Allowing Colleges to Make Money Off the Ignorent is Wrong, and other inanities.

David Veksler at Truth, Justice and the American Way reports on a Boston Globe news article in which Boston Mayor Thomas Menino wants to ban retail stores from opening low cost health clinics in them. The Mayor's argument is that such clinics will not provide a continuum of quality health care to its customers.

Of course the Mayor thinks he knows better than poor people what is good for them and plans, like the primitive savages of the past, to force his idea of the good on the rest of society. Our Constitution was written precisely to prevent men like Menino from violating the rights of citizens by forcing them to comply with his whims, and they are whims. If one ever needed proof that altruistic government controls are not about concern for others, this is a prime example. As I wrote here about the same clinics reported in Detroit's papers:

But, as the main headline reveals "Quick, low-cost outlets prompt medical turf war", this is about political control.

And so it is. Mr. Menino may have strong feelings about wanting to do good by poor people. So what? Feelings mean nothing in this world, not his or mine or anyone else's. What matters are facts. And when Mr. Menino decides to forcibly prevent poor people from getting a more affordable medical care in these clinics, he is violating their rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". He is also violating the same rights of of the businessmen to provide that care. They have a Constitutional right to do so.

But the Meninos of the world are like the distraught recipient of unrequited love who kills the object of his affection on the grounds that if he can't have her then no one can. If Bostonians can't have the kind of health care Menino wants them to have, too bad they're not going to get any other. Again, our Constitution was written to prevent this sort of thing. The right to 'liberty and pursuit of happiness' means that every person has the right to determine what kind of health care he wants and can afford without any interference from government.

Ayn Rand once said (from memory) that man's capacity for evasion was almost limitless. Mr. Menino is evading the fact that poor people have rights to think for themselves. What the Mayor also evades is that it is not up to him to decide what kind of health care anyone gets and that our Constitution was written to protect citizens from government, not themselves. But the biggest evasion is his equating mutual trade for mutual benefit in the marketplace, which is what buying and selling health care is,--with the activities of robbers, theives and other hustlers when he said:

"Limited service medical clinics run by merchants in for-profit corporations will seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene. Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong."

The absolute asininity of that statement was nailed by David when he pointed out that "Allowing restaurants to make money off hungry people is wrong." I would add "Allowing newspapers to make money off the uninformed is wrong" or "Mayors, like Menino, who collect paychecks off the backs of their poorest citizens are wrong." He evades the fact that health care is a commodity and service just like any other. If one wants to make affordable health care available to the masses, then put in on the free market like all other plentiful commodities. Keep the government out of it.

You know, back in the 60s and 70s we had hoards of mindless hippies and emotionally oriented nit wits running around our university campuses holding sit-ins, lay-ins, love-ins and assorted other brainless feel-ins. Well, these twits have since moved into and control most of our universities. Every year they graduate classfuls of unthinking clones who now have spread into all parts of the culture. I think America will survive these zombies but there will be some convulsions along the way. I hope the people of Boston wake up to the kind of Marxist, power luster they have for a mayor and decide not to return him to office. But I'm not optimistic, Boston is after all, in Massachusetts.


Update: corrected typo in headline.