Obamacare: Disaster for Who?

On the one hand people argue that President Obama's plan for health care reform is the end of freedom as we know it.

On the other hand others argue that his plan is a bridge too far that will end in failure worse than Hillarycare in 1994.

And they are arguing it in the July 20 National Review now on line.

Mark Steyn is arguing the end-of-freedom line, as the professional pessimist he has become. Call it "Dependence Day," he says, for government health care will transform our culture and our politics forever.

Ramesh Ponnuru is arguing a bitten-off-more-than-they-can-chew line. People love the idea of health reform as long as they come out ahead. Only trouble is that the week-by-week of health care politics this year is demonstrating clearly that a government plan will mean massive tax increases. Or benefit cuts. Or both. Or fiscal meltdown.

But which is it?

I'd say: both and neither.

There is still plenty of scope for politicians to offer free stuff to voters. They will do this up until the moment after the whole government spending thing crashes in ruins.

And it is also true that in places like Europe the people demonstrate an extraordinary docility and appetite for dependency. No doubt there are plenty of people in the United States who would love to live like dependent adolescents.

But then there's the law, proudly called Stein's Law by Herbert Stein. "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

It often seems in these latter days that liberalism and the continual growth in government spending is unstoppable. But the truth is that the notion of the Medicare unfunded liability as $30 trillion or $50 trillion, or whatever it will be next week means one simple thing. Medicare cannot go on the way it is forever. It will stop.

Viewed strategically, Obamacare is the Democrats' current attempt to lasso the health care problem. But it is probably just another bout of shadow boxing.

Because today health care can go on as it is. For a few years, at least.

That's because of Chantrill's Corollary. If things can go on as they are then they probably won't change.

Or at least the politicians probably won't get to change it. They will be afraid of the opposition.

Eventually the welfare state will end in disaster. That will happen at the point that things just can't go on like they are any more and when people are utterly abandoned to dependency.

It will all be very fascinating for the historians. But not too much fun for the people trying to live through it.

Farewell to All My Greatness

To visit Ashland, Oregon, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is to visit a Petit Trianon of liberalism. It is to experience a perfect stage-set of liberal verities.

Why, the very Playbill to the festival season outlines the liberal program. The Mission Statement talks of "cultural richness" and "our collective humanity." The Values Statement speaks of "Excellence" "Inclusion" "Learning" and "Environmental Responsibility," as well and a "safe and supportive workplace" for the theater company.

As you can imagine, on this stage set there are members of traditionally marginalized groups carefully included in the blocking, even to the extent of a spot of sign language here and there. Everyone included except for you-know-who.

And to top it all, here's Artistic Director Bill Rauch:

Whatever one's political perspective, it's hard to deny that there is new optimism in our country, even in these hard times.

You gotta love these liberals. In fairness, the Playbill must have been written in the fevered transition between a six percent victory and a triumphant inauguration. But you know that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival would never have celebrated the first 100 days of Ronald Reagan in such florid terms.

But to be fair (again, because we are conservatives) the festival recognizes that it has a problem. Right now it's in the middle of an American Revolutions project to commission a cycle of history plays. But project director Alison Carey has a problem.

"You cannot tell the story of the United States without including the story of conservative political and social movements," said Alison Carey [to] the New York Times.

Unfortunately so far she’s come up blank: "I've never had a play come to me that I could say had a conservative perspective," said Ms. Carey at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, adding that if anyone hears of a playwright with one in hand, "send him my way."

Yes, it must be a problem. The liberal moral/cultural community has just spent half a century telling itself that conservatives have nothing to say. So, not surprisingly, no conservative has imagined that anything they say would be welcome in the uber-liberal culture of the theater.

This sort of thing cuts both ways. If liberals have so "excluded" the possibility of a conservative history play at the turn of the 21st century then it also means that they have no clue about how the conservative temperament works and how it could rise and thrive, perhaps beginning in thousands of chaotic Tea Parties and ending up bringing on some new American Revolution.

The danger of a Petit Trianon of liberalism is that one say they will be happily repeating liberal-speak in the liberal court of the ancien regime as one liberal bastion after another disappears in a confusion of smoke and rubble.

And then comes the day when a minor mob storms the empty shell of the Bastille.

Or then comes the day when King Henry VIII has no need of the conniving political skills of his Cardinal Wolsey, and the cardinal is left muttering farewell, a long farewell to all his greatness.

The New Spoils System

Back in the late 19th century, the Progressives, great-grandparents of today's liberals, were all agreed in substituting a civil service system, with promotion examinations, for the evils of the spoils system. They wanted to purge the governmental apparatus of political corruption and favoritism.

