Re: Medicare and the GOP

Easy, Mr. Barlett makes another (uncharacteristic) error in his essay. He writes:

The 'slippery slope' argument has been a staple of conservatives' thinking for decades--they claim that every government program is the first step on the road to socialism. And, as economist F.A. Hayek argued in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, that inevitably leads to totalitarianism.

This argument continues to be made today in the health care debate, even though it is transparently false. The nations of Europe have governments much larger than ours and long had national health insurance without suffering the sort of tyranny that was certain to have come about by now if Hayek was even remotely correct.

I haven't read Hayek in a while and can't attest to the context of his remarks on totalitarianism, but I do know that in the 1920's 'totalitarianism' was coined to promote the elimination of the distinction between the government and a private sphere, collapsing all of civil society into the bureaucratic state.

Mussolini was the clearest articulater of this new form of society, and at the time his vision was almost universally accepted as good. It was only later (1930's? Post WWII? 1950's?) that 'totalitarianism' came to be seen as a barbaric oppressive Gulag-ridden system of tyranny that Mr. Bartlett seems to be referring to.

In the original 1920's definition of the term, European National Healthcare did, indeed, result in totalitarianism. Europe long-since has become a bureaucratized culture with its governments intruding into every nook and cranny of its citizens lives.

But even under Bartlett's assumptions, that Europeans seem generally happy with the situation does not mean Europe is not a tyranny. If you slowly swath people in the cotton of government care for a few generations, it is not surprising they will be unaware that they are now bound and gagged like so many mummies.