Throughout the pandemic, we have heard from free thinkers, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), that government-controlled health care is an imminent danger to society. This is especially true when the central planners do not have the best interests of the public in mind.
Despite this truism, central planners like Dr. Anthony Fauci have pushed their preferred public policies, regardless of whether or not those policies have proven beneficial to the American people. For example, Fauci has relentlessly advocated for lockdowns, even though the evidence clearly indicates that draconian lockdowns do more damage than good. The same could be said for school closures and many other policy prescriptions supported by Fauci and others.
Another example would be the single-minded support ofCOVID-19 vaccines as the one and only pandemic panacea; one that breeds cronyism while ignoring reason, logic, data, and research. Instead of helping end the pandemic, it seems like our central planners are more concerned with diminishing privacy while increasing government surveillance.
The suppression of remedies for COVID-19 has evidenced itself when effective remedies are suddenly rejected or not distributed. Facts show there are other remedies to limit the severity of the virus; however, we see only the vaccine continuing to be pushed—though the efficacy of the vaccine has caused much controversy.
It is truly medical malpractice to force people who don’t need a given treatment to get that treatment and then suffer the consequences from its side effects. Socialized medicine or government mandated medical treatment is unethical and by far unconstitutional.
Thomas Sowell writes about the incentives sparked in government-run medical ventures and central planning that causes a misuse of treatments by the patients and physicians as well as time itself. Sowell calls these “quantitative consequences.” Doctors are incentivized to expand their treatment options and look beyond more simpler ways to treat a medical issue. “When patients pay for their own medical treatments, they are more apt to establish priorities, so that someone with a fractured leg is far more likely to go to a doctor than someone with a minor headache.” The implication here is that expanding government control within medicine can create a qualitative and quantitative issue even though the worldview is that health care sponsored by the government, through taxpayer dollars, is helping those in need. Moreover, central planning in the end is socialism under the guise of medical care or “slowing the spread.”
Ludwig von Mises opined about government intervention decades back through a series of lectures in Argentina. Mises does not leave room for anything government does that can lead to socialism or more control. The government is to function as protecting the market economy in that it protects “against fraud or violence from within and from outside the country.” Socialism is steeped in fraudulent activity because the point is control at all costs.
Mises makes it clear that the government has a purpose; however, interventionism moves beyond its rightful scope. Through interventionism, the government stops restricting its function to preserve order and protect; instead, we find that central planning creates new paths to surveil and control citizens—a socialist regime at its finest.
Currently we see an ever-faint glow of light within the darkness this country has witnessed in recent times; it’s important and essential that reason and truth will trump all sinister plans to erode our Constitution. This erosion, in the end, would infringe upon the beauty of true freedom.
Gina Lee
Gina is currently a graduate student at Liberty University where she is studying public policy to collaborate in the non-profit sector as well as teach at the collegiate level.
