Maggie's Farm

Via Protein's Progressive utopia — enemy of Liberty:

If liberals are so disturbed by Congress dictating whether abortion is
a legitimate health care issue or not, it only makes sense that they
should be equally troubled by government management of other health
care decisions.
Undoubtedly, this is zealously naive thinking on my part. Reaching
such a conclusion demands a modicum of consistency. And as we’ve seen,
health care “reform” is an ideological crusade immune from logic. 

That's a question She Who Must Be Obeyed asked me. Well, here's one. 

I do not think it's an issue that lots of people are fired up about. The chanting part is amusing. "Communism" -  "Now!" Also, "What do we want?" -  "Free stuff." "When do we want it?" -  "Now!"

From Coyote:

Over the last year the Congress and Administration have:

- Printed trillions of dollars of new money, raising the risk of future inflation

- Borrowed trillions of dollars, sucking capital out of private lending markets

- Run up deficits that pretty much guarantee future tax increases

- Toyed with health care bills that will substantially increase the cost of labor

- Toyed with climate bills that will substantially increase the cost of fuel and electricity

- Demagogued industries with average to below-average profitability
for making obscene profits that must be reduced (e.g. health insurance
companies who make 3-4% of sales)

- Taken over whole industries (autos, banks) and run them to the
benefit of favored political constituencies, even when it violates the
law (e.g. trashing for secured creditors of auto companies in favor of
the UAW).

- Demonstrated a disdain for money-making by imposing populist
compensation limits on executives of out-of-favor companies and
industries.

- Spent money in the stimulus mainly to add government jobs, every
one of which is generally focused on making my life running a business
harder.  If you do not understand or believe this, you have not run a
business that employs people.

- Shown a general philosophic hostility towards markets and capitalism

An uplifting piece about freedom at American Thinker.

Even freedom of food is easy to lose and difficult to regain.

Lots of folks around the world like to eat McD's when they are hungry. I do not care for it much (I like Subway for on-the-road fast food if there is no local seafood or redneck joint in view), but what does what I like have to do with anything - except me?

I do not give a darn what other people eat. Food has become a fetish for some people. (For the French and the Italians, I will make excuses, however.)

Government planning, via Marginal:

China's empty city
(of the day).  YouTube.  At about 1:20 you will see that a city built
for one million residents remains empty, a' la Austro-Chinese business
cycle theory.  "Ordos was a government idea, an infrastructure project
taken to its limits, the motivation was likely gdp..."  -- can you
get better than that?  After the first minute or so the video
is stunning.

From Legal Insurrection, via Tiger: 100% Plus Taxation Key To Permanent Dem Majority.

One quote:

To say that antipoverty programs in the United States are perverted may
be an understatement. When you take into account the loss of
means-tested benefits (e.g., cash assistance, food stamps, housing
subsidies, and health insurance), and the taxes that people pay on
earned income, the return to working is essentially zero for those in
the lower two quintiles of the income distribution.

For many of
the working poor, the implicit marginal tax rate is greater than 100
percent. The long-run consequence of undermining the positive incentive
to work is, of course, the creation of an underclass acclimated to not
working...

From Ace's excellent (and serious) essay Pelosi: It's Very Fair That We Jail You If You Don't Buy Health Insurance:

I'm paranoid? Really? I am not fretting here about some remote and
unlikely possibility. We are not speaking here of "slippery slopes" or
in terms of "what comes next?"

We are instead objecting to a black-letter law spelled out for all to see in the very first piece of legislation you're proposing.

Right out of the box. The state here -- Pelosi, Reid, Obama -- are
claiming that they can imprison people for behavior that has never
before even been hinted as being a crime, on the theory that such
behavior constitutes unpatriotic economic behavior which is detrimental to the state's balance sheets.

Think about what a broad, all-encompassing term "economics" is. 80%
of our waking hours are spent in economic activity of one sort or
another. The state here is asserting the right to imprison people
for behavior they consider not actually morally reprehensible or
harmful as other crimes are, but instead merely detrimental to the
Great Push Forward, the state's master plan of economic health and
well-being.

Right out of the box they propose sending people to jail for acting as economic subversives and economic traitors and yet I am, somehow, paranoid if I point out that the first step here is to reduce human freedom and increase state power.

And this is just a down-payment, remember. This is merely the first
of many freedoms you previously believed sacrosanct to be lost.

 Read the whole thing.

