The other day, Peter Singer quoted me in his New York Times piece, Why We Must Ration Health Care:

In the conservative monthly The American Spectator, David Catron … asked whether we really deserve a health care system in which ’soulless bureaucrats arbitrarily put a dollar value on our lives.’

For anyone familiar with Singer’s positions, which include the advocacy of infanticide in certain situations, it will come as no surprise that his answer to my question is “yes.”

The task of health care bureaucrats is then to get the best value for the resources they have been allocated. It is the familiar comparative exercise of getting the most bang for your buck.

This assertion is an excellent argument for not giving those bureaucrats our bucks. It also highlights what Singer and other advocates of government-run health care mean by “we.”

When these people say we need to do something, what they really mean is the government wants to do something to us. And it is always something that we don’t want done.