Liberty Minute November 6 2013

Arthur Guett, who presided over the Health Affairs division of the Nazi regime?s Interior Ministry, attacked the Hippocratic Oath and promoted  the collectivist view that a medical practitioner?s first duty was to society, rather than the individual. Guett insisted that ?the ill-conceived love of thy neighbor has to disappear, especially in relation to inferior or asocial creatures.? That category included not only Jews and others regarded as inferior races, but also congenitally ill, handicapped, and mentally infirm Germans who were regarded as ?life unworthy of life.?

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and intimate adviser to Barack Obama, has embraced a similar collectivist view of health care. Dr. Emanuel, a key architect of the Obamacare program, insists that we must abandon the Hippocratic Oath and the moral obligation it imposes on doctors to treat the individual patient. He maintains that physicians should embrace a more communitarian view in which the needs of the elderly, the newborn, and seriously ill people would be considered less important than the good of the collective ? as defined by exalted beings like himself.

The song remains the same, even if Dr. Emanuel is performing it in a different key from his Nazi forebears.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.