While reevaluation of the profit motive in health care is appropriate, that does not portend a legitimacy for its abolition in other endeavors.

Perhaps this is  a time when believers in freemarket principles, me among them, should question the appropriateness of the profit motive in  health care. Some priorities in human activity are higher than others. Since Life precedes liberty and the  pursuit of happiness, we reason that the use of resources for preservation of life ( as through health care) outweighs the use of those same limited resources for other purposes. Life itself trumps profit.

But of course it's not really that simple. When talking about the three basic human rights (listed above), the public (constitutional) assurance of the numero uno--life--also includes something even more precious than notions of inherent liberty. In the minds of some townhall contrarians, an extension of that right to life  requires protection of life (23+23=46 chromosomes) from its inception. Maybe those disrupters are being manipulated, as Wendell Potter suggests, by the wizards of insurance, but they are nevertheless real people with real values, and not as stupid as you think. It is possible that every one of us is manipulated in ways we do not discern. 

Some of those angry people are looking for an assurance that their tax dollars will not be used for abortions. If you could spell that out for them in the proposed legislation, it would help them to accept the public option.  Let janedoe pay for her own procedure of choice.

This popular resistance to governmental planning is not just about the insurance industry secretly prodding the rabble to disrupt public meetings, although I'm being convinced that that probably is happening. (And I despise the rudeness.) There are, nevertheless, real philosophical issues at stake, and they are no less than: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness . We Americans are not just pawns in a game;  the human struggle for dignity arises from much more than just exploitation of the proletariat by some capitalist roader puppeteers who hide within their insured fortresses.
 
Pursuit of profit, while arguably not as noble as other human inclinations, is a subset of the "pursuit of happiness."  It therefore falls within the category of constitutionally protected activity. In the midst of reevaluation of a profit motive in the health care industry , freemarket advocates are not willing to sacrifice their endorsement of the profit motive as a legitimate basis for other endeavors. The profit motive seems to be enduring, in many quarters, a fundamental attack these days. This provokes knee-jerk-conservative reaction against the  "socialist" bogeyman.

 And it doesn't help matters that the HFT traders and default-swappers have absconded the public image of capitalism. The force of hyper-technologized greed--running roughshod through operation of perpetual-motion HFT money making machines--does not represent the face of true capitalism. This is very frustraing for advocates and practitioners of true capitalism.

That real face--that authentic representative of true capitalism--is found on the main streets and behind the storefronts of every town and hamlet and city in America. And some of those visages are found on insurance agents.

On the other side of the coin, neither is Kevorkian the face of the public option. So this is a case of public care advocates educating their fellow-citizens about the real issues involved, in order that we might collectively dispel the hysteria.

The sustained effort will require something like the persistent gradualism that Ted Kennedy epitomized.

Let's take care of the American people. Let's find a way to get everybody covered. But we need not extinguish the pursuit of profit while doing so. And surely we don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water.