Totalitarian Means to Totalitarian Ends

Posted on Comments

David Harsanyi:

You can’t keep your insurance if you like it under Obamacare because you’re too ignorant to understand what’s good for you.
That’s the argument we’ve been hearing from a lot of folks on the left; an argument that pivots from “common good” to soft authoritarianism.

Doug at Daily Gator:

Obamacare is about coercion not choice . . . It was forced on Americans even though a majority opposed it. . . . Obamacare is about crushing the choice we have in health care.

The failure to understand what’s going on is disturbing. It is as if no one in the media ever read Atlas Shrugged or The Road to Serfdom.

What’s happening is an “end justify the means” argument that is, as usual with such argument, fundamentally flawed. If the end you seek to achieve is genuinely beneficial, you should be able to persuade people to achieve it via honest, peaceful and lawful means.

The very fact that people resort to dishonest, coercive or unlawful means to achieve an end should cause us to question whether the end they seek to achieve is actually beneficial, or whether there is some ulterior motive — a hidden agenda — to their policy.

The minute you say “ulterior motive” or “hidden agenda,” it sounds like you’re proposing a paranoid conspiracy theory, which isn’t what I mean at all. Rather, I believe the basic motive of Democrat support for ObamaCare was not a matter of policy, but politics. The arguments made for it were dishonest because they were motivated by politics, rather than by actual concern about health care.

When people are willing to lie persistently and routinely to achieve their objectives, you can be sure their objectives are not good.

Some people hate freedom. Some people hate America.

We call these people “Democrats.” Don’t vote for them, ever.

 

41 comments

  2. The manifesto for today’s liberals is Cass Sunstein’s Nudge. Nudge is the “intellectual” basis for the notion that Kathleen Sebelius somehow magically knows what’s best for the rest of us.

    Like marxism, the “big idea” of today’s liberalism is the notion that a self-proclaimed group of the uber-enlightened are somehow magically entitled to consciously direct the future of mankind.

  3. To say the dishonesty is predicated upon politics, while true, leaves out the main part of the story. Americans spend around 2 trillion dollars per year on health care. That’s approximately the same amount of money derived from income taxes. The statists see that money as “wasted” upon individuals. Thus, as much of it as possible must be appropriated to feed Leviathan’s maw. And so, we are subjected to a system which siphons away a substantial chunk of that through increased premiums and taxes, while at the same time instituting a system of mandatory restraints on individual spending–think substantially higher deductibles and panels determining what sort of care will be provided–all to maximize the amount of money the government takes. The lies are legion, but the one no one talks about is this theft from the American people in money and healthcare.

  5. “It is as if no one in the media ever read Atlas Shrugged…”

    Don’t be silly, Stace. Of course they did. Though they regarded it less as a ham-fisted cautionary tale and more as a how-to guide.

  6. The “Nudge” sounds a lot like “geniocracy”…

    Such systems and the bureaucracies that sustain them inevitably succumb to the Peter Principle!

  10. ObamaCare isn’t about health care at all. That’s a part of the reason it is falling flat on its face.

    It’s about power and control over a $2.5 trillion industry. It gives the government more direct control over our lives. That’s the point. The entire point. And it always has been.

    Even the most optimistic projections showed only 5 million of the 30 million uninsured Americans would be covered in ten years of PPACA. There would still be 25 million uninsured, although they would be in many cases different individuals.

    The plan was to cover Democrats and make Republicans pay for it, but they forgot that some middle class people were dumb and supported Democrats, and now they are getting screwed too and they don’t like it.

  11. Blind faith in “experts” is a hallmark of the Left/liberal/progressives going back to their birth as a movement over a century ago. What they never learned is that there are no experts, period.

  12. The ideology of liberalism places an irrational faith in soothsayers and fortune tellers.

    One of the more interesting examples of this is in the global warming crowd where liberals claim that fortune-telling and sooth-saying are somehow magically science.

    Science deals with the immediate circumstances surrounding physical events – not conjuring up magical fortunes and pseudo-scientific predictions regarding the earth’s future.

  13. No question. If you can dramatically raise the prices of health care and electricity you can bankrupt the middle class per the strategic objective outlined in Marx’s Manifesto.

  14. I take it you’ve been reading Ace’s post on how Obamacare is the apotheosis of the progressive mindset. We’re currently saddled with a collection of overconfident self-styled “elites” who imagine themselves to be able to do everyone else’s jobs, even when they aren’t even competent at their supposed professions or areas of study. Leftism is practically a living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

    The greatest example of this is, naturally, their demi-god, Obama. Even as he brags about how he could do the job of anyone else in government, he’s completely incapable of doing his own.

  16. I’ve been studying it on my own, but I’ll definitely check the Ace post as well.

    Th. Jefferson had, in Notes on the State of Virginia, at least a little to say about the threats posed by the delusional nature of the mulattoes he had observed.

  17. “A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”

    This post reminded me of this pearl… (Emphasis mine) I found out about its origins on Wikipedia:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fraser_Tytler

  21. You’ve reminded me of this statement of John Randolph of Roanoke:

    I would not live under King Numbers [ie: Democracy]. I would not be his steward, nor make him my task-master. I would obey the principle of self-preservation , a principle we find even in the brute creation, in flying from this mischief.

Comments are closed.