DANIEL GREENFIELD: OBAMACARE’S LIBERAL GREED
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamacares-liberal-greed/
Oliver Stone made Gordon Gekko and his famous quote “Greed is Good” into everything that was wrong with capitalism. A quarter of a century later, liberal politicians like Obama and Bill de Blasio are still running against Gordon Gekko while pocketing his contributions and doing special favors for him.
Their class warfare is as nakedly greedly as Gordon Gekko shouting into a brick of a cell phone. Class warfare is the greed of the con artist playing on the stupid greed of his mark who wants to steal from someone else, but lacks the skill and daring to do anything but sign on to someone else’s scheme.
The only way to get conned is to get greedy. The con artist plays on his mark’s desire to get something for nothing. That’s why every piece of advice about not getting conned begins with “If it’s too good to be too true…”
When Obama promised Americans that if they liked their health plan, they could keep their health plan, that everyone would somehow get more while paying less, it should have triggered all those “If it’s too good to be true” alarms.
You can’t get something for nothing. Insurance companies are not about to go out of business or even take a serious hit to their profits. So where was all that extra free stuff going to come from?
The mandate was another element of the con. Those who had health insurance assumed that forcing lots of healthy people into paying for policies they didn’t want and wouldn’t use would cover the costs for those who did. But that was a distraction. The only way that the numbers would really work was by cancelling policies and hiking premiums.
The loud outcry from those who supported ObamaCare only to discover that their policies are gone is that of the greedy mark who thought that he was cheating someone else, only to discover that he was the one being cheated all along.
Those Americans who thought that liberal greed was better than the capitalist kind are discovering that they weren’t the con artists; instead they were the marks of men who make Gordon Gekko look like a saint. Capitalists even at their worst occasionally create value. The left at its best only destroys value.
The 99% campaign of Occupy Wall Street was a greedier scam than anything Gordon Gekko would have imagined. It convinced millions that there was a 1% that would pay for everything that liberal politicians were promising them. But when the liberal bill comes due; it’s always the middle class that pays.
ObamaCare was a monumental con. And too many people who should have known better forgot the same lesson they were forced to relearn every April about who really pays for everything.
As Gordon Gekko said, “It’s a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses.” Most of those signing on to the ObamaCare election express in 2012 understood that. But they thought that they would win and that somebody else would lose.
You can’t be conned unless you get greedy. The easiest kind of person to cheat is looking for shortcuts.
But there’s something that every Democrat who holds a non-government job and pays actual taxes needs to understand; the only way to win in the liberal zero sum game is to either work for the government or not work at all.
If you work, if you earn money, then you lose.
ObamaCare was yet another wealth redistribution scheme. It was a liberal Gordon Gekko with a teleprompter selling good liberal greed. Everyone would win, except for the people being robbed.
There are no movies made about the evils of good liberal greed, even though good liberal greed turned Russia, China and Cambodia into charnel houses filled with corpses. The 1% of Communist Party members won and the 99% got a grave, a gulag or a miserable life of working in a bad job at low pay.
When all was said and done, there was no land or bread or peace. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that ObamaCare doesn’t really offer health care. It takes the health care you had and increases the price you pay for it, makes it harder to access and more expensive to use.
When someone promises you more of a finite quantity of something without having to give anything up, you know you’re being conned. But the left has done such a fine job of teaching people that liberal greed is good that their victims are no longer even able to recognize their base emotions as greed. They associate being conned with high moral values. When someone offers them stolen property, they feel that they’re being good people by accepting.
“Why shouldn’t you have X, Y or Z?”, the Obamas and de Blasios ask the eager crowds. The answer is that robbery only works if you’re the robber. Not if you’re the one encouraging the robber go about his business in the expectation that he will rob your neighbor down the block who has three cars and two leather sofas and leave you alone because you only have two cars and one leather sofa.
Class warfare cons the middle class into thinking that it’s going to be doing the robbing when it’s actually the one being robbed. Class warfare makes its victims complicit in its criminality. And like many victims of cons, it leaves them too ashamed to come forward and complain for fear of admitting their own guilt.
Liberal greed, like all greed, blinds people to their own character flaws, it encourages them to think that they can steal from someone else and get away with it when they’re really stealing from themselves.
The cancelled policies, high premiums and deductibles are only the first part of the ObamaCare bill. The real bill will take years to arrive and it will be much bigger and uglier.
The first phase of the ObamaCare con is wrapping up. Like all cons, those who pulled it off have a choice between flying away to Argentina with briefcases of money or doubling down and convincing the mark that even though he lost money this time around, he can get it all back and make even more money if he commits to the next phase of the con.
The next phase of the con is being previewed by Robert Reich and Paul Krugman. The endgame is health care nationalization. It’s an American NHS complete with death panels and unsustainable spending. The only question is will the marks of the ObamaCare con wake up now that their money is as lost as an advance fee sent to a Nigerian 411 scammer or will they go on making the same mistakes all over again.
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