Patriot Update - A Free Press for the Conservative Revolution

The most effective way to sell anything—house, car, clothing, or food—is to appeal to the emotions of the buyer. The best sales professionals understand this fact and use it to their benefit. President Obama and his supporters are turning out to be consummate salesmen. The “product” they are selling is socialism and their sales pitch is based solely on emotionalism. Emotionalism is the most effective tool President Obama and his supporters have for selling socialism to the American public, and healthcare is the issue they gift wrap in false compassion.

Socialists believe that healthcare should be free and universally available to everyone regardless of their ability to pay. “Free” universal healthcare is the five-hundred pound gorilla on the list of the left’s most important issues. On the surface “free” universal healthcare is an appealing concept. Few things are closer to the hearts of Americans than their health and the health of their loved ones. Healthcare is a deeply personal issue, which is why emotionalism is such an effective sales tool for socialists pushing the universal healthcare agenda. But there is a problem here that socialists like to ignore. Nothing is free, and especially not healthcare. In fact, few things are more expensive than healthcare. Calling anything provided by the government free just means that the American taxpayer will foot the bill.

Even with all of its abundance, America has finite resources. There are simply not sufficient resources in this or any other country to provide high-quality universal healthcare that is paid for by taxpayers. When economists point out this inconvenient fact, socialists immediately fall back on emotionalism and portray the naysayers as “hard-hearted” capitalists who don’t care about their fellow human beings. This is an excellent example of a key difference between a socialist and a capitalist. Socialists envision a utopian world and think it can be made perfect simply because that they want it to be. Capitalists are better students of human nature. Consequently, they temper their dreams with reality.

One of the realities capitalists always keep in mind is limited resources. Any time there are limited resources, decisions must be made and sometimes this can require hard decisions. In every other aspect of our lives, most people understand that those who can afford more in the way of material advantages will have them. This is the nature of life. But socialists like to play the class card and label this fact of life as unfair. Putting aside the fact that life itself is unfair, what is wrong with an individual who contributes more to the economy being able to secure better healthcare in the same way he is able to secure a bigger house or a nicer car? After all, even socialists understand this concept.

For example, ask yourself where the wealthy liberal politicians in Washington, D.C. live, what kind of cars they drive, and where they send their children to school. So what is different about healthcare? The answer to this question is simple: emotional appeal. Healthcare appeals to people on such an emotional level that wealthy leftists can use it to build an ever-growing constituency of poor people by questioning the fairness of a system that treats the rich and the poor differently. The hard truth—and socialists do not like hard truths—is that when you have universal demand but finite resources the fairest system is the free-market system.

What socialists conveniently gloss over is that in its own imperfect way, the free-market system results in better healthcare for the poor, the wealthy, and those in the middle—just as it results in better cars, homes, food, and everything else needed by human beings. This is because the free market provides incentives to be productive while socialism provides no such incentives. On the most fundamental level, the free-market system gives people the incentive to improve themselves economically so they and their families can enjoy better healthcare, homes, cars, foods, and all of the other human necessities. Socialism, on the other hand, provides no such incentives. Why work hard to improve your economic circumstances when you have a “right” to the same economic advantages as someone else who contributes more than you to society?

Socialists despise the logic of this question. Consequently, upon hearing this kind of question they typically respond with their favorite knee-jerk comeback—one that is virtually dripping with emotional appeal: “You think you are better than everyone else.” The relative worth of individual human beings is not the issue here. Christians know that all people stand equally before God as sinners, which is precisely why it is best to let the free market rather than the state make difficult economic choices for us. When the free market chooses, the issue is not who is better than whom but who has the resources to afford more.

Of course there are people whose wealth is inherited, people who have done nothing to deserve the advantages they enjoy in a free-market system. In fact, many of them are left-leaning politicians who hypocritically push a socialist agenda—Senators Ted Kennedy (deceased) and John Kerry come to mind. Advocates of socialist programs like to use emotionalism to claim it is unfair that a poor person should receive less of some human necessity than a wealthy person. According to socialists, this is just not fair. However, these same socialists are unable to explain why they think it is fair that someone who contributes less to society should be entitled to the same benefits as someone who contributes more.

Left-leaning politicians such as President Obama and his supporters claim to be more compassionate than free-market proponents, but their emotional appeals for “fairness” are just empty words. If they really wanted to be fair, they would be more charitable with their own substantial wealth rather than taxing middle-income Americans who work hard to provide for themselves and their families. It is easy to be “compassionate” with someone else’s money. But where is the fairness when left-leaning politicians live in the most exclusive neighborhoods and send their children to the best private schools while taxing hard-working Americans who can neither live in those neighborhoods nor send their children to those private schools? This is the hypocrisy of the left and its emotional appeals for socialism.