A reader writes:

So, I just had a thought. For the longest time, the 6th Amendment right to an attorney clause only meant that the state couldn’t stop you from hiring an attorney. Gideon changed all that, and now we have public defender’s offices all over. For those who (myself included) worry about framing the right to health care as a right to government provided health care for free, I think we also need to think about whether the right to an attorney at a criminal trial changes our minds on the issue. Where does that right fit? More or less important than health care? Should we instead say that while lawyers have an obligation to charity to represent the indigent but society doesn’t have the obligation to provide them? It seems like it is a settled question that public defenders are good. I wonder if we will all feel that way about government care (myself included) twenty years from now.

I think, human nature being what it is, that whatever arrangement we arrive at, people will be used to it in 20 years time. That does not, of course, mean that the arrangement will necessarily be just. It merely means that human beings have the ability to put up with a lot. 🙂

On the other hand, “being used to something” and being reconciled with it are two different things. For instance, (and not to suggest you are saying anything about abortion), we are all used to the abortion regime Roe created by arbitary fiat. Millions are not, however, reconciled with it and rightly so. We put up with it for the sake of living in a civil, ordered society. But millions of American will go to their graves–go for all eternity–at war with it in their hearts and praying daily for a more just system. If Caesar keeps compounding his arrogance with more assaults on human life, that system will eventually collapse. Indeed, it is already giving out lots of warning signs of terminal levels of stress.