The U.S. entitlement problem was grim before Obama was in the White House. Instead of fixing it Obama has doubled down on entitlements. Mark Steyn has an article out today titled “Welcome to Deemocracy.” As usual Steyn sums it all up.
Look around you, and take it all in. From now on, it gets worse. If you have kids, they’ll live in smaller homes, drive smaller cars, live smaller lives. If you don’t have kids, you better hope your neighbors do, because someone needs to spawn a working population large enough to pay for the unsustainable entitlements the Obama party has suckered you into thinking you’re entitled to. The unfunded liabilities of current entitlements are $100 trillion. Try typing that onto your pocket calculator. You can’t. There isn’t enough room for all the zeroes, and, even if they made a pocket calculator large enough, and a pocket large enough, you’d be walking with a limp. To these existing entitlements, Obama and his enforcers in Congress propose to add the grandest of all: health care, on a scale no advanced democracy has ever attempted.
Steyn also points out that ObamaCare will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II. Someone has to collect all those taxes.
Why are the Democrats willing to go to any measure to pass health care? It’s all about Statism. Nothing else can explain Obama’s obsession with this bill. The President sold this bill as a way to reduce our debt entitlement, lower health care costs and reduce premiums. The bill does none of these things. It doesn’t even come close and the President is still willing to do anything, even jamming it through the Senate via the partisan reconciliation process. Passing the bill is a certain calamity in the short term for Democrats. This is suicide voting at its finest. Democrats are willing to lose in the short term because once health care becomes an entitlement in the minds of the American people the Statists win. Mark Steyn wrote an article over the weekend that is essential in understanding what the liberal end game is on this issue.
It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect. (Let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative.”) The result is a kind of two-party one-party state:
Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless. Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic.
This already exists. Think about entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Both of these programs are unsustainable. Reforming these programs is extremely difficult, and scrapping them all-together and starting over is an impossibility. The right has capitulated and the left has an entitlement that moves the nation further from limited government.
The Democrats’ answer for every problem is more government. If Obama said today: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” it would be hilarious. The President certainly doesn’t believe it and neither does his party. Government dependency can be the only reason that the Democrats are so determined to pass a bill that a majority of Americans do not want. Either way the House votes on this bill is bad for the Democrats in the short term; however, if ObamaCare does pass the repeal movement may ultimately be more devastating to Democrats than Obama’s fragile ego if he fails to deliver.
“Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
-George Orwell, 1984
Though we celebrate our independence with gusto each year, I wonder if Americans are losing the independent spirit that animated the founding of our nation. Do independent people rely on the federal government to provide any number of conveniences, like health care, and then portray those conveniences as God-given rights? Do independent people really believe in the transfer of their wealth and power from their local governments to an all-encompassing, centralized federal government?
The obvious answer should be, “Hell no!” But Americans are proving to be less independent with each passing year. Beaten down by relentless propaganda from the left-wing media, both the “news” and entertainment arms, the American people are more accepting of a centralized and intrusive government than they ever were before.
The founders made it clear that the majority of power should reside locally, not in the federal government, though the federal government required more power to control the states than was allotted by the Articles of Confederation.
According to the Constitution, the power to regulate the individual clearly resides in local and state government while the power to regulate the relationships between the states and the collective states with the rest of the world reside in the federal government. Basically, general power is given to the federal government and specific powers to local governments.
This is the most rational and logical approach to government since it allows people, particularly in a mobile society like the United States, to make laws that make sense for their local situation and to move to a location that best suits their needs. If you don’t like local government, you can get the hell out of Dodge, so to speak.
And that’s exactly what people have been doing as of late as they flee the oppressive nanny/bully states of California and Massachusetts for the less intrusive and freedom-loving states of Texas, Colorado and Nevada. Ironically though, a lot of these immigrants bring with them the same political ideology which made their home state unlivable and then make their adopted states less livable.
Local governments are obviously much closer to the needs and concerns of their people, whereas a national government is remote and cannot possibly discern between the specific needs of a citizen of New Orleans versus those of a citizen in Seattle.
Too much power in the hands of a remote body that is less accountable to its citizens is extremely dangerous to liberty. Is it safe to cede most regulatory and legislative power to what amounts to 545 aristocrats (Congress + Senate + President + Supreme Court) whom most people agree are generally corrupt and imminently corruptible?
