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Liberals keep accusing conservatives of being inherently violent, yet somehow, it is the left that always celebrates political violence. 

The latest example is the reaction to the assassination of UnitedHealth Group’s CEO Brian Thompson. 

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If you spent any time over the past few days on social media, you would have been treated to a chorus of celebration, mostly from leftists, over the murder of a corporate CEO. 

There were more than a few people who recoiled at the glee, but far too many put the assassination video on loop and chuckled at his death. Ostensibly, this was because Thompson was a Very Bad Man, responsible for the death of thousands because UnitedHealth is in the business of profiting off people’s suffering. 

There is a great deal of overlap between the class of people who celebrated Hamas’ attack on Israel and the assassination of a CEO. Both are driven by a resentment of people who wrongly consider themselves oppressed despite being among the most privileged people in the world. 

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Almost all of them are college-educated, gleefully sure of their moral superiority, and for the most part, they feel like they don’t get the power, prestige, and financial rewards that are their due. They are members of an elite class, but generally speaking, they are the losers in the race to the top of the elite. They have degrees in all sorts of useless “studies” for which they paid an outrageous amount and will never get any return on their investment. 

And, since the younger set in elite institutions gains social status through victim points, even some “winners” in the elite race to the top adopt the same attitudes as a form of class consciousness. 

There is a lot to gripe about when it comes to our healthcare system, but as a practical matter, the insurance companies are just a cog in a Rube Goldberg machine. It’s not the CEOs who are the problem, but rather a creaky system in which the government pays about half of all health care costs, pharmaceutical companies play an outsized role, and legislatures and the feds impose arbitrary mandates that drive up costs. 

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United Healthcare’s business model is the product of federal legislation, not especially greedy corporate policies. Just as Canada’s long wait times, inability to provide basic services, and push for medical murder is a product of the choices that country has made. In the UK, dissatisfaction with the NHS is a chronic problem because, well, it sucks. 

Violence is not the way to solve the problems that government policies and the realities of limited resources have created. A hundred years ago, almost none of the diseases we now routinely cure were even treatable. And many of the diseases the treatment of which is bankrupting us are self-induced. 

Shooting CEOs won’t solve them, and taking money out of health care is a fantasy. Healthcare will be rationed one way or another because resources are not unlimited. 

No doubt United Healthcare is imperfect as a company, but if you read carefully, most of the stories about denial of care are a lot more complicated than they first appear. Often, the care was not really denied–the company just asked to have it justified before approving it. This happens to me all the time, and you too. The doctor prescribes one treatment, and the insurance company asks if it is really necessary or a luxury treatment–which actually makes sense given limited resources. The alternative is raising prices even higher for everybody. 

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Many of the same people upset with United Health’s policies are perfectly fine with this:

If we don’t like that system, we can change it–our government created it. If you think there is a free market in healthcare, you are wrong. 

Regardless, politics by assassination is the path the left is apparently going down, and it’s a funny way to express compassion.