The Moral Case Against Government Control of Health Care

With his usual clarity, Tom Sowell explains why people who earn money should be allowed to spend it on their loved ones - notwithstanding the uninformed opinions of bureaucrats who think "society's resources" should be allocated in different ways:

The medical care stampede is about much more than medical care, important as that is. It is part of a whole mindset of many on the left who have never reconciled themselves to an economic system in which how much people can withdraw from the resources of the nation depends on how much they have contributed to those resources. Despite the cleverness of phrases about people who "happen to have money," very few people just happen to have money. Most people earned their money by supplying other people with goods or services that those people were willing to pay for. Since it is their own money that they have earned, these people feel free to spend it to give their 80-year-old grandmother another year or two of life, or to pay for a hip replacement operation for their mom or dad, even If some medical "ethicist" might say that the resources of "society" would be better used to allow some 20-year-old to talk over his angst with a shrink. ...More is at stake than the outcomes of medical decisions, extremely important as those are. What is also at stake is freedom and the dignity of individuals who do not live their lives as supplicants of puffed-up power holders who are spending the money taken from them in taxes.