On Friday July 5, for about 90 minutes, I debated with \u201cthe Son of Man\u201d\u2014the leader of the New Nation of Islam\u2014on his Detroit radio and television broadcasts.\u00a0 The issue was the Affordable Health Care Act, i.e. ObamaCare.<\/p>\n
Never before having heard of \u201cthe Son of Man,\u201d and knowing only that he considers himself the successor of Elijah Muhammad\u2014the deceased Nation of Islam head responsible for both inspiring and, eventually, murdering Malcolm X\u2014and that he calls himself \u201cthe Son of Man,\u201d I was reluctant to accept his invitation. \u00a0Yet given the graciousness with which he extended it, his assurances that I would be treated with respect and courtesy and, last but not least, his willingness to give a prospective opponent as much air time as needed to express an alternative point of view, I found it hard to refuse.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The experience was an interesting one.\u00a0 To my host\u2019s credit, he proved himself to be a man of his word.\u00a0 Not only did he give me as much time as I needed, he gave me more than enough time.\u00a0 In fact, he actually wanted for me to stay on for the full two-and-a-half hours with him.\u00a0 And not once did he try to shout over me.\u00a0 On the one occasion when one of his congregants jumped on the line to express his displeasure with my position\u2014it happened so quickly, I didn\u2019t hear a word that this malcontent mumbled\u2014\u201cthe Son of Man\u201d wasted not a second in smacking him down.\u00a0 He excoriated his disciple for \u201cdisrespecting\u201d his guest and cautioned him in no uncertain terms against attempting a move like that again.<\/p>\n
All of this aside, it became painfully clear that my thoughtful host wasn\u2019t so thoughtful on this issue of ObamaCare.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t that he was necessarily any less thoughtful\u2014or any more thoughtless\u2014than anyone else who favors this monstrosity.\u00a0 He was, to put it charitably, confused.\u00a0 <\/em>And he was confused for the same reasons that all proponents of ObamaCare are confused.\u00a0 Gently, but firmly, I drew the attention of \u201cthe Son of Man\u201d to the error of his ways.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n First, I remarked, the plethora of cost-benefit analyses of ObamaCare that both its friends and foes supply are, in the final resort, of no relevance.\u00a0 <\/em>Utilitarian considerations of the kind that these studies invoke are not germane to the ultimate question: Does it amplify or diminish liberty?\u00a0<\/p>\n Even if ObamaCare promises to solve every material challenge that we face, even if it will drastically reduce health care costs for all, it should be resoundingly rejected if it violates our liberty.\u00a0\u00a0 But to determine whether this is the case, we need to be as clear as possible as to what liberty\u2014our <\/em>liberty\u2014is.<\/p>\n The liberty that Americans have traditionally prized is not some abstraction.\u00a0 It is a concrete manner of living to which earlier generations of Americans had become habituated.\u00a0 This way of life is both cause and effect of the decentralization of authority and power of which our institutional arrangements have historically consisted.\u00a0<\/p>\n Thus, ObamaCare is indeed a violation of liberty, for it requires and assigns an allocation of authority and power to the federal government that is unprecedented in both size and scope.<\/p>\n This, I believe, is the decisive point against ObamaCare.\u00a0 Yet \u201cthe Son of Man\u201d essentially ignored it and, instead, insisted upon citing all of the good\u2014all of the substantive satisfactions\u2014that ObamaCare will allegedly yield.\u00a0 So, I changed tactics by availing myself of a particularly powerful\u2014actually, an unanswerable\u2014argument from analogy: if the federal government is justified in demanding of all citizens that they purchase medical insurance for their own good and that of their fellows, I said, then the federal government would be no less justified in demanding of all citizens that they purchase memberships to fitness clubs for the very same reasons.\u00a0<\/p>\n My interlocutor replied that this would be \u201cunreasonable.\u201d\u00a0 This, though, is no response at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n What is \u201creasonable\u201d or not,\u201d I informed him, is for the most part a function of habit.\u00a0 The federal government under which we live todayAmerica\u2019s founders would have found wildly \u201cunreasonable.\u201d\u00a0 There isn\u2019t a single state in the Union that would have remotely conceived of ratifying a written constitution that envisioned a national government like that under which we currently labor. \u00a0<\/p>\n When \u201cthe Son of Man\u201d noted that only those people \u201cat the bottom\u201d who don\u2019t already have heath insurance will be burdened by ObamCare\u2019s \u201cindividual mandate,\u201d I tried to hammer home the point that even if this was true\u2014and it is not\u2014it would still be utterly immaterial.\u00a0 Many of us belong to gyms and regularly exercise.\u00a0 That is, we <\/em>would not be burdened by the government\u2019s efforts to mandate that every citizen\u2014or any citizen\u2014purchase a gym membership.\u00a0 Still, there is scarcely a soul who wouldn\u2019t be outraged over any such attempt.<\/p>\n And the outrage over such a law would stem, not from any consideration regarding who would or would not be most put out by it, but from the fact that it would be a blunt affront to liberty.<\/p>\n ObamaCare sparks\u2014or should spark\u2014outrage for the same reason.<\/p>\n Thirdly, \u201cthe Son of Man\u201d asserted that ObamaCare is necessary if we are to care properly for our fellow men and women. To put it another way, those of us who oppose ObamaCare are negligent of those in need. \u00a0<\/p>\n My answer to this line was straightforward.\u00a0<\/p>\n The peoples of the Earth, I replied, have never encountered such compassion and charity as they witness on display in the Christian world.\u00a0 Yet these moral excellences, as well as all such excellences, are distinguished on account of the fact that they are freely <\/em>chosen. There is no virtue that redounds to the credit of the citizen whose government conscripts his resources into the service of others.\u00a0 Moreover, more good is done\u2014more people actually helped\u2014when individuals are at liberty to give to those whose circumstances they know best.<\/p>\n Fourth, \u201cthe Son of Man\u201d made an appeal to the requirements of patriotism. <\/em>The patriot, he argued, is devoted to his government.\u00a0<\/p>\n I wasted no time in correcting him on this: the patriot is devoted, most definitely not <\/em>to the federal government, I declared, but to his country.\u00a0 Certainly he wishes to preserve the integrity of his government; there is no question regarding his loyalty <\/em>to it. But it is to the preservation of the historical identity of his country <\/em>that he devotes his energies first and foremost.<\/p>\n Finally, discourse partner for the evening not infrequently appropriated the imagery of a benevolent parent when referencing the federal government.\u00a0 He confusedly oscillated between this image and that of an umpire.\u00a0<\/p>\n I brought to his attention the stone cold fact that these two images were radically incompatible.\u00a0 I further informed him that the idea of government-as-parent is just as incompatible with the idea of citizen as self-governing agent.\u00a0 If the government is like a parent, then the citizen is like a child.\u00a0 But the Founders envisaged a government that was more like an umpire, a government that is the custodian of rules that all citizens were obligated to observe, but rules that simply stated how <\/em>they were to conduct themselves\u2014not what <\/em>they were to do.<\/p>\n I left this radio show being that much more convinced that ObamaCare is an unmitigated disaster for liberty.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Friday July 5, for about 90 minutes, I debated with \u201cthe Son of Man\u201d\u2014the leader of the New Nation of Islam\u2014on his Detroit radio and television broadcasts.\u00a0 The issue was the Affordable Health Care Act, i.e. ObamaCare. Never before having heard of \u201cthe Son of Man,\u201d and knowing only that he considers himself the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n