Pay the Piper – And Let Only the Piper Determine What to Play!
30th November 2015
Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, has some harsh words about feeders at the government trough.
For the head of Planned Parenthood to self-righteously complain about the “politicization” of women’s health care as her organization receives tens of millions of dollars annually in government subsidies – money forcibly extracted by government from taxpayers and then given to Planned Parenthood – is an astonishing feat of hypocrisy. No one who is ethically mature demands money from Smith and simultaneously complains when Smith expresses opinions about how that money is spent.
People – such as this head of Planned Parenthood – who use politics to seize other people’s money and who then are surprised and angry when such money comes along with attached political strings are inconceivably naive (at best). They are akin to the person who orders a kosher ham sandwich – or, alternatively, they are akin to the would-be pet owner who wants a dog that flies and meows rather than one that walks and barks. Such people, in short, are detached from reality.
Actually, that’s not all there is to it. As long as ‘health care’ involves procedures that a large number of people, in conformance with traditional morality, regard as out-and-out murder, then ‘health care’ is going to be politicized, because what constitutes murder, under the law, is inevitably a political question.
The same problem would arise where there a large population of Muslims in the U.S. who made it a practice to behead apostates from Islam. They don’t regard that as murder, but justice, based on the law they know. The fact that non-Muslims consider it murder is of absolutely no interest to them, except as an annoyance.