The “no one would ever do that crowd” has been having a bad couple of years. It has become quite clear that, yes, a government would do that, that being an increasing number of things to which we can add using assisted suicide to euthanize undesirable populations.
Related: Gov. Run Health Care Lesson from Canada – Won’t Pay for Treatment, Will Pay for Assisted Suicide
It is an idea older than progressivism but not much of an icebreaker since Hitler’s police state took it to its logical conclusion. While American progressives were thinking about sterilization and minimum wages (pricing the poor and unskilled out of the labor pool), Hitler went yard and murdered millions for whom he had no use.
No one is suggesting (quite yet that) we line up the “poor” along a ditch and shoot them, or gas them, or inject people with experimental drugs, but given the slippery slope we are on, this is a reliable “solution” to whatever a government can imagine is a “problem.”
Closer to Home
A good while back, Canada crippled their healthcare system by socializing it. Some years later, the idea occurred to some progressive eugenicists that caring for the chronically ill would cost a lot less if they could convince them to do us all a favor and kill themselves. Medically assisted suicide was mainstreamed, with nary a peep from the anti-capital-punishment “lethal injection is cruel” crowd, and they’ve been chasing a legal path to “compassionate” mass murder ever since.
From cruel to cool, almost overnight.
Canada wasn’t first, but they’ve been very progressive, with coloring books to get the children used to the idea that it is perfectly normal to have caring state-managed self-execution. And now, two ethicists at the University of Toronto have published a paper that takes this compassion™ to the next level.
Should MAiD be available to people in such circumstances, [poor economic conditions – I.C.] even when a sound argument can be made that the agents in question are autonomous? …
we use a harm reduction approach, arguing that even though such decisions are tragic, MAiD should be available.
Igor Chudov commenting on “In Choosing Death in Unjust Conditions,” notes that “The real reason for allowing euthanizing the poor shows up a couple of paragraphs down and is, no surprise, a financial one: Canada has a collapsing healthcare system, and euthanizing poor people “clogging hospitals” would allow more deserving individuals (note my sarcasm) to use medical services. The authors stop before saying that out loud, but this is my interpretation of why they brought up collapsing healthcare.”
In case you forgot, the pro-Obama Care folks were not shy about the need to manage care, which meant some folks would get pain pills instead of more expensive therapies, treatments, or operations. Misery or addiction (maybe both) is not a death panel (or a death sentence), even in a culture chasing suicide as a patriotic duty or a social good.
MAiD in Canada
MAiD is the name of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying Program, and “In Choosing Death in Unjust Conditions” looks like the first step toward a long warned logical conclusion for the practice of state-approved or assisted suicide. Someone has said the quiet art out loud, probably at the behest of a government research grant.
As you may know, Canada socialized medicine (as in deliberately ruined its own health care) and watched as care declined for decades, culminating in a political pandemic. Now we have ethicists hinting that unless the country approves a plan that allows poor people (to be convinced by more government) to kill themselves, the whole thing could collapse under a weight they were long warned (by scoundrels on the free market right) it could never manage.
Poverty is not a crime, nor is it a death sentence. Escaping it “against all odds” continues to be the foundation of tales that inspire people regardless of where they started on the economic ladder. And millions of people (billions?) live happily below any conception we in the West might have of poverty. These are people with no health care and perhaps no potable water most of the year. But there they are, getting by with what they have, all with great potential – burping out the occasional rags to riches story, while a “rich” Western nation like Canada will consider the musings of ethicists who proposed legal chemical suicide as a solution to a problem the government created.
America, which was once the best place to start poor and work your way into or above the middle class, has a handful of states with legalized self-execution, with my neighboring Vermont offering that “compassion™” to tourists who meet a set of strict criteria destined for mission creep.
As for Canada, at least a third of Canadians are also okay with using MAiD on the Homeless, and what happens when that number rises to 51%, which it will if you tell folks the homeless or the poor is the reason you have to wait six months for a procedure? Or that it is the only responsible and compassionate cure for an increasingly more comprehensive range of things, including Alzheimer’s? Get that crazy grandpa off your mind by letting us put an end to his! It’s what he wants.
And you thought Canadians were “nice.”
