Winston Churchill knew a few things about elections. In 1945, during an election campaign, he faced opponents who espoused a socialist agenda, just as John McCain’s opponent does. Churchill said of his opponent’s plans for Britain, “Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the object worship of the state.” John McCain needs to speak to the American people about this same problem.

Voters in the US have been lured gradually into an acceptance of socialism. The camel of socialism first sneaked his nose into the tent of US free enterprise during the New Deal. People suffered during the Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt announce he had come to help. He rolled out bank holidays and WPA and Social Security. Perhaps, if Hitler had not sent his tanks rolling into Poland, the American people would have seen clearly that the New Deal was picking their pockets with the hand not occupied with flashing the smoke and mirrors of socialism before their eyes.

In Election 2008, B. Hussein Obama is busy with his own road show, trying to convince us all that we need socialism in many forms. His proposals clearly demonstrate the truth of Churchill’s words. Churchill associated socialism with “worship” of government and totalitarian oppression. If Obama is elected, we will see exactly what Churchill was talking about.

Obama’s web site lists his positions and objectives for many issues. Take healthcare, for example. Obama proposes a national health care plan coupled with a watchdog agency to hover over the private insurance companies. Obama plans to assure that nobody can be rejected by an insurance company for any medical reason. He will demand record-keeping and guarantees from insurance plans and healthcare providers. The government’s tentacles will creep into every healthcare visit and transaction.

If anyone wants to know how well that will work, the first place to look is Medicare. This medical program operated, funded and guaranteed by the government has been a boondoggle from day one. Before Medicare, patients and doctors decided what medical treatment was appropriate for a diagnosis. After Medicare, the government runs that show. When a small rural hospital in Missouri wanted to provide dialysis in a location convenient for rural patients, the doctors eventually gave up trying to meet the regulations. Among the problems – Medicare will not pay for a lab test to determine if a patient has the right levels of medication in his system. According to Medicare, the test is only justified if the patient’s medication is outside the boundaries of acceptable levels. Unfortunately, the doctors were not able determine without a test the actual level of the medication in the patients’ systems. Medicare regulations like these make it very difficult for a doctor to provide good care for a patient.

In case you think that Medicare’s limitation to geriatric patients makes any difference, you could look at universal healthcare that the British have enjoyed now for many years. The British government pays for that system, and the British government makes the rules for that system, just as our government makes the silly rules for Medicare. Hence, even though Aricept has been demonstrated to slow the progress of Alzheimer’s in many patients, no British patients in the national healthcare system can use it. The cost was determined by the government administrators of the NHS to be prohibitive.

Obama calls his plan national health insurance, not national healthcare. Do not be deceived. The restrictions and regulations he is proposing would only be the first step. In fact, Medicare is still called insurance, too, but the regulations and reporting associated with it result in severe government involvement in the actual care of patients. True socialized medicine would not be far behind. I can hear now the call to end all the different programs – Medicare, Medicaid, national health insurance, private health insurance – to cut costs and eliminate waste. I can hear now the call to end the pretense that it is health insurance, and simply call it national health care. After all, the government is paying all the bills.

Concern about the cost of healthcare in general will only escalate if the government pays all the bills. After all, the most powerful impetus in the war against smoking has been the cost of medical treatment for smokers who develop lung cancer, heart disease and stroke. A loudly vocal movement has developed to make smokers into social outcasts, and the biggest reason is that treating lung cancer, heart disease and stroke is expensive. We hear constantly that huge sums of money are paid annually for the treatment of diseases of smokers. Employers and insurance companies put a lot of pressure on smokers to quit, because they do not want the cost of medical treatment for smokers.

If Obama were successful in bringing about socialized medicine in the USA, we would see a great many other campaigns just like the campaign against smokers. In fact, the government can bypass a campaign altogether and simply say, if you smoke, we refuse to pay for your medical care. Period. Is this what Americans want?

I can imagine another campaign that would become a regulation, too. New York passed a law against trans fats in restaurants. California has outlawed trans fats in the whole state. It is all about obesity, and the concern for the obese is all about the costs of health care. If the federal government runs health care, what is to keep the federal government from telling people what they can eat?

