The interesting thing about this moment from last night's Cruz vs. Sanders debate is in this exchange they are both being very articulate spokesmen for their point of view. And it gets at the Free Enterprise vs. Socialist divide in the debate.
Cruz once called Sanders an honest Socialist. And unlike the Romney vs. Obama or Trump vs. Hillary debates, you are seeing something fairly close to "honest Socialism" here.
Ted Cruz defines what a right is. A right is the freedom to make decisions for yourself.
Bernie Sanders ridicules that. You can make decisions for yourself, but what good does that do you if the government doesn't give you the things you need and you can't afford to pay for them.
Sanders says that rights are entitlements. Cruz argues that they are freedoms.
And that is what the debate comes down to. Freedom or entitlement. And the tricky border where we try to combine the two. As our government does. Health care is the most explosive area there is.
The Sanders position is easy. Obamacare doesn't go far enough. The government ought to give you everything you want. And then there will be no problems. Cruz's counter is to show how badly that works around the world. But that's an abstract. The ordinary people in the audience are not especially interested in events in Cuba, the USSR or even Canada.
Entitlements are always more seductive. Especially with a corrupt government that's giving away things to so many people anyway. And Sanders can angrily play on class envy. Look at Trump's mansions. Look at how the rich are living. While you can't get the health care you need. It's malicious and misleading. But it's hard to resist.
The left has played this range of emotions, greed, pathos, envy, outrage, like a violin for a long time. It's deeply seductive. Cruz's counter to it, freedom and principle, are much tougher sells. Conservatives ask us to be better than we are. Liberals ask us to be worse. They tell us that we ought to be angry and feel sorry for ourselves. And that if we don't have what we want, we ought to take it from others.
At the heart of this is a deeper question.
If a right is freedom, then freedom demands responsibility. But if a right is entitlement, then it's a demand. A demand that others give us what we deserve.
Free people fight for independence. But the left's revolutions are struggles for tyranny. They protest for better masters. They violently agitate for rulers who will run their lives better.
And that too is in the air here. Obama didn't give you enough. Vote Bernie. BernieCare will do everything that ObamaCare didn't. And if it doesn't, there's SteinCare. Or the NHS.
The left claims to be rational, but Bernie is playing on emotions. He's agitating for outrage. And he's angry. The thing that he is angry about may not really be health care. It probably isn't. Radicals channel personal anger into political outrage. How many of the anti-Trump marchers really hate Trump. How many of them hate their parents or their meaningless lives.
Freedom asks us to be better people. It tells us that we have responsibilities to live up to. The left imposes responsibilities on us. It gives us no choice in them. Just as it gives us no choice in health care.
The debate, every genuine debate between conservatives and the left, comes down to the question of whether we want to be better people. Do we want to have the right to choose or the right to get stuff. This is often a difficult question. It's especially difficult when it comes to health care. Yet the seductive answer, the one offered by Sanders, is deeply corrupting and doomed.
No society can be better, more able to make good decisions, than the people it is composed of.
Socialism degrades the people and enters a failure cycle in which it is less able to live up to its promises with every descent into deeper government control. In health care, Socialism gradually corrupts the system into a hybrid over-regulated mess that raises costs until only the government can fund it. And then only the government can ration it. But de-socializing medicine is too painful and scary. It's easier to try and tinker with it, to "repair" ObamaCare instead of getting rid of it.
And then the cycle spirals further down.
A society lives or dies by its people. If they can take on responsibilities and make good decisions, then it can grow and be strong. If they can't, then it decays. And everything else is just bread and circuses.
Our founding documents endow us with the right to be better people. That is what built the America we have. Being better people is hard work. It's always more seductive to take the left turn.
Socialism is inherently dishonest. Sanders is about as close to an honest Socialist as you can get on a national debate stage. But his Socialism is a lie. The left seduces us into evil. That is what it always does. It seduces us into agreeing to let men like him do our dirty work for us. It tells us that we can have everything we want without having to go over to our neighbor's house and steal his things.
It plays on our emotions. It summons up pity and outrage. And in the end it leaves us with nothing.