This is how you criticize the health care bill

Regular readers will remember that I’ve been critical of some attacks on the recent health care legislation.  These attacks criticize the “dependency on the government” that will be supposedly fostered, while implicitly or explicitly promoting an ideal of independence (i.e. dependence on the impersonal market).  I said

Dependency is the most basic fact of human existence.  The independent man is a fantasy, an imaginary creature like the Tooth Fairy, the noble savage, the state of nature, and the social contract.  The project of conservatism is precisely this:  to moralize and dignify the dependence of man on his fellows.  Nor is dependence on the government an inherently bad thing.  We are supposed to depend on the government after all; that’s what it’s there for.  Conservatives only object to dependence on the government when it undermines other meaningful dependency relationships, e.g. dependence on one’s family or local community.

Now Anthony Esolen has, in the context of the health care bill, stated the argument against government overcentralization in terms that a conservative can whole-heartedly endorse.  Here’s an excerpt:

The Thomistic view of the polis underlies the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity, which asserts that communities closest to the issue at hand should be allowed the freedom to tackle it. That is not simply because they do a better job of it, as some conservatives insist. It is because the fullness of community life is essential to our being human. It is doubtful that the state, much less the federal government, is better at educating children than were the fully engaged American townsmen of old, who hired and fired their own teachers at will, and had a fairly clear idea of what their children ought to learn. But even if it could do the job well, its assumption of that role would take from the community one of the most important responsibilities it possesses. It would overstep its own zone of authority to usurp another. Supposing some state agency could, with wonderful efficiency, feed children and make them do their homework and put them to bed; still, its exercise of this role would rob from the people one of the great challenges and joys of life, the raising of children according to one’s own best lights.

Professor Esolen is one of my favorite traditionalist writers, and he states our fundamental positions well.  I’m still not sure how this applies to the issue at hand, namely health insurance, which is not a traditional function of the family, the Church, or the local community.