Mark Steyn is a genius. I recommend everything he has written, but today these two columns on health care and the effects of big government on a society are especially relevant:
The Nationalization of Your Body
A sampling:
In a nanny state, big government becomes a kind of religion: the church as state. Tommy Douglas, the driving force between Canadian health care, tops polls of all-time greatest Canadians. In Britain, after the Tube bombings, Gordon Brown began mulling over the creation of what he called a “British equivalent of the US Fourth of July”, a new national holiday to bolster British identity. The Labour Party think-tank, the Fabian Society, and proposed that the new “British Day” should be July 5th, the day the National Health Service was created. Because the essence of contemporary British identity is waiting two years for a hip operation.
They can call it Dependence Day.