"What is not forbidden is required"

That was how someone once described life in the old Soviet Union, a few decades ago. The state tells you what you may not do on the one hand, and what you must do on the other. Personal freedom? Fugeddaboudit.

So it should be with some trepidation that we digest the first paragraph of this AP story: "House bill would make health care a right."

WASHINGTON (AP) - House Democratic leaders, pledging to meet the president's goal of health care legislation before their August break, are offering a $1.5 trillion plan that for the first time would make health care a right and a responsibility for all Americans.

Italics added. Note well that the Democrat party is clear that the government should take over the administration of health care for every American. This they have plainly stated. Now they want to make it a right. What that means is that you will get only the health care that they decide to give you. That is, your right will be not to health care per se, not to health care in itself, but only the health care that the government deems affordable, necessary and proper for you. What does this mean for certain kinds of people? Well, the elderly will find themselves getting shut out (as they already are in Britain).

And don't forget that they say health care is also a responsibility. Whose responsibility? Why yours, of course. So to receive government-funded and -controlled health care, there will be certain standards we will have to meet. For example, will we have the "right" to health care only as long as we take "responsibility" to merit it? That would mean, oh, let's see: exercising in government-approved ways and standards, maintaining a government-approved weight, no smoking, limited alcohol intake, limited intake of certain foods, such as fast foods. (Driving fast food restaurants out of business is not exactly a hidden agenda of the health Left.) And more - what about refraining from risky activities such as motorcycling, skydiving, or certain kinds of boating?

Because health care is such a huge chunk of the American economy - closing in on 20 percent of all spending - the duality of us having a right to health care only as long as we prove we are responsible enough to receive it is a despot's dream formula for controlling almost every aspect of our lives.

No wonder that psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz wrote, "Universal Health Care Isn't Worth Our Freedom."

The idea that every life is infinitely precious and therefore everyone deserves the same kind of optimal medical care is a fine religious sentiment and moral ideal. As political and economic policy, it is vainglorious delusion. Rich and educated people not only receive better goods and services in all areas of life than do poor and uneducated people, they also tend to take better care of themselves and their possessions, which in turn leads to better health. The first requirement for better health care for all is not equal health care for everyone but educational and economic advancement for everyone ...

If we persevere in our quixotic quest for a fetishized medical equality we will sacrifice personal freedom as its price. We will become the voluntary slaves of a "compassionate" government that will provide the same low quality health care to everyone.

Henry David Thoreau famously remarked, "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." Thoreau feared a single, unarmed man approaching him with such a passion in his heart. Too many people now embrace the coercive apparatus of the modern state professing the same design.

If he can quote Thoreau, I can quote de Tocqueville:

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I wrote last February in, "How Democracies Perish," that if you know how to use free corn to capture a herd of wild pigs, then you know how to confiscate freedom from the American people. And this administration is printing money and passing legislation to give away all the free corn it wants to. The question is, will we decide to be hungry occasionally but roam free or will we surrender our freedom to get government freebies?

The tragedy is that we are, as a nation, willingly surrendering an enormous level of our freedom to gain a little level of health care. We should remember, as Ben Franklin warned in 1775, if we give up liberty to obtain security, we will find ourselves with neither.

Because one day the free corn will run out. But we'll still be trapped.

Update: In fact, the administration's plan is to push private health insurors out of business altogether, leaving everyone dependent upon the government. Surely you are not surprised.