Congeries of cross connected concepts
Another of the standard posts about government healthcare which equates the compassion of a society with how much government funded healthcare there is. There’s always the question of why healthcare is such a dominating issue for the Left (to the extent that national healthcare seems to excuse anything else).
What’s interesting is the title of this post, “Americans still care about one another”. The presumption here, which seems a common one, is that the only way to care about other citizens is by subcontracting that caring to a huge federal bureaocracy. The view seems to be that it is impossible to care about other citizens directly, that it is only possible via government agency. This is in fact a totalitarian viewpoint, where society and government are conflated and nothing interaction between citizens is outside the scope of that government.
Moreover, it’s far from clear that a desire for government funded healthcare is really caring for fellow citizens. It strikes me as far more of a “what’s in it for me?” attitude. Rather than the work of having good relations with family and friends, or joining a private organization, one should just have the government spend someone else’s money for one’s personal benefit. That kind of thinking is the symptom of an atomized, alienated nation, not one that has a lot of mutual respect and caring among the citizens.
When Toqueville wrote of the US, one of the signal strengths he found was the proliferation of private organziations dedicated to the care and help of fellow citizens. I have always strongly agreed with that view. What we see on display here is the exact opposite, a view that such organizations are a sign of weakness and decay from which the only path of recovery is to replace such volunteers with paid government employees. This seems completely backwards to the Leftist insistence on personal activism and sacrifice, but of course Left has always really been about salving their consciences on other people’s dime.
