Common Senselessness

One who is habitually surrounded by persons of intellect and percipience can easily forget that, as the old saying goes, half of Mankind is below average. Worse, even the most gifted among us occasionally "down tools" in service to wishful thinking. In this connection, have a gander at this bit of incredulity from Victor Davis Hanson:

If [ObamaCare] was passed through coercion, noble lies, and subterfuge, and ushered in with the same, why would anyone believe it will not operate in the same spirit and practice? Why should everyone who has insurance expect to believe that he was simply given it and that everyone who doesn’t was deprived of it, when millions made difficult and costly choices not to play the odds while at least a few million others in no different circumstances embraced different choices?

The implications are inexorable and irrefutable...but to whom has Dr. Hanson addressed them? His usual readers hardly needed to be told any of that. Those to whom it would be potentially illuminating are unlikely ever to encounter it...and a hefty fraction thereof, probably more than half, would fail to grasp it.

Nor is that uniformly because of an inability to comprehend it.

---

Consider the following picture, which I stole from Battlefield USA:

The arithmetic is off, but there's a germ of insight in the concept. The $900 billion the Obama Administration originally projected to be the ten-year cost of ObamaCare comes to about $30,000 for each American, or $250 per month for every month of that period -- and the projection was lowballed by a factor of three or more. Inasmuch as a family of four, pre-ObamaCare, could routinely purchase a high-deductible (typically about $3000) medical insurance policy for about $450 per month, wouldn't the supposed goal of ObamaCare have been more directly and economically attained by subsidizing the cost of medical insurance?

There are other, similar cases. For example, the amount spent by the Department of Health and Human Services in any single year would suffice, if distributed to the "poor" as outright cash gifts, to eliminate "poverty" completely. So why do we still have poor people?

Is it plausible that the persons who operate those programs and departments are unaware of this? Indeed, is it plausible that anyone unable to do long division would rise to such a height in the federal bureaucracy?

Don't all answer at once, now.

---

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's tale The Sign Of The Four, the inimitable Sherlock Holmes says to his sidekick Dr. Watson, "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" And it is so. At the very least, "whatever remains" must be a superset of the truth, within which one may locate the truth with penetration and diligence. So: If we have reduced to absurdity the proposition that ObamaCare was erected for the purpose of assisting Americans in the purchase of "affordable" medical insurance, what possibilities remain?

1. The enlargement of the permanent dependent class;
2. A new mechanism for robbery via "crony capitalism;"
3. Power for specific individuals in the Obama Administration.

Any or all of these possibilities might be true. The first two are already visibly in operation. Given the perpetuation of the Obamunists' scheme, the third will arise over time. I can think of no other outcome of the Affordable Care Act that can be linked to a motive known to men.

If the set above is complete, what does it tell us about the character -- not the achievements nor the personalities, but the moral character -- of the persons who have imposed ObamaCare upon these United States?

---

Men are capable of deluding themselves. Therefore, it is quite possible that many within the Obama Administration have persuaded themselves, at least superficially, that they serve the "greater good." They may even believe that they are "sacrificing themselves" on the altar of "public service." They certainly make enough such statements before audiences of wide-eyed college students.

We in the Right have a charming yet deplorable tendency toward political naivety. We strain to think the best of our adversaries in the political sphere. We want to believe that their ultimate aims are as benevolent as ours, even if we must wish away the evidence of our senses and the deductions of our minds to do so. We cannot abide the suggestion that President Smith, who claims so insistently to have the well-being of all men as his one and only aim, might really be an American O'Brien:

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power....The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"...

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement....All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever." [From George Orwell's 1984]

...the idea is just too horrible to contemplate, because of the possibilities it implies for every human heart, including one's own.

Yet to one who lacks the insight, or the intellect, or the energy, or the perseverance to achieve greatly on his own, without conscripting unwilling others, what other path to "greatness" is there? When you look open-eyed, without presumptions, at the creatures that have infested our federal government and made it into the wallow of corruption and brutality we endure, what else could you possibly imagine of them?

---

If there is a single absolute necessity before us who love freedom and want it back it is to press O'Brien's six critical words into the American consciousness so firmly that they become indelible:

The Object Of Power Is Power.

It is a fatal mistake ever to concede power to one who seeks it. His intentions, even if wholesome and sincere, do not matter. Even the seemingly allowable power of taxation for Constitutionally licit purposes is infected with the germ of totalitarianism, for as with all coercive privileges, it is inherently unlimited, a license to kill those who resist too strenuously. Equally, it acts as a magnet upon those to whom power over others is their foremost desire -- and among such there is a hierarchy through which one can only ascend by ever-increasing brutality and ruthlessness.

Ayn Rand said it best:

"When force is made the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket." [From Atlas Shrugged]

This must become the common sense of Americans. Nothing else will suffice.