According to PolitiFact, the 2009 Lie of the Year award went to Sarah Palin on 18 Dec 2009.
Sarah Palin had said that the implementation of medical socialism, by way of the Affordable Care Act, would lead to rationing medical care and even to death panels — where a panel of bureaucrats gets to decide if your grandma can keep receiving her medicine or not.
That conjectured administrative panel, possibly indirectly, would decide who gets to live and who doesn’t.
Even without panels
Even if there is no explicit panel of bureaucrats making explicit decisions about whether vital, life-saving treatments should be withheld from Americans, it is still the case that unproductive social systems such as feudalism, fascism, socialism and communism are systems which fail to keep people alive.
In large nations such as Soviet Russia, where you could not ever fully enforce totalitarianism — i.e., by eradicating all trade in the black markets — life expectancy suffers by a lot. People lose about a decade of life under such systems.
Worse yet is totalitarianism in a small nation — where it can be enforced completely (no black markets, etc) — and the experience in Cambodia in the 1970s shows how bad things can get:
That’s Cambodia at bottom right and your eyes aren’t deceiving you. They lost over half of all of their life expectancy within a decade by fully-implementing communism.
Apparently, they didn’t get the memo: You NEVER go “full-Commie.”
Even the stagnation at left in the UK — where life expectancy could not improve over centuries — was due to feudalism which prevented the enforcement of individual private property rights and an objective rule of law.
Here is the same image with markings:
Here are shots of the “before” and “after” life expectancy when a nation goes “full-Commie”:
Before Communism (Cambodia)
After Communism (Cambodia)
And here is the annual change in life expectancy in the UK over time:
And let’s zoom in on the right end of the yearly changes, beginning with the very last time in the UK (1949) when the life expectancy had failed to improve from one year to the next:
Now let’s return to the original question about what is going on in the USA. The explicit death panels might not have been implemented, but as said above, socialized medicine is not capable of keeping as many people alive as free market medicine is, and especially so at the same cost of treatment:
The breaking of trend in increased life expectancy occurred in the very same year that the Affordable Care Act passed. In all years that followed, life expectancy could not improve.
Why Capitalism?
Free market capitalism is unregulated capitalism, where property rights and contracts are enforced, and it leads to the greatest increases in life and in life expectancy. It excels better than all other systems at putting “food on the table” and at allowing people to lead extremely fruitful lives.
Something that is (for a little while) almost as good, is the “regulated capitalism” which has been present in the USA for at least a human life-span now.
Regulated capitalism leads to regulatory capture by oligarchs though, which leads to a feudalist system, sometimes branded as fascism, socialism or communism, but always being a system which fails to enforce individual rights under an objective (favoring no one) rule of law:
And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class - whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
- Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual”
Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
—Online source for the quote
That’s why regulated capitalism can only stay “almost as good” as free market capitalism for a decade or two. After that, things start going to hell in a handbasket, as organized crime takes over and eventually puts the citizens through increasing turmoils in order to extract evermore money and power.
COVID is one such turmoil, and it seems too coincidental that exactly the kind of gain-of-function research was going on in coronaviruses when COVID “broke out.”
Organized criminals loves the idea of being able to intervene in the business affairs of others. Economic regulation makes capitalism “game-able” and thereby gives them the foothold that they need to implement oligarchy.
To consistently win the “game” — they coopt or coerce the “referee.”
Who’s going to pay for that?
Paying for socialism, or any anti-capitalist system, is costly. Look at these decade-old projections for Social Security, for instance:
The Social Security costs are rising beyond the revenue, reaching over 6% of GDP by 2030. A key reason is the Baby Boomer Generation which is retiring in vast numbers now, but without any large generation following them to pay into the system.
At first, there were dozens of workers paying into the system for every beneficiary collecting social security. Then only one dozen workers per beneficiary. Then only six workers per beneficiary. Then only three:
The beneficiaries are increasing faster than the workers, especially so out to 2030. In fact, here is a visual guess at the rate of increase in this ratio, using the two extreme scenarios for cost assumptions:
But that projected growth may have been interrupted by the Affordable Care Act and especially by COVID, as this graph shows:
Even before COVID, but during the Affordable Care Act, the rate of growth in new beneficiaries was sliding down below projections.
Even if COVID wasn’t a sinister plan to clear out the Social Security rolls in order to extend the loot-and-grab welfare state for another decade — it is still the case that the kind of feudalism being advertised by the Great Reset crowd (“you’ll own nothing, and be happy”) is simply not productive enough to feed the world.
Let’s Refuse Great Reset World Feudalism (GRWF)
Feudalism keeps barons rich and powerful, but it does not keep the peasants and paupers alive and well. The centuries-long data on life expectancy in the UK prove that point.
Who wants to go back to dying at age 35? This isn’t Logan’s Run, for instance, where the system is so socialist and intractably unproductive that people are ritualistically killed after passing their prime.
Let’s not allow today’s barons to reinstate world feudalism (the Great Reset). The life you may lose if they do, could be your own.