That was then. This is now.

In 2009 we have a liberal Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to Michael Barone, discussing the blatant manipulation of civil service procedures as just the workings of politics. For Ginsburg it is not outrageous that, in the New Haven firefighter case, city officials pressured the civil service commission to disregard the results of a promotion examination for city firefighters. Comments Barone:

It may remind some of us old enough to remember of the machinations and contrivances of Southern white officials and agitators employed to prevent blacks from registering and voting.

Then there are liberals like Yale Law faculty member Emily Bazelon.

She laments that the promotion test rewarded memorization and that it favored " 'fire buffs' -- guys who read fire suppression manuals on their down time." She is outraged that a fire department might want to promote firefighters who know more about suppressing fires, rescuing victims and protecting their colleagues rather than simply promote a predetermined number of members of specific racial groups whose self-appointed political spokesmen back the politicians in office.

The irony is that the civil service movement of a century ago argued precisely in favor of this kind of professionalization. They insisted on objective criteria for hiring and promotion in government service.

It is indeed astonishing that liberals should have strayed so far from the principles of the clean government Progressives. Except that it is not.

You'd expect that, after a century, a political movement like the Progressive movement would have become corrupted. You would expect that their political activists and office holders would start to believe in themselves rather than their ideas. You would expect that they would start to favor their friends rather than their principles.

But is still shocking to see law professors and Supreme Court justices descending to their level.

That's the way a proud political movement loses its moral authority. Every political movement has plenty of bad apples and corner cutters. But things really start to go bad when the good people give in to the temptations of power and condone the cheap betrayals of once noble principles.

Still, it's good to see that the Supreme Court still believes, 5-4, in equal justice under law, and that it has ruled in favor of the firefighters.

But it's only 5-4. The Supreme Court is one vote away from an endorsement of a racial spoils system.

Now It's Atheist Summer Camp

Thank goodness for professional atheist Richard Dawkins. Like God, if he didn't exist we'd have to invent him.

According to Michael Deacon, Dawkins is helping inaugurate a kids' summer camp. For atheists.

Professor Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, is helping to launch Britain's first summer camp for young atheists. At Camp Quest UK, children aged eight to 17 will be given lessons in evolution and rational scepticism.

As if. As if children aged eight to 17 are not already getting lessons in evolution and rational skepticism 24-7 from their government schools, from the liberal media, from the hedonistic culture!

Actually, more fun than the article are the comments, a slug-fest between folks stuck in the Reformation and folks stuck in the French Revolution.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

But what the atheists miss, I suspect, is that the idea of summer Bible camp that they want to compete with is to get kids out of the me-me-me culture of daily life and think a little about the higher things.

As Charles Taylor, the center-left Catholic philosopher might say: There seems to be a universal human need for something other than ordinary human flourishing. You can call that something the Higher Things, God, Genuine Democracy, Peace and Justice, the Non-dual, or even the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

But I'd say that there is something to life other than evolution and rational skepticism.

The problem is that the "something other" presents itself as an irreducible mystery, a riddle wrapped in an enigma. And so people tend to argue about it.

Duke Part Deux

Let's face it. The original Duke rape case, the white-boy lacrosse team raping an African-American stripper was too good to be true. Too good to be true for liberals.

It hit all their liberal hot buttons: South. Whites. Frat boys. Traditionally marginalized race, gender, class, etc.

The new Duke Rape Case, reported by conservative criminology prof Mike Adams, is too good to be true as well. For conservatives. Look at the ingredients

• A liberal gay social worker who's worked on "health-disparities researcher" studying HIV/AIDS in the South
• Employed by Duke University
• Accused of offering his adopted underage son for sex
  
• Accused lives in a liberal enclave "co-housing community... which emphasizes communal life"

So let's not rush to judgment, folks. Unlike our liberal friends in Duke Part One. Just because the case seems to confirm everything we suspected about what goes on behind closed liberal doors.

Especially because the case seems to confirm everything we suspected about what goes on behind closed liberal doors.

America Starts to Rumble

What's wrong with me, she asked in the email? I've got "increasingly angry," and it seems like in the Obama world WASPish values like "hard work, integrity, initiative, accountability, self-determination... have been rendered totally worthless in the blink of an eye[.]"

Reading stuff like that makes me have faith in America. You see, the United States is built upon a faith, a reckless faith, in the idea of a government of limited and specifically enumerated powers. It is built upon the notion that hard work, integrity and the rest will trump power every time. But only if you let it.

We few, we lucky few who believe in this incandescent faith, stand against almost all of history--of power, piracy, and plunder.

