Trading a free market for an interventionist state

The moral footing of the health insurance industry
--the voluntary pooling of financial risk in a free market--
has been weakened to the point of extinction
by the gentle art of peaceful coexistence.

The moral imperative of personal responsibility
has been manipulated to the point of nonrecognition
by the iron fists of government intervention
in the velvet gloves of Social Security and Medicare.

1.
New Lies for Old
by Anatoliy Golitsyn (1984)
[page 130] Peaceful coexistence was defined under Khrushchev, as it was under Lenin, as a form of class struggle between antagonistic social systems based on the active exploitation of the contradictions within and between noncommunist countries . . . "Communists do not keep it a secret that coexistence is necessary for world-wide victory of Marxist-Leninist ideas, that there are deep-rooted differences between the two world systems of socialism and capitalism. To solve those differences, Marxist-Leninists hold, war is not an obligatory means in economic, political and ideological struggle [quote from a Soviet military newspaper, 1963]."

2.
Iron fist in the velvet glove means autocratic rule beneath a softer exterior.

3.
John Stossel (8/12/2009): Manipulation is what we got many years ago when we traded a more or less free market for the "progressive" interventionist state . . . Observe: Although President Obama and big-government activists demonize health-insurance companies, the companies "are still mostly on board with the president's effort to overhaul the U.S. health-care system," the Wall Street Journal reports . . . Not that Big Pharma and Big Insurance like every detail of the Democratic plan. Drug companies don't want Medicare negotiating drug prices -- for good reason . . . As for the insurance companies, they worry -- legitimately -- that a government insurance company -- the so-called public option" -- would drive them out of business . . . But despite these differences, the biggest companies in these two industries are on board with "reform." . . . In this case, big business wants to shape -- and profit from -- what inevitably will be an interventionist health-care reform.
Can you think of the last time a major business supported a truly free market in anything?

4.
The god that failed
Richard Crossman, ed.
As written by Andre Gide [page 164]: The disappearance of capitalism has not brought freedom to the Soviet workers--it is essential that the proletariat abroad should realize this fully. It is of course true that they are no longer exploited by shareholding capitalists, but nevertheless they are exploited, and in so devious, subtle and twisted a manner that they do not know any more whom to blame.

[page 165] There is no doubt that all the bourgeois vices and failings still lie dormant, in spite of the Revolution, in many. Man cannot be reformed from the outside--a change of heart is necessary--and I feel anxious when I observe all the bourgeois instincts flattered and encouraged in the Soviet Union, and all the old layers of society forming again--if not precisely social classes, in at least a new kind of aristocracy, and not an aristocracy of intellect or ability, but an aristocracy of right-thinkers and conformists. In the next generation it may well be an aristocracy of money.