Materialism and the Rights of Man

By Mr. Curmudgeon

“RomneyCare might continue to help Mr. Santorum over the next month,” said the lead editorial in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. “The furor over the Obama Administration’s birth-control mandate on religious hospitals illustrates the core problem with government mandated insurance, and voters are paying attention. If Santorum keeps pounding away, we might even have an instructive health-care debate.”

So far, so good.

But then the mouthpiece of muscular American capitalism stumbled in a big way. “Mr. Santorum often gives the impression that he views the economy as a secondary issue, something he’ll get to after he saves the traditional family. But a President can do only so much to shape the culture, while in the current moment he can do a great deal more to help the economy.”

Quite frankly, I’m getting tired of listening to the tedious and moronic arguments between the two camps of soulless materialism: those who wish to redistribute the nation’s treasure in the name of “fairness” and those who believe the accumulation of wealth is liberty’s greatest expression.

One of capitalism’s greatest defenders, economist Milton Friedman, wrote, “The fact that these arguments against the so-called capitalist ethic are invalid does not of course demonstrate that the capitalist ethic is an acceptable one. I find it difficult to justify either accepting or rejecting it, or to justify any alternative principle. I am led to the view that it cannot in and of itself be regarded as an ethical principle; that it must be regarded as instrumental or a corollary of some other principle such as freedom.”

Ah yes … freedom.

When our Founder’s issued the Declaration of Independence, the document’s first paragraph boldly proclaimed America’s right “to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them,” adding that humanity is “endowed” by its “Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The document declares the Supreme Being’s bequest of freedom as unalienable, inviolable, and absolute.

The Declaration goes on to indict the British monarch in a 27-count bill of particulars. Among the charges: “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good,” and “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

In other words, the argument for independence hinged on the king’s failure to observe the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Before King George III could “eat out their substance”, he first had to violate the colonist’s God-given liberties.

When the constitutionality of ObamaCare was put before the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid filed a brief insisting, “What the Affordable Care Act regulates is not personal autonomy, but commercial transactions.”

The Department of Health and Human Services’ ruling requiring religious institutions to violate their conscience obliges the government to violate First Amendment religious freedom to achieve the materialistic goal of regulating “commercial transactions.” This harasses our people and eats out their substance. That “substance” is not money but the nation’s spiritual coin-of-the-realm – liberty.

America’s bipartisan materialists are blind to the spiritual costs inflicted by the Progressive drive for control of the nation’s wealth, forgetting the warning by patriot Patrick Henry: “It is when people forget God that tyrants forge their chains.”