The Idiocy of Obamacare

The Idiocy of Obamacare
http://www.voicesofliberty.com/artic...-of-obamacare/

June 26, 2015—H.L. Mencken once noted: “The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”
The Supreme Court voted [IMG]file:///C:\Users\Jason\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\ clip_image002.jpg[/IMG]Thursday to uphold such an idea. But what or who is more idiotic, the idea itself, or the gleeful roughly-half of Americans celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision? Of course the idea I’m talking about is Obamacare. The Court ruled that taxpayer-funded subsidies are valid in the states that did not bother to set up their own health insurance exchanges. Obama refers to the taxpayer-funded subsidies as “federal government subsidies,” as if the subsidy-money appears out of thin air at the snap of his fingers instead of being forcibly extracted from productive American citizens.

On another hand, American money in-general actually does appear out of thin air, as the Federal Reserve indeed “prints” it out of thin air. But that’s a whole other idiotic idea whose day of reckoning is presumably coming sooner than later. The greater point here is that Obama – and the majority of the Supreme Court judges – are once again relying in part on the “stupidity” of Americans to swallow what dissenting Judge Antonin Scalia characterized as the “pure applesauce” and “SCOTUScare” that is Obamacare. Anyone who possesses any iota of common sense or intellectual honesty who is also familiar with the stated logic behind the Court’s ruling would agree with Scalia that clearly, “words no longer have meaning.”
At any rate, I use “stupidity” in the spirit of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. Remember Gruber, one of the chief architects of Obamacare? Remember how last year, videos surfaced of him smugly celebrating the “huge political advantage” of Obamacare’s lack of transparency and the “stupidity of the American voter” which helped pass the law? Begs the question again, which is more idiotic, Obamacare itself or the American people who are still celebrating Thursday’s Supreme Court decision?
[IMG]file:///C:\Users\Jason\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\ clip_image004.jpg[/IMG]

By the way, did anyone notice the new revelations this week that Gruber worked much more closely with Obama than Obama wanted us to believe? Shocking, isn’t it? About as shocking as the fact that the IRS tried to permanently destroy tens-of-thousands of Lois Lerner’s emails, or that Republicans delivered the TPP to Obama on a silver platter this week while the rest of us were at each other’s throats over a flag. Clearly flags have more meaning than words these days, and they’re obviously more important than the anything-but “free” trade deal Obama the corporatist-in-chief is pushing, which will cause immeasurably more harm to all Americans than any flag can at present. How do I know the trade deal is immeasurably harmful? Well, both Obama and mainstream Republicans are for it. In a perfect world this would render it incapable of even passing the smell test. But we don’t live in a perfect world. Which means it will undoubtedly pass and it’s passage will certainly not be good for you and me. Partisanship screws you. Bi-partisanship screws you twice.
But back to Obamacare, the central idiotic idea at hand (of which Obama himself and his cohorts in DC are not subject to — far from idiotic on their part). Let’s humor ourselves by entertaining the non-idiotic idea that Obamacare is equally as idiotic as the idiots celebrating it. The case is poignantly made both economically and morally. Obamacare forces people to buy a product – healthcare — under the threat of fines and imprisonment. Furthermore, Obamacare makes it illegal for a person to buy cheaper insurance, and it does not allow for a person to choose their own doctor. Premiums are rising and will continue to rise, and quality of healthcare will go down. This is basic economic law. Obamacare will lead to healthcare rationing and shortages, and as Obama-cheerleader Paul Krugman notes, higher taxes and “death panels” (Krugman’s term, not mine).

And the American taxpayer is forced to pay for it all via higher taxes which means less jobs and less opportunities. Subsidize something; you get more of it. Tax something; you get less of it. It becomes a case of more takers than makers. Such a case is not sustainable. And now, not only is the American taxpayer forced to pay down Obamacare, but also all of America’s expanding wars and military interventions around the globe and the $18 trillion-and-rapidly-rising national debt and all the other tens-of-trillions of unfunded liabilities while on the cusp of perhaps the biggest economic bubble in the history of the world. Idiotic?

Perhaps Obama should have questioned why the costs of healthcare were so high to begin with, well before he decided to ram the Un-Affordable Care Act that is Obamacare down Americans’ throats shortly after the “greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression” (priorities, yes, priorities…). If he did, he’d have understood that the culprits behind the sky-rocketing costs were the government and the health insurance companies themselves, the same entities laughably charged by Obamacare to keep healthcare “affordable.” After all, as Murray Rothbard noted way back in 1990:

“The government, in its wisdom, perceives a problem (and Lord knows, there are always problems!). The government then intervenes to ‘solve’ that problem. But lo and behold! instead of solving the initial problem, the intervention creates two or three further problems, which the government feels it must intervene to heal… And so, our very real medical crisis has been the product of massive government intervention, state and federal, throughout the century; in particular, an artificial boosting of demand coupled with an artificial restriction of supply. The result has been accelerating high prices and deterioration of patient care. And next, socialized medicine could easily bring us to the vaunted medical status of the Soviet Union: everyone has the right to free medical care, but there is, in effect, no medicine and no care.”

Curing socialism with more socialism? The sheer idiocy of this begs the question: Cui bono? To whose benefit? Surely not the American people.

Now, I do want everyone to have access to affordable – and sustainable – healthcare. I’m libertarian. And I’m libertarian because libertarianism is the most moral and economically efficient political philosophy. Freedom is the best remedy for poverty, oppression, tyranny, cronyism, war, even racism. It’s also the remedy for American healthcare. Scratch the whole corrupt, crony, inefficient system and start over and stay on freedom. Freedom begets competition which begets higher quality and lower prices for the consumer no matter the product, including healthcare (just ask this guy). In short, freedom is the truly affordable idea which the government would not even have to enforce with the threat of fines and imprisonment.

Mencken might agree there’s nothing idiotic about that.