DeathCare

"Once Buffalo enjoys the benefits of Hamilton-level health care, I wonder where Ontario will be shipping the preemies to. Costa Rica?"

Pretty funny, Steyn.

Now that we've had our laugh over it, let's think about it again. It will come to a point where they won't get shipped anywhere until after they're dead. Scooter has taken to calling the thing "DeathCare", which I will promptly steal every chance I get.

Sooner or later, the facts of medical production will have their ways. Medicine is an economic good which must be produced just like anything else, no matter anyone's protestation of "rights". It is being regulated out of production (the basic problem in Canada) right in front of your eyes. The implications will be profound for everyone's general quality and length of life, and acute for specialized cases. The dynamic flexibility of free production will not avail in cases like this, and they will eventually be allowed to discreetly -- and then not so discreetly -- die.

How soon all this becomes real-life fact depends on the alacrity and severity with which DeathCare is imposed in this country. It should be noted that every "deployment" (there's a fnord for you) necessarily demands its own successors. This is rationale for curing the ills that it inflicts. Coercive interventions, the essential nature of government, instigate demand for coercive interventions. This makes it extremely difficult or impossible to foresee every logical extension of principles in action. The degree and rate of advance into actionable tyranny by any reasonable measure are more logarithmic than linear, and all is subject to swerves of short-range political emphasis.

(e.g., in the current context: picture a maddened national campaign mounted, for various reasons in and given conditions, in order to establish Crisis Posts in every hamlet across the land, that preemies may live... which would also naturally serve the existence of the patrons of their political authority. Consider that the mindless hysteria of the herds surrounding the cannibal-pot of U.S. ethics, now, will intensify as the values in the pot become more rare -- a necessary economic consequence of diktat -- and more explicitly political. This will make these herds ever more subject to the rally-cries of anglers playing for power. "Representative democracy" is a good term for all this, although the reality of it is very far from the hearts of most of its street-level proponents. To be represented at this democracy -- this mass-grasp in which success depends solely on numbers -- is to be taken in bag as weight to be swung by a champion at the lip of the pot. It is to be used. Because mass, not ideas, is the only utility to the "representative" in all this, every possible ethical principle is open to political alliance with any other, should the need of power call for it.)

The road is being opened.

The extremities await, and they will not be very far away.

('twas John Venlet linked Steyn)