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Friday, September 23, 2011

Good Samaritans or Bad Government

Spurred on by Wolf Blitzer’s lame attempt at a “Good Samaritan” scenario, liberal pundits all over the country have climbed upon their health-care “high-horses.” Leading the parade of liberals wallowing in self-righteousness, New York Times’ columnist, Paul Krugman, laments the fact that today’s GOP has gone from Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” to Ron Paul’s “free to die.”

He comes to this conclusion as a result of last weeks GOP presidential debate where CNN’s Blitzer presented Paul, and other republicans, with a hypothetical: A 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly finds himself in need of six months of intensive care—Blitzer wants to know what the “compassionate conservative” response would be.

Congressman Paul stated, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Thrilling liberals everywhere, Blitzer pressed the matter and asked whether “society should just let him die.” A member of the audience shouted “Yeah!” [Though Krugman reported it as a “crowd erupt(ing) with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”] Krugman then piously concluded that, “The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.”

Washington Post columnist and creator of the infamous liberal blog-spot, JournoList, Ezra Klein, stated that, “It’s all well and good to say personal responsibility is the bedrock of liberty, but even the hardest of libertarians has always understood that there are places where your person ends and mine begins…in health care, it has to do with compassion.”

Asking “Where Are the Compassionate Conservatives,” Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson, notes that Blitzer next turned to Michele Bachmann, “whose popularity with evangelical Christian voters stems, at least in part, from her own professed born-again faith. Asked what she would do about the man in the coma, Bachmann ignored the question and launched into a canned explanation of why she wants to repeal President Obama's Affordable Care Act.”

Robinson then declares that, “According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus told the Pharisees that God commands us to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself.’ There is no asterisk making this obligation null and void if circumstances require its fulfillment via government.”

However, the book of Luke records that, when Jesus is asked by “an expert in the Law” what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus asks him what the Law requires. The man answers correctly: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind,’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Sounding like a liberal pundit at a GOP debate, or as Scripture puts it, “attempting to justify himself,” the man smugly asked Jesus, “who is my neighbor?” That is when Jesus launches into the Good Samaritan parable. Of course, the parable reveals that, as a true act of love, a Samaritan—whom the Jews of Jesus’ day generally despised—took care of an injured man on his own time and with his own resources. Not quite the picture of Obamacare that today’s liberals would have us believe.

Liberals love to quote Scripture when they think it might help them further their big government social agenda. They also love to talk about compassion and morality but would prefer it if you left Scripture out of it. Perhaps if more liberals were for posting the Ten Commandments in every public school and post office in the U.S., more Americans would feel comfortable putting health care in the hands of the federal government.

Perhaps if more liberals were willing to allow their morality and compassion to move them to protect the most defenseless among us—the unborn—more Americans would take them seriously when they talk in terms of “moral visions” and “compassion.”

Taking a stand against big government—even during a severe economic crisis—President Grover Cleveland denied aid to a very deserving orphanage in New York City. Cleveland, a Democrat, said, “I will not be a party to stealing money from one group of citizens to give to another group of citizens. No matter what the need or apparent justification, once the coffers of the federal government are opened to the public, there will be no shutting them again…”

Of course, later democrats (and republicans) ignored Cleveland’s warnings, and the coffers of the federal government have been wide open for decades. As a result, most of America is suffering as we are now “reaping what we have sown.”

Copyright 2011, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com