The Lords Of Entitlement

Editorial - November 9th, 2009 - Wall Street Journal

Perhaps the most unsurprising news in this drama [over healthcare] was the collapse of the Blue Dog "deficit hawks." Enough of them always cave in the end to give Mrs. Pelosi her way. It's nonetheless worth noting the surrender of that most vocal scourge of deficits, Tennessee's Jim Cooper, who voted aye on grounds that the bill can be improved in the Senate.

But Max Baucus's Finance Committee bill includes a similar gimmick of making the numbers look good by using 10 years of new taxes to finance only seven years of spending (six in the House). The deficits explode in the second decade and beyond in both bills.

The House also contains a new government long-term insurance program that starts collecting premiums in 2011 but doesn't starting paying benefits until 2016 and then runs out of money in 2029. North Dakota Democrat Kent Conrad called it "a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of" in an interview with the Washington Post in late October. Mr. Cooper has with a single vote made his entire career irrelevant.

This bill is an ideological nightmare. Again and again people who are paying attention have insisted that Barack Obama has as his core supporters the global socialists who see capitalism and freedom as anathema to their Utopian dream of a just society. They see only the good intentions of their goals, not the unintended consequences of the tyranny that they are willing to inflict on America to accomplish their goals.

No matter how many times socialism fails, they reject the failure as the fault of the system they adore. They always come up with excuses for the failure that ignores the inherent consequence of empowering people in government with rules which allow them to make people be "good" or "behave" in desirable ways. Whatever they meant to accomplish is overwhelmed by both corruption and petty envy of the individuals who populate these positions of power. The end result is failure and tyranny. Democrats in the House have just voted to destroy freedom. It is up to those of us who love freedom to stop it in the Senate before it is too late.

We are about to see how bad it can get here in America.