Aug 7

I Am The Mob

Policy brownshirt tactics, healthcare reform, mobs Comments Off

One of John F. Kennedy’s more famous and insightful quotes was, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”  I would submit that the DNC and its odious water-carriers, in characterizing vigorous dissent from Democratic healthcare reform efforts as an affront to democracy, have started the country down that path.  Exhibit A?  For the unpardonable sin of passing out Gadsden flags outside a townhall meeting held by Congressman Russ Carnahan of Missouri, an opponent of “ObamaCare” was physically assaulted by a union thug.

And yet according to Democratic Congresscritters it’s the opponents of ObamaCare who are engaging in “Brownshirt tactics”.

For the record: I have never received a thin dime from any GOP officeholder, candidate, lobbyist, or affiliated special interest.  I am not even a registered Republican; I’m an unenrolled voter, and to the extent I pull the lever for Republicans it’s because they’re usually not quite as corrupt and authoritarian a gaggle of collectivists as modern Democrats.  I just as often vote for Libertarian Party candidates.  The only time I have ever donated money to a political campaign was during last year’s Republican presidential primary, in the amount of $25.  I get more political advocacy junk mail from Democrats than I do from Republicans.  My views are, in other words, my own.  So why would an independent thinker oppose ObamaCare?

It will kill the private healthcare industry.  One of the most shameless lies peddled by proponents of ObamaCare is this one: “If you like your plan you can keep it.”  Why is this a lie?  Plainly and simply, because the so-called “public option” that Mr. Obama has said is a non-negotiable component of any reform will not compete with private insurers on a level playing field.  The “public option” can operate at a loss indefinitely, buttressed by generous taxpayer subsidies, while private insurers who try to comply with new regulatory requirements (such as that they cover pre-existing conditions — essentially forcing the insurer to assume the cost of losses that predate the inception of the policy, something that’s intuitively insane if you think of it in the context of, say, auto insurance) will rapidly find themselves unprofitable.  Moreover, it’s likely that many employers will cease offering private healthcare insurance given a cheaper-through-taxpayer-subsidy “public option” that they can fob off on their employees.  With a dwindling customer base and the government requiring them to engage in unprofitable business practices, private insurers will, gradually, close their doors.  And it should be pointed out that for many advocates of ObamaCare, likely including Mr. Obama himself, that’s exactly the point: a “public option” is an incremental step toward the end goal, which is a “single payer” system that has the government fully in charge of a sixth of the United States economy.

It’s unaffordable.  I have harped on this endlessly, but the irresponsible fiscal course charted by the Bush administration has been immeasurably worsened by the Obama administration.  In just 200 days in office Mr. Obama has burdened the United States with more debt than all of his predecessors combined, and entitlement spending is going to explode over the next few decades as the Baby Boomers retire.  The Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan budget research agency which answers to the legislative branch, has projected that the ObamaCare proposals current under consideration in Congress will cost hundreds of billions of dollars just in the first decade (to say nothing of the long term), which Congress proposes to partially offset with unrelated tax increases.  And as anybody familiar with the history of federal entitlements knows, it is the nature of these things to grow, not shrink, in scale and scope over time.  We’re facing unsustainable entitlement costs already, and this administration is proposing to add more.  Who’s going to pay?  How?

It will suck.  As I have argued before, government does nothing — nothing — well.  On its best days, government is merely tolerably incompetent.  And this is the case regardless of which political party currently holds power: institutional incompetence is an inherent characteristic of all bureaucracies.  Particularly given the well-known follies of Medicare and the VA, there is absolutely no rational reason to think that the federal government is capable of efficiently and effectively managing a healthcare system serving 300 million people.

It’s provides easy justification for authoritarianism.  Collectivists love the idea of healthcare reform because it gives them a free-ranging excuse to meddle in people’s everyday lives.  Once healthcare costs are paid out of the treasury, then any private behavior that actually or even potentially raises those costs can be regulated or banned in the name of cost control.  Smoking?  Drinking?  Eating fatty foods?  Owning a firearm?  Regular coffee rather than decaf?  Whole milk rather than skim?  Given a tenuous enough link to public health nothing is beyond the reach of the we-know-what’s-best-for-you regulators anymore.