Atlas Shrugs: Doctors ‘Going Galt’

Human Events ^ | October 13, 2009 | Ralph R. Reiland

[bamahead]

The headline in Investor’s Business Daily, Sept. 16, 2009: “45% of Doctors Would Consider Quitting If Congress Passes Health Care Overhaul.”

The headline in the Boston Globe, Sept. 28, 2009: “States risk it, raise tax on rich.”

The problem with four of nine U.S. doctors saying they “would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement” is that “the number of doctors is already lagging population growth,” reports IBD.

Add millions of new patients to a shrinking supply of doctors and the obvious result is an English-style queue, longer waits in pain, and a centrally directed rationing of service.

That Boston Globe article on soaking the rich explains that New York’s increased confiscation of income from the “deep-pocketed rich” through higher taxes is producing a “millionaires’ exit.”

Said New York’s lieutenant governor, Richard Ravitch, regarding the flight of the state’s millionaires and the decline in government revenues that has already occurred as a result of the higher tax rates: “People aren’t wedded to a geographic place as they once were.”

In Atlas Shrugged, a novel by Ayn Rand, the most productive and creative citizens in the United States -- the innovators, risk-takers, artists, entrepreneurs, capitalists, intellectuals, industrialists -- overturn the conventional concept of victimhood and go on strike, refusing any longer to be exploited by society, refusing to be demonized as too successful, too rich, too individualistic, too free.

Led by John Galt, the novel’s hero, the industrious organize a strike against the ever-expanding yoke of government coercion. They strike to halt the murder of man’s spirit, to halt the confiscation of man’s work, to defend individualism, reason, liberty, human achievement and the market economy.

[elkfersupper]

who is really being protected?

"Licensing" is a barrier to entry to a profession or trade, constructed by the people already in the profession or trade, with the assistance of legislatures and governors / presidents.

[Mom MD]

Add me to that list.....