laissez fairy

Try to imagine, if you a will, another news story you’ve read in the last few years that integrates so many far-flung global issues as this brief item published last week in Canada’s Globe and Mail.  Honestly, you got a pet issue?  Whatever it is, step right up!  This is an issue buffet: “Universal health care,” gay rights, religious freedom, separation of church and state, the coming Islamification of most Western countries, freedom of speech, socialism.  Really, it’s got it all.

“Andrea Markowski says she sensed the doctor’s unease from the first waiting-room handshake.  She thought she’d been upfront about her background when she asked for a meet and greet with Dr. Karmeila Elias at Winnipeg’s Lakewood Medical Centre.  It was pretty simple. She and her same-sex partner Ginette had just arrived from Yellowknife. They were looking for a good family doctor. Dr. Elias was accepting new patients. In a country where finding a GP can take months of agony, the match appeared to be a no-brainer.”

Months of agony to find a GP? Even in the most rural and isolated ares of the U.S. all it takes is a regional phone book to find dozens of GP’s who can see you within a few days.  I consistently find that those Americans who (ignorantly) claim that Canada and Britain’s socialized medical systems are “just as good” as our semi-private system DO NOT EVER ACTUALLY READ Canadian or British news stories.  If you do actually pay attention to the Canadian or British media, you know that medical horror stories and bizarre statements like “where finding a GP can take months of agony” are pretty commonplace.

But back to the drama in Manitoba:

“But judging by the confused look Ms. Markowski she says she saw on Dr. Elias’s face, nobody had mentioned their sexual orientation ahead of time.  “When I introduced myself and introduced Ginette as my partner, it took [the doctor] a little while to put it together. When she did, she looked really uncomfortable.”

Uncomfortable, eh?  Well, I’ve had a couple instances in my life where I mentioned to a doctor that I’m gay, and they seemed a bit uncomfortable with it.  I responded in the way that most reasonable individuals would respond, the way free individuals in a free society respond to such things: I exercised my right of non-association.  I simply never went back to those doctors.  They were free to judge me; I was free to no longer pay for their services.  That’s how freedom works.

But things aren’t so simple north of the border.  First, in Canada the state has an absolute monopoly on medicine, which leads to incredible scarcity.   (Months of agony to find a GP!) Unlike in Britian, where you are at least free to visit private physicians if you can afford it, in Canada the practice of medicine by an individual not employed by the state is illegal.  (As a side note, this has resulted in a huge “black market” for medical services in Canada; sometimes the renegade physicians do it for profit; sometimes the motive is purely humanitarian, and you find brave physicians under threat of prosecution secretly helping suffering individuals.)

I mean, honestly, only in Canada do you read bizarre shit like this:

“The Quebec government says it’s committed to a strong public health care system, but it’s opening the door to some private sector involvement. Patients will be allowed [WTF? Allowed?] to use private providers for their health care in the province if they wait longer than six months for knee replacement, hip replacement or cataract surgery. . . Life threatening situations such as heart surgery or cancer care would still only be available under the public system.”

How sweet of the Quebec politicians, right? No.  This little bit of freedom was a grudging attempt to comply with a decision by the nation’s highest court:

“The policy document was developed in response to a Supreme Court of Canada ruling last June that said the province’s ban on private health care violated the rights of patients who were forced to wait for treatment.”

In a society where the state has created this level of scarcity of medical services, I can no longer exercise my right of non-association with regard to medicine.  I might well have to choose between a homophobic physician and no medicine at all, unless the Quebec government is so gracious as to “allow” me to seek private treatment.

Second, by virtue of the government monopoly on medicine, any physician suddenly becomes a “state actor.”  So any discrimination laws that apply to the state apply to every individual physician.  A physician has a religious or moral qualm about gays?  Or abortion?  Very quickly, the physicians lose all religious and moral freedom; in the case of abortion, for instance, the physician may even be forced to perform or recommend actions which they personally and honestly believe to be murder.  This should be a major conondrum for those who advocate freedom of thought and association but socialization of industry: Once we’re all employees of the government, then any action we might take (e.g. refusing to perform an abortion, refusing to treat a white supremacist, etc.) becomes a “state action,” and freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of speech all dissapear under the grand tide of “equality.”  Consider what happened to Dr. Elias back in Winnipeg:

“It was the beginning of an alleged incident that has prompted a human-rights complaint and raised thorny questions about how the Canadian medical system acculturates foreign-trained doctors.”

