It's always interesting when we turn over the rock that is socialized medicine and watch all the bugs squirm out of the light. Today's installment is from Great Britain where Baroness Warnock declared that those suffering dementia have a duty to die because they suck up too many resources.
The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are "wasting people's lives" because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain.
She insisted there was "nothing wrong" with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.
The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be "licensed to put others down" if they are unable to look after themselves.
Perhaps Nicholas Provenzo will write another stirring column on the morality of killing inconvenient people. After all, according to Provenzo, killing Downs Syndrome babies is the moral thing to do because they are only "marginally productive" and wind up being a burden to family and society.
I am not the first to note that the downside of socialized medicine--aside from the outrageously long waits for procedures and the lack of motivation for innovation--is that somebody must get less care so that somebody else can get more care.
When the State has the burden of providing “free” medical care, that care will get rationed in ways that are, unfortunately, all too predictable. Human life stops being sacred and instead becomes a commodity with a balance sheet. If bureaucrats decide that a particular life, or a class of life, has become a net negative, then eventually they will find ways to eliminate the liability.
Totalitarian governments have always worked this way; the shock comes from the same impulse occuring in supposedly enlightened democracies. We’re seeing a new kind of government these nanny states, though — a democratic totalitarianism that makes all of the choices for its subjects after they willingly give the bureaucracy the power of life and death over them. It’s a voluntary totalitarianism, and it starts by assigning government the role of caretaker from cradle to grave, the latter point coming at their choosing.
We've heard about this obligation of the sick and the elderly to off themselves so that the healthy can live better before. It's similar to Provenzo's argument justifying aborting Downs Syndrome babies. And it's still barbaric.
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