The Mandate Represents What’s Wrong With Democrats
The Mandate Represents What’s Wrong With Democrats
Jay Cost
Tomorrow, the Supreme Court is expected to hand down its ruling on Obamacare--and, in particular, the individual mandate, which requires individuals to purchase health insurance whether they want it or not.
Let us hope that the Court invalidates this law.
The individual mandate is the apotheosis of the modern Democratic party’s way of doing business. In particular, it is the quintessential example of how, hiding behind a smokescreen of egalitarian rhetoric, the party has become deeply, perhaps hopelessly, anti-republican, happy to dole out favors to privileged groups while the rest of the country is left with nothing.
First, the individual mandate represents an enormous transfer of wealth, completely independent of income or social status. It transfers resources from the healthy to the sick, from the young to the old, without regard to who has more money to begin with. Democrats typically rail against supposedly regressive GOP tax proposals, but nothing the Republicans have ever cooked up compares to the individual mandate. While we’re on the subject of Democratic regressiveness, LBJ’s Medicare is a similarly regressive form of taxation, and ditto Social Security, ever since Johnson turned it into a pay-as-you-go system. Yet watch Democrats howl with outrage whenever the GOP dares suggest reforms that would alter this socially unjust status quo.
Second, the mandate itself is the method by which the Democrats have delivered literally billions of dollars worth of patronage to the key interests groups that lined up with them during the health care debate. The party sought to apply new layers of regulations upon doctors, nurses, hospitals, retirement care facilities, etc., and they rightfully feared a rebuke from these key “stakeholders,” as the Obama White House called them. What better way to buy their silence than to require 30 million Americans become their customers, whether they want to or not! All it took was a flip-flop on the part of the president – who conveniently disavowed his campaign opposition to a mandate – and suddenly all those opponents turned in to lusty supporters, eager to get their hands on all that new revenue.
But what about the “public option”? The inclusion of a public option would have mitigated the perniciousness of the mandate – for then, at least, the government would not be requiring individuals to contract with private, for-profit entities as a condition of their citizenship. Liberal Democrats, naturally, blamed Republican perfidy for the death of the public option – but it never stood a real chance, anyway. The White House hinted early in the health care process that there were many ways to get to universal coverage, and never once suggested that the exclusion of a public option would be a deal-breaker. And that was because none of those stakeholders whom the mandate bought off wanted to compete with the government! And what would be the point of buying them off with a mandate while including a public option? So, in reality, the “will they or won’t they” drama over the public option in the fall of 2009 was mere kabuki theater: the insurers, the drug makers, the doctors, hospitals, nurses, and so on would go ballistic. It was never going to make the final cut.
Let’s put all this in historical context. The Democratic party is the oldest existing political party in the entire world, and it was founded as a people’s party. Andrew Jackson’s veto message of a bill to recharter the Bank of the United States stands to this day as a kind of mission statement for the modern party, and it is worth quoting at length (emphasis mine):
It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers--who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.
The individual is an overwhelmingly unpopular item that requires a patently unjust transfer of wealth for the purpose of paying off the interest groups that have the biggest financial stake in health care. Considered next to Jackson’s veto message: It is a signal that the Democratic party has become the opposite of what its founders intended to be. The individual mandate is a testimony to the broken nature of the modern party. It is a symbol that, despite their egalitarian rhetoric, contemporary Democrats are ready, willing, and able to bend the policy needle toward the interests of “the rich… and the potent,” at the expense of the “farmers, mechanics, and laborers.”
Let us hope that the Supreme Court has the good sense to do away with this awful innovation.
Despite what liberals may say, the individual mandate represents a qualitative expansion in the powers of the federal government, the likes of which we have not seen since the 1930s. We can be confident that the Democratic party as it is currently constituted lacks the ability to use this new power in a socially responsible way.
If the Court allows Washington to mandate commerce in order to regulate it, this will open new, terrible avenues for the Democrats to pay off their client groups, at the expense of the public good. Today it is a mandate to buy a policy from Aetna; but who knows what tomorrow may bring? Clever Democrats could surely find some “compelling” reason for private parties to contract with the SEIU, AFSCME, the UAW, the Sierra Club, NOW, or any of the wide assortment of narrow interests that depend on the Democratic party for their patronage.
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Reader Comments
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I know, yard dog...Fishing's a helluva lot more fun.
Speaking of fishing...here we go again, digressing from the topic with fish stories...have you guys been back to Sugarloaf lately?
Ask Jeff Masters, knothead.
He knows both of us.
No health and monetary reasons have not permitted it.
We did go to the keys for a two day fishing from shore type trip in May.
Come to think of it...I'm tired of seeing you on my wall.
Poof... and you have a nice, lonely day.
June 26, 2012 Posts: 0 Comments: 1
June 27, 2012 Posts: 0 Comments: 0
That's better than a sharp stick in the eye :)
I'm needing a salt fix badly.
I'll have to ask MLC if I can go :)
Bwahahaha
If you talk to MLC tell him I said hi :O)
sure was.
The stick in the eye is they just closed our Fave fishing spot locally til the end of Aug for dredging.
Bright spot is that should be when snook season is resumed for catch and keep.
Skeptical666
I happen to know who both MLC and Shep are and they are two different people. I can pick up the phone and call one of them right now and I am sure if I asked the other would give me his #. Unless you are willing to call me a liar I suggest you drop this and an apology would be in order
No more talking about fishing, spathymon.
Stick to the topic man.
:))
Thanx J
BBL...gotta cook supper
Well what would you consider to be the underlying reason for the high rate of African American incarceration? Are they not committing more crimes? Or do you believe that blacks proportionately commit the same amount of crimes as other ethnic groups but a racist society disproportionately convicts them? If you believe they do commit more crimes then what is the reason behind this? They are entitled to commit crimes because of racism?
