Conservatism is reduced to a few irritable mental gestures in Trump's America

Colorado Democrat Faces Recall After Narrow Victory Courtesy Of Libertarian Spoiler

Ross Kaminsky has the story in The American Spectator, here:

Forty-five miles north, Senate President John Morse is in even bigger trouble. Although his senate district includes the quirky (and liberal) town of Manitou Springs, John Morse won his 2010 election by only 252 votes in a race in which a Libertarian candidate won five times that number. In other words, if not for the presence of a third party candidate, Mr. Morse would likely have lost; this is not a safe “blue” seat, despite redistricting since 2010 having made the district lean slightly more Democratic than its prior configuration. ... [P]erhaps most galling, even to Morse’s liberal constituents, were comments he made on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show in which he proudly said (while claiming the mantle of Abraham Lincoln) that he counseled fellow Democrat senators to avoid reading e-mails from constituents. To be fair, Morse probably assumed that nobody was watching the show.

The "Right" To Healthcare is a Threat to Life and Liberty

Ross Kaminsky for The American Spectator here gets close to making a point which needs to be made more often, more forcefully, and more primary, namely, that one man's right to healthcare comes at the expense of another man's right not to provide it if he doesn't wish to:

[I]f health care is a right, that means that an American who for whatever reason does not have access to a doctor must be provided that access, whether that means redistributing taxpayer money to the would-be patient or even the potential of forcing a doctor to provide his services in an area "underserved" by health care professionals. ...

In other words, when one person's right is forcibly taken away for the benefit of someone else, it can no longer be a right any more than taxes extracted for the benefit of the poor may be deemed charity.

A doctor practices medicine by choice, not by compulsion, so we can no more force him to provide care than we can force people to become doctors. But, of course, if the courts decide that government can compel expenditure for health insurance, then it is a short distance to compelling other things, indeed anything, at which point this country is finished, if it isn't already.

Quibbling about how the inherent limitations accruing to conceptions of positive rights shows that they are not rights, such as that Obamacare under Berwick's rules will be provided as a right only

up to a certain age, a certain degree of sickness, or a certain cost,

has utilitarian value but is really beside the point.

A different contract governs the relations between a doctor and his patient, which Obamacare would overthrow, as full of negative pledges as the Bill of Rights is full of negative rights, the most famous of which people remember as "to do no harm."

The real offense of Obamacare is the compulsion at the heart of it, as real as the oppression of any tyranny.

What we need to stop it is a Hippocratic Revolt.