It all boils down to exactly what Churchill observed. Socialism in any form is tyranny. Socialism sounds so kind at the first. In Russia in 1917 poor people were deceived into believing that socialism would take care of them. By 1991 their eyes had opened. They had learned that the government only takes. They could not count on the government to do anything but push them around. They were still poor. They stood in line for toilet paper and soap, and the government could not even be counted on to pay them for their work. US citizens need to look with great skepticism at Obama’s suggestion that government health care will be better than free enterprise healthcare. Then they need to look with the same skepticism at all his other proposals to take care of them.

In a socialist country the government takes care of itself. People receive what the government is willing to give them, but the government gets all the good stuff. Citizens unite! Do not let Obama deceive you into giving away your freedom. Do not let him lure you into worship of government. Stand up for the Constitution, personal freedom and free enterprise. These are the forces that have made our country great and strong for more than 200 years. Do not give away your freedom for the false promises of a government caretaker.

Election rhetoric is full of proposals for programs of all kinds. Candidates promise us that they will enact laws that solve problems and change people’s lives. History teaches us that it doesn’t work that way.

Programs do not transform people. The best they can do is to expose people to a different way of living. The people may or may not internalize what they see. The history of programs to address social need is that we spend more and more money without reducing the incidence of crime, hunger, disease or ignorance. A program works by enrolling participants, giving them services or training or money, and then graduating them when they are ineligible or the program is defunded. At the end, there are a lot of people who have been through the program. None of them is transformed by it.

For over 70 years this country has been creating and testing programs to address poverty, hunger, crime, education, healthcare, etc. If throwing money at problems would solve them, our problems would have been solved ten times over. Instead, it appears that each program has a few moments of glory and not much else to show for its existence. In the river of human grief the programs should address, there is hardly a ripple to show for all the government money that has been spent.

Socialism is a political idea that sounds a lot like the social and moral dimensions of Christian teaching: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Unfortunately, when this idea that sounds so kind is cloaked in bureaucracy and when the definitions of need and ability become political footballs, the society that results is more oppressive than the worst thing we have ever seen in a world of free people engaging in free enterprise to make profits. Social themes become the tools of terrible oppression when they do not grow out of transformed lives.

Barack Obama is the messiah of socialism. He preaches that government will take care of the citizens. All they need to do is give to government everything they have, and the government will give them back what it thinks they need. Government gets to decide what they need, too, and those who decide need more than anyone else. That is the gospel of socialism.

We must defeat Barack Obama. This country can’t afford Barack Obama. I will vote for John McCain, because I do not want to live in the Union of Socialized Americans.

I read an article today about an employer who not only refuses to hire any employees who smoke, but he also goes after their spouses. He is encouraged in this endeavor by a public attitude and a few huge court settlements that have made tobacco a four-letter word. Smokers are discriminated against in ways we would not tolerate if the discrimination were about age, gender or religion. To date, our increasingly socialist government has never made it illegal to grow, sell or buy tobacco or any of its products. The only thing illegal about tobacco is using it.

One wonders how such a thing could happen in a free country. Supposedly in the USA, if a product is legal, we are free to use it. When the product is tobacco, that freedom is daily being compressed. How did this happen?

The root of the problem is healthcare. Back in the days when people managed and paid for their own healthcare, the use of tobacco was every individual’s own choice. The government paid subsidies to tobacco farmers under certain circumstances, just the same as it did for corn and cotton. Some people smoked; some didn’t. Some smokers got sick and died; some didn’t. A few very elderly people attributed their longevity to a daily cigar. If a smoker, or anybody else, became ill, treatment was provided by means of interaction between a doctor and a patient. That was it.

Today, things are quite different. Today, hardly anyone pays for his own healthcare, and most people think that nobody should pay for his own healthcare. Healthcare has become a political issue. Furthermore, computers, computers everywhere pump out more statistics than anyone can absorb, and the data is interpreted in scientific papers as well as op-eds and personal blogs. Long ago when I was first exposed to the mathematical maze of statistics, I concluded that if someone wants to make people think they have discovered truth, all he needs to do is feed them numbers. People are so impressed by numbers, and most people cannot do the math or the logic to confirm the accuracy of either the data or the interpretation.

