Winner Take All On Healthcare

by Jonah Goldberg - November 24th, 2009 - Los Angeles Times

I hereby forfeit my claim to a vast right-wing conspiracy decoder ring by offering two cheers for the Democrats. I congratulate them on their victory Saturday night in the Senate, and while I can't quite wish them continued success on the course they are following, I'm beginning to make peace with the possibility that they'll win.

For years, conservatives and liberals have flirted with the idea of disposing of the fool's errand of bipartisanship. Seeking compromise with partisans across the aisle is a recipe for getting nothing important done.

As much as it seems Jonah Goldberg might be right on the philosophy, it annoys me that he can take such a detached view of our nation and it's future. What true patriot can "make peace with the possibility that they'll win?" Liberals have been fighting for most of the last century to destroy the freedoms that America enjoys. They launched a culture war in our schools to eliminate Christianity and they won. They launched a welfare war against poverty to entrench a permanent underclass, and they won. Now they are moving up. They wish to eliminate free choice in health care, enslaving the middle class in our society.

As Goldberg notes in his article, "Democrats sincerely believe that nationalized healthcare, in one form or another, is the best thing for America and that if they can get it passed, voters will fall in love with it. Politically, there is a real danger they're right. Americans are loath to relinquish entitlements once they've secured them."

Actually you don't need for a majority of Americans to love some new entitlement. You just need a plurality that will vote for nothing else. As soon as a plurality can swing elections, it might as well be a majority. That is how we lose freedom. Our previous rejection of government entitlements is why no other nation ever had the level of freedom that we once enjoyed in our nation. George Washington really was the father of our country, and his desire to go home and live his life free of government became the ethic that ruled our nation until recently.

Now we are throwing away that freedom and embracing the standard of thousands of years. Totalitarian government telling people how to live their lives. Enjoy freedom while you can. It is quickly slipping away from us.

The intellectual detachment of Jonah Goldberg is not the world you live in. Nor do I. We live in the real world where losing political battles has true consequences for empowering bureaucrats to make our lives miserable.