Please let's discuss it if you believe that racism is behind society's ills certainly you have thought this through.
BTW what social welfare programs have I promoted the closure of? Or do you just believe I do? I do not believe there is a single social welfare program I have advocated closing, reforms yes but actually closure I do not think so. Unless you believe the departments of energy and education are social welfare programs,
By Thomas Sowell on 6.26.12 @ 6:07AM
Racism is like ketchup. It can be put on anything.
Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.
"Racism" is another term we can expect to hear a lot this election year, especially if the public opinion polls are going against President Barack Obama.
Former big-time TV journalist Sam Donaldson and current fledgling CNN host Don Lemon have already proclaimed racism to be the reason for criticisms of Obama, and we can expect more and more other talking heads to say the same thing as the election campaign goes on. The word "racism" is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything -- and demanding evidence makes you a "racist."
A more positive term that is likely to be heard a lot, during election years especially, is "compassion." But what does it mean concretely? More often than not, in practice it means a willingness to spend the taxpayers' money in ways that will increase the spender's chances of getting reelected.
If you are skeptical -- or, worse yet, critical -- of this practice, then you qualify for a different political label: "mean-spirited." A related political label is "greedy."
Read the rest here
Link
Actually I am very much for social welfare programs, I am just for them being handled and run at the state and local levels where I believe they would be far more effective and economical. I believe most people of my political persuasion feel this way, it is the left that has created a characterization of the right to support their agenda which closes their ears to what we are saying.
I have no idea, nor do I know other than your assertion that MLC ever said that, for all I know you could have mixed up MLC and Shep. However if both gentlemen said it, I would be inclined to believe it. Unlike you I know who they are.
By Frank J. Fleming
So right now we’re in this asinine situation where we’re waiting for the Supreme Court to get back to us and tell us whether it’s okay for the federal government to force us to buy stuff whenever it feels like it. To the average American, who learned in school that the Constitution is a document that defines and constrains the power of the federal government, the notion that the dimwits in D.C. can start making spending decisions for individuals is patently ridiculous. But the left and “constitutional law scholars” are freaking out that anyone is even questioning the government’s power to do this. Obviously, there is a bit of a disconnect here.
Some people have recently coined the term “originalist.” That’s a fancy term meaning “you read the Constitution like it actually means something.” You don’t see this term applied to many things other than the Constitution.
“This road sign says, ‘Wrong Way,’ so we probably shouldn’t go down this street.”
“Oh, so you’re one of those simplistic road sign originalists.”
By default, most Americans are originalists, because they have this wacky habit of reading words as if there were meaning to them. They assume this philosophy applied to the Constitution when it was written, because if that document didn’t actually mean anything, how in the world was it supposed to hold back the powers of the government?
But there are many people who read the document as if it doesn’t hold meaning, if they read it at all. I’m not sure what the term is for these people. I think it’s “jackasses.” Instead of the text of the Constitution, they study “case law” and “precedent,” though a more accurate term for this stuff would be “constitutional fan fiction.” The only thing in the Constitution universe that is canon is the actual text of the Constitution, but they have all these made up stories they’d rather pay attention to. And while it’s pretty obvious that nothing in the text of the Constitution allows the federal government to make us buy stuff, in all the fan fiction about constitutional law, it’s super obvious that the government can always do whatever it wants if it is really, really, super certain that it’s about something important.
This is idiocy. It has to stop.
So how did we get here? Well, we keep hearing that most constitutional law scholars are surprised ObamaCare is even being questioned, but let’s look at how ridiculous the term “constitutional law scholar” is. The Constitution is only six pages long. So “constitutional law scholar” just means “guy who can read six pages.” Except, judging by their statements, it’s not provable that a lot of them have even completed this task.
We need to stop acting like the Constitution is this special, complicated document when it’s a simple thing that any normal person could understand. And to do that, we need to get rid of the Supreme Court. Because it’s idiotic. It’s the least well thought-out part of the Constitution and undermines the rest of it. We select the best and brightest minds in the country to be Supreme Court justices who… read a six page document. Of course they’re going to make it more complicated than it needs to be so they can justify their esteemed positions. We’re also stuck in this completely moronic situation where the justices have lifetime appointments, and we just keep hoping they die during an administration that actually acknowledges that the Constitution means what it says.
Currently, we’re one poorly timed death away from not having a right to bear arms. There are actually four justices on the Supreme Court right now who can’t find the right to bear arms in the Constitution — something any child can do. You just want to grab the justices by the head and shove their faces into the Second Amendment and shout, “There it is, you braindead twit!”
If we want the Constitution to have a simple, real meaning and successfully restrain the government, we need to get rid of the judges so we can stop acting like it’s complicated. Instead, the Supreme Court should be like jury duty — we just grab nine random people with basic reading skills for each case and give them an hour or two to read over the Constitution and the law in question. All decisions should be in the form of: “Article 2, Section 3 allows this” or “I didn’t see that in there,” and that’s it. All the lower courts can make complex pontifications, but at the very top, we have to keep things basic if we want the Constitution to have any power at all.
Think of what it would be like if we had this system in place now. Instead of ridiculously waiting for the ObamaCare decision, about an hour after ObamaCare reached the Supreme Court, we would get a 9-0 opinion on it — obviously, they couldn’t find anything in the Constitution that says the federal government can force people to buy stuff. Then all the people in Congress who voted for ObamaCare would be arrested for treason and exiled to Antarctica. I know exiling politicians to Antarctica isn’t explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, but if you look at original intent, I think it’s pretty much implied.
Perhaps but it sure is foolish to call someone a fool on their own blog
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