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Tuesday, February 17, 2009
The Eye of the Super
Nanny State
It
neither slumbers nor sleeps.
STIMULUS PLUS. Despite the FDR legacy it references so self-consciously, the first 100 days of the Obama administration are likely to reduce personal liberties in this country more than anything which has occurred here in the 220 years since the constitution was ratified. Consider just a few of the developments we've witnessed in a mere month.
Congress has passed a bill -- which none of the legislators voting on it had time to read -- that at one fell swoop committed taxpayers to the largest single government spending spree in the history of the United States. The price tag is bigger than the entire cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (or World War II for that matter). Worse, much of the expenditure on government jobs will become a permanent part of the national budget, re-funded ad infinitum, a burden the citizens who actually work for a living will be paying for in perpetuity.
The bill also includes dramatic changes in the administration of healthcare, welfare, and unemployment benefits. It includes provisions for government intrusion into private treatment decisions between patients and physicians, with a new federal right to proscribe treatments deemed too expensive or experimental. It's the first, vital step toward the rationing of healthcare based on actuarial factors such as age and lifestyle. You can now be too old or too politically incorrect (smokers!) to receive available treatment that could save your life. With respect to welfare, the bill commits the federal government to begin paying bonuses to the states for increasing their welfare caseloads. And unemployment benefits will now be paid to people who actually quit both full-time and part-time jobs because of personal and family circumstances unrelated to their employment. The real long-term costs of these changes are unfunded since no one has estimated or budgeted for the loss of life, jobs (through increased employer risk and nonproductive expense), employment incentive, and GDP that will follow as the night the day.
We are guaranteed that there will be more bureaucrats, more paperwork, more invasion (and regulation) of our private lives, more welfare cheats, higher costs of trying to do business, more federal intrusions into business operations, more expensive lawsuits, and ever higher taxes on those who do the real work that pays for all the parasites. But high taxes will no longer be an electoral basis for changing the government because most of what the bill calls tax cuts will be checks written to people who don't pay income taxes now. For the first time in our history taxpayers will be the minority of the population. And who else has any incentive to restrain government spending? Even FDR never dreamed of such a one-shot coup against the schmucks who pay the bill for all of government's presumptions.
That's less than 30 days in.
What will the next 30 or 60 days bring? Worse things. Much worse things.
Congress will pass a bill that eliminates privacy in votes on whether or not a workforce wants to be unionized. Which will immediately revive the ancient union practice of intimidation, violence, and extortion against those employees who prefer to bet their livelihoods on a company rather than a union. Small businesses will go out of business by the tens of thousands because unlike businesses, unions are legally entitled to be monopolies and apply the full weight of their power to every entrepreneur, no matter how small.
The sabers are already rattling in the House and the Senate for an all-out assault on the only aspect of the First Amendment Democrats disapprove of, meaning the only aspect the founders actually cared about -- political speech. The Tolerant Ones will go the last mile for the free speech rights of seditionists, traitors, pornographers, and jihadists, but they are adamantly opposed to free expression in the two parts of the mass media they don't own lock, stock and barrel -- talk radio and the internet. Look for the FCC to revive the Fairness doctrine via regulatory rather than legislative procedures. And then look for them to extend the authority of the FCC to the Internet.
On other fronts, the Obama administration is in the process of 1) eradicating the independence of the census by appropriating it to White House control so that the electoral college, apportionments of congressional seats, and other partisan considerations can be invisibly "fixed" via statistical conjuring, 2) conspiring to sell out the sovereignty of the United States in economic matters by subscribing to the ludicrous leftist hoax called Global Warming in a variety of anti-capitalist international forums, 3) abdicating the moral authority of the United States to oppose murderous regimes in the middle east by blaming all international problems on George W. Bush's foreign policy, and 4) endorsing worldwide anti-semitism by participating in the vicious Durban initiative denouncing the Jews, and Jews only, for racism in the middle east.
And if you oppose gay marriage, be prepared to be prosecuted openly, or perscuted insidiously, for hate crimes.
Meanwhile, the Tolerant Ones in charge of governments at the state, municipal, county, city, and township levels are continuing with their various offensives against parental input to public schools and textbooks, freedom of public worship in any form outside a church, the Second Amendment, smoking (in cars, at home, in the Grand Canyon), child discipline, food (freedom of 'eat'), cars (hybrids yes, SUVs immoral), fuel (corn yes, gasoline Armageddon), parental notifiication of abortion requests by minor children (even in cases of statutory rape), and arguments against Global Warming in the presence of a minor (public school programmed) child.
Our freedoms are being devoured. This is not a paranoid fantasy. It's the onrushing juggernaut of hatred launched against us by those who call themselves -- laughably, absurdly, grotesquely -- "liberals."
What they are is fascists. And if you don't start looking for ways to fight back now, it will be too late before you even have time to get the dumb look off your face. (Christopher Buckley, Kathleen Parker, and Peggy Noonan, take note.)