They might use the Commerce Clause (nowadays it seems to cover almost anything the government wants to do), but I think the idea of forcing everybody to buy something is not a government power.

The topic is discussed here: Sen. Reed:
Forcing People to Buy Health Insurance is Constitutionally Justified
Because It’s Like Making People ‘Sign Up for the Draft’, Huh?

and here:It's not the same as car insurance.

Name that fallacy.

I would expect better from those guys.

Quoted in a piece at NYM on homicide:

By the time European states became democracies, the populace had
accepted the authority of the state. But the American Revolution
happened before Americans had got used to the idea of a state monopoly
on force. Americans therefore preserved for themselves not only the
right to bear arms—rather than yielding that right to a strong central
government—but also medieval manners: impulsiveness, crudeness, and
fidelity to a culture of honor. We’re backward, in other words, because
we became free before we learned how to control ourselves.

We Americans are so darned uncivilized. Heck, I shoot people anytime anyone bothers me. Like when somebody tries to sneak into the 15 items or less supermarket line with 16 items. We all shoot jerks like that, here in the back woods of Connecticut.

Europe has a long tradition of feudalism, and they still emotionally cling to it like small children while speaking condescendingly about the messy freedom we have in the US. I'll take our messy freedom anytime over "respecting the authority of the state."

The Euros still seem to think of themselves as serfs, at heart. "L'etat, c'est moi" says me, a proud American.

From The Examiner:

There is a nagging fear among those who closely watch not only the economy but government policy that these nascent (recovery) economic forces might be murdered in their crib by the current administration.

Small-business men I met with this week tell me they are in a state of paralysis as they watch the debate over the health care "reform" bill wending its way through Congress. Lurking in its 1,502 pages (the Senate version) are provisions that will markedly raise their costs, and their personal taxes. So even as business gets better, they won't take on more staff because they can't figure out what it will cost them to do so.

Then there is the turmoil over all aspects of the financial services industries. The bonus brawl is the most widely publicized, with bankers somehow stunned that the public should resent their record takings after being bailed out by the government and, in cases such as Goldman Sachs, continuing to benefit from government guarantees of their debt.

More important, indecision on how to reform the financial sector continues to weigh on growth, as banks develop ever more stringent restrictions on credit availability while they wait to see who wins the battle between the Obama White House, which wants to give more power to the Fed, and the Congress, which wants to give the Treasury Department authority to close down any financial institution it deems unfit.

This is no small matter, as the at-least partly nonpolitical Fed is less likely than the completely political Treasury to move against an institution for purely partisan political reasons.

That is what I am hearing too. The government, in their infinite wisdom, is at war against economic growth. Ignorance, indifference, or by intent? They seem to focus on growth of the federal government, and little else.

I think I need a Bloody Bull with double vodka before I go out riding with She Who Must Be Obeyed now, to calm my nerves. The Lefties are finally getting to me.

Betsy McCaughey: What the Pelosi Health-Care Bill Really Says. It is unbelievable.

Also, "ObamaCare’s Redistribution of Health...Of course the president and Congress are after money, but they really want control over your life."

And don't forget the $250,000 fine or go to jail. The major medical policy I now own and enjoy would be illegal.

What they have in common is that they are two pieces of a giant puzzle. Put together, they place the government in the position to regulate or control almost every detail of our daily lives.

In democratic systems, the taking of freedom is always cloaked in a patronizing, slaveowner-style benevolence.

From Steyn's Green Totalitarianism:

In the name of “the environment,” the state gets to regulate everything you do. The cap-and-trade bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, for example, is a bold assault on property rights: in order to sell your home—whether built in 2006 or 1772—you would have to bring it into compliance with whimsical, eternally evolving national “energy ef?ciency” standards, starting with a 50 per cent reduction in energy use by 2018. Fail to do so and it would be illegal for you to enter into a private contract with a willing buyer.

And Lindzen:

MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen has warned: "'He who controls carbon controls life. It is a bureaucrat's dream to control carbon dioxide." Washington, D.C., and the U.N. are in a field of dreams right now as they envision one of the most massive expansions of controls on human individual freedom ever contemplated by governments.

Same idea applies to government medicine which, it is estimated, would create 111 new bureaucracies. Even an Office of Administrative Simplification (not kidding). As Mike Pence said yesterday:

As President Ronald Reagan said: “Since the American founding, we have been a people with a government, not the other way around.”

