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It is NOT 'rabid individualism'.....it is merely a ackowledgement that each of us needs to be RESPONSIBLE for our own lives and decisions.

It is NOT up to Government to decide for us....or to take away the Right to our lives.

redrock

.....it is merely a ackowledgement that each of us needs to be RESPONSIBLE for our own lives and decisions.

You are headed down exactly that atomistic bent they want you to take.

One really groovy thing about setting up the communists as bogeyman all these years was the ability of some -- like that Diva of Selfishness Rand and others -- to turn altruism into an evil and render selflessness an absolutely incomprensible notion.

There is no greater love than for a man to lay down his life for a friend .... much less a closely related member of this Family of Man.

As human beings, we are responsible for and obligated to each other. Either we realize that at the family level (starting with the birthing and rearing of the children we off or institutionalize with ease these days) or the State steps in.

Evil loves a vacuum.

This Walden Pond utopian vision of the Self-Reliant man is a ruse.

Folks should be always Personally Accountable for their actions (especially the State's actors!) but they are not always in a position to be responsible for themselves and are rarely without some responsibility for another ... whether or not it's being in direct proportion to their regard for others allows them to realize it at all.

Families are an important part of all the equations of life, doubt it not. It's one of the reasons why they're under assault by the Left and by the Omnipotent State. But responsibility, strictly speaking, is something only an independent moral agent can possess -- and a family is not a moral agent; it's an aggregate.

All families that function properly are somewhat socialistic, in a voluntary fashion. We don't practice strict personal responsibility with our kids; they'd starve to death. When a sufficiently limited group is united by bonds of love that are sufficiently strong, we can eschew the rigid allocation of responsibility for one's health and welfare to oneself, and ask that others in the group help out. But that model is not appropriate to a whole nation. It wouldn't even be appropriate to a small village.

All in all, the politicization of health care and retirement has had the same effects as the politicization of everything else that's properly a matter for private decisions; it's destroyed the rights of privacy, increased our costs, weakened voluntary relationships, muddied the waters of accountability, given the unscrupulous lots of ways to rip us off while hiding behind a veneer of public service, and created intense interest-group warfare that threatens our social cohesion. Apart from that, it's perfectly all right.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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