Kudos to Sen. Bob Corker on declaring ObamaCare a Ponzi scheme, which it so obviously is. But we need not share his pessimism about the prospects for repealing it. The latest Rasmussen Reports survey of likely voters puts public support for repeal at nearly 60 percent, a number that seems to rise every time the president gives another speech telling us how wonderful ObamaCare is.
But here’s the thing: Repeal isn’t just politically popular; repeal — or something very much like it — is literally unavoidable. If you accept Sen. Corker’s view that ObamaCare is a Ponzi scheme, then there are only two options:
* Republican congressional majorities elected in 2010 and/or 2012, in tandem with a GOP president elected in 2012, could abolish ObamaCare directly, through legislation.
* Barring that, the laws of economics will repeal it by default when we run out of money to pay for it — you know, the thing that eventually makes all Ponzi schemes collapse.
I favor option No. 1, since it would not involve national insolvency and related unpleasantness. But it’s an open question whether we will dismantle ObamaCare or let it dismantle itself and us with it.
Choose.
Imitation: the sincerest form of insanity
It has been convenient for European nations, defended by American military might, to abandon the cost and responsibility of providing for their defense. It lets them spend more on health care and other “entitlements” while tut-tutting about those militaristic Yanks who quietly keep them safe.
“What’s easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it can’t afford — cut back on nanny-state lollipops, or shrug off thankless military commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite?” asks commentator Mark Steyn. “(T)he only reason Sweden can be Sweden and Germany Germany and France France is that America is America.”
Which raises an obvious question: To whom will America — much less Europe — turn for protection when an unconstitutional medical bureaucracy consumes so much of our own gross domestic product that too little is left over for the constitutional trifle of national defense?
If there is a Bangladeshi or Bolivian military shield behind which we can hide from soon-to-be-nuclear-armed terrorists, we might want to make its acquaintance before ObamaCare eats us out of house, home and weaponry.
Benevolent tyranny?
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has been snatching up private financial institutions, recently turning three of them into a state-run bank. He has been engaged, meanwhile, in a war of words with yet another private banker, and he couldn’t resist threatening to nationalize that institution, too.
“If you’re going to become a politician, become a politician, and then give me your bank,” he thundered, before quickly correcting himself — “Well, to the state.”
It is always so with those who think they embody the will of the people. Infinitely worse than the despot who openly exults in his despotism, they believe that meeting their countrymen’s needs and fulfilling their own lust for power are one and the same thing.
C.S. Lewis wrote, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. … To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
And Lewis hadn’t even seen ObamaCare.
To reach Steve Barrett, call 423-757-6329 or e-mail sbarrett@timesfreepress.com.