Primum non nocere

A Latin phrase that means "First, do no harm."

What if we elected people who took the same oath our physicians take? If you said the result would be "a smaller, constitutional government that defended our rights (the actual ones, not the ones people keep making up) and didn't end up taking our freedoms while making things worse", go to the head of the class. (Jefferson's concise explanation found at the top of this page sums it up nicely.)

Alternately, if you said, "anarchy and ruin", well, as Bill Engvall says; "here's your sign".

Hippocrates might have been a good choice for a representative if he wasn't busy inventing medical practice. Hippocratic medicine was supposed to be humble and passive. Which is the same idea the framers had for governing ourselves after we kicked King George's royal arse back to England.  Good 'ole Hippo had a splendid idea that would apply equally to both practices. According to Wikipedia, the translation for the above phrase was roughly; "given an existing problem, it may be better to do nothing than to do something that risks causing more harm than good."

The impending first step to single payer government run health insurance (President Obama's unabashed and well documented goal for America) is only a few days away and qualifies as a perfect example of the above principle. It's only one of thousands of course, but it's the biggest one in the history of our moribund republic.

This isn't your run of the mill slippery slope folks. This is a fatal plunge off the precipice of Mount America. Nothing is as personal as decisions about your health and once you have abdicated that responsibility to people in government, every other decision will be essentially irrelevant. And it's easy, they don't have to forbid you from buying your own insurance, they merely have to make sure it is not available. And make no mistake, that is the plan. They wanted that result all at once, but even if they have to do it incrementally, it is the goal.

Absolutely everything one does can be in some way linked to their health. From what you eat, to how you travel, to what activities you engage in, it all can be "regulated" for the good of the people. And no individual can be allowed to engage in anything that raises the costs for the group.

A federal "Nurse Ratched" making your choices for you? Think I'm cuckoo? Over the top? Hysterical?
Perhaps, but I fear a day when you may think I was too timid.

Such a conclusion would show that, indeed, they "did great harm". Harm fatal to our way of life, and maybe even our life itself.