FREE TO CHOOSE “Who protects the worker?” Video and Transcript Part 1 of 7

In 1980 I read the book FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton Friedman and it really enlightened me a tremendous amount.  I suggest checking out these episodes and transcripts of Milton Friedman’s film series FREE TO CHOOSE: “The Failure of Socialism” and “What is wrong with our schools?”  and “Created Equal”  and  From Cradle to Grave, and – Power of the Market. Milton Friedman shows in this episode how the worker is best protected and it is not by the government!!!!!!!

Liberals say that the government must step in to help the workers and that the unions must but truly the best opportunity for the worker is increased competition from employers trying to hire him or her. Many times when the government gets involved the most unskilled worker is hurt the most.

Friedman: People who earn their living in a modern heavy industry seldom engage in the kind of back-breaking toil that was the everyday lot of most workers a century ago. And yet they earn far more. What has produced these improvements? The offhand reaction of most people is likely to be that labor unions are largely responsible for the enormous progress workers have made in the past two centuries. But clearly, at least for the U.S. that cannot be true. After all, in the 19th Century when workers did very well, there were hardly any labor unions at all. And even today, no more than one out of four or five workers is a member of a trade union. And the remainder do very well indeed in achieving the highest level of living in the world. Labor unions do, of course, benefit their members but far from being a key to the development of the modern society. They are a throwback to an earlier pre-industrial era to the agreements among craftsman in the middle ages or to go back even earlier, more than 2000 years ago to the agreement among medical men in Greece.

From the tiny Greece island of Kash, the coast of Asia Minor is four miles away in the mist. Twenty five hundred years ago a hospital and medical school flourished on Kash. The great Hippocrates, the founder of modern medicine, work there. Legend has it that Hippocrates taught his students in the shade of this plain tree. He welcomed anyone who wanted to learn, so long as they paid his fee. There is another legend that St. Paul stood here and preached the Gospel of Christianity. What isn’t legend is that Hippocrates and his followers started medicine on the road forward to becoming a science. When Hippocrates died at the age of 104, or so legend has it, this island was full of medial people, his students and disciples. Competition for custom was fierce. Some 20 years after he died they got together and constructed a code of conduct. They named it the Hippocratic Oath, after their old teacher and master. Every new physician, before he could start practice, came to this spot back here in front of those columns and took the Oath. The oath was full of fine ideals for protecting the patient. But it also had a couple of other things in it. Listen to this one, “I will impart a knowledge of the art to my own self and those of my teachers and to disciples bound by a stipulation and oath according to the law of medicine, but to none others.” Today we’d call that a closed shop. Or listen to this one referring to patients suffering from the agonizing disease of kidney or bladder stones, “I will not cut persons laboring under the stone but will leave this to be done by men who are practitioners of this work.” A nice market sharing agreement between physicians and surgeons. Hippocrates must turn in his grave when a new class of medical men takes that oath. After all, he taught anyone provided only they pay his tuition. He would strongly have objected to the kind of restrictive practices that physicians all over the world have adopted to protect their custom. In the United States the American Medical Association has for decades been one of the strongest labor unions in the country, keeping down the number of physicians, keeping up the costs of medical care, preventing competition by people from outside the profession with those in it. All, of course, in the name of helping the patient.

Without warning, anyone of us may suddenly need medical care. If we do, we want the very best care we can get. But who can give us that care?

It is always a graduate of an expensive medical school who has a union card called a medical license? Or might it be someone like this a trained paramedic working for a private enterprise organization rendering emergency care?

Paramedic: And hopefully we’ll get a very good contract out of that.

Friedman: Many such businesses provide primary care for emergency cases in the United States. This particular paramedic team is attached to a fire department in southern California. They’re good at their job. But it’s not unusual to find local physicians objecting.

Joe Dolphin: They take the Hippocratic Oath here in the United States and they believe that they should be the one that is treating their patient. They should be the one that saves that patient’s life. And if someone else does it, it just kind of interferes with everything that they have been taught.

Friedman: But why should medical care be a monopoly of licensed physicians? Shouldn’t anyone who is capable of providing effective help be free to do so.

Paramedic: I’m going to take your blood pressure here. Okay, any one see him go down?

Friedman: You can be sure that no one would be able to stay in this business very long unless he can demonstrate by performance that he’s doing a good job. Joe Dolphin knows that very well.

Joe Dolphin: We’ve taken some statistical samples of the kind of effectiveness paramedics have in California. Giving an example of that, in one district of California that we serve which is a county which is populated to the extent of 580,000 people. Before the introduction of paramedics, less than 1% of the patients that suffered a cardiac arrest or their heart stopped, lived through their hospital stay and were released from the hospital. But with the introduction of paramedics, just in the first six months of operation, 23% of the people who’s heart stops, are successfully resuscitated and are released from the hospital and go back to productive working society. We think that’s pretty amazing. We think the facts speak for themselves. However, relating that to the medical community is sometimes very difficult. They have ideas of their own.

Paramedics: Respirations 12 and regular by… Looks good to me Dave. How are you reading this down there? Are you guys ready to go? Yeah. It says Code Two. Code Two?

