We are hearing a lot about the liberal bubble and political reality. Liberals all thought that Obamacare would be sweetness and light as they rammed it through Congress and talked to each other about how wonderful it all was.
But the American people hate Obamacare, because most people are getting socked with big increases in health care costs. Who could have seen that coming. Well I did, for one. The fact is that the average American already has health insurance. So obviously a government program to extend health insurance people to the uninsured was going to cost the average American.
Forget the principle, or the glorious vision of affordable health care for all. What real people want is free stuff if they can get it. But if they can't have free stuff, they sure resent having to pay for somebody else's free stuff.
Same thing with green energy. Liberals like Tom Steyer and his wife Kat live in a San Francisco liberal bubble and everyone they know agrees that we must do something about greenhouse gases and save the planet before fossil fuels cause catastrophic warming. But the average person just thinks about the cost of filling up the truck and the cost of natural gas for heating. In the 2008 election the greenies almost got wiped out by "Drill Baby Drill" until the collapse of Lehman Brothers brought on the Crash of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama.
Liberals may live in a bubble, but conservatives have our blind spots too. One is that a constitutional convention would change things. Look I love Mark Levin and The Liberty Amendments, but there's two little things getting in the way. Here they are, from Table 3.2 in the Budget of the United States Government.
Just sayin', but the American people will give up on Medicare and Social Security when we take it out of their cold dead hands, and it is fantasy to imagine otherwise. That's why whenever the Democrats get into trouble they accuse Republicans of plotting to cut Social Security and Medicare. (Yeah, and the Democrats are the ones planning huge cuts to Medicare, as in Death Panels, to pay for Obamacare.) Most people cannot imagine funding their retirement with their own savings and insurance. They imagine that the way over-committed entitlement programs represent security for them.
Government is force. But collectivism is force too. And most people like it that way; it makes them feel secure.
What people like is this. Government and collectivism remove responsibility from their lives, and reduces their lives to their "rights". And people with "rights" are quite happy to have the government apply force to other people so they can get theirs.
I was listening to Michael Medved on the radio extolling the charitable virtues of the Koch Brothers. And their giving really is spectacular. Yeah, but, said a caller. They could be using that money to pay a little more to their employees; same with the heirs to the Walton fortune over at Walmart. You can see what's going down. The caller would like to force the Koch Brothers and the Waltons to spend their money on people like them rather than on hospitals and schools.
We conservatives need to realize that individualism, the idea that each of us is individually responsible for contributing to society, is a brand new concept and utterly terrifying to most people. Their default society is the village and its "big man." In village society the big man looks after you and he keeps any would-be Koch Brothers in line, and loots them to hand out free stuff to the people. Yeah, baby!
The great truth of our modern era, the truth blazing in the sky that nobody can see, is that from the moment we stopped the village big man from sucking up all the oxygen in the room and gave the Koch Brothers their economic freedom, the Koch Brothers and their kind all over the world started creating wealth like humans had never known or even imagined before.
And how do people respond to economic miracle? They say: "they'd better not touch my Medicare."
People won't give up on big government and its free stuff until big government collapses in financial ruin. And maybe not even then.
But the American people hate Obamacare, because most people are getting socked with big increases in health care costs. Who could have seen that coming. Well I did, for one. The fact is that the average American already has health insurance. So obviously a government program to extend health insurance people to the uninsured was going to cost the average American.
Forget the principle, or the glorious vision of affordable health care for all. What real people want is free stuff if they can get it. But if they can't have free stuff, they sure resent having to pay for somebody else's free stuff.
Same thing with green energy. Liberals like Tom Steyer and his wife Kat live in a San Francisco liberal bubble and everyone they know agrees that we must do something about greenhouse gases and save the planet before fossil fuels cause catastrophic warming. But the average person just thinks about the cost of filling up the truck and the cost of natural gas for heating. In the 2008 election the greenies almost got wiped out by "Drill Baby Drill" until the collapse of Lehman Brothers brought on the Crash of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama.
Liberals may live in a bubble, but conservatives have our blind spots too. One is that a constitutional convention would change things. Look I love Mark Levin and The Liberty Amendments, but there's two little things getting in the way. Here they are, from Table 3.2 in the Budget of the United States Government.
| Federal Entitlements | ||
| Sub- func. | Program | FY2015 $ billion |
| 571 | Medicare | 519.0 |
| 651 | Social Security | 867.3 |
Just sayin', but the American people will give up on Medicare and Social Security when we take it out of their cold dead hands, and it is fantasy to imagine otherwise. That's why whenever the Democrats get into trouble they accuse Republicans of plotting to cut Social Security and Medicare. (Yeah, and the Democrats are the ones planning huge cuts to Medicare, as in Death Panels, to pay for Obamacare.) Most people cannot imagine funding their retirement with their own savings and insurance. They imagine that the way over-committed entitlement programs represent security for them.
Government is force. But collectivism is force too. And most people like it that way; it makes them feel secure.
What people like is this. Government and collectivism remove responsibility from their lives, and reduces their lives to their "rights". And people with "rights" are quite happy to have the government apply force to other people so they can get theirs.
I was listening to Michael Medved on the radio extolling the charitable virtues of the Koch Brothers. And their giving really is spectacular. Yeah, but, said a caller. They could be using that money to pay a little more to their employees; same with the heirs to the Walton fortune over at Walmart. You can see what's going down. The caller would like to force the Koch Brothers and the Waltons to spend their money on people like them rather than on hospitals and schools.
We conservatives need to realize that individualism, the idea that each of us is individually responsible for contributing to society, is a brand new concept and utterly terrifying to most people. Their default society is the village and its "big man." In village society the big man looks after you and he keeps any would-be Koch Brothers in line, and loots them to hand out free stuff to the people. Yeah, baby!
The great truth of our modern era, the truth blazing in the sky that nobody can see, is that from the moment we stopped the village big man from sucking up all the oxygen in the room and gave the Koch Brothers their economic freedom, the Koch Brothers and their kind all over the world started creating wealth like humans had never known or even imagined before.
And how do people respond to economic miracle? They say: "they'd better not touch my Medicare."
People won't give up on big government and its free stuff until big government collapses in financial ruin. And maybe not even then.
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