Because Freedom

In his column today, Paul Krugman asks, “How many Americans will be denied essential health care in the name of freedom?”

Specifically, the time-honored practice of attacking beneficiaries of government programs as undeserving malingerers doesn’t play the way it used to. When Ronald Reagan spoke about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, it resonated with many voters. When Mitt Romney was caught on tape sneering at the 47 percent, not so much.

There is, however, an alternative. From the enthusiastic reception American conservatives gave Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” to Reagan, to the governors now standing in the way of Medicaid expansion, the U.S. right has sought to portray its position not as a matter of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, but as a courageous defense of freedom.

And this begs the question, how does the U.S. right define freedom?

When I speak of freedom in the political sense, I’m thinking of self-determination and the exercise of free will. But there’s nothing terribly “free” about sickness, chronic pain, untreated disability, or death. The sick and disabled find their life options limited. They may have self-determination in theory, but not in fact. Where’s the “freedom”?

Prairie Weather has it nailed:

Krugman points to that shocking moment, back at a presidential debate in 2011, when Ron Paul was asked whether people without insurance should be left to die, and a tea party contingent yelled “yeah!” The tea party was still interesting, often titillating, back then. All along their idea of freedom has been nothing more noble than freedom from moral responsibility.

But now we know more about the arrogance, their authoritarianism, their self-indulgent cruelty and we have decided that the tea party’s definition of freedom should be, well, left to die.