You know that tired old bumper-sticker bromide, “It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber”? It’s alive and well. Says New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in “The Body Count at Home”:

“After Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans, eight years ago on Friday, we went to war and spent hundreds of billions of dollars ensuring that this would not happen again. Yet every two months, that many people die because of our failure to provide universal insurance — and yet many members of Congress want us to do nothing?”

Basically, the argument amounts to: If we have money to spend on war, then we have money to spend on health care for everyone.

But this argument ignores the fact that some expenditures are properly the responsibility of government, and others are not. Or, rather, the average liberal who spouts this bromide is actually reversing which is which.

War against nations that sponsor terrorist states is a proper function of government. In that case, government is protecting our individual rights from enemies who would like to deprive us of life and liberty. Of course, we can argue that the war in question should not have cost us nearly as much as it has, neither in dollars nor in American blood spilled, because the reason this war has been so dragged out and so expensive is that America is not willing to fight to the utmost of her capability and to squash terrorism-sponsoring states as they deserve to be. But that is beside the point; what’s relevant to our discussion here is that national defense is something that government should properly pay for because it is necessary in order to defend individual rights. Americans have the right to be left alone — not to have their lives and their property threatened by rogues — and defending that right sometimes means war.

Health care, by contrast, is not a right. It consists of goods and services that must be produced — and having the government provide it for Americans merely means that those goods and services (or the money to pay for them) must be seized from some Americans and given to others. Even if this is not done through a direct government handout, but rather by regulations that force insurance companies to cover everyone, it’s still the use of physical force to make some men sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others. This is not a proper function of government, and no matter how many wars’ worth of money we have, it would not be enough money to make government interference in health care the right thing to do.

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