A Daily Kos diary was posted attacking the baby boomers and their dietary shortcomings. The argument was made that they should not be allowed unlimited health care because they don't deserve it - they should have eaten better.
This is typical Right wing nuttery. But what surprised me was the response.
Many arguments accepted the premise that health care is earned and responded by proposing that the baby boomers have indeed earned their health care because they are paying for it - with social security etc.
What I didn't see was one argument that addressed the real issue - that access to health care is not something you earn, it is a right.
As decent people of good conscience we must reject the Right wing frame of health care as a privilege or something you must earn. What kind of society turns away the sick because they don't "deserve" health care? A sick society.
This is the disease of the free market ideology - the idea that everyone, working in their own selfish interests, creates an equilibrium which benefits society as a whole.
What this ideology creates is a society of sociopaths. We must restore the health care debate to the realm of common decency.
And we must reject the fallacy that Adam Smith's invisible hand can replace our basic obligation to our fellow man.
Humans, on the most instinctual level, have always understood that we depend on each other to survive. Society itself is a product of this understanding - why we have always ran in tribes instead of going solo.
The ideology of the free market, the view of society as the aggregation of individual self interests, and its insidious byproduct, "Market Democracy", are just inventions designed to allow the corporate model to operate without conscience or regard to social responsibility.
It has been embraced and propagated by capitalist forces who see democratic institutions and government regulation as enemies to profit. The health care system is only one egregious manifestation of this sociopathic ideology. There are many others from environmental abuse to economic injustice.
What the Left has allowed in the US is nothing less than the defeat of the idea of society as a social compact. We have allowed Right wing forces to slowly redefine our most basic values and subvert the instrument of Social Democracy.
Even entertaining the sociopathic notion that people should be denied access to health care because, by some criteria, they don't deserve it, is evidence of how far we have fallen.
The instrument of Social Democracy, the way we as a society make collective decisions on how to benefit society whole, is democratic government.
But the Left, and Democrats specifically, have largely accepted the Right's fallacy that government is inherently flawed. We have allowed the subversion of the most powerful agency of social justice in the history of man - the US federal government.
This could not have happened at a worse time. The problems facing our country, indeed our world, from the health care crisis to global warming, require not some fictitious Invisible Hand, but the wise governance of the democratic process.
The first Americans fought and died for the same government that Ronald Reagan, the presidential candidate, called "the problem." We must fight for our government again. We must fight for the idea that a free, thinking people can come together and work for not only the interests of the individual, but the interests of society.
