Bil Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it”, by repealing the elements in the system’s regulations that discouraged work, marriage, and not having children the recipients couldn’t support. This elicited howls from his own party that he was “gutting” welfare, but it did get him re-elected in 1996- even though he never actually did much to change the system.
Now, fourteen years later, we see the same “disincentives” to actual adult behavior being imposed on the American people as a whole by the new “health care reform” act. There are two possible reasons for this;
A. “Progressives” are utterly incapable of learning from experience; or
B. “Progressives” liked what the original form of welfare did to poor people, and want to do it to everyone (except themselves).
(B) is the most likely explanation. Progressives believe in “leveling”, i.e. bringing everyone (other than themselves) down to the same low level. A level at which if you step out of line, you’re done for.
Their “ideal state” is one ruled, not by the open terror of the gun (although that is always in the hands of their minions as a final threat), but by the subtle terror of a Byzantine system purposely designed to be both Draconian toward people they don’t like (think; self-reliant people with actual assets) and incomprehensible even to those working in it. The principle being that the only thing better than laws which punish individual initiative are laws which cannot be understood, or are deliberately contradictory. In either case, everyone will live in constant fear of inadvertently violating those laws, and suffering the wrath of a government acting like a schoolyard bully with a sneer on his face.
Of course, like the bully who always gets away with saying “he did it!” while pointing at his victim, the “enlightened elite’” will never be subject to the same penalties if they break the rules. Because those rules will carefully be written to exclude them. (The “health care reform” act of course exempts Congress from its provisions.) As always, there will be one set of rules for the majority, and a different and much more lenient set for the ruling class. This is the way “truly enlightened” states are run, according to the progressives. States like the old Soviet Union, for example.
If you want to know what the fate of a typical American family in the upper-middle-class income brackets with no one working for the Federal government or a “politically correct” NGO will be under this “enlightened” legislation, I’d suggest Googling the terms “kulak” and “Stalin” together.
clear ether
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