Image via WikipediaTo be fair, Nancy Pelosi did later add that maybe we need to look into the funding of the Mosque would be good too. If you have not seen Peter Johnson Jr.'s commentary on the Mosque issue I recommend it. He does the best job of expressing where I stand on this issue.
That said, I'd like to share my reaction to Alan Grayson's remark. When I heard him say this I wondered how he reconciled the "Complete Lives System" proposed by Ezekeil Emanuel. The above link takes you to a paper written by him and some of his colleagues: "Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions." Among the eight simple principles for allocation are classified into four categories according to their core ethical values. The one that concerns me is the "promoting and rewarding social usefulness." I do not mean to say that I don't recognize that there are and will be times when there are shortages. I just want to be assured that the individuals who are making the decisions have a strong moral base in the sanctity of life. Have and will hard decisions need to be made? Yes. I just want us to strive to make those decisions on certain basic values.
I believe that our system of government was established as a Constitutional Republic in order to ensure that we continued to make decisions based on our core principles. We are abandoning the system of checks and balances and that is not conducive to using those core principles to make tough decisions. This, coupled with statements made by the Fabian Socialist, George Bernard Shaw, urges us to take a closer look. In this video GBS recommends that people come before a sort of "panel" and be asked to "justify their existence." If they are not doing their share or perhaps a little more then he ultimately suggests some sort of humane gas to end that existence.
That sounds scary, but I do not intend to use it as a "scare tactic." If you entrust your well-being to someone whom you have elected to represent you and those you love I believe you need to know their character and on what basis they make their decisions. You don't have to agree with everything, but it's good to know when times get tough that the person has a core set of values that doesn't change. I'd like to also add, for your consideration, a recent article that came to my attention via Hot Tea Radio. The comment was titled: "Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo, which cancer drug has to go?" (or something like that :-) The link takes you to an article that includes the phrase "death panels." I know that phrase has been labeled a scare tactic, rhetoric, and/or propaganda, but I urge you to take a closer look at what people mean when they say that. If my medical options have to change for whatever reason, I believe the decision-making should remain as close to my family, my doctors and myself as possible. I feel that the further away it gets, the more like a "death panel" it becomes. And it won't necessarily look like a "panel." It will involve the slow, steady, and dispersed establishment of various restrictions and regulations that you might not even know about until it hits close to home.
This all leads me back to something I read in The Road to Serfdom. Hayak writes on page 6:
"...the fatal flaw of socialist planning (is that) it "presupposes a much more complete agreement on the relative importance of the different ends than actually exists, and that, in consequence, in order to be able to plan, the planning authority must impose upon the people that detailed code of values which is lacking....and why, even democratic planning, if it were to be successfully carried out, eventually requires the authorities to use a variety of means from propaganda to coercion to implement the plan."
My belief in our system of government does not reflect an opposition to change. It reflects the belief that the farther removed the decision-maker from those who are impacted by those decisions the more danger there is in abandoning those principles and values that are so important. The checks and balances are there for a very good reason: our government and country consists of flawed human beings.
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