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Central governments are really good at just a few things. Waging war, funding interstate highways (maybe), and protecting our borders (well, sort of) come to mind.
But most of the rest of what our taxes go for in the post-modern US of A gets botched, lost, wasted or just plain stolen. This, then, in significant measure is because government has presumed to take on so many functions, address so many perceived problems (after often creating the problems in the first place) on issues where it has no business, anyway.
The list could fill this publication, single-spaced, many times over. Within the list would be the chronicles of governmental overreach, crony capitalism and the delusions of three generations of socialists whose intention collectively has been to create a society of incompetent serfs utterly dependent for their every need and want upon the all-wise soothsayers of the omniscient Left.
And all has proceeded apace while the people and their nominal “representatives” have been beguiled into this terminal symbiosis—until now.
Welcome to the netherworld of Obamacare, eventually single-payer health care, in less-enlightened times known as socialized medicine. If ever there were the pluperfect example of governmental overreach, incompetence, intransigence and insanity, this is it.
To begin to fathom the depths of this mess, it is necessary to look back into those now-dark alleys of the march of liberalism to the place where “taking care” of us really began to look like an eventual total takeover of every facet of our lives.
Our president-as-candidate not so long ago was clear about his desire for single-payer health coverage, with that single payer being the federal government, as far back as his debates with the hapless John McCain. One might suspect that some gaggle of his minders gasped at such unintended and rare candor so that the statement was quickly eradicated from the text and scrubbed from his mouth with some strong soap, but he said it, nonetheless.
More recently, other statist luminaries such as Harry Reid and John Conyers of Michigan have said the same thing. And that brings me to my point.
The evil intentions of Marxian socialism can be accomplished only by a dogged and perpetual incrementalism of idea and purpose.
From social “security” taking from us the responsibility to provide for ourselves in our later years, to Medicare taking from us the equal responsibility of arranging for our own medical care, to Medicaid taking from the community its bounden duty to care for those who cannot care for themselves, we have little by little succumbed to the offers of government programs to “take care of us” from cradle to grave.
And nothing has ever done more to send us into the abyss of statist/fascist control than the Affordable Care Act.
Now make no mistake. It won’t work. It’s not supposed to work. It will simply be the last push in the chain reaction of governmental takeover that ends with the shoulder-shrugging, “Looks like the only way out” that ends with, “Stop, I’ll save you!” and the infernal bureaucracy’s simply deciding to take it all over and pay for all the health care it thinks you should have.
So if you like this incompetent beast that is now leaving you on hold for hours before hanging up on you, just wait till single-payer socialized medicine gets here.
But, hey, look on the bright side—the IRS will be in charge! Sleep tight.•
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Garrison is a partner in Garrison Law Firm LLC in Indianapolis and a talk show host on WIBC-FM 93.1. Send comments on this column to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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