Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Peck Praises Mackey

Blogger Tim Peck penned the following eloquent response to John Mackey's proposed free market health care reforms.

Here is an extended excerpt from Peck's letter:
...I too believe that the government must reverse its inappropriate manipulation of the health care industry and turn to free market solutions to repair the problems that prior government intervention has created.

I believe that the government's only proper role is the protection of individual rights. Interference by the government in the health care and insurance industries violates individual rights by forcing unwilling participants to pay for a predatory collective, by pressing physicians and other independent professionals into involuntary servitude for the sake of some mysterious, shape-shifting and ultimately illusory "common good," and by dictating the terms upon which an insurer can operate. This regulatory interference causes the rising cost of health care and diminishing access to the quality and innovation that only the profit-motive can supply.

The "public option" and "single-payer" health care proposals being advanced by disinterested power-seeking central planners in Washington would mean a government bureaucracy interfering in the private relationships between doctors and their patients. It is a subversion of the individual's right to contract. It is a subversion of the right to use one's judgment to act in one's own best interest without interference. It is a subversion of the right of doctors, nurses and insurers to voluntarily offer products and services to satisfied health care consumers for their mutual benefit.

...As philosopher Ayn Rand urged throughout her life, political and economic freedom are requirements of life. Statism serves to undermine those ends while capitalism serves to further them. Capitalism is not right because it works, it works because it is right.

TIM PECK
ASHEVILLE NC
(Read the full text of Peck's reply to Whole Foods.)

More Americans like Peck speaking out to defend the principle of individual rights. And more politicians are starting to listen.