The Lovecraftian World of Obamacare
http://reason.com/archives/2014/02/12/the-lovecraftian-world-of-obamacareObamacare’s conservative critics sure know how to make themselves look out of touch. From Sarah Palin’s 2009 warning about “death panels” to last week’s headlines that a new CBO report said the Affordable Care Act would kill more than two million jobs, the law’s critics keep telling whoppers.
Say this much for the critics, though: At least they’re just bungling the facts.
Facts are easy. You can check facts. What supporters of the law are doing, on the other hand, transcends factual bungling. It’s far more advanced: a warping of reality so debauched it looks like something out of a tale by H.P. Lovecraft.
It is difficult to take supporters of Obamacare seriously as thinking humans. Were they honest and spoke in Lenin's terms of "Who? Whom?" I might despise them, but grant them that they are honestly waging warfare on the middle classes. But, they argue on one aspect of Ocare using one rationale and then use the exact opposite rationale to argue another aspect to another audience.
And, at the end of the day, they are perfectly content to have agents of gov't shoot people in the face to enforce their mutually contradicting illogics. There seems to be less & less difference between our gov't in practice and authoritarian regimes where reality is defined by the state, not empiricism. I think we tread on more dangerous ground than most acknowledge if we allow this state of affairs to stand.
A world in which nobody has to do unpleasant work is a world in which you ride to the park on a unicorn. But that is a world many of Obamacare’s supporters inhabit: a place where the individual mandate is both a tax and not a tax; where the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause requires religious people to violate their faith; where “the state” means “the federal government”; where taking a job is wage slavery, but taking a handout is freedom.