For those of you unfamiliar with Canada’s ghastly human-rights tribunals and the innocent lives they’ve ruined, the complaint against Dr. Elias for her statement of her religious beliefs could easily result in the end of her career or even expulsion from the country - and all because she was a “state actor” who accidentally said the wrong thing to a lesbian couple.  Her personal convictions magically became a crime because she is employed by the state.  But, at the same time, it’s hard to criticize her lesbian accusers; thanks to the scarcity of physicians, they probably didn’t have the realistic choice of another physician.  And, besides, a good chunk of their income is being seized each year by the Canadian government to pay Dr. Elias’ salary.  Are you starting to see how complicated things get for freedom when industries are socialized and we all become “state actors”?

“There are an estimated 7,000 international medical graduates, or IMGs, in Canada. Most go through some form of cultural sensitivity training before earning a Canadian licence, but if Ms. Markowski’s experience is in any way accurate, the primer falls short.  She says her encounter with Dr. Elias - who trained in Egypt and moved to Canada five years ago - turned for the worse when the trio retreated to an office. “We started running through my medical history and [the doctor] could not look at me. She was flustered. She couldn’t focus. I knew something was up, so I asked her, ‘Is our sexual orientation an issue for you in terms of your ability to treat us?’” Ms. Markowski alleges Dr. Elias soon confirmed her suspicions. “She said, first thing, that it was against her religion, and second, that she had no experience caring for lesbian or gay patients.”"

Canada, Britian, and a number of other countries with “universal health care” have so thoroughly destroyed the natural market for medicine that in those countries being a physician has become one of those jobs that “white people won’t do.”  The enslavement of the medical profession in those countries means that physicians earn only about 30-50K a year, which for the native population simply is not worth it given the years of schooling and training involved.  As a result, most of the physicians in Canada and Britain and like-minded countries have been imported from countries like Egypt - countries with 12-Century moral views on homosexuality. The leftists in Canada and Britain need to realize they’ve gotten what they asked for; NO FREE LUNCH, bitches; no whining now please; the right, the libertarians, and the best economists in the world all tried to warn you.

So you have this bizarrely perfect conflict one afternoon at Winnipeg’s Lakewood Medical Center: Lesbian couple asserting their rights (as VICTIMS!!!) against an innocent Muslim believer expressing her beliefs who had been recruited by a self-proclaimed “free” society on the other side of the world which through government controls had destroyed its own medical system and was begging for foreigners to come in and keep it afloat.  Dr. Elias comes from a vastly different culture; the fact that it took her so long to even understand that she was looking at a lesbian couple speaks to her innocence in this matter.

It’s a knot.  Call me crazy, but I think it make much more sense to just let everyone do what they want.  The physician can perform their work however they wish and for whatever price they want, and I can receive care from whomever I wish and at whatever price I can afford.

Why do certain people need to make freedom so complicated?

Freedom is not their goal though.

Or so says Reason columnist Radley Balko, and he makes a pretty good case.  Some funny shit.

Take a look at this map from the fabulous Strange Maps.

For advocates of a free and rational society with a limited government, this map should be disturbing on its face.

But also consider the history involved.  The feds control most of the land in the newest states; the dramatic shift from east to west on this map roughly correlates with the 19th-Century growth of statist philosophy in American politics.  Just a few other quick thoughts:

1) You can’t explain the stark east-west divide by “beauty” of the territory.  Oregon and Washington look almost exactly like West Virginia or northern Arkansas or Kentucky.

2) The areas where the feds control the most land are usually considered to be  rich in natural resources, esp. oil (Alaska: almost 70 percent fed control).  The fact that the feds control all this land (and the fact that the medievalists in the environmental lobby have gained so much sway over the feds since the 1960’s) means that we’re not even allowed to explore most of this land for natural resources.

3) The map seems to reveal almost zero correlation between percentage of land owned by the feds and cost of living.  Massachusetts and California are both very expensive.  Similarly, Utah and Arkansas are both extremely cheap places to live.  This is curious because normally liberals argue that housing (and, hence, everything else) is so expensive in Boston, NYC, San Francisco, and DC not because of insane left-wing policies like rent-control, high taxes, environmental impact studies, and refusal to build new freeways but because of the amount of available land.  (Obviously such arguments are nonsense.  Boston is one of the world’s most expensive cities, but a quick drive across Massachusetts reveals that most of the state is uninhabited.)  But if you’re focusing on “available land” as a factor in cost of living, the difference on this map between available land in California and Massachusetts is revealing, as is the similarity of available land in California and Utah.

4) What does this map say about all those studies that liberals cite to the effect that the “red states” receive more government pork than the blue states?  Obviously it requires great sums of $ for the feds and the states to monitor all this vacant land to make sure none of us pesky citizens are trespassing/squatting and maybe trying to put the land to good use.

Liberals with serious heart conditions or a history of suicidal thoughts are advised to avoid clicking here.

These guys are pretty funny:

This is one is a bit outta date, but still hilarious: