notes.jays.net

Health care & compromise

Originally posted to deafferret on 2013-08-24.

Impressed by Penn Jillette thoughts on the US health care debate (“Obamacare”) and his citation of Ayn Rand’s view on compromise. Penn’s Sunday School, episode 77 “Penn Can’t Drive.” Jump to 63:05.

I’m for socialized medicine. Below, the Ayn Rand quote. Fascinating.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube …

When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/compromise.html “The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion,’” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 255