During the Cold War era, there was something known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, which was the notion that once a nation was taken over by communists, there was no going back. A similiar principle takes place in the battle between statism and freedom in America. The left understands that once people get hooked on government dependency for some aspect of their basic needs, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to restore liberty. This is why the Democrats are willing to temporarily lose Congress in exchange for imposing a collectivist healthcare system – especially since they are confident Republicans will never have the cojones to undo the damage. Mark Steyn explains:
…the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”). The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless. …Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists — sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it…. Look at it from the Dems’ point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health-care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That’s a huge prize, and well worth a mid-term timeout. …government health care is not about health care, it’s about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.
Was it Lenin who said that once you take [total] control of the health care of a nation, the government will [finally] have total control of its citizens? Americans who did NOT do their homework before electing obama in 2008 and/or 2012 has the right to act surprised and now feel they were lied to. Obama made it clear time and again he wanted to “transform” America. Obama’s entire biography from childhood to adulthood should have revealed his [anti-American/socialist] ideology. Shame on those who worshiped at this snake salesman’s altar.
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Dan,
what is your completely honest, no-kidding prognosis for this country? I mean, realistically is there any hope? Is this place to far gone? Every day its seems things are getting worse. Would love to hear your big picture assessment.
Andy
Sorry, but the same comment I posted a few days ago, applies again:
“The American people better wake up and examine what has kept them most prosperous people in the world for nearly 100 years (Hint. It was not the big government model that the rest of the world was following).
2 Billion people in the Far East are growing at 5-8% by slowly abandoning the collectivist/socialist model. Meanwhile the less than 1 billion people of the West are moving towards the collectivist/socialist model and thus growing at 2.5% (in good times that is). Convergence will come much sooner than I thought.”
afraid Mark Steyn and you are right and that is where the US is headed.