr. Steele lives in Massachusetts, where Gov. Mitt Romney signed a \u201cpermanent\u201d ban on semi-automatic so-called \u201cassault weapons\u201d on July 1, 2004 (the year the book in question was published) saying \u201cDeadly assault weapons have no place in Massachusetts. These guns are not made for recreation or self-defense. They are instruments of destruction for the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like redcoats? I believe General Gage told the residents of Lexington and Concord pretty much the same thing about arms of military usefulness in 1775. And neither the 2nd nor the Fourteenth Amendment mentions \u201crecreation,\u201d the operative phrase being \u201cthe security of a free state.\u201d The only thing Mr. Romney failed to do to really get his point across during that signing ceremony was to unzip his fly and pee on the Capitol statue of the Minuteman.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t the first time. When Romney ran the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah residents who had jumped through every hoop to acquire a concealed-weapon permit found they were not allowed carry their self-defense weapons at Mitt\u2019s big United Nations Winter Games, because that might \u201cfrighten the foreigners\u201d … despite the terrorist murders at the 1972 Munich games which were a direct result of the suicidal victim disarmament policies in place there.<\/p>\n
But back to Allen Steele\u2019s \u201cCoyote Rising.\u201d<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s also leave aside the windmills — one of the most inefficient means of power generation known to man, often using up all the power they can generate just to re-orient and de-ice their own hawk-slicing blades, which if operated without quick-starting natural-gas back-up cause endless blackouts whenever the wind stops blowing (and that\u2019s with sophisticated materials technology — Mr. Steele imagines his windmills made by primitive off-world settlers entirely of WOOD.)<\/p>\n
But I draw the line when an author who just spent an entire book portraying the evils of slave-driving collectivism, and a victory over same by wily and courageous freedom fighters, ends up by telling me the victorious freedom-fighters have just set up \u201ca new infirmary, with free medical care guaranteed for all.\u201d<\/p>\n
How would \u201cfree medical care\u201d work, exactly? You have a condition requiring visits to the doctor on a weekly basis. Over the period of a few weeks, you notice every time you go to see the doc for some follow-up medicine, she\u2019s growing weaker, more frail. Finally, when you go back the third or fourth time, you find her lying cold and still in her office. Since the medical care was \u201cfree,\u201d no one was paying her and she died of starvation.<\/p>\n
Is that what anyone means when they refer to \u201cfree medical care guaranteed for all\u201d? Of course not. Nor would a frontier planet have any large organized charity or single philanthropist capable of funding such an enterprise.<\/p>\n
No, Mr. Steele\u2019s victorious \u201cfreedom-fighter\u201d must, inevitably, mean that everyone within reach would be TAXED to fund this \u201cfree\u201d medical care, probably with those who work hardest and save up the most being taxed most heavily.<\/p>\n
There will always be some treatments and medicines so costly and hard to acquire that they can\u2019t be provided to all who want them. The best solution is rationing by price. Consider a couple who are tempted to sweep the supermarket shelves of bottled water at 99 cents a gallon, because they heard a storm was coming and they got to the store first. Ten minutes later a couple arrive with a baby who will die without formula, for which they need two or three gallons of pure water. Sorry; sold out.<\/p>\n
But if a \u201cgreedy\u201d store-keeper had jacked up his price to $20 a gallon, the first pair of discretionary buyers would probably have settled for the four gallons they\u2019re likely to really need, leaving plenty for the couple who would happily pay the higher price to save their infant.<\/p>\n
Rationing by price delivers rare commodities to those who value them most highly, while teaching the young that there are proper rewards for those who work hard, prioritize, save for a rainy day.<\/p>\n
Socialized medicine is socialism, collectivism, communism. It drives the best people out of the profession, makes fools of those who work hard and set aside for the future, substituting government rationing by \u201cneed,\u201d which leads inevitably to mob scenes, which can only be thinned out only by death panels. Schemes like Romneycare and Obamacare just take us closer to the Soviet model by small steps. That\u2019s what they\u2019re DESIGNED to do. \u201cI happen to be a proponent of single-payer universal health care coverage,\u201d Obama told the AFL-CIO in June, 2003.<\/p>\n
If the Republicans aim to repeal Obamacare because it\u2019s socialist, why have they never even tried to repeal Medicare and Medicaid, the huge steps towards total \u201cone payer\u201d socialism which have caused most of the problems that Romneycard\/Obamacare pretends to solve?<\/p>\n
Because they\u2019re the two interchangeable branches of the big-government Republicrat Party.<\/p>\n
And the huge highway signs as you drive into Massachusetts still say \u201cHave a Gun, Go To Jail.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently finished the second book in Allen Steele\u2019s Coyote series, 2004\u2019s \u201cCoyote Rising.\u201d We\u2019re eight pages from the end of this 382-page science fiction novel. The outnumbered space colonists have managed to defeat and ship home the invading earth army that tried to impose communism on the planet Coyote. Guerrilla leader-turned-president Carlos Montero walks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[42,8,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2012-election","category-2nd-amendment","category-medicine"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sWqFl-981","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=981"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":983,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions\/983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}