Before I go further, let me address the issue of a very sick child in need of our help first as it is of primary importance to those in our community who believe in helping others among us who are less fortunate or who are in need for a shoulder or a helping hand.

Reminder from: BillericaWatchers Yahoo! Group

Title: Nate’s Night to benefit the Terrasi family

Date: Saturday March 20, 2010
Time: 6:15 pm – 9:15 pm
Next reminder: The next reminder for this event will be sent in 1 day, 12 hours, 4 minutes.
Location: Billerica Lodge of Elks, 14 Webb Brook Road, Billerica
Notes: Nate’s Night to benefit the Terrasi family

WHEN Saturday, March 20, 6 p.m.
WHERE Billerica Lodge of Elks, 14 Webb Brook Road, Billerica

TICKETS $20, $50 families. Available at the door or in advance.

To purchase tickets, or for more information, contact Robert Monagle at rmonagle@comcast.net or Joe Keane at keane_joseph_j@yahoo.com or join “Nate’s Night” on Facebook.

DONATIONS can be brought to the event or also be made by writing a check out to Nathan Terrasi and sent to: Nathan D. Terrasi Benefit, P.O. Box 990752, Boston, MA 02199

I received this e-mail, below, via the informative and somewhat politically effective Billerica Watcher’s Group. As stated above, it is primarily intended to to confirm a donation to obtain medical care for a very sick child who will have long term treatment needs. However, there is also a second element that also screams out to be addressed, if for no other reason than it seems to have come from a narrowly informed mind on the politics of individual liberty and capitalism vs central planning and a nationalized economy.

To: BillericaWatchers@yahoogroups.com
From:
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 13:28:31 -0700
Subject: Re: [BillericaWatchers] Nate’s Night to benefit the Terrasi family, 3/20/2010, 6:15 pm

I will send a donation to this benefit and hope that with the passage of health care reform, we will soon see the day when a family trying to care for a seriously ill child will not need to worry about the costs of medical care.

With all the opportunities the opposition party had to do something about health care, I wonder why they did NOTHING!

Below, I try to provide a cursory overview as to why his question reflects more poorly on him and his understanding of the issue than it does on his target. However, this is not a simple subject and although the question may be simple minded, it requires a complex answer. While I am not a republican, I am against the health care bill because of it’s use of unjust force to push though a mandate that is in direct opposition to the will of the people.

I am against this bill because the tactics used to make it a law are not in compliance with the Constitution and the rule of law. Speaker Pelosi and President Obama have stated that they don’t care about the means (the rules), so long as the end objective (passage of this unjust law) is achieved. If the President of the United States, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Majority Leader of the Senate and the majority of their underlings don’t care about following established rules and the Constitution, then what message are they sending to citizens when it come to the need for the common man to take the rule of law seriously? So, with that disclaimer, here is my response (I will only post a link to this article on the BWG website to avoid burdening people with unsolicited information there):

Don’t hold your breath on this unjust bill making a difference should it become law, sir,

My wife has a coworker who has pancreatic cancer and who has been out of work for just over a year. He’s has had a couple of surgeries and has been told that he would be an excellent candidate for a new drug. However, he can’t get that drug because he can’t afford it and his insurer is denying payment because of the location of his cancer. Guess which insurer he is covered by. Big hint: it’s not a private company. You do realize that Medicare rejects about the same number of claims as any other insurance, don’t you?

If you believe that an already overburdened system with physicians ready to leave in droves won’t increase the incidences of denials of claims and raise the amount of rationing of care when 30,000,000 new people enter the system; then, I feel sorry for you. Disaster is always difficult to deal with, but even more so when you are unprepared and the first step in fighting back is to get your head out of the sand.

As to the opposition party, they did do something this time around; they tried to stop a plan that will ultimately be found un-Constitutional. Health care is NOT a right. It is not mentioned and cannot be found anywhere in our nation’s founding documents. Do you suppose that illness and injury didn’t plague the founder’s generation? Do you suppose that there may have been many people who could not afford a physician’s care back then and who were dependent upon the charity of others?

