ROGER KIMBALL: OBAMA’S DEPENDENCY AGENDA
http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/08/22/obamas-dependency-agenda/?print=1
“ObamaCare is not a train wreck waiting to happen. It is a train wreck that is happening now. Sally Pipes has some very good ideas about applying some effective first aid for ObamaCare in her new Encounter Broadside on the subject [2]. We should instantly adopt her proposals.”
It’s the little things that get you. Yesterday, our former paper of record published a story about the decision by UPS [1], the big package-delivery company, to restrict or eliminate health care coverage for spouses of its white collar workers. It is thus, the Times reports, “joining an increasing number of companies that are restricting or eliminating spousal health benefits.”
This fact, and the trend it represents, puts the Times in something of a bind. The paper has been one of the most conspicuous boosters for everything Obama, with the result that it has, like the monkeys in the story, adopted a policy of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” when it comes to the president’s many failed policies and initiatives. Benghazi? It happened because of an anti-Muslim internet video. Trayvon Martin? Murdered by a “white Hispanic” in a fit of racial hatred. The use of the IRS as a political weapon to intimidate and punish conservatives? Has that even been reported on in the Times? ObamaCare? What, do you want to deny health care to the poor?
(Pardon us while we disable the non sequitur buzzer . . .)
So, let’s just say the the Times likes ObamaCare. So how do they deal with the many defections, left and right, from its economy- and health-care destroying provisions? Bring on the monkeys! Listen to this:
U.P.S., the world’s largest package delivery company, said its decision was prompted in part by “costs associated with” the federal health care law that is commonly called Obamacare. Several health care experts, however, said they believed the company was motivated by a desire to hold down health care costs, rather than because of cost increases under the law.
Got that? Unnamed “experts” said that UPS “was motivated by a desire to hold down health care costs, rather than because of cost increases under the law.” And the difference is . . .?
ObamaCare is not a train wreck waiting to happen. It is a train wreck that is happening now. Sally Pipes has some very good ideas about applying some effective first aid for ObamaCare in her new Encounter Broadside on the subject [2]. We should instantly adopt her proposals.
But as I have argued in this space before, ObamaCare, the ostentatiously Unaffordable Care Act, is only incidentally about health care. That 2000-page monstrosity — which Nancy Pelosi said we had to pass to find out what was in it [3](remember that?) — this hypertrophied insult to the idea of responsible legislation, is really, at bottom, about the Obama administration’s Dependency Agenda. They want the government to control access to health care, and they want the IRS to police that control, because they want to control you. That’s the bottom line. Controlling more and more of your life: that’s what this “debate” is really about. “We’re only five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” That — what to call it? That promise? That threat? — that campaign statement by candidate Obama in October 2008 will, I predict, be his legacy: fundamentally transforming a free, prosperous country dedicated to the principles of democratic capitalism and individual liberty and setting it instead on the road to socialist immiseration and conformity.
Stories like the one about the UPS cutting back on its health care benefits are like so many canaries in the mine: warning signals, tocsins of alarm, minatory adumbrations of things to come. But there are still plenty of people and institutions like the Times, held captive by the idea of Obama the savior, ensorcelled by the rhetoric of “hope and change,” desperate to salvage some fragment of self-infatuation from the wreckage that has been this preposterous administration’s effect on America. It will all end badly, I am certain of that, but the question is how much collateral damage will our misguided masters in Washington inflict on the rest of us before the people rise up and expel them in a cathartic fit of political regurgitation?
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