National health care led to rise of the Nazi party
Friedrich Hayek's seminal book "The Road to Serfdom" (1944), explains how Nazi Germany went totalitarian.
Hayek, who won the Nobel Prize in 1974, said it was the nationalization of health care that led to the rise of National Socialism. Health care had been nationalized under Otto Bismarck in 1883. It began as an attempt to undermine the claim of the radical socialists.
"Bismarck embraced these reforms while at the same time repressing the socialists; indeed, the reforms were designed at least in part to undermine the socialist position and thereby strengthen the Empire," Hayek wrote.
But the reforms created a vast network of controls that provided the socialists with their first hold on power. By the 1920s, genetic health courts began to euthanize the mentally ill or the mentally retarded.
Once he got power, the network allowed Adolf Hitler to control not only who got health care but also who was exterminated. Modernist painters and poets, gypsies and Jews were some of those who were exterminated, but political rivals were killed, too.
Hayek, an Austrian who had fled Austria after it was annexed, wrote that the logic that led to Nazism was collectivism: "It is simply collectivism freed from all traces of an individualist tradition." Once the wealthy are removed, or if the power to tax can strike them down, then the state is supreme in its power.
"Life unworthy of life" became the catchphrase that death panels used to send prisoners off to "sanatoriums" where death became a unit of production.
"Nazi Doctors" (Basic Books, 2000) by Robert Lifton shows how the medical industry can be used to become a death industry, which weeds out undesirables, killing them on the basis of "defective genetic materials" or any other criterion useful to the state.
Kirby Olson
Delhi
Obama should choose veterans over immigrants
Could someone please explain to me how you can support Obama when he lets thousands of illegal immigrants stay in this country and take jobs away from U.S. citizens?
We have thousands of veterans who are out of work and more returning soldiers who will need jobs. Plus there are thousands of homeless veterans. How can anyone support Obama on this? Should we not take care of our veterans and citizens first?
Mark A. Barry
Unadilla
Barry is a retired first sergeant.
