Canadian Health Care and Growing Dependence on the State

My Canadian friends explained that doctors are allocated to different provinces by the government. They seem to accept this heavy handedness without question, so I asked whether they considered it presumptuous of the government to tell doctors where to practice. Their response was that the government contributed to the education of doctors and therefore had a right to decide where they could practice. There are no private universities in Canada so the government is the source of doctors.

My Canadian friends had no response to the observation that by the same argument, the fact that the state provides a free public education would entitle the state to tell everyone, not just doctors, where they can live and what jobs they can occupy.

What is scary is not that my Canadian friends are somehow indifferent to the ever-expanding power and intrusiveness of the state, but rather that these people are not unlike me. They have much the same temperament and interests. Under only slightly different conditions, our places could be exchanged. It is chilling to realize how fragile appreciation of freedom and independence is; how easy it is to willing exchange personal freedom for security and to accept the role of sheep with the government as benevolent shepherd.

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