THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: Sunday, August 21, 1994 TAG: 9408190022 SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL TYPE: Letter LENGTH: Short : 47 lines
For the first century and a half of this nation's history, the government basically did what it is constitutionally supposed to do, which is to defend the nation from its foreign enemies and leave the populace along to pursue whatever it wished as long as the lives and freedoms of others were not infringed.
During that period, the nation set a standard for growth, compassion and charity that has not been seen anywhere at any time in the history of the world.
That all started to unravel with the passage of the income tax in 1913 and the notion that the federal government could spend our money more effectively than we could. The notion (despite assurances from the government that only the rich would pay) caught on. Since then, we have been unable to stop the Congress from ever more expansions of government.
To date, we have expended endless trillions of dollars trying to achieve one or more social goals. To my knowledge, none of these high-minded programs has come anywhere near achieving the goals for which they were intended. However, they have cost a ton of money. By whatever criteria one wishes to use, socialism simply does not work, and every nation that has tried it is either defunct, bankrupt or otherwise trying to escape its ruinous effects.
Now we have a concerted effort to try socialized medicine in this country. In one mammoth stroke, the Clintons and some friends in Congress are asking us to scrap the best medical system in the world, then replace it with another monstrous bureaucracy that will expand its own mandate and cost endlessly. Thanks, but no thanks.
One of your syndicated columnists said recently that we are the only civilized nation to not have some sort of national health plan. To this, I reply with some sage advice given me as a child by my parents when I wished to do something stupid. My argument was that ``Everybody's doing it'' and their rejoinder: ``If everybody jumped off a building, would you jump also?''
If problems exist in our already first-rate system, by all means fix them. But let's not scrap the entire system for an already bankrupt ideology. We can ill afford all the government we already have.
FRANK BRYSON
Virginia Beach, Aug. 9, 1994 by CNB