This one is a particularly popular straw man documentary:

Documentary look at health care in the United States as provided by profit-oriented health maintenance organizations (HMOs) compared to free, universal care in Canada, the U.K., and France. Moore contrasts U.S. media reports on Canadian care with the experiences of Canadians in hospitals and clinics there. He interviews patients and doctors in the U.K. about cost, quality, and salaries. He examines why Nixon promoted HMOs in 1971, and why the Clintons’ reform effort failed in the 1990s. He talks to U.S. ex-pats in Paris about French services, and he takes three 9/11 clean-up volunteers, who developed respiratory problems, to Cuba for care. He asks of Americans, “Who are we?”

How do we think an identical documentary that resembles this would go over?

Documentary look at health care in the United States as provided by profit-oriented health maintenance organizations (HMOs) compared to “free”, universal care in Canada, the U.K., and France and demonstrates that it is no so free and not so universal, nor does it achieve the egalitarian claims its founders and supporters advocate for. Oroom contrasts U.S. media reports on the high quality of Canadian care with the actual experiences of Canadians in hospitals and clinics there, and especially those Canadians in hospitals and clinics and recovery rooms and intensive car units in America. He interviews patients and doctors in the U.K. about cost, quality, and salaries. He examines why Nixon promoted HMOs in 1971, and why the Clintons’ reform effort failed in the 1990s and also why corporations offer health insurance as part of our compensation packages today, why a mess of cartel-like provisions keep doctor pay high, why the high regulatory burden keeps drug costs high, why limits on selling insurance across states, how mandating minimum coverages, by community rating, by guaranteed issue and subsdizing expensive procedures have all reduced drive up expenditures in the US and why efforts to end the tax favored treatment of employer provided health insurance failed as well as why efforts to make the insurance and medical market more competitive have failed. He talks to U.S. ex-pats in Paris about French services, and he talks to some other U.S. ex-pats in Paris about unsatisfactory French services, and he takes three 9/11 clean-up volunteers, who developed respiratory problems, to Cuba for care. He takes three others to Cornell Health Center for care. He asks of Americans, “What is your favorite color of the rainbow?”

There can be no such thing as “human rights” without a corresponding right to property. Indeed, a property right is a particular form of human right. This has to be true. Consider the basic human right of “free speech.” We all think we know that it means Wintercow can say whatever he likes, wherever he likes, so long as he does not libel someone in doing so (although some folks even argue that libel is morally appropriate!). But what does this right actually mean? Am I a floating wraith in space? Not at all. To say that I have the right to “free speech” is nothing more than to say that if I have peacefully acquired the means to create speech, then and only then is my right to say whatever I want guaranteed. But no one has to provide me a microphone, a podium, a website, book, pen or paper. I am free to speak so long as I can acquire those things and to deliver such speech to people who voluntarily agree to hear it.

Similarly, to invoke a right to anything implies that humans have obligations with respect to that right. To say that there is a human right to speak freely means that others in society are obligated to provide you with the means to do so. Now, that obligation insofar as I see it, only extends to respecting your ability to speak conditional on you obtaining the property upon which to do it. But I have met very few people who seriously argue that as a member of the human community, wintercow has an obligation to provide pens and paper to every other person, and also to guarantee that every human read what others write. And so long as no such obligation is generally accepted as required, then there can be no right to free speech. If governments want to legislate such positive rights, I suppose that is fine to do – but then let’s not call them rights. And then let’s remember that in legislating your “right” to speak freely, then they are also mandating that someone provide you with the resources to do it. It’s no different in health care or any other positive “right” that is typically invoked.

Which brings us to the Marxists and their relatives. A fundamental proposition of Marxism is the abolition of private property. But if it is true that property rights are a particular form of human rights, and that no one in a collective nirvana can or ought to have private property, then it follows that the fundamental ethic and idea of Marxism is an explicit and direct violation of human rights. That’s not exactly the bill of goods the left sells us now is it?

That uncomfortable position is eerily similar to this one.

After we’ve taken care of their wealth, to keep the nation happy and prosperous we should pass a law making it illegal for there to be a wealthiest 1 percent — this country should just be the normal 99 percent.

Sure, that isn’t mathematically possible, but government shouldn’t be about what’s possible; it should be about what’s fair.

From the NY Post.

Community and collectivism are opposites. Community is valuable and powerful; it is individuals freely choosing to cooperate and identify with each other to achieve more than they can individually, as we do in the open-source community.

Collectivism is a fraud. It pretends to be about community, but it is actually about the use of force. Collectivists want us not only to bow to their desire for power over others, but to thank them for coercing us and praise them as our moral superiors.

I understand that our country has people living in poverty, some of whom are now losing their jobs to Chinese competition, but that’s simply our shame – we have all the money on earth, and we haven’t figured out how to spread it around.

…

Which is why it seems intuitively obvious when you’re in China that the goal of the twenty-first century must somehow be to simultaneously develop the economies of the poorest parts of the world and undevelop those of the rich

…

But try to imagine the political possibilities in America of taking Chinese aspirations seriously – of acknowledging that there isn’t room for two of us to behave in this way, and that we don’t own the rights to our lifestyle simply because we got there first. The current president’s father announced, on his way to the parley in Rio that gave rise to the Kyoto treaty, that “the American way of life is not up for negotiation”. That’s what defines a tragedy.

That from Bill McKibben’s classic piece, “The Great Leap.” I appreciate the honestly. However, this becomes a little problematic for me when over half of the students I will be teaching, and most of the academics who style themselves as “E”nvironmentalists deeply adhere to this line of thinking. I respect that you have these views, I really do. But I do not appreciate being forced into dozens upon dozens of “debates” about the environment and sustainability when it is falsely believed as axiomatic that economics as we know it has nothing to add to the discussion.

Explaining this mystery (why Big Oil is not investing more heavily in renewables) may bring us back to where we started. In the childlike enchantment we’ve lived under since the Reagan era, we’ve wanted very much to believe that someone else, some wavy-haired CEO, would do the hard, adult work of problem solving. In fact, corporations are the infants in our society — they know very little except how to grow (though they’re very good at that), and they howl when you set limits. Socializing them is the work of politics. It’s about time we took it up again.

That from the Bill McKibben Reader, p.171.