Obamacare: The systemic gamechanger

This past weekend the US House of Representatives put its stamp of approval on the Senate’s healthcare bill by 219 votes to 212.  Those 7 extra yay votes have turned the US political economy on its head and might represent both a massive strategic victory for the Democrats but also the beginning of the final stanza of the ‘American moment’.

A lot of conservative commentators are glibly pronouncing the death of the Democrats as they look toward an expected liberal drubbing in the November Senatorial elections.  Ha, don’t be fooled.  These pundits miss a crucial point.  Even if passing healthcare causes the Dems to get smashed in November, it’ll be a smashing worth taking for a long term political game changer in their favour.

Restructuring healthcare and ramping up entitlements to the degree proposed fundamentally alters the relationship between citizen and state and what people expect from government.  Such a system is not easy to reverse in a democratic state (near impossible), especially as many entitlements become enshrined as statutory obligations of the state.  As you can see in Europe, socialised healthcare has changed the political landscape and shifted it permanently leftward.

The Dems don’t need to retain power all the time to get a strategic victory, just to re-draw the political lines so that far left is the new left, moderate left is the new centre, centre is the new right, centre right is the new far right, and far right is the new knuckle-dragging mental asylum.

As Mark Steyn so often says, the Dems are thinking strategically, the GOP is all tactics.

Here is some good commentary on the healthcare bill by Thomas Sowell, George Will, Peter Suderman, and Nile Gardiner.

Meanwhile, good ol’ Peter Schiff is getting his views out firmly and clearly as he makes his push for a senate seat in Connecticut.  Human Action fully endorses Mr. Schiff for senate.  In a note to supporters yesterday Schiff opined,

Sunday, March 21, 2010, will go down in the history books as the day democracy died in America.

Since Barack Obama took office last winter, the administration, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have edged America closer to the brink of socialism with their bailouts of the banking and automobile industries, mind-blowing spending and appointment of czars to micro-manage America.

But yesterday, with the House passage of the Senate health care bill, the federal government officially crossed the line. The far left has socialized nearly one-fifth of the American economy and forced our health care under government control.

Liberals insist that Obamacare is the solution to every Americans’ problems, rich or poor. But Washington has failed to correct the fundamental flaws of our medical system. Without addressing the root cause of health care’s growing price tag, costs will continue to skyrocket, and consumers will be forced to dig further into their pocketbooks.

… Obamacare will not solve the problems inherent in the American health care system and will only add to our economic troubles.

Socialism wasn’t successful when the Soviet Union tried it; China had to open its markets to free trade to become economically viable; North Korea depends on foreign aid to feed its citizens. Why does Barack Obama think he can make socialism work in the United States of America?

Socializing medical insurance won’t minimize costs, and health care’s increasing financial weight will come to rest on the shoulders of each taxpayer for generations to come. I don’t have to tell you that Americans cannot afford that! We need to cut taxes, not raise them. And we need to stop spending. The national debt is dangerously high and the only way to reduce it is to stop letting the federal government use your tax dollars to foot the bill.

History has proved time and again that a socialized economy only leads to disaster, yet Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have forced government-run health care onto America, at the tax-payers’ expense. It’s time to tell Washington enough is enough.

Meanwhile, here’s what we had to say about the leftward shift of the Obama administration a few months ago, and here is what we wrote about the imminent senate passage of the healthcare bill on Christmas Eve in a piece called Healthcare: US on the brink of a systemic game changer.

The election of Republican Scott Brown to senate in Massachusetts was clearly a vote against increasing O-cialisation. But, instead of stopping King Barack in his tracks, the event has only galvanised establishment Dems into the realisation that time and political capital is fast running out for them to affect the next Great Leap Forward.

Unfortunately, as it was in China, socialist attempts to move society toward a higher plain of economic existence always end in the utmost economic depravity and decay.