it the most moral.  It was the country of individualism and personal
independence.

Today, however, we are seeing the rise of principled *immorality* in
this country.  We are seeing a total abandonment by the intellectuals
and the politicians of the moral principles on which the U.S. was
founded.  We are seeing the complete destruction of the concept of
rights.  The original American idea has been virtually wiped out,
ignored as if it had never existed.  The rule now is for politicians to
ignore and violate men's actual rights, while arguing about a whole list
of rights never dreamed of in this country's founding documents --
rights which require no earning, no effort, no action at all on the part
of the recipient.

You are entitled to something, the politicians say, simply because it
exists and you want or need it -- period.  You are entitled to be given
it by the government.  Where does the government get it from?  What does
the government have to do to private citizens -- to their individual
rights -- to their *real* rights -- in order to carry out the promise of
showering free services on the people?

The answers are obvious.  The newfangled rights wipe out real rights
-- and turn the people who actually create the goods and services
involved into servants of the state.  The Russians tried this exact
system for many decades.  Unfortunately, we have not learned from their
experience.  Yet the meaning of socialism (this is the right name for
Clinton's medical plan) is clearly evident in any field at all -- you
don't need to think of health care as a special case; it is just as
apparent if the government were to proclaim a universal right to food,
or to a vacation, or to a haircut.  I mean: a right in the new sense:
not that you are free to earn these things by your own effort and trade,
but that you have a moral claim to be given these things free of charge,
with no action on your part, simply as handouts from a benevolent
government.

How would these alleged new rights be fulfilled?  Take the simplest
case: you are born with a moral right to hair care, let us say, provided
by a loving government free of charge to all who want or need it.  What
would happen under such a moral theory?

Haircuts are free, like the air we breathe, so some people show up
every day for an expensive new styling, the government pays out more and
more, barbers revel in their huge new incomes, and the profession starts
to grow ravenously, bald men start to come in droves for free hair
implantations, a school of fancy, specialized eyebrow pluckers develops
-- it's all free, the government pays.  The dishonest barbers are having
a field day, of course -- but so are the honest ones; they are working
and spending like mad, trying to give every customer his heart's
desire, which is a millionaire's worth of special hair care and services
-- the government starts to scream, the budget is out of control.
Suddenly directives erupt:  we must limit the number of barbers, we must
limit the time spent on haircuts, we must limit the permissible type of
hair styles; bureaucrats begin to split hairs about how many hairs a
barber should be allowed to split.  A new computerized office of records
filled with inspectors and red tape shoots up; some barbers, it seems,
are still getting too rich, they must be getting more than their fair
share of the national hair, so barbers have to start applying for
Certificates of Need in order to buy razors, while peer review boards
are established to assess every stylist's work, both the dishonest and
the overly honest alike, to make sure that no one is too bad or too good
or too busy or too unbusy.  Etc.  In the end, there are lines of
wretched customers waiting for their chance to be routinely scalped by
bored, hog-tied haircutters some of whom remember dreamily the old days
when somehow everything was so much better.

Do you think the situation would be improved by having hair-care
cooperatives organized by the government? -- having them engage in
managed competition, managed by the government, in order to buy haircut
insurance from companies controlled by the government?

If this is what would happen under government-managed hair care, what
else can possibly happen -- it is already starting to happen -- under
the idea of *health* care as a right?  Health care in the modern world
is a complex, scientific, technological service.  How can anybody be
born with a right to such a thing?

Under the American system you have a right to health care if you can
pay for it, i.e., if you can earn it by your own action and effort.  But
nobody has the right to the services of any professional individual or

--- FleetStreet 1.19+