Friedman: Disputes between union and non-union workers are not always as high-minded as between organized medicine and Joe Dolphin.

I would to hear your reaction to this short clip and transcript below:

Related posts:

________________

_____________

________________________________________________

_____________________________________________

Francis Schaeffer Whatever Happened to the Human Race (Episode 1) ABORTION

_____________________________________

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?)

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro)

Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1)

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of Truth & History (part 2)

Francis Schaeffer Whatever Happened to the Human Race (Episode 1) ABORTION

_____________________________________

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?)

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro)

Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1)

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of Truth & History (part 2)

_______________

The Founding Fathers and the Right to Life

Jameson Taylor
Permission Granted

The Declaration of Independence draws a very clear line between sanity and insanity by proclaiming the existence of certain self-evident truths that all rational men should recognize: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

A self-evident truth is, by definition, evident to anyone who is sane. Persons who do not accept that all human beings are endowed with an inalienable right to life—for example, the 82 percent of Americans who think abortion should be legal—are, by this definition, insane.

The right to life is inalienable because it is not of human, but of divine origin. 1 Because man does not create himself, he cannot deprive himself of the primary goods that are inherent to human existence: life, freedom and happiness. Just as no government can deny its citizens these inalienable rights, neither can a man deprive himself of these rights. The “inalienable” right to life thus precludes abortion as well as suicide.2

A Closer Look at Roe

But what about Roe vs. Wade? Does a “penumbra,” or shadow, of the 14th Amendment guarantee a right to privacy that includes the right to an abortion?

The fact is, as Justice Byron White’s dissenting opinion in Roe vs. Wade concluded, there is “nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court’s judgement.” Indeed, just as the logical development of the Declaration’s recognition of man’s inherent liberty required federal intervention to abolish slavery, the Declaration’s acknowledgment of the inalienable right to life would seem to favor federal intervention to end abortion. 3

James Wilson’s “Lectures on Law,” given at what eventually was to become the University of Pennsylvania, clearly affirm that the right to life encompasses the unborn. Wilson was one of only six men to sign both the Declaration and the Constitution, and was a Supreme Court justice from 1789 to 1798. Recognized as “the most learned and profound legal scholar of his generation,” Wilson’s lectures were attended by President George Washington, Vice President John Adams, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and a “galaxy of other republican worthies.” For this reason, as constitutional scholar Walter Berns states, “Wilson, when speaking on the law, might be said to be speaking for the Founders generally.” So what do the Founders say about the right to life?

Wilson clearly answers this question: “With consistency, beautiful and undeviating, human life from its commencement to its close, is protected by the common law. In the contemplation of law, life begins when the infant is first able to stir in the womb. By the law, life is protected not only from immediate destruction, but from every degree of actual violence, and in some cases, from every degree of danger.”4

Given Wilson’s exegesis, one cannot doubt that the Founders recognized that unborn infants are owed the full protection of the law. The key question thus becomes the point at which the unborn fetus becomes an unborn child.

Wilson, in agreement with the limited medical jurisprudence of his time, assumed that life begins with the “quickening” of the infant in his mother’s womb. As taught by Aristotle, the quickening was the point at which the fetus was infused with a human, rational soul. John Bouvier’s Law Dictionary, first printed in 1839, defines the quickening as follows: “The motion of the foetus, when felt by the mother, is called quickening, and the mother is then said to be quick with child. This happens at different periods of pregnancy in different women, and in different circumstances, but most usually about the fifteenth or sixteenth week after conception….”

One of the sources of both Wilson’s and Bouvier’s opinion is William Blackstone’s widely read Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769). Blackstone’s discussion of the quickening observes: “Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual; and it begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb. For if a woman is quick with child, and by a potion, or otherwise, killeth it in her womb… this, though not murder, was by the ancient law homicide or manslaughter. But at present it is not looked upon in quite so atrocious a light, though it remains a very heinous misdemeanor…”

The ancient law referred to by Blackstone is best articulated by Henry Bracton (1216-1272), the renowned “Father of the Common Law.”5 As Roe reluctantly admits, Bracton categorized the abortion of a “formed or quickened” fetus as a form of homicide, “the slaying of man by man.” Wilson seems to agree with Bracton on this issue, and thus affirmed that the inalienable right to life applies just as much to unborn, quickened human beings as it does to any other human beings. The fact that Blackstone emphatically characterizes abortion as “a very heinous” crime suggests he may sympathize with the ancient law on this matter.

Needless to say, the Founders undoubtedly recognized that unborn infants older than 15 weeks possess a constitutionally protected and inalienable right to life. Given that, according to Planned Parenthood, at least 90 percent of all abortions occur in the first trimester, this conclusion seems almost irrelevant. To begin with, however, the obvious intentions of the Founders as well as the weight of the common law compel the Congress and the courts to prohibit abortion—for any reason—in the second and third trimesters. Abortions performed during these late stages are clearly murder—and cannot be justified by a penumbra of the 14th Amendment, the mother’s health or a woman’s “right to choose.”

