The Gasping Strangled Death of a Lie

Don't say you weren't warned. What we are witnessing this Fall, as Democrats flail away trying to create a bill out of the morass of lies they call health care reform, is a watershed moment, a tipping point.

It is more than the death of an ill-thought legislative measure, an attempt to conjure up an image of low-cost universal health care with makeup, lighting, and a winning stage presence in the leading man. It is the end of an era. It is the end of the pretense that you can satisfy the basic wants and needs of humans with a bureaucratic government program.

Let us just look at just one of the crazed ideas in the Baucus bill. It is the luxury tax on excessively generous insurance plans. Notice what is going on here. First of all, government encourages the luxuriant growth of health insurance by making it into a tax-free employee benefit. The whole thing started, you will recall, in World War II as a way of evading war-time wage and price controls.

So now, in order to deal with the inevitable effect of such a subsidy, the solons propose to set up a penalty to stop health insurance from getting too luxuriant!

This sort of thing is so commonplace in the modern social democratic world that we even have a law to explain it: the law of unintended consequences.

But the whole thing is madness anyway, as Tony Blankley explains.

[T]he same Congress and president who want to stop the banks from taking too much risk cannot stop themselves from ever more deficits. Indeed, so intoxicated -- nay, hypnotized! -- by debt is the current government that it is not even proposing to try to cut back.

Yes! Even before the Baucus bill the Congressional Budget Office reports that "The federal budget is on an unsustainable path[.]" Why is that? Because "Rising costs for health care and the aging of the U.S. population will cause federal spending to increase rapidly."

Does President Obama propose a radical program of bringing the federal budget back to reality? No. He proposes to double down.

The ideology of the progressive educated class has always been a lie. It was a lie when Marx proposed the "immiseration" of the working class. It was a lie when the Prussians enacted the social insurance model that paid for the workers' social benefits out of the hide of the middle class. It was a lie when FDR enacted the cruel Wagner Act that cartelized Big Labor and Big Business. It was a lie when he passed Social Security in 1935, sent Publishers Clearing House letters to every voter in 1936 that they might already have won a pension, and then started the taxes in 1937--after the election. It was a lie when LBJ lied about the future costs of Medicare in 1965.

And it is still a lie as Democrats propose to force America, in a strictly partisan effort, to pay for the health care of slacker liberals, now and forever.

Well, it's not working. And even if some form of health reform passes, it will not stand. Democrats are heading straight for disaster, generational disaster. They are going into a reverse like Stalingrad or the Battle of Kursk. The health bill is like the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, extending slavery to Kansas and Nebraska in the moment between the fall of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republican Party. It is setting up the casus belli for a great civil war. It is the one last lie that will collapse onto and demolish all the other lies that we have been forced to believe on penalty of being labeled a racist, a sexist, an exploiter, or a homophobe.

As usual, of course, it will be the poor who will suffer.