Not the Economy: Obamacare and Social Issues (I)

“Obama's solicitor general . . .is part of a political culture that has never thought seriously about the Constitution, has never thought that our masters in Washington need to beg the people for any permission beyond their vote every two to six years. . . The Washington conventional wisdom has long been rooted in constitutional contempt.”

-- W. James Antle, III, American Spectator

Let me keep it simple. The people want jobs. Business people create jobs. If the election is a battle between the party of business, which creates jobs, and the party of government, which has proven unable to create jobs, then the business party should win.

So Democrats, the government party unable to grow the pie, wish to recut the pie, redistributing wealth. Government can recut the pie, if that’s what voters want. President Obama, with his (inaccurate) 99% v. 1% rhetoric, is focused on redistribution.

Even without proof that government, in the absence of job creation, can provide the country with more pie, redistribution speaks to the Democrats’ natural constituencies—liberals, government workers, unmarried women, minorities, and youth—a potential 60% of voters that embraces government as its friend.

Democrats begin with a majority base, and a belief they are America’s future. Government helps people, people support government, freedom of choice. It’s how democracy works in Europe, under democratic socialism.

I have been struck by the insight liberal Stanford economist Victor Fuchs’ expressed in his 1976 article "From Bismarck to Woodcock: The 'Irrational' Pursuit of National Health Insurance." Fuchs understood that health care leads the way to permanent control of our country:

one of the most effective ways of increasing allegiance to the state is through national health insurance. We live at a time when many of the traditional symbols and institutions that held a nation together have been weakened and fallen into disrepute. A more sophisticated public requires more sophisticated symbols, and national health insurance may fit that role particularly well.

We are less than 90 days from a Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare. At this stage, Obama’s signal achievement is in trouble (see quote above), because of its apparently unconstitutional mandate to buy health insurance. As health care reaches the crucial point along its path toward securing the liberal agenda, it seems Democrats may have avoidably over-reached.

It’s an error Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal alluded to when he said:

Democracies always begin in liberty, but they don't always keep it. [In] The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn [wrote,] "At the Philadelphia convention, with exquisite care and with delicate nuances, they devised a complex constitution that would generate the requisite power but would so distribute its flow and uses that no one body of men and no one institutional center would ever gain a monopoly of force or influence that would dominate the nation." We shall see.

We shall see.