Mid-20th-century assumptions of generational
progress no longer obtainable
No
one has ever before attempted to devise a uniform health system for 300 million
people — for the very good reason that it probably can’t be done. Britain’s
National Health Service serves a population less than a fifth the size of
America’s and is the third-largest employer on the planet after the Indian
National Railways and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the last of which
is now largely funded by American taxpayers through interest payment on federal
debt. A single-payer U.S. system would be bigger than Britain’s NHS, India’s
railways, and China’s army combined, at least in its bureaucracy. So, as in
banking and housing and college tuition and so many other areas of endeavor,
Washington is engaging in a kind of under-the-counter nationalization, in which
the husk of a nominally private industry is conscripted to enforce government
rules — and ruthlessly so, as Michelle Malkin and many others have discovered.
Obama’s
pointless, traceless super-spending is now (as they used to say after 9/11)
“the new normal.” Nancy Pelosi assured the nation last weekend that everything
that can be cut has been cut and there are no more cuts to be made. And the
disturbing thing is that, as a matter of practical politics, she may well be
right. Many people still take my correspondent’s view: If you have old money
well managed, you can afford to be stupid — or afford the government’s
stupidity on your behalf. If you’re a social-activist celebrity getting $20
million per movie, you can afford the government’s stupidity. If you’re a
tenured professor or a unionized bureaucrat whose benefits were chiseled in
stone two generations ago, you can afford it. If you’ve got a wind farm and
you’re living large on government “green energy” investments, you can afford it.
If you’ve got the contract for signing up Obamaphone recipients, you can afford
it.
But
out there beyond the islands of privilege most Americans don’t have the same
comfortably padded margin for error, and they’re hunkering down. Obamacare is
something new in American life: the creation of a massive bureaucracy charged
with downsizing you — to a world of fewer doctors, higher premiums, lousier
care, more debt, fewer jobs, smaller houses, smaller cars, smaller, fewer,
less; a world where worse is the new normal. Would Americans, hitherto the most
buoyant and expansive of people, really consent to live such shrunken lives? If
so, mid-20th-century America and its assumptions of generational progress will
be as lost to us as the Great Ziggurat of Ur was to 19th-century Mesopotamian
date farmers.
George
Orwell, after attending a meeting of impoverished but passive miners, remarked
sadly that “there is no turbulence left in England.” The Democrats, and much of
the Republican establishment, have made a bet that there is no turbulence left
in America, and the citizenry will stand mute before Obamacare’s wrecking ball.
Unless they’re willing to accept a worse life for their children and
grandchildren, middle-class Americans need to prove them wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment