Paging Comrade Obama: Kill The Profit Motive And You Kill Modern Medical Advances And Prosperity
By Donald Joy
Good economic policy accords with human nature. This is why governments and societies which respect capitalism succeed, and those which see capitalism as bad, fail.Rational self-interest (not greed, which is excessive self-interest) is part of human nature, and it is normal and healthy.
Altruism is healthy, too, and on a higher plane, spiritually, than normal self-interest, but you can’t help another person unless you first have something to help them with–have enough of your own primary needs sufficiently met, in order to be able to donate or exchange any kind of goods (material or intangible) at all; to be able to engage in socially beneficial conduct and relationships. This principle applies to all voluntary human interactions.
It is this fundamental, divine truth to which socialists like Obama and his deluded base seem to be oblivious. Their stubborn, wrong-headed philosophy of attempting forced egalitarianism only results in increasing uniform poverty among a rapidly growing lower class, while the upper crust of government-connected elites enrich themselves more and more obscenely. What’s even worse is that social conduct and relationships suffer in this distorted scheme, too, as fewer people bother to build private charitable networks and mutual-aid societies when government do-gooders rush to sieze more and more revenue from private hands, declaring that all solutions to social ills can be enacted by government force, instead.
Obama and the Democrats’ 2014 catch-phrase and campaign theme is turning out to be, apparently, that of supposedly confronting “income inequality.”Taken at face value, such an agenda against “income inequality” agenda amounts to nothing less than outright communism. Taken to its logical and historical conclusion, it is a recipe for economic disaster.
It is the same economic approach and regimen which resulted in the prisoner-populations of Cuba, North Korea, and the former Soviet Union, where socialist central-planners jealously forced just about all economic activity under their purview, declaring the profit motive bad, outlawing free enterprise, and pretending to make everyone “equal” in a supposedly classless society which amounted to a nightmare of squashing anyone who might make a peep about offering a different, better idea, product, or policy, and squashing all prosperity in the process, making everyone equally poor except the high-living party elites running the vast prison.
One of the hallmarks of socialism is its hostility toward and targeting for elimination of the “bourgeoisie”–the prosperous middle class, who pose an existential threat to the socialists/statists, in large part due to their relative economic autonomy. The fact that they are mostly capable of self-sufficiency and of running their own lives means they neither need nor want big-government central-planners micromanaging their every decision, and therefore the middle class must be decimated by the likes of Obama–even while Obama and his Democrat fellow-travellers hypocritically, falsely speak of “protecting the middle class,” “fighting for the middle class,” and “growing the middle class” in their cynical ploy to get middle class people to vote for more doomed Democrat policies.Fortunately, some of the biggest lies of Obama and his party have now been realized by millions to be what they are–outright lies.What is yet unfortunate is that the socialists have still largely suceeded in convincing so many that it is the profit motive of capitalism which is to blame for the alleged awfulness of income inequality, and the alleged awfulness of various other disparate outcomes upon which envy and class-conflict are based, that they think it is a viable campaign strategy for the upcoming mid-term elections.
And so, it is the same old badmouthing and attempt to eliminate the profit motive, which Obama and his fellow travellers have deployed in their destruction of our health care system–the abject economic horror known as Obamacare.
Yet that same profit motive is what has given modern medicine and pharmacology such marvelous breakthroughs over the last several decades, which is and has been in Obama’s crosshairs all along.
Socialized medicine regimes only barely limp along in other Western, developed economies such as Canada, Sweden, and Great Britain, with just enough marginally-satisfied customers to keep their populations from revolt (not to mention that numerous dead and dying recipients of inferior medical care delivery really can’t make much of a political peep, can they now?) only because the profit motive has still been somewhat alive in America in order to drive the innovations enjoyed by patients in the more socialist countries–countries which ride along on the coattails of our advances and revolutionary medical developments!
It is mainly due to the existence of the remnants of capitalism, and the research, development, and marketing activities of extremely competitive, profit-seeking enterprises (mostly here in the United States and wherever making a profit is still allowed), which have produced the miracle drugs and the space-age, mind-boggling medical technologies enjoyed by citizens throughout not only the developed world, but increasingly throughout the emerging economies and the third-world, even more and more.
Just how, exactly, do the do-gooders propose to do good, anyway, without the goods with which to do? Capitalism supplies the goods. The profit motive provides the primary impetus for production of goods, without which distribution of any kind is utterly out of the question.
It has been shown over and over again that production and innovative development are comparatively stagnant when private interest is not operative. The phenomenon in economics known as “the tragedy of the commons” illustrates this amply, wherever and whenever collectivist do-gooders seek to co-opt or get rid of private incentives.
The next time some deluded cheerleader of socialized medicine tries to point to Germany or Finland or wherever as if they’re some kind of success story, remind them that the real success story is that capitalism has prolonged lives and given people unprecedented standards of living throughout the world, and that without it, there’d be no excess of goodwill nor goods to spread in the first place. Then send them this article. Tell them an ounce of preventative self-interest is worth a pound of stagnant Obama-carcass.
