In a fit of self-abuse, I delved into HR 3200. That's the bill sometimes termed Obamacare. As I understand it, Obama left the crafting of this legislation to the grasping hands of Nancy Pelosi and her minions since the extent of his executive responsibilities begins and ends with reading a teleprompter. It seems Obama has been running for office his entire life to the exclusion of any meaningful work, and now can't seem to stop. I suppose his next office will be Pope. Look for a conversion to Catholicism. In fact, if Obama had applied for a job in the private sector, any glance at his resume would disqualify him. He can't seem to hold a job for long. So perhaps the bill should be termed Pelosicare, which sounds even more frightening now that I think of it.
Anyway, the bill was obviously written by attorneys since anyone else would have given up writing at about a dozen pages or so. Term papers were bad enough for most of us. There's a good reason why your elected officials have not actually read the bill. They can't. Or, at least they can't and still retain their mental faculties. The language is so dense, complex and ambiguous that it should keep attorneys busy for years should it come to pass. Which reminds me that, in case you haven't noticed, the people who make law, execute law, administer law and adjudicate law are all attorneys. In other words, attorneys run this country, if not the world.
It's like we've scrapped European aristocracy and instead, adopted homegrown lawyers as the new ruling class. A lawyer once told me that he regarded his membership in the bar as a license to steal. He should have added that it's also a license to rule.
If there's one thing apparent about the bill, it's that any good Soviet would recognize its fundamental premise. That is, central planning and decisionmaking are necessary because the private sector is incompetent or evil. Politicians love to mirror image. So, the only solution is to create a mammoth bureaucracy that will tell physicians what they can or cannot do, how much to charge, and which patients are too costly to treat. Likewise, the hapless American citizen will be told to join the government plan (or else), will have his or her medical records examined by a government bureaucrat, and will probably have to hire an attorney to get life and death decisions reconsidered by faceless paper pushers who will, not unlike private insurance companies, try their best to cut costs by cutting your life short. But unlike private insurance companies, government health care will be a monopoly just as soon as the private insurance companies are driven out of business. (Have you ever noticed that the leftist hates every monopoly unless it happens to be his own?) This bill would not only provide more work for attorneys, which may be its real intent (trial lawyers don't love Democrats without reason), it would create thousands of new government jobs.
So, aggregating power in a centralized bureaucracy, despite every lesson from history to the contrary, is deemed the appropriate solution to any problem by those on the left. The Democrats do the Soviets one better, however. Dissatisfied with paltry five year plans, they prefer to plan out for ten years. If the Democrat party has philosophical roots anymore, they have nothing to do with Jefferson, Madison or even Hamilton and Adams. Their philosophy is an outgrowth of Karl Marx's theories.
Imagine. This country was founded on a principle that was and still is unique to the world in all its history. That principle is that every person lives for his or her own happiness and has sovereignty over his or her own existence. Government was created to ensure that principle and would protect the natural rights of each person. The Constitution and its Bill of Rights was intended to restrain the natural tendency of people to dominate other people by legitimizing their power under the guise of governing them. The Constitution gave the federal government a certain list of limited responsibilities and left the states and the people the right to govern themselves. The result was an extremely dynamic society that creates wealth commensurate with the liberty to pursue happiness. It's this uniquely American system that the Democrats want to discard in favor of the European model. It's this American exceptionalism they disdain.
In Europe, the feudal system prevailed for centuries under the notion that the aristocracy would rule in accordance with noblesse oblige, that is, the obligation to take care of their underlings. Of course, it never worked that way. The rulers victimized their underlings to enhance their own power and wealth. Eventually, Europeans did away with the aristocracy but kept the feudal system, calling it socialism, and substituted bureaucrats for aristocrats at the pinnacle of the social hierarchy. Under that system, each person's interests would be subservient to the state's and individuality would be subsumed into a class system. Every person and his or her interests would then be defined and treated according to their designated group. And if need be, any individual could be sacrificed for the "common good" as defined by the new bureaucratic aristocracy.
That's why the Democrats could embrace every leftist murderer and thug in the world even when they lined dissidents against the wall. Who cared how many people were executed or thrown into hell hole prisons so long as the state, which must know better than the individual, could provide at least low quality health care? The new feudalists love humanity. It's people they can't stand. The health care bill is another step on the road to serfdom.
Under the present leftist Democrat party, the march to socialism begun by FDR has speeded up to a veritable trot. It's not surprising that an outraged American people, or at least those who have not become wards of the state, see Obamacare for what it is, a power grab by arrogant, condescending politicians who are driven like baboons who try to dominate their troop so that they can get first crack at food and mating. And they justify it by claiming that they only mean to take care of us, just like the old feudal lords. It's a philosophy that is anything but "progressive", the label they prefer now that liberal has become synonymous with socialist. In fact, the need to dominate others, to dictate their behavior and grab their resources, is not only regressive, it's so primitive as to be atavistic.
If anything, individualism and liberty are spiritually advanced forms of social organizing because they eschew the coercion of mobs and officials and instead, place the responsibility for spiritual growth on the individual unimpeded by government restraints. The left is highly materialistic, deeming the state's provision of life's necessities a form of freedom, even if it means restricting your freedom to act in your own interests. The animal confined to a zoo may be taken care of or disposed of according to the will of its keeper, but it will never have the range of experiences that will lead to wisdom or folly. The new feudalists want to be your zoo keeper and the Obamacare bill is a net they're about to throw over you.