Give Joe Scarborough credit for being the one person on MS-NBC with the brains to ask Dick Durbin why we want to hike taxes on capital gains while we struggle to recover from the Great Recession. The ObamaCare bill applies Medicare taxes to investment income for the first time, putting earners above $200,000 on the hook for the bill while Congress spreads that wealth as it sees fit. For the self-employed earners, those taxes are doubled, since there is no employer to share the burden; for businesses, it creates yet more expense, eating up cash that could have gone toward expansion and hiring.

So how does Dick Durbin respond?

Yes, if you’re making over $200,000 a year, you’re going to pay slightly more in taxes. It’s the cost, I think, of having the kind of America we want to have.

What kind of America is that — one with chronically high unemployment and a growing dependent class? Jim DeMint puts the question this way:

What kind of America do we want to have? One where people are free to live their lives as they see fit, or one where Washington controls nearly every aspect of our lives?

Democrats like Durbin obviously want the latter. We’d better make sure that Republicans support the former before getting behind them in elections from now on.