Death Panels, All the Way Down
Thomas L. Knapp at Center for a Stateless Society - the Obamaoists are complaining about Sarah Palin's highlighting of the "death panels" in the socialist health care bill. Mr. Knapp reminds us that government is all death panels all the time. Death is the penalty for everything they demand, and they demand a lot.
Every time you're pulled over by (or otherwise encounter) a police officer, that cop is a de facto one-man death panel. He will pass judgment on the question of whether or not you represent a threat to the people or property around you.
If he decides that you do (or maybe if you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time, get caught up in a situation where you're inadvertently "in the way," or even just, well, piss him off), he'll attempt to arrest you. And if he decides that you represent a threat to him during that process, he'll put you down like a rabid dog without a second thought.
If you make it through that encounter, you may find yourself in the custody of "corrections" personnel with the same powers and prerogatives, or under the jurisdiction of a court empowered to find you guilty of a crime and order that you be strapped to a gurney and injected with a fatal drug overdose.
Of course, that encounter may never happen. Maybe you'll just come down with a disease for which the best available treatment is still under review by, or has been rejected by, the Food and Drug Administration. Thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands, of Americans die every year at the prohibitionist hands of (or due to the bureaucratic delays of) FDA's death panels.
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An old anecdote tells of a lecturer (Stephen Hawking thinks it may have been Bertrand Russell) who was giving a talk on celestial mechanics -- the orbit of the earth around the sun, the movement of the stars in their courses and so forth -- when a lady objected, and insisted that the earth is actually a flat disc resting on the back of a giant turtle. When the lecturer asked what was under the turtle, the lady answered "it's turtles all the way down."
The essential claim of the state is that it controls and disposes of your life by right. Every government process is an exercise of the prerogative of determining who gets to live (and how well, and for how long) and who must die (and when, and how). Government is death panels all the way down.
