"When he tried to steal our sunlight, he crossed that line between everyday villainy and cartoonish super-villainy."
The Simpsons S07E01, Who Shot Mr. Burns
Here's a funny story:
When I was five, my mother took me in for a fairly routine medical visit. I was poked and tested a bit, had some kind of injection(s) then the nurse told my mother she didn't need to be present for the last few tests and could wait outside, she'd just take a blood sample and bring me right out. A bit confused at the sudden change in procedure, we nonetheless complied.
I won't pretend I understood the event completely back then (hence my not discussing it with my parents until decades afterwards) but some details will reliably make a five-year-old take notice. Like big needles. The nurse was telling the technical truth, she did take blood from me. First though she swapped out the syringe for one she hadn't let my mother see, a much, much larger implement (I didn't know from ccs but remember it was as long and wide as my tiny forearm when placed next to it) with a thicker needle... and pumped it up. My mother, slightly worried when she got ousted, put it out of her mind when she saw no obvious pain or fear from me. In fact she remembered me being very calm as I was led back out, even a bit dopey for the rest of the day. Calm. Yeah, no shit. Hypovolemia will do that. (In her memory, she suspected the nurse might've given me something (to keep the kid still) not taken.)
See, while I regret feeding all the various blood libel conspiracy theories, there is a demand for children's blood, and I don't mean emergency rooms. One of rich fucks' classic spa treatments involves large-volume blood transfusions with that of little children, supposedly untainted by the recreational narcotics and other aftershocks of wealth and power. Clean 'n pristine, y'see? A literal infusion of youth and vigour. Whether effective in a practical sense or mere superstition, the result is still that rhinos get their horns sawed off and my erythrocytes probably carried oxygen for some Swiss or British banker.* (Tho' personally I prefer to think it was the likes of Mick Jagger or Ozzy Osbourne, so I could claim to have been a rock star in my dating profile.)
Many of the Americans who've voted to tear down their own government and let theocrats and robber barons take over would list the broken health care system as a chief concern. Of course, when your biggest problem is pharma, doctors and hospitals setting whatever sky-high prices they want, a small-government and anti-regulation stance is not so much a bandaid as a chainsaw applied to a gaping chestwound. Trust me, you don't know what a broken government looks like (yet) (cf. Trump' dozens strong failed business record) and if you think any market, black, white, gray or whatever, can "self-regulate" per the delusions of libertarians, go ahead and ask my near-comatose five-year-old self about it. While stories from failed states tend to focus on wartime atrocities for the biggest shock value, you'll suffer first and longer from the sheer infinite variety of harm that can be perpetrated when no public authority has the power to demand to know the provenance of your food, your car's parts, the paint on your walls or that little red bag in the fridge.
There is a rancid gulf in the behavior of respected professionals Americans will soon be crossing en masse between getting price-gouged and such comic-book malfeasance as stealing preschoolers' blood!
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* Of all the bits from Plucky Seven that could've been autobiographical, I bet you wouldn't have guessed it's that one!