Now comes the Pelosi plan for a government takeover of health care. It is a freight train of runaway spending, bloated bureaucracy, mandates and higher taxes. If the liberals in Washington have their way, they will forever change the relationship between the government and “we the people.”

If the Pelosi plan for a government takeover of health care passes, we will each become dependent on the political class in Washington for the provision of services of the most urgent and personal nature.

Illness, our own, or more importantly the illness of a parent, or a spouse, or a child, has the capacity to suspend our priorities.

What was important before the crisis grows dim in the harsh light of disease affecting a loved one.

The Pelosi health care plan targets us when we are most vulnerable.

The Pelosi health care plan makes us dependent on the state at the most urgent moment in the life of our family.

Their hope: that little by little, we’ll yield our freedoms and our resources to the ever-growing appetite of the federal government.

One commenter on Althouse's piece on constitutionality, mandated insurance, and the Commerce Clause observes:

Debate this all you like.

I have a message for the Supreme Court and the Congress: Put me in fucking jail.

I will not be forced by you to purchase health insurance.

Period.

And if you try to force me to, you'll reckon with me.

As the Monty Python song goes:

Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the loooord's consent.
Yeah, yeah,
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
(na na na na)
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
(na na na na)
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
(na na na na)
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent...

Re Bruce's post below, I'd like to point out that the government-designed medical insurance is not really insurance at all. It's just payment for medical services, at government-determined rates.

In fact, it's insurance only in the same sense that Social Security is insurance - you are forced to pay into it, and you are forced to take it.

I like to have freedom of choice in selecting my coverage, just as with my auto insurance. I have a relatively high-deductible ($10,000 over 2 years - 100% thereafter) Major Medical insurance. What I save in premiums with this comes close to my deductible - plus I have a Medical Savings Plan. It's all quite inexpensive. It does not cover aromatherapy, massage therapy, chiropractors, homeopathy, addiction treatment, experimental treatments, abortions and other elective procedures like sex-change operations, routine check-ups, and tons of other things that politicians, under pressure from interest groups, will squeeze into the government-designed plan.

The insurance I have today, which is designed to keep you out of financial  catastrophe if you get really sick, would not be permitted under the Baucus plan.

A reminder of Heather MacDonald's Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach, from City Journal in 1998.

That essay was linked by George Leef's comment on the Send Fewer Students to College topic. Leef concludes:

If you think about the reality of higher education rather than its lovely facade, you have to drop the belief that we need to send more students to college.

John at Powerline asks why they need the public option:

Under the House bill, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that health insurance companies are no longer in the insurance business. They can't rate and underwrite risks, which is the essence of insurance. That's illegal. They can't decide to whom they will issue policies; that's illegal, too. They can't offer novel or innovative coverages; their coverages are dictated by law. To a limited extent they can make decisions on paying claims, but under the watchful eye of government regulators. Meaningful competition among insurance companies will be, in effect, illegal. (In that context, it is a sick joke that the Pelosi bill also subjects health insurance companies to the antitrust laws, from which they had been exempted in consideration of their regulation by state, not federal, authorities.)

In the world that the House bill would create, the money we will pay to insurance companies won't really be insurance premiums. Insurance premiums are contractual payments which the parties voluntarily agree upon and which are based on a mutual assessment of risk. Rather, the checks we write to insurance companies will be taxes--legally compelled, at rates set by the federal government that are designed to punish some and subsidize others.

Isn't this socialized medicine in all but name? The only difference, perhaps, is that when things start to go badly, as they inevitably will--spiraling costs, long waits for treatment--Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues will have someone to blame: the insurance companies. Maybe old-fashioned socialized medicine would be better. Then, at least, the government would have to take responsibility for its folly.

Exactly. Turn them into form-processors instead of free enterprises. Regulate them to death.

Steyn:

Did you know every aspect of your life was being negotiated at Copenhagen? But in a good way! So no need to worry.

The details of the new taxes in the Dem bill. (h/t, Blue Crab). These would go into effect right away.

Sounds as if they are designed to crush business and employment.

From Patriot Post:

Our Constitution's principle author, James Madison, wrote, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined [and] will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce."

Concerning the legislature's authority, Thomas Jefferson asserted: "[G]iving [Congress] a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole [Constitution] to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please. Certainly, no such universal power was meant to be given them. [The Constitution] was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect."

At City Journal, Sol Stern on E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy: A content-rich pedagogy makes better citizens and smarter kids. One quote:

The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch’s legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch’s ideas and urge other states to do the same.