I have no problem with health care being codified as a right if the procedure in doing so is done correctly. To do this correctly is to do so with the consent of the governed in a manner prescribed by the United States Constitution in the form of a Constitutional Amendment. The government spent a lot of time and a lot of money to get an Amendment on the ballot for Equal Rights for Women.

The Equal Rights Amendment wasn’t needed then; nor is it needed today. The Declaration of Independence begins with the sentence, “All men are created equal…” Nothing more needs to be said other than the government has been derelict in its duty to govern by the rule of law in every instance where it failed to support and enforce this “inalienable right” be it from God of from Nature.

Writing a law is only half the battle in securing a nation that governs by the “rule of law”. Enforcement of each law without prejudice and with blind impartiality is the other half. Slavery should have ended by the very same means; however, in those days, our black brothers and sisters were not classified as men, but were instead accepted legally as property.

Two centuries after our founding, we recognize that view of black folk as absurd and work harder than we ever have to ensure those who still think along those lines are punished whenever their actions match their thoughts. President Lincoln recognized this condition and need to recognize slaves as people protected under the law over a hundred years ago when he wrote the emancipation proclamation. That document reflected an honorable and right thinking mind.

However, if Lincoln deemed all that his emancipation proclamation stated to be true, why do you suppose that he did not order the Federal government to ensure that freed slaves were afforded the same protections as any other man “endowed by his creator with certain inalienable rights, among them the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? Do you suppose that there may have been some political considerations that had to be observed in order to keep the freshly reunited nation whole? Do you suppose that not everyone in the North saw ending slavery with the same set of eyes? And, finally, do you think that all pre-war southerner’s saw slavery as a good and essential foundation for the building of a primarily agrarian economy?

Change takes time and a lot of subtle manipulation before most people are willing to accept it. It has taken nearly a century since FDR to reach the stage where a candidate for President of the United States could state outright that we were “weeks away from fundamentally transforming America”. What do you suppose “fundamentally transforming America” means? Have you picked up any sort of clue since President Obama has taken office with an overwhelming cadre of Democrats in both houses?

Democracy is not a guarantee against a dictatorship. Liberty, as stated by Lord Acton, “is not a means to a higher political end; it is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for the security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.”

Democracy, on the other hand, is essentially a tool or device used to safeguard peace and individual liberty. It is the means to an end. Many “democracies” have offered far less freedom than some autocratic governments over the centuries. As F. A. Hayek states. “it is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogeneous and doctrinaire majority, democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship.” With this last part, consider Fascist Germany or Italy, World War II Japan, or the period of legalized slavery in the United States and every other nation that engaged in enslaving people as one of the “spoils of war” or of conquest. Even native America tribes took and held competing tribesmen as slaves.

In a planned society, e.g. one that is centrally planned and where entire industries are nationalized; the prospect for great political mischief and autocracy is, by necessity, increased. When such conditions exist, the most effective means for universal compliance is coercion and the enforcement of ideals by various means without the consent of the governed. These are the trademark tools of all dictatorships. Consider that while democracy is no true guarantor of individual liberty; it can and often does exist under totalitarian regimes. Consider forcing legislation that usurps 17% of a nations economy from the private sector to control by a central government without the consent of the governed. When more than 70% of the population is against such a move is it not representative democracy that has also been stolen, and is it not also individual liberty that is lost.

Again, referring back to F. A. Hayek: “A true dictatorship of the proletariat (the workers), even if democratic in form, if it undertook centrally to direct the economic system, would probably destroy personal freedom as completely as any autocracy has ever done.” Look at Cuba, Soviet Russia and other non-Western governments that came to power at the end of the gun carried by the workers who later became enslaved after surrendering their guns to those in power. Those in power, in turn, used guns to centralize the economy, industry and politics to keep power, even from those who helped to secure it – the common man and their fellow comrades.

Were life only so simple as a single simple minded statement.

By the way, in case you hadn’t noticed, if the health care bill is codified; the federal government will have also succeeded in nationalizing education. Stay tuned for more information on that topic once the dust settles.