“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C.S. Lewis
It is in keeping with the sardonic sense of humor of the cosmos that the President addressed the nation to verbally seize his gold medal for the “success” of Obamacare on the Day of Fools. Straining credulity, after a “rocky start (as the train wreck of a rollout has been affectionately renamed), the final tally of sign-ups miraculously is pretty much exactly what it was projected to be so many months ago. Of course, the numbers are unverified, you’ll just have to take the President’s word for it, and as always, if you like the numbers, you can keep ’em. You couldn’t write this good a come from behind story if you made it up… or I guess maybe you could.
So after 7 million sign-ups in a nation of over 300 million, where 30 million were said to be uninsured, while 5 million existing policies were cancelled causing many to sign on to avoid becoming uninsured, and counting as signups those not yet paid or enrolled (a very secret number that no one seems to know)– this is being touted as an overwhelming success. Anything less would have been a failure, but barely meeting expectations, or not even meeting them if you consider the demographics, is enough over the threshold to celebrate with enthusiasm. Assuming the numbers to be accurate, and I’m not, Obamacare has sold about as well as the first week of the role playing game Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls V, and even a little bit better than the six million copies of Justin Bieber’s album “Believe”, which, despite it’s title, I am equally incredulous of. Of course, there is no law that says you have to listen to Justin Bieber music or buy video games. There is no IRS agent waiting to penalize you if you don’t. So without the benefit of an act of Congress, a Supreme Court decision, and a President who spends more time hawking the ACA on daytime talk shows and on-line comedy venues than his regular duties on the golf course even; despite all this, a has-been bad-boy Canadian songster, and a twenty something computer nerd dressed in a wizard costume are enjoying pretty much the same sales.
You can’t equate submission with demand. You can’t assume even 7 million people wanted this when the mandate of law, the IRS penalty, and the threat of being uninsured are all hanging over their heads. You can’t offer people one choice and then trumpet when they choose the one choice you gave them. It’s like the banana republic “free elections” where the despot always gets 100% of the vote. It’s like saying that wide spread compliance with paying taxes indicates that people want to pay taxes. It’s like saying that a woman who submits to her rapist’s threats of violence must have wanted to be violated.
Any time this much money changes hands there will be winners and losers, and the President can trot out all his anecdotal beneficiaries while his critics put forward all their horror stories, but in the end intelligent observers will need to weigh the law in the balances of cost versus benefit, and included in that tally needs to be the intangible loss of liberty. As is regularly the case with progressives, the President declared the debate on the repeal of the law to be over, and then proceeded to continue the debate for about five more minutes. Law, like Science, is never final; the science is never “settled”, no law is ever beyond debate or repeal. I’m sure the same Progressives who used like tactics to pass Prohibition similarly tried to silence critics by insisting the debate was over.
IMHO: In the opening quote Lewis tried to point out the danger of tyrants whose tyranny emanates from a clear conscience, convinced that all their manipulations and coercions are for the ultimate good of those they are manipulating and coercing. These are the true believers whose arrogance arises from a sense of moral superiority; they don’t know they are tyrants, they envision themselves rather as clever benefactors, benevolent rulers. It is clear that President Obama sees himself in this light. He does not even see the intrusion of government into healthcare as a question of cost versus benefit. He sees it simply as a natural and long delayed function of government, “progress”. He is the “omnipotent moral busybody” C.S. Lewis refers to. Such busybodies consider themselves to have a ministry of intrusion, to fix all the world’s ills with the heavy hand of control. In his speech the President made it clear that he considers this milestone a success, that the debate is over and Obamacare is progress, and that once the law settles in we can proceed to more “progress”. Maybe we can make this an annual tradition and roll out some new government intrusion every October. Then we could celebrate the success as “progress” on April 1 every year. It could be a holiday… what should we call it?
