Does anyone — on either side — really think that the Patient Deflection and Unaffordable Care Act is about health care?For if it’s about “health care,” aren’t there a myriad of ways in which the system could be improved without a “comprehensive” top-down solution? At a time of extreme economic dislocation, was there a nationwide clamor to make “health care” the top priority of the new administration?
Or is it really about the exercise of raw governmental power, to teach the citizenry an object lesson about the coming brave new world, one that surely will get even worse once Obama is safely past the shoals of his last election?
To believe in the “good intentions” of the former — as soft-headed conservatives are sometimes wont to do when crediting the hard Left with anything but sheer malevolence toward the country as founded — is to have to pretzel one’s mind around the internal contradictions of the bill itself (it’s a tax! It’s not a tax!) and the way in which it was imposed just a couple of years ago by a one-party Congress that no longer exists, having been rebuked and sent packing by an outraged electorate.
Far easier to believe in the latter — that Obamacare is just the canary in the coal mine of what’s coming next. That, once having established the hammer, the administration will use Obamacare (should the law be found constitutional) as the anvil upon which to smash the Republic once and for all. And the “progressives’s” Long March through the institutions will finally end in the all-powerful centralized government for which they’ve long yearned.
Does the Supreme Court still read the election returns? We’d better hope so.
I want to just leave this without comment, but then again I have to remember that this was on the main blog of one of the most prestigious and serious journals on the Right. This isn't some loser like me in his spare time, this is presumably a serious political thinker who gets to post at National Review! People must be buying this stuff! ObamaCare was the least invasive way possible to get close to making health insurance universal in the US. To paraphrase Churchill, the only thing less invasive that accomplishes the goal is everything else. The ACA was the final big social program the Left has been yearning for in public, out loud, since the 1960s. To see it as the thin edge of the totalitarian wedge is so paranoid that it really shouldn't even require refutation. But here it is in National Review! What are these wack jobs in tin foil hats going to say if Obama wins four more years and does what he says he'll do: more of the same center-left incremental change? I guess they'll just move right along screaming about something else. Conspiracy theorists can't be satisfied. |
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