I don’t normally like
to post long articles, but this one by George Will says it all. Liberals have ruined our education system,
they have ruined every city they have run, and now they are in the process of
ruining our healthcare system. The irony
is that the million or so people Obama claims have signed up are people with no
assets who are choosing Medicaid. They
have exposed all their personal data to thieves, but the thieves have nothing to steal.
2013’s
lesson for conservatives
This report on the State of Conservatism comes at the end of an annus mirabilis for
conservatives. In 2013, they learned that they may have been wasting much time
and effort.
Hitherto, they have thought that the most efficient way to
evangelize the unconverted was to write and speak, exhorting those still
shrouded in darkness to read conservatism’s most light-shedding texts. Now they
know that a quicker, surer method is to have progressives wield power for a few
years. This will validate the core conservative insight about the mischiefs
that ensue when governments demonstrate their incapacity for supplanting with
fiats the spontaneous order of a market society.
It is difficult to recall and hard to believe that just three
months ago some conservatives, mirroring progressives’ lack of respect for the
public, considered it imperative to shut down the government in order to
stop Obamacare in its tracks. They feared that once Americans got a glimpse of
the law’s proffered subsidies, they would embrace it. Actually, once they
glimpsed the law’s details, they recoiled.
Franklin Roosevelt, emboldened by winning a second term in 1936,
attempted to pack, by expanding, the Supreme Court, to make it even more
compliant toward his statism. He failed to win congressional compliance, and in
1938 he failed to purge Democrats who had opposed him. The voters’ backlash
against him was so powerful that there was no liberal legislating majority in
Congress until after the 1964 election.
That year’s landslide win by President Lyndon Johnson against
Barry Goldwater, less than 12 months after a presidential assassination, left
Democrats with 295 House and 68 Senate seats. Convinced that a merely sensible
society would be a paltry aspiration, they vowed to build a Great Society by
expanding legislation and regulation into every crevice of Americans’ lives.
They lost five of the next six and seven of the next 10 presidential elections.
In three years we shall see if progressive overreaching earns such a rebuke.
In 2013, the face of progressivism became Pajama Boy, the supercilious, semi-smirking,
hot-chocolate-sipping faux-adult who embodies progressives’ belief that life
should be all politics all the time — come on, everybody, spend your holidays
talking about health care. He is who progressives are.
They are tone-deaf in expressing bottomless condescension toward
the public and limitless faith in their own cleverness. Both attributes
convinced them that Pajama Boy would be a potent persuader, getting young
people to sign up for the hash that progressives are making of health care. As millions
find themselves ending the year without insurance protection and/or
experiencing sticker shock about the cost of policies the president tells them
they ought to want, a question occurs: Have events ever so thoroughly and
swiftly refuted a law’s title? Remember, it is the Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act.
From Detroit’s debris has come a judicial ruling that the pensions that
government employees’ unions, in collaboration with the political class, extort
from taxpayers are not beyond the reach of what they
bring about — bankruptcy proceedings. In Wisconsin, as a result of Gov. Scott
Walker’s emancipation legislation requiring annual recertification votes for
government workers’ unions and ending government collection of union dues, more
than 70 of 408 school district unions were rejected.
This year’s debate about the National Security Agency demonstrated
the impossibility of hermetically sealing distrust of government to one
compartment of it. Worries about the NSA’s collection of metadata occurred in a
context of deepened suspicions about government because of this year’s
revelations that the administration has corrupted the Internal Revenue
Service, the most intrusive and potentially the most punitive
domestic institution. Conservatism is usually served by weariness of
government.
The prophet Al Gore has given many hostages to fortune, and this
year fortune shot another of them. In 2008, he predicted the North Polar ice
cap would be gone “in five years.”
Finally, a regularly recurring fever of progressive indignation
about the name of Washington’s professional football team again
waned without success, which means Oklahoma will not
have to change its name. “Oklahoma” is a compound of two Choctaw words, “okla” meaning people,
and “homma” meaning red.
Labels: Healthcare, Liberals and Conservatives
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