Are we really so ignorant as to think that they have our best interests in mind? Or, is it possible that they have their own power, wealth, and influence in mind as they pimp for dollars from special interests that do not represent the people at large and certainly not those in Sioux City, Iowa?
Most people would agree with the second rhetorical question, and would claim to agree with the principles set forth by America’s founders. Still, for whatever reason they continue to vote for concentrating power – their power – in the hands of a few in Washington, D.C.
As Mark Steyn put it in a recent column: “The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government ‘security,’ large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time–the freedom to make their own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and eventually (as we already see in Europe, Canada, American campuses, and the disgusting U.N. Human Rights Council) what you’re permitted to say and think.”
Last week I had the immense pleasure of reading Mark Steyn’s America Alone. I have always been a little weary of drawing false conclusions based on population projections. History is littered with projections of doom based on population trends. Most of these projections have been based on overpopulation. Ever since Thomas Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population prophets of doom have been warning the world of the dangers of overpopulation. Mark Steyn’s book takes a different look at population, especially looking at Europe where immigrating Muslims will be the majority in a few decades if the current trend continues. Unfortunately for Europe these immigrants aren’t assimilating into European culture.
Much of the developed world has quit having children. Most of the native Europeans aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. This is also true in Japan. Australia and the United States are two exceptions. The same thing is happening in the Northeastern Blue States. The Southeastern Biblebelt and the increasing Hispanic population are driving the population increase in the United States. I have pointed out time and again the looming fiscal crisis facing the United States with our entitlement programs, but Mark Steyn explains how the Europeans have it even worse. I don’t see how Europe’s economy will survive unless they take drastic steps to curb entitlements, decrease unemployment, and find a better way to assimilate the new immigrants. It’s funny how many American’s hold Europe up as example we should follow when they have so many problems.
Steyn’s book is clever and often laugh out loud funny. It’s a short read and he offers 10 points in the last chapter that the West can adopt to stem the tide of the extreme Wahhabi branch of Islam. Progressives in the United States and Europe like to beat up on “Christian Fundamentalists” in America, but there’s much larger problem facing the World. Europe is slowly capitulating to extremism, if they don’t do something soon the US will be the world’s last hope. Well, if the trend continues.
Evidently free speech is alive and well at York University in Toronto. The Canadians have had issues lately with liberal fascism. Mark Steyn is one example, and these on campus pro-abortion groups are another. Evidently they consider the Pro-life position as sexist in nature and that it shouldn’t be tolerated at all. They are trying to ban all groups on campus that have a pro-life position. That’s right, ban!
In response to a series of controversies over abortion debates on Canadian campuses, the student government of York University in Toronto has tabled an outright ban on student clubs that are opposed to abortion.
Gilary Massa, vice-president external of the York Federation of Students, said student clubs will be free to discuss abortion in student space, as long as they do it “within a pro-choice realm,” and that all clubs will be investigated to ensure compliance.
“You have to recognize that a woman has a choice over her own body,” Ms. Massa said. “We think that these pro-life, these anti-choice groups, they’re sexist in nature … The way that they speak about women who decide to have abortions is demoralizing. They call them murderers, all of them do … Is this an issue of free speech? No, this is an issue of women’s rights.”
How can this be a sexist issue when according to polls women are more pro-life than men? Are women being self sexist? I have never really understood the militant defense of the pro-abortion position. A majority of Americans agree that it’s a gruesome practice, especially partial birth abortion. Even many abortion supporters claim to be “pro-choice” not “pro-abortion.” That’s one of my favorite bumper stickers. I can understand a fairly ambivalent libertarian position on abortion rights, but the extreme defense on the Left is puzzling.
These women look super excited about infanticide.
The emotion of Pro-lifers is understandable considering they believe abortion is murder. Unfortunately, most of the time the debate is framed in such a way that being pro-life means debating someone who says “what about pregnancies from rape and incest.” Basically a gruesome hypothetical situation is the justification for 40 million people not having a chance to live. About 88% of abortions take place before the end of the first trimester. That means approximately 5 million have taken place in the second or third trimester. It’s difficult to believe that is a positive and acceptable development for society.
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