Eugenics, the darling of elite, educated progressives 100 years ago in their quest to create Utopia, has been out of favor since those crazy Germans took it too far in the late 1930s, but there is one sound reason it found favor; why wouldn’t we eliminate serious diseases beforehand instead of treating them after? [...] As we begin to turn over more and more choice to government, and now health care too, the potential for social authoritarianism similar to a century ago creeps back in.  If we all have to pay for your medical care, maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to smoke or eat Happy Meals or get vaccines - the majority can become tyrannical toward minorities, as witches in Salem and Republicans in the humanities surely learned when they were driven to extinction.

Social authoritarianism under the guise of compassion already happens. For my last two children the hospital ran tests to see if the babies had Down’s Syndrome, the obvious reason being to tell you to abort the child if it was there.  Yet since society will pay for medical care in 2014, what if parents chose not to have an abortion if the potential - or reality - of a serious illness were there?  Could society, with the full, unstoppable might of law, force an abortion or sterilization? 

Don’t count on ethicists to get us out of that one.  Modern ethicists don’t subscribe to any notion of morality or even logical formalism.  If you can abort a baby before birth, they contend, you can abort them after too.