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Jewish World Review March 6 , 2012/ 12 Adar, 5772 Wouldn't it be nice? By Paul Greenberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Have you got health insurance? I do. Wouldn't it be nice if everybody did? Just think: No more worries about losing your health care if you lose your job, or just get a different one. Ah, peace of mind at last. No more freeloaders who go uninsured and expect those of us who pay insurance premiums to take care of them when they fall ill. It would be only fair. No more overcrowded emergency rooms -- the most expensive and least efficient way to deliver medical care -- because people use them instead of carrying health insurance. What an improvement that would be. Health insurance is such a good idea, the wish was father to the law. Which is why we now have Obamacare, and will soon have more of it if All will be watching how the new health-care system develops -- some with hope, others with fear, most with a mix of both. This much is certain: There will be changes. Settled law and settled habits will have to be changed. There will be objections. From the states, among others. Some churches won't want to pay for procedures that violate their beliefs, like contraception, sterilization and abortion. But there's no rush. They have a whole year to figure out how to violate their conscience. Maybe their objections can be papered over by a little creative accounting or verbal prestidigitation here and there. The word for this process is accommodation. There's no problem, no expense, no objection that can't be met, or at least postponed, or talked away, or discreetly hidden. But start recognizing some conscientious objectors, and the danger is you have to recognize all of them. Soon everybody will want to follow his own conscience. That's no way to maintain an unconscionable law. Don't fret. It'll all be nice. Just leave it to government. It knows best. And it's all for our own good. The velvet glove will be so soft that after a while we won't notice the iron hand inside. The important thing is that nothing come between
A French visitor to this then new democracy saw it coming. In his two-volume guide to "Democracy in America" that remains the most relevant study of our system, he pointed out the two great contending forces in the American psyche -- the love of liberty and the drive for equality. His conclusion: Democratic nations are peculiarly susceptible to a soft form of despotism that doesn't so much dictate to its people as embrace them, infantilize them, smother them ever so gently in its all-encompassing arms. We would all be saved the trouble of making our own decisions, providing our own necessities (like health care), and generally thinking for ourselves. Which was always a bother anyway. Such a regime would cover "the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. ... Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people." The important thing is that nothing come between the caretaker State and its subjects, formerly citizens. So there will be no confusion about who is in charge, no divided loyalties with each of us going our own way, following our own ideas rather than melting into the warm ocean of The People Yes. But the road to serfdom must be smooth, broad, safe -- an interstate compared to the crooked little roads each of us might choose. It'll be more efficient that way.
In a different era, when the nation was paralyzed by a Great Depression and its own fears and uncertainties, Americans looked to It was called the National Industrial Recovery Act and was passed in the first flood of New Deal emergency legislation in 1933 -- toward the end of the fabled Hundred Days. It covered just about everything in the economy -- every wage paid for every job, every price for every item manufactured, even down to every chicken slaughtered in But it didn't last. The designers of this grand scheme had overlooked a detail or two, like the Constitution of Why? The law was too broad, too detailed, too intrusive. It delegated comprehensive legislative powers to an all-powerful, unelected federal agency, the
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