Beyond reform of the medical and insurance industries, the health-care debate raging today in our nation is an excellent case study of the argument over a powerful centralized government vs. federalism and individual rights.

Imagine for a moment a Wyoming rancher. Here is a man who chooses to separate himself from the hustle and bustle of big-city life for a much simpler and slower-paced existence of fresh air, sweat and self-reliance. The rancher feels no more a complete man than when, astraddle a horse for 12 hours straight, he's moving cattle scattered across his 30,000-acre spread to a holding pen for transportation to market.

Imagine then a man in a suit pulling into his ranch in a new Volvo. The man comes to the rancher and demands up to a third of his income to pay for New York City midnight basketball leagues; subsidies for a super-conductor/super-collider in Texas; paychecks for retired loan officers and autoworkers in Indiana and Michigan; food and housing for mothers of multiple illegitimate children in Chicago; health care for able-bodied, but unemployed young men who recently migrated from Mexico to Los Angeles; and myriad buildings, libraries, roads and bridges from across the fruited plain.

Or imagine the middle-aged owner of a used-book store in Waukesha, Wis. The man's grandparents came to this country from Germany and his parents worked hard to provide an education and opportunity for their children. That's why the man didn't hesitate to move his aged mother into the guest room last year after his father passed away. He works hard to pay off a mortgage and the loan on his 1987 Dodge. At the same time, he's trying to help two of his three kids get through college while taking care of Mom.

But here comes the same guy in the same Volvo asking for his money for the same sorts of things the Wyoming rancher is financing.

He, like the Wyoming rancher, balks. Why should I have to pay a dime to take care of someone I don't even know, he asks the bespectled Volvo driver? The man in the suit chastises the bookstore owner for lacking compassion, to which he responds: I give to my local church, United Way and the local food pantry to take care of those in my community who are in need. I take care of my mother. Why should I take care of someone else's mother also?

Why indeed.

But the man in the suit has the full power of the U.S. government backing him. Those who don't play by the rules face imprisonment and the loss of everything they have worked for.

It is so often said that it has become a cliche. But charity starts at home. Why don't we believe it anymore, or if we do believe it, why don't we practice it?

The tragic truth is that the more the government, in the name of compassion, provides assistance to nameless, faceless "victims," -- the less individuals are willing or able, for that matter, to support local private charities that benefit their neighbors.

This is what is inherently immoral about liberal, big-government programs enacted in the name of compassion. Coerced taxation has nothing at all to do with compassion. Indeed, it breeds contempt on a universal level for the very people who otherwise would induce our mercy on a local level. Add to the mix a nationalized health-care system that compels perfectly healthy people to contribute to health-care costs incurred by strangers and reprobates.

We are the most prosperous nation in the world, because we are the freest. Our freedom ought to be extolled, not reviled, which is exactly what we do when we adopt immoral, big-government programs speciously in the name of compassion.

Jay Eastlick is news editor of the Southeast Missourian.