To Be or Not to Be (an Organ Donor)

I’ll start by saying I’m an organ donor, and have been since I got my Drivers License over 30 years ago. I ride motorcycles, so both the chance of me needing an organ, and being able to donate an organ is a little higher than most. This is a choice I made concerning my body. The question is do I own my body or is it the States?

The State of New York is losing productive citizens by the thousands who are moving to states with less taxes and regulations. Fundamentally the newly proposed law by Assemblyman Brodsky, is the heart of why people are leaving NY and in general why the left doesn’t appreciate middle American values. Assemblyman Brodsky introduced a bill that would give state the right to decide if you are an organ donor or not. The law would make everybody an organ donor unless they opted out. Right now hospitals and the State have a hard time keeping track of those who voluntarily donate their organs. If this law passes they can assume you are, harvest your organs, even if you’ve opted out, and say it was a screw up later (how is your family going to get them back once transplanted?) Brodsky believes that because enough people don’t volunteer to be organ donors that the State has a right to your body parts, but should offer individuals a way to opt out.

This is typical liberal thought, if people don’t make the choices that liberals think then use government to force people to make the “right” choice. The FDA’s war on salt is typical. The FDA without direction or law passed by congress is proposing rules that would force food manufacturers to cut salt from processed foods. Voluntary reduction in salt has not been as successful as the government would have hoped. The problem is when people are given a choice between saltier foods and less salty foods they vote with their wallets for food that tastes good (salty). The FDA (hence the government) feels that they must dictate to people what they can and cannot eat. This is a fundamental shift in thinking. By what right does the federal government have in dictating what a person can and cannot eat?

If you believe that it is the purpose of government to take care of the sick, the poor, the needy, and decide what’s best for the people then you are very wrong, and may want to find another country to live in. The purpose of our government is clearly not to provide for its citizens needs but protect their rights. Again I will call on you to examine the purpose of our government as so clearly stated in our founding document the Declaration of Independence; “ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Now obviously NY isn’t the federal government, but how a law that assumes the State has a right to people’s body parts unless they actively protest meets the purpose of government is beyond me.

Notice how because they powers that be in the Obama administration cannot get the laws they want passed through congress, are dictating rules (which carry the weight of law) through bureaucratic agencies like the FDA. Clearly rules that dictate the salt content of food do not serve the stated purpose of our government, and worse yet, because it is enacted and enforced by unelected bureaucrats who are not accountable to the people, the proposed salt rules are not at the consent of the governed. Laws like Obamacare, clearly enacted against the will of the people; the placement of unelected Czars, who are not approved by the senate, the dissolution of the rule of law for political purposes are all the actions of despotic rule, not a republic, and are typical of Obama’s first year in office. This kind of arbitrary tyranny, over a few decades is exactly what lead to the Revolutionary War. Since history, specifically the reasons and actions of a tyrannical government which did not want or accept the wishes of the governed, are no longer taught in our public schools, we may be forced to repeat history again. Where the people threw off the yoke of tyranny from a government that was destructive to the purpose for which it was established. In fact when a government’s actions are destructive to the purpose for which it was established it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

Our long and established government should not be changed for light and transient causes; experience has shown that we are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which we are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is our right, our duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for our future security.

I sincerely hope that: a dramatic change will be seen in our next election; That the oligarchy that is our “two party” system will the thrown out; That the tea party voters will put principled temporary citizen leaders into office like Libertarian Senate Candidate Alex Snitker; and That the despotic statist actions of the past few years can be turned back. I fear that if the despotic statists remain in power and continue to ignore the will of the people, the Russian analysts who’ve predicted the breakup of this great nation may be right, and because the socialist overcrowded urban areas of this country cannot survive without the productive minority of flyover country it may get ugly.

It’s your body not the states and nobody has the right to it, not even its parts when you die. Since it is your body not the governments, what you choose to put into it is your business not the theirs. I urge you to eat healthy because it’s good for you, but I also urge you to be vocal and fight against any government actions which try to control what you put into your body, which is your ultimate property. Please become an organ donor, because it is a good thing to do for your fellow man, but be vocal and fight against any government actions that tries to force you to do so.