Pro-abortionists assert that any restrictions on access to abortion in even the second and third trimesters are bound to result in the prohibition of abortion altogether. By the same logic, however, society would have no right to forbid any crime. The reason abortionists claim that women have an absolute right to an abortion at any time is because they recognize that even the right to an abortion during the first trimester is arbitrary. Douglas Kmiec, professor of constitutional law at the University of Notre Dame, discussed this point in his 22 April 1996 statement before the House Committee on the Judiciary. Kmiec’s analysis of internal Supreme Court memoranda related to Roe vs. Wade revealed that Justice Harry A. Blackmun, author of the Roe majority opinion, even admitted to his fellow justices that “you will observe that I have concluded that the end of the first trimester is critical. This is arbitrary, but perhaps any other selected point…is equally arbitrary…” (emphasis added).

What are we to make of this shocking statement? Perhaps the justices did not know that an infant’s heart begins beating at five weeks or that at eight weeks brain waves can be measured or that at 12 weeks the child can and does cry and sometimes sucks his thumb.

Abortion is legal today not because the justices did not know when life begins, but because the justices—as well as the 82 percent of Americans cited earlier—do not know what liberty is. For most Americans, liberty is the subjectively defined right to do whatever you can get away with. Sandra Day O’Connor memorialized this faulty conception of freedom in her 1992 Planned Parenthood vs. Casey decision, which claimed that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

America’s Founding Fathers would have condemned such an opinion as madness. Because both life and liberty are “endowments” or “gifts” from God, the proper exercise of liberty requires that man adhere to the “laws of God and Nature’s God” in the use of his freedom. When James Wilson stated that life begins with the infant’s “quickening,” he was not making an “arbitrary” decision as to who is human and who is not. Wilson’s opinion was based upon a reasonable assessment of the best scientific, legal and philosophical opinions available at the time.

Had Wilson and the Founders had access to the discoveries of modern biology, they certainly would have agreed that life begins at conception. Medical discoveries in the years following the American Revolution increasingly encouraged American and English lawmakers to come to this conclusion. In 1803, for example, England adopted a law known as Lord Ellenborough’s Act that made it a capital offense to “cause and procure the Miscarriage of any Woman quick with child.” The law established severe penalties for aborting infants in the first trimester as well: “…if any Person or Persons…shall procure to be used or employed, any Instrument or other Means whatsoever, with Intent thereby to cause or procure the Miscarriage of any Woman not being, or not being proved to be, quick with Child at the Time of administering…that then and in every such Case the Person or Persons so offending, their Counsellors, Aiders, and Abettors, knowing of and privy to such Offence, shall be and are hereby declared to be guilty of Felony, and shall be liable to be fined, imprisoned, set in and upon the Pillory, publickly or privately whipped. …”

Bouvier, citing Theodric and John Beck’s 1835 Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, himself questions the age-old idea of the quickening, noting that “physiologists, perhaps with reason, think that the child is a living being from the moment of conception.” More to the point, Bouvier’s entry, “Foeticide,” comments that “recently, this term has been applied to designate the act by which criminal abortion is procured.” Such scholarship soon bore fruit, with Maine, in 1840, becoming the first state to ban the abortion of infants “quick or not.”6

Subsequent federal and state laws banning abortion altogether were a logical development of the Founding Fathers’ absolute reverence for the self-evident and inalienable right to life. It is no accident that the Declaration, as written by Thomas Jefferson, characterizes the right to life as the first of those three foundational rights for the sake of which government itself is instituted. Where there is no guarantee of the right to life, legitimate political authority simply does not exist. Where there is no guarantee to life for both the weak and the strong, the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all are themselves at risk. The “New Freedom” heralded by the Supreme Court and other partisans of the Sexual Revolution has thus turned into nothing less than a new enslavement. Only when we as a nation return to our faith in the Creator who gives us life and liberty will we again be truly free.

Footnotes

1  “Our liberties do not come from charters; for these are only the declaration of pre-existing rights. They do not depend on parchments or seals, but come from the king of kings and the Lord of all the earth.” John Dickinson, Founding Father and author of the Articles of Confederation. [Back]

2  “Nobody can give more power than he has himself, and he that cannot take away his own life cannot give another power over it.” English philosopher John Locke, II Treatise, iv. [Back]

3  As recognized in Holy Trinity vs. U.S. (1892), the Declaration is part of the “organic” or “fundamental” law that provides the context within which the Constitution must be interpreted.[Back]

4  “Lectures on Law,” Ch. 12, p. 597 in The Works of James Wilson. ed. Robert G. McCloskey (1967).[Back]

5  Joseph Story, Supreme Court justice from 1811-1845, states that at the time of the Founding, “the common law of England [was] the fundamental law of all the Colonies.” See also Ex Parte Grossman, 267 U.S. 87, 108.[Back]

6  Justice Rehnquist’s dissent in Roe vs. Wade mentions that by the time the 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, 36 states and territories had enacted abortion laws. The Maine statute of 1840 is referenced in Brian Young’s “A Brief Survey of U.S. Abortion Law Before the 1973 Decision.”[Back]

Francis Schaeffer Whatever Happened to the Human Race (Episode 1) ABORTION

_____________________________________

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?)

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro)

Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1)

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of Truth & History (part 2)

_________________