Who has been minding the store? I step out of the country for a few days to go sailing and, Pow, ObamaCare™ and all that it entails slouches towards Washington to be born.
As I’ve often noted in this space, what travels under the rubric of “health care reform” is only incidentally about health care and hardly at all about reform, i.e. improving things. Really, it is about increasing the government’s control over your life, partly by handing over the machinery of health care to its phalanx of bureaucrats, partly by the familiar mechanics of choice — limitation that such “reform” involves: more regulation, more bureaucracy, and last but most assuredly not least higher taxes. As Ronald Reagan noted more than a quarter century ago, “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project.” Sunday was a sad day for individual liberty and a sad day for America.
But I did not return from the Caribbean to bellyache. As the philosopher Yogi Berra observed, it ain’t over till it’s over, and it ain’t over yet. No one should underestimate the gravity of Sunday’s vote. By a narrow margin, the Democrats have pushed the United States that much closer to the slough of socialist dependency and fiscal suicide. But the victory may yet be a pyrrhic one. All across the land people are awakening from their dogmatic slumbers. Tea partiers from Washington, D.C., to California are brandishing the insignia of freedom. Never in my lifetime has there been such a strong field of conservative political candidates. A week, as Harold Wilson once observed, is a long time in politics. But it looks now as if the November 2010 will mark an historic victory for the partisans of freedom and prosperity. What can be enacted can also be repealed, as the fate of the ill-judged 1988 Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act reminds us. One scant year after it passed, it was repealed. That antistrophe might provide a useful model for those wishing to respond to this latest assault on freedom.
It is also worth keeping the larger perspective in view. I found the “debate” over health care “reform” a sickening spectacle: Can Nancy Pelosi find the right bribes to win over a few more wavering congressmen? Here we were talking about a sixth of the United States economy and Washington was riveted on smarmy gamesmanship, back-room deals, empty Executive Orders of dubious Constitutionality. These are the people we have chosen to represent us? Disgusting. (I remind readers once more about ThrowTheBumsOut.org.)
Seen rightly, every challenge is an opportunity. And this defeat is no exception. It is time now to persevere with the work of recovery. It is time, too, to step back and remind ourselves of some basic principles — to remind ourselves that what we are fighting for is not just the 216 votes for this or that bill but something much larger. Like what? A friend just sent me this reflection, titled “Thoughts on the Moral Case,” from the Margaret Thatcher Papers in Cambridge.
Our views on the way a government should run the economy can be described as “libertarian”: that is to say freedom to develop trade and industry within the framework of a strong and clear law. The most important part of the case for this economic freedom is not the way it produces greater prosperity but its consistency with certain fundamental moral principles of life itself. Each soul or person matters; man is imperfect; he is a responsible being; he has freedom to choose; he has obligations to his fellow man.
Morality is personal. There is no such thing as a collective conscience, collective kindness, collective gentleness, collective freedom. To talk of social justice, social responsibility, a new world order, may be easy and make us feel good, but it does not absolve each of us from personal responsibility. We don’t carry out our moral commitment by taking up a public stance on these things, but only by choosing to do something about them ourselves. You can’t delegate personal morality to your country. You are your country.
Inspiring, what? Here’s an exercise: try to imagine what you might find in the yet-to-be assembled Nancy Pelsoi Papers at the University of California at Berkeley. Not pretty, is it?
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