Tomorrow, the Supreme Court is expected to hand down its ruling on
Obamacare--and, in particular, the individual mandate, which requires
individuals to purchase health insurance whether they want it or not.
Let us hope that the Court invalidates this law.
The individual mandate is the apotheosis of the
modern Democratic party’s way of doing business. In particular, it is
the quintessential example of how, hiding behind a smokescreen of
egalitarian rhetoric, the party has become deeply, perhaps hopelessly,
anti-republican, happy to dole out favors to privileged groups while the
rest of the country is left with nothing.
First, the individual mandate represents an enormous transfer of wealth, completely independent of income or social status.
It transfers resources from the healthy to the sick, from the young to
the old, without regard to who has more money to begin with. Democrats
typically rail against supposedly regressive GOP tax proposals, but
nothing the Republicans have ever cooked up compares to the individual
mandate. While we’re on the subject of Democratic regressiveness, LBJ’s
Medicare is a similarly regressive form of taxation, and ditto Social
Security, ever since Johnson turned it into a pay-as-you-go system. Yet
watch Democrats howl with outrage whenever the GOP dares suggest reforms
that would alter this socially unjust status quo.
No comments:
Post a Comment