It turns out the assassination of the CEO of the largest health insurance company in America on the streets of Manhattan by a masked gunman using a silencer amounted to the least shocking aspect of this crime. Even revelations by law enforcement that the murderer had inscribed “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” on the shell casings — words similar, as the New York Post pointed out, to those in the book Delay, Defend, Deny: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It — did not come as the most shocking part of this shocking crime. The truly jaw-dropping part of this story involves the reaction. A methodical, cold-blooded killer murdered a husband and father in a bustling part of the most populous city in the United States, and segments of the public depict the assassin as a sort of folk hero. On the day of the shooting, cryptocurrency enthusiasts created a “memecoin” featuring the assailant’s image and the three words found on the shell casings. Less than 24 hours after the murder, 802 people had purchased the “Deny, Defend, Depose” memecoins. One grasps public opinion most accurately not in news coverage about a subject but from the anonymous reader reactions listed beneath online articles. Even Fox News articles on the murder, the comments include: “United Healthcare sells catastrophic coverage at Cadillac rates” and “When accountability to shareholders is the primary goal there may be unanticipated downsides.” One Redditor posted, “The gunman looks kinda hot,” while another predicted folk-hero status “on a tier between Bernard Goetz and Killdozer” for the murderer. The internet provides a window into public opinion that even pollsters cannot open because speech remains relatively free and anonymity (real and imagined) is protected. Large amounts of people passionately — evidently, not as passionately as the gunman who absconded into Central Park on a Citi Bike — feel profound contempt for the field (broadly speaking, healthcare) that traditionally enjoyed popularity along the lines of the uniformed professions. “Kill all the lawyers” has not quite morphed into “kill all the doctors,” but the related industries, such as health insurance and pharmaceuticals, that make them wealthy and enable them to charge exorbitant amounts earn the public’s disdain. What happened? Our quasi-socialist healthcare system combines all of the negatives of capitalism with those of socialism to allow for entrepreneurs to charge what the market can bear all the while distorting that market through compulsory insurance laws, blank-check subsidies, and quasi-monopolies. Healthcare insurers benefit from this capitalist-socialist Frankenstein gouging both the customer and the taxpayer. People generally do not articulate their frustrations in so many words (or in so few as used by the gunman). They just know that the medical profession, like the other capitalist-socialist Frankenstein of higher education, rips them off. Beyond this, small people increasingly blame their troubles on big institutions. Possibly this motivated the murderer to some degree. Villains do not murder presidents and royalty because of their association with the government. They murder them because of their power. Many, including, apparently, the assassin, regard ostensibly private-sector actors as obtaining and wielding power unjustly. A back-to-the-future quality colors this mindset. One thinks of Alexander Berkman’s attempted assassination of Carnegie Steel’s Henry Clay Frick or the plot to murder John D. Rockefeller Jr., in which the conspirators blew themselves up. Nutters and villains once targeted captains of industry because they imagined oppressive power unleashed there. Did the Manhattan Murderer come from the same mold as the anarcho-communist Berkman or might his grievance stem from more personal reasons? One guesses, given clearer images of the assassin’s face, a discovered cell phone, DNA on trash, and possibly a credit card used to ride the Citi Bike, that we know who did this and why very soon. The assassin shot a man from behind. Denizens of the Old West regarded that as the ultimate admission of cowardice. In the wild west of the internet, it elevates one to the plane of a folk hero. READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: Dems Click Off MSNBC and Discover There’s No Place Like Home A Gen X President (Four Years From) Now More Than Ever Campaign Grifters Ironically Killed Dems’ Government Grift The post The Most Shocking Part of the Shocking CEO Assassination appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.