Beyond the Near Horizon

posted at 11:49 pm on September 30, 2009 by Doctor Zero

Rumors are swirling that Democrats will try to push ObamaCare through Congress as early as next Thursday, by attaching the unwritten health-care bill to another bill that has already passed the House. The idea, detailed in this Human Events article, is to graft the Senate health-care framework onto a House bill designed to tax bonuses paid to employees of companies that received TARP benefits, such as the notorious AIG. The Democrats in the House and Senate would then shove the hybrid bill onto President Obama’s desk with a party-line vote. Of course, since the health care reform bill remains largely unwritten, Obama would essentially be signing a blank check to himself, backed by vast amounts of power and taxpayer money, for a government-run health care system to be designed and implemented later.

How many people who supported taxing the “outrageous” bonuses paid to those evil AIG employees realized they were actually supporting the destruction and re-creation of the health insurance industry? How many understood that by raising their hands to shred the property rights of the gang at AIG, they were actually agreeing to a bill that would mutate into fines and jail time against them, for failing to purchase government-approved health insurance?

Big Government wants this health-care plan much more than the American people, who have organized with remarkable vigor against it. If the Democrats short-circuit representative government and reasoned deliberation, to force the greatest expansion of government power in American history down our throats with a parliamentary trick, it would be a triumph of power and aggression for a State that has come to see its people as obstacles to be overcome, rather than constituents to be served. “The heart wants what it wants,” said Woody Allen, in defense of his degenerate relationship with the adopted daughter of his ex-wife. The State wants what it wants, and right now it’s calculating the odds of completing a Hail Mary pass to itself, to win the big seventy-year game against the independent middle class.

Maybe the Democrats won’t try this little maneuver next week, but they’re going to bring ObamaCare to a vote eventually – they’ve invested too much energy and political capital in getting this far. Enraging their base by giving up without a vote would deal as much damage as pushing through the health-care bill and weathering a storm of outrage from the majority of Americans who oppose it, so they might as well take their shot. If the nerve of the Blue Dog Democrats fails, and they don’t get a bill through Congress, it will be a shattering blow to their party, and a fatal embarrassment to the President. If they muscle health-care reform through, they face an electoral bloodbath in 2010 from a population justly furious at the notion of industries nationalized through half-written bills, hustled through Congress at breakneck speed.

If the population isn’t furious about that, then we have reached the end of this chapter in American history – a chapter that began with a sprawling agrarian nation mastering the power of industry to defeat world-conquering monsters, and rebuild the broken nations of its grandparents. I do not believe that chapter will end with a tired, timid people agreeing they cannot be trusted to take care of their own bodies, but I speak from faith, not prophecy.

No matter how the ObamaCare saga ends, we are approaching the near horizon, where the sea meets the sky. Everything will be different after this. I hope it will be better. If the Democrats lose Congressional power in 2010, the passion and intelligence of the town-hall protesters should next be turned against the Republicans, who could use a few miles of road work under the watchful eye of several million tough coaches. The task ahead for them will be enormous, for the failure of Obama’s absurd ideas leaves a unique opportunity to do something that has never been done in the modern era: make the government smaller.

We’re living through a recession that constantly threatens to turn into something much worse. The state-run economy has been languishing on the couch, tossing unread bills into a growing pile next to a half-eaten bag of Doritos and a nest of empty soda cans. It hasn’t held a steady job in months, and when its mom hassles it to get up and look for one, it whines that nobody’s hiring… but it keeps flipping to the shopping channels and ordering massive entitlement programs. It has drained the college funds of its unborn children, and sold them into indentured servitude for quick cash, after it maxed out every credit card it could find. The state-run economy has become hideously bloated, and it could use a good shower to wash off the stink of corruption, but it howls in psychotic rage if anyone dares to call it fat or smelly. It occasionally makes feeble promises to lose some of its flab, but it has no intention of keeping them. The only thing that will make it haul itself off the couch is the sight of someone it thinks it can squeeze money out of. It’s only a few years away from the fatal coronary it refuses to admit is coming.

It’s going to be tough to whip this mess into shape. We have to begin by trimming the stupendous amount of waste and graft in our government. It started long before the 2008 elections, but it’s reached critical mass. We need leaders with the guts to issue indictments and prosecute people like Charlie Rangel, because he’s not leaving until men with badges and guns take him away. We need extensive audits of Obama’s outrageously unconstitutional czars, who should be defunded as quickly and thoroughly as ACORN. We must find those billions of dollars Obama says could be saved through improving the efficiency of Medicare. We have to stop paying for 45,000 hours per week of postal worker “standby” time. The money spend on ridiculous pork-barrel projects should be returned to the people who earned it. We can’t correct the problem of Big Government entirely, by reducing corruption and waste… but it would make a terrific starting point.

We can bring life to a moribund economy through tax cuts. Businesses plan around upcoming tax payments, so a tax cut on the horizon will have swift benefits. We can create jobs by privatizing moribund government-controlled industries, like the post office, and especially education. Hiring can be spurred by reducing government and union interference in labor costs, and by opening new natural resources for private industry to exploit. We cannot afford trillion-dollar tithes to the religion of madcap environmentalism any longer. It’s particularly important, given our dependence on foreign oil, to allow reason and science to triumph over primitive superstition, and begin building nuclear power plants again.

We can quickly add huge amounts of value and productivity to our economy by reducing the weight of government regulations, which cost us hundreds of billions in compliance costs and lost opportunities. To anticipate the reflexive objections of the Left, we don’t have to “de-regulate everything” – we could reduce our regulatory burden by fifty or sixty percent, and still have thousands of pages of codes and restrictions left over.

Which Republican or independent candidates have a brilliant, detailed blueprint to restore American vitality and prosperity? None of them, of course. It’s the voters who have those blueprints. Americans know how to succeed and prosper. They need fewer guns, badges, agendas, and tax forms shoved in their faces when they get busy. They need fewer voices demanding they feel guilty or inadequate. Just beyond the near horizon, we may find a land where our government has the courage and humility to believe in us, and we have the spirit and self-respect to demand nothing less. We can begin the journey after the tedious man in the White House makes one more stab at telling the electorate how an utterly broke, corrupt, mortgaged-to-the-hilt State, which can’t even cover the commitments of Social Security and Medicare any longer, can lavish trillions of dollars on a socialized medical plan. I believe the American people will retain the common sense to shake their heads and turn away… and then we can get down to serious business.

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