0912 Healthcare Czarist Style
“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves” (Edward R. Murrow).
The most significant difference between sheep and wolves is their relationship to each other in the food chain. Sheep know only one way to defend themselves; they run, hoping that when the attack is over and the wolf is done gorging on someone else, he will have the good sense to not come back for more.
Wolves will always return to an easy mark. By the fabler’s account, wolves will even dress up themselves like sheep in order to gain the trust of the flock for even easier pickings at a more opportune time. The history of gaining control in the name of benevolence is as old as the Garden of Eden.
Under this administration as well as the previous three, a constantly returning, ever expanding, ever more demanding central government has fleeced the flock. Americais becoming a nation run by unelected micro-managing bureaucrats. Presidents as far back as Nixon or before have created czar positions or allowed agency heads to create and enforce laws through regulatory fiat.
Apparently believing that past misbehaviors justify future ones, President Obama has expanded czarism to a new level and the House of Representatives passed health care reform that will increase the fleecing of Americans to the tune of another sixteen to eighteen percent of their livelihoods. If the Senate agrees, 111 new agencies and programs as well as another czar or two will corral the flock.
Sheep are simple-minded animals. That seems to be the attitude toward the American people by the majority in Congress. They clearly view free citizens using free market mechanisms to solve free market problems as beyond the intelligence, ability or moral fiber of their constituency. By using a watershed opportunity to autocratically decree their wishes, legislators are acting as predators instead of the shepherds envisioned in our founding documents.
Predators not shepherds fine people with a 2.5 percent income penalty because they choose something other than Washington-certified health plans. Five years of prison time and a $250,000 fine is not loving treatment of citizens who choose no insurance. Such mandates serve only to cure any spirit of health self-determination.
The American people should be questioning if Congress has constitutional authority to nationalize health care. If, by strict interpretation, proper deference is given the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses (Art. 1 Sec. 8), the Ninth Amendment and the Tenth Amendment for their original purposes within their historical and documentary contexts, the House acted illegally. On the other hand, if the Constitution is putty for each new generation, Congress is sure to find a way to do this and anything else their hearts conceive. Some support could be claimed from legal precedent but the Constitution itself trumps misguided precedent.
The only things more exasperating than being drafted into a care system that is both unnecessary and unwanted by most Americans are the deceptive blockades of other options by the majority in Congress and the information blackout by the media. No member of the minority in Congress has ever advocated simply letting the flock scatter and die. The choices have never been either do nothing or slaughter the existing system while wounding members of the flock in the process.
Sheltered by our “caretakers”, few of us know about at least four other less intrusive, less expensive, more efficient and comparable plans offered by the minority. The majority in Congress has afforded few of us the opportunity to understand the six or seven targeted liberty-based solutions to the problem. So much for Obama transparency and “government by the people”.