Today, we are bombarded with numbers. One set of numbers tells us how many people smoke cigarettes. Another set tells us how many people die of lung cancer. Yet another set purports to tell us that there is a high correlation between smoking and dying of lung cancer. That is how it started. We are all exposed to statistics like this every day, and we are so accustomed to the mathematical stew that we don’t even question it. We don’t ask how the data was collected. We don’t ask how data was selected for analysis. We don’t ask why a particular analytical algorithm was chosen. Moreover, we don’t ask if the graph displayed as a result means anything at all. We assume that the graph is a true picture of something, and we believe what the reporters tell us it means.

For many years, as computers grew larger and more powerful, and as databases of statistics became more readily available and as we moved into the world of receiving what passes for news on a twenty-four-hour schedule, we have been fed statistics and analysis on two subjects: healthcare and tobacco. The statistics have told us that healthcare costs are spiraling out of control, and they have told us that large numbers of smokers become expensive patients during treatment for lung cancer and other conditions. The statistics that correlate smoking with lung cancer, and the statistics that correlate lung cancer with healthcare costs have met on the field of political discourse.

It all happened after the signing of the first Medicare bill in 1965. Prior to that time, wise heads in Congress rejected numerous attempts to involve the government in the provision of healthcare. The Constitution provides no hint that providing healthcare is a defined role for the federal government. Until 1965, the Constitutional standard prevailed, and healthcare was a matter to be managed by patients and their doctors. The passage of the Medicare Act of 1965 changed all that.

Without weighing the reader down with a history of Medicare, I will sum up its impact briefly. After Medicare came into existence, it immediately became clear that the government had no idea how to administer health insurance. When people realized that it was an inefficient mess, members of Congress put their heads together and made the situation worse, by crafting legislation which inserted the federal government into the administration of hospitals and clinics. The insurance industry watched what was happening and began to model its delivery and administration on what wasn’t working at all well for Medicare, because the insurance industry actually knew how to milk the healthcare cow. Today, Medicare is a complete scandal, and so is private insurance. Between Medicare and the insurance industry, healthcare costs have climbed to unbelievable numbers.

Enter the smoker. And the statistics that purport to correlate smoking and lung cancer. And the statistics for healthcare costs associated with lung cancer. And political discourse which says that a) healthcare is a fundamental human right, just like “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and b) if healthcare is a human right, then the government should provide it, and c) if the government provides it, then the government should be able to require people to be healthy. I have greatly oversimplified the progression of thought, but it is actually the case today that US citizens believe that the government has a right to prevent citizens from making unhealthy life choices, the government has a right to legislate the healthy choices people must make, and all this happens because people actually believe that they have a right to scorn people whose health costs society a lot of money.

The USA is becoming more and more socialist every day. It is truly bizarre that citizens who believe costs of anything are too high for them to pay believe that the government should provide that thing for them at no charge. Where do they think the government will get the money to provide the free service? Government is not like a business. Government does not produce a product or service which it can sell at a profit. The only way government can acquire money to give me something is to take money away from me in the form of taxes.

The socialist agenda is leading us toward a socialist state, and it is accomplishing this objective without changing the Constitution. A thinking person will ask how that can happen, and the answer is that people simply don’t question the idea of a caretaker government any more. When FDR introduced the New Deal during the Great Depression, most families had been hurt so badly that they welcomed anything that seemed like help. It sounded good – a chicken in every pot. FDR increased the size of the Supreme Court and then packed the court with socialist judges, and ever thereafter we contend with an interpretation of the Constitution which fundamentally changes it. Today, a very loose construction of the Constitution allows the government to intrude in our lives to a degree that John Adams and George Washington would have completely rejected. Today, a loose construction of the Constitution mandates social programs which a reasonable level of taxation cannot possibly pay for. Today, a loose construction of the Constitution has been translated into a social notion that it is okay for an employer to demonize an employee’s spouse for smoking.

This situation will only get worse if Obama is elected president. How ironic that he is a smoker! Maybe John McCain should run an ad that calculates the cost to taxpayers if a smoker is elected president and then gets lung cancer. I plan to vote for John McCain in the hope that his affiliation with the Republican party will eventually translate into an aversion to socialism. For now, he looks less like a socialist than Obama, and we can hope that if conservatives unite to elect McCain, they will be able to influence him to more conservative political choices.