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Jewish World Review August 27, 2009 / 7 Elul 5769 Brother, You Ain't My Keeper: The Saccharine Tyranny of Altruism By Robert Tracinski http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Struggling desperately to find a health-care argument that will win the support of voters, Barack Obama has tried to seize the moral high ground, declaring in a conference call with religious leaders that government-provided health care is required by "a core ethical and moral obligation: that is that we look out for one another, that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper." Well, I have news for the president: Brother, you ain't my keeper. Think what this idea of being "my brother's keeper" actually means. If the person invoking it is asking for your help, it means: you are my keeper. It is your job to work and struggle and produce wealth, so that you can support me and provide for my needs. To take a timely example, it means the union worker who wants billions of taxpayers' dollars to keep GM afloat, or who wants the UAW to be put in line in front of Chrysler's creditors, so that he can continue to collect inflated wages and a bloated pension. It is the manifesto of a leech. But the way Obama means it is even worse. He does not view himself as a man in need of keeping; he views himself as the keeper. He invokes that line about being his brother's keeper in order to sell us on a health-care bill that will require all health-insurance plans to be designed and approved by a government overseer, and in which we will all be pushed into accepting health care provided by the government, on the government's terms. This is why he justifies the "savings" that his plan will allegedly produce by denigrating the integrity of doctors, accusing them of performing unnecessary procedures which his system, in its superior wisdom, would prevent. Who will decide what surgeries are necessary and which are unnecessary? Our keepers in the federal government. This is the real moral essence of the often-noted condescension of the left. Their attitude is: you, the average citizen, are helpless and lost, unable to care for yourselves or make your own decisions. You need a keeper—a government official who is presumably wiser and more provident, who will put you in a kind of protective custody and provide for your needs. Barack Obama wants to be our brother, all right. He wants to be our Big Brother. Or perhaps that description is not quite grandiose enough to describe his pretensions. As part of his campaign to rally religious support for his health-care plan, Obama reportedly told a group of rabbis, "We are G-d's partners in matters of life and death." G-d's partners? During the election campaign, Obama notoriously dodged a question on abortion by demurring that the theology of the issue was "above my pay grade." Apparently he's been promoted. What does it mean to be G-d's "partner"? Obama also quoted "from the Rosh Hashanah prayer that says that in the holiday period, it is decided 'who shall live and who shall die.'" As one conservative commentator asks, "is this really the context in which he wishes to discuss health reform—a powerful and unseen being making determinations of life and death? One would think that he would want to avoid anything that could raise the specter of rationing, death panels, or the like." You know we're living in a world turned upside down when Sarah Palin is starting to look smarter, better informed, and more prescient than Obama. Why does Obama expect us to put up with the prospect of living under government keepers? He is depending on what legal blogger William Jacobson calls, in a brilliant coinage, "ghimmitude." That's a combination of "gimme" and "dhimmitude," a term that refers to the voluntary acceptance by non-Muslims of second-class citizenship under the rule of Muslim overlords. Jacobson defines "ghimmitude" as "a peaceful surrender to the state in exchange for health-care security and benefits, based on accepting the inferiority of the individual and individual rights." This perfectly captures the way in which the leftist chooses to sell his soul, giving up his birthright of independence in exchange for a handout from the state. Conservatives usually make the mistake of referring to this kind of handout-seeking as "selfishness." But the person who wants to live on the dole is not selfish enough. He is not selfish enough to want to stand on his own two feet and live on his own terms. He is so unselfish that he is willing to make himself dependent on the will of others. The morality of altruism—the idea that we are our brother's keeper—is supposed to be a morality of benevolence and good will, but it actually offers men a choice between two roles: the keeper or the kept. It is the moral code of a kind of saccharine tyranny, a combination of maudlin appeals to pity and condescending authoritarianism. It is the opposite of the uniquely American vision of the proper relationship between men. The novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand—who escaped to the US from Soviet Russia and thus had a better appreciation for the unique virtues of the our system—summed up the essence of American individualism in an oath taken by her characters in Atlas Shrugged: "I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." That's the code that we need to affirm in response to Barack Obama's injunction about being our brother's keepers. We need to tell him that he is not our keeper—that we do not want to be keepers nor to be kept, but to be free and independent men. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. JWR contributor Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIADaily.com. Comment by clicking here. Archives © 2009, Robert Tracinski

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