Reality Chomps

This is for those who believe, like me, that the Affordable Care Act is all the bad things that all of us who believe it's bad have been saying about it.  It's not directed at anyone who thinks it's good - we know why they think it's good and we'll never change their minds about it.

This is, instead, for the folks who value individual liberty and who are struggling, after Thursday's Supreme Court ruling, to understand what to do; where to go.

It is intended as a hard reality check.  And a warning.  And as reassurance that we shall carry on.

*****     *****

The Reality Check

The United States of America is no longer a libertarian-based republic.  On June 28 the final nail was put in a coffin that's taken a very long time to close.  We must not delude ourselves that the principles of American-bred liberty will ever - in our or our great-great grandchildrens' lives - see the light of day again.

To be sure, we will still have certain freedoms, just like so many other places (the majority of countries in Europe; Japan; Canada, etc.) have certain freedoms.  But having certain freedoms and being guaranteed liberty, as we know, are two separate things.

America was founded on the principles of liberty first, with everything else starting, at most, at a distant second.  Since Thursday, we are now firmly on a path - working leftward from the libertarian ideal, whereas China (as an example) is working its way rightward from a totalitarian starting point - toward the European-style middle ground where a single global economy and set of societal operational systems are rapidly falling into place.

The Republican Party is not going to stop that from happening, gang.  It's already happened.  If you honestly think Obamacare is going to be repealed, you are in for an immense, painful fall.  It's time to mourn the loss of what America was now and get it over with.  We still have work to do.

Getting lost in all of the hubub about the ACA itself is something far more crucial:  Regardless of how much the law is stripped down over the course of time (and yes, even if magic dust fell on us all and Congress repealed it entirely), the Supreme Court of the United States declared last week that the federal government, if it decides something is important enough, has the right to require its citizens to affirmatively act to purchase a product or service from private industry and then call it a tax.  This is now the unambiguous law of the land.  Forget Obamacare.  There are far more intrusive "taxes" headed our way.  We need to understand that the operational paradigm of America has changed.  Permanently.

We will have free speech - up to a point.  We will have the freedom to prosper - but only so far.  We will have the ability to live our lives as we choose - so long as the ways we choose are within the parameters of governmental regulations which inhibit our behavior for the greater good.

America is no longer a union of sovereign states; it is now generally accepted to be - and after last week's High Court decisions on immigration and health care, more than ever legally sanctioned as - a single Federal Government which rules with impunity over the entirety of the nation.

This is difficult to admit, but the truth is that this way of life is not the equivalent of living in the hell-on-earth of totalitarianism of North Korea or the former East Germany or even modern Cuba, as so many of us (including myself) have so often fretted about over the years.  The vast majority of people in Great Britain or Australia or Denmark will surely confirm that moderated, monitored and controlled freedom isn't that bad at all.

What it is not, though, is liberty.  It does not embrace risk as the only place true achievement can begin.  It craves equality above everything else, including exceptionalism and individualism.  A lot of us here in America - the people this post is addressed to - are hard-pressed to abandon the principles of liberty.

And I'm not saying we should.  What I am saying is that our struggle to pass these principles on to future generations must now be considered just that - a struggle.  An intellectual and demonstrative exercise.  Occasionally these principles will see the light of day, but only in the way they appear intermittently in England or Canada, and always within the context of the Socialist paradigm.

And health care?  The entire ACA was designed, in my humble opinion, to fail.  We are headed toward a single-payer system, and all we can do now is slow it down. It'll be in full force within the next ten years.  Count on it.

It's going to be important to constantly remind future generations of why and how libertarian principles made the United States wealthy and powerful; it's also time to stop daydreaming that we can overturn a system that is now so entrenched in progressive Socialism that it simply can't be turned off like a switch by the mere election of a certain set of politicians.

Which brings me to the icky part.

*****     *****

The Warning

we have - all of us - left and right - fallen into an extraordinarily dangerous trap by being told - and believing - that we are essentially a country of two separate "teams."  Each side portrays itself, and imbues the other side, with a strict set of stereotypes.  This way of looking at ourselves encourages the notion that beating the other "team" is more important (and - here's the perverted thing - gratifying) than accomplishing a result that's good for everybody.

And the only people who benefit from this are the politicians.

They tell us that all we need to do is elect them into a majority, and then our beliefs will magically be enacted into law and all will be blueberry pancakes and wet kisses.

Right.  In case anyone hadn't noticed, having a single party in the White House and as the majority in both houses simultaneously hasn't exactly netted a whole lot of great stuff in the recent past.  Usually what ends up happening is that one or two truly messy laws (huge tax increases in 1993; the Patriot Act in 2001) get passed and then the party in power devolves into slow, sloppy and greedy.  And life stays pretty much the same.  With the same politicians - with one or two exceptions as majorities shift - holding their jobs election cycle after election cycle.  The nation eats itself alive with political warfare while our elected officials gleefully host every cannibalistic dinner party.

Libertarians and conservatives are susceptible right now to being manipulated, brutalized and tossed aside by Republican politicians as we never have before.

PAY ATTENTION: Obamacare is here to stay.  It is not going to be repealed.  When you hear a Republican candidate tell you that all we need to do is elect Mitt Romney  and get a Republican majority in both houses of Congress and the health care law will be repealed, he or she is either lying or not qualified to hold office.

The ACA is built into the system so deeply now that it can't ever be fully exorcised from the body of the government.  The only hope we had at actually tearing the wholdthing out "by the root and branch," as Michele Bachmann is so fond of saying, was to have the law invalidated as law by the Supreme Court, thereby taking politicians out of the equation.

But now that the law has been found to be constitutional, no amount of attempts at legislation will rip out every part of it.  The law was cleverly designed to implement certain features right up front (the extension of their parents' insurance to those 26 and under; the "no preconditions" provisions) that will be impossible for politicians to take away once the ad with the kid in a wheelchair getting thrown off the Mackinac Bridge by John Boehner starts airing in major television markets.

In short: The steamship carrying the idea of repealing Obamacare has sailed, with Captain John Roberts at the helm.  And we've got to give ourselves a good slap in our collective face and snap out of it.

Barack Obama must be voted out of office.  Republican majorities in the House and Senate will be crucial to attempt to repeal the individual mandate through reconciliation.  If we can get that accomplished, it'll be a tremendous victory.  But don't expect any Congress or president to ever get rid of nationalized health care.  It's here and will continue to grow.  Forever.

*****     *****

We Carry On

Nothing in this post is intended to dissuade anyone from standing up for their principles and fighting for them.  What I'm hoping we can avoid, to the extent possible, is tilting at windmills.  Which uses up precious time and resources.

We have a moral obligation to keep standing up for the ideas of individualism and self-reliance.  Of charity freely donated rather than taxes collected by an unfeeling machine to dole back out at the will of that machine.  Of teaching the value of work and struggle and pain and loss and the prosperity that can be achieved from prevailing through all of it.

And we have that same obligation to work toward enacting those values into law.  We must never give up on the idea of liberty.  What we need to re-think is how we share that idea.  And how we do that, for the next hundred years or so, will be the way conservatives in other parts of the world do it: Within a Socialist society.