But this faith is not just wishful thinking. It is based on the revolution in human affairs since the rise of the commercial city.

In the countryside, land is life. You must have land to survive, and to keep land you must fight for it, or pay someone else to fight for it. In such a world power is everything, for he that does not have power does not have land, and he that does not have land does not eat.

But in the city not power but trust is king. You can only get power by serving your customers, and that power is good only as long as you continue to serve them. It is not collateral that is needed when a banker makes a loan but trust. Said J.P. Morgan, on oath: "Because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom."

The entire program of our lefty friends is built upon the notion that this is rubbish. Marx insisted that the history of mankind is the history of class struggle. Al Gore promised in the election of 2000 to fight for the people against the powerful. President Obama has launched the federal government upon a massive grab for power.

But we say that the spirit of democratic capitalism is that if you limit power, if you separate political power from economic power and moral/cultural power, then you will flood the world with prosperity, with liberty, and with moral elevation.

We conservatives should thank President Obama. He is helping Americans reach clarity on the power and scope of government.

He is proposing to change health care provision in this country to a system in which government experts will decide what kind of health care you will have. Do you think that is a good idea, or do you think that people should have the right to make their own decisions on the matter?

He is proposing a radical change in the way we produce and use energy with a heavy tax on fossil fuels. Do you think this is a good idea, or do you think that the social system of property and the market, under law, should be the way forward?

And let us not imagine that, if Hillary Clinton or John McCain had been elected in November 2008 that we would be in a different place today. President Obama represents the consensus of the ruling class in America, the progressive educated elite. Not surprisingly, the elite believes in elite power, and they believe that they know, based on the knowledge of the experts they have retained, that they know what is best for us.

There is another way. It is baed on the idea that no elite, no experts can know enough to know what is best for us. It is that discovery is the way forward, by individual discovery by ordinary men and women and social discovery in the marketplace. And that means learning from our mistakes. We have all the tools we need to make this system work, and they work every time they are tried. They are law, markets, prices, money, credit, equity, trust, mercy, service, "hard work, integrity, initiative, accountability, self-determination."

They worked for us before, and they will work for us again. But first we have to have the courage and the determination to take our country back.

In my judgment we are seeing already that the courageous and detemined people are already organizing to do just that.

The Hit-the-wall President

You really can't blame President Obama. It's not his fault. After all, what is the leader of the Democratic Party for?

His job is to implement the policy nostrums of the liberal world.

Right now, liberals want, in foreign policy, to negotiate rather than fight a war on terror. In health care, they want to implement their dream of a universal health care program. In energy and environment, they want to force-march the nation away from fossil fuels and towards a planet-saving renewable future.

OK. Let's check the half-time score on these liberal dreams.

In foreign policy, the negotiate-with-dictators policy is dead, as Jonah Goldberg as pointed out. The Iranian regime now has blood on its hands, the blood of the Martyr of Tehran, a beautiful young woman, Neda Salehi Agha Soltan. No American president can now negotiate with the Iranian regime, whatever his ideas on "soft power."

So the Obama foreign policy has hit the wall.

On energy and environment, the energy-tax bill is in deep trouble, and looks like it will barely make it out of the House of Representatives. It would be best for Democrats if it did stay there, because if the energy tax ever gets into law it will wreak havoc on the economy and on the political future of the Democratic Party.

So the Obama energy and environment is about to hit the wall.

On health care, President Obama made a damaging admission on TV, reported by ABC News. A physician asked him what he would do if medical care he needed for his wife and kids was disallowed by government gatekeepers.

Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it's not provided by insurance.

Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn't seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he's proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.

The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if "it's my family member, if it's my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.

Er, just a moment, Mr. President. Isn't that game, set, and match? The whole point of the Obama plan is to impose government rationing. It has to do that if it refuses to ration by price. But if rich Democrats can dodge the limits, then where's the justice, where's the equity?

So the Obama health care policy is hitting the wall.

So it looks as though the Obama administration is hitting the wall on three separate signature issues.

I've always said that this is why we needed the Obama administration. The only way America is going to get beyond the folly of liberal ideas and liberal policies is when they hit the wall.

We've tried being nice about it. We've tried a national conversation on the issues. But we have found out that liberals just won't listen.

So now we've got to do it the hard way.

And by the way, the score still isn't in on the Obama administration's economic policy. Remember this. When the economy last hit the wall in 1980-82, the policy of the Reagan administration was to cut spending and cut tax rates. The policy of the Obama administration is the exact opposite. Increase spending and increase taxes.

I'd say that both policies can't be right.