Mark Steyn today: [1]
[2]Last Thursday, Nancy Pelosi, as is the fashion, used the phrase “the children” like some twitchy verbal tic, a kind of Democrat Tourette’s syndrome: “This is a discussion about America’s children … We could establish ourselves as the children’s Congress … Come forward on behalf of the children … I tried to do that when I was sworn in as speaker surrounded by children. It was a spontaneous moment, but it was one that was clear in its message: we are gaveling this House to order on behalf of the children.”
Etc. So what is the best thing America could do “for the children”? Well, it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a system of unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme…
…I’m in favor of tax credits for child health care, and Health Savings Accounts for adults, and any other reform that emphasizes the citizen’s responsibility to himself and his dependants. But middle-class entitlement creep would be wrong even if was affordable, even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover it every month: it turns free-born citizens into enervated wards of the Nanny State. As Gerald Ford likes to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. As I point out in my book, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: Once a fellow’s enjoying the fruits of Euro-style entitlements, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and who cares if it’s going to bankrupt the state a generation hence?
That’s the real “war on children”: in Europe, it’s killing their future. Don’t make the same mistake here.
That’s all this has ever come down to. What Mark is warning about here, is precisely what the Democrats, particularly Hillary Clinton, want to inflict on us.
The big question at this point, is why Republicans are going along with this nonsense? Why do they not argue from the standpoint of government takeover of health care is a complete disaster [3], to the exact agree which government takes over health care, (I suppose Medicare and Medicaid to be examples of this, to say nothing of the failures of socialist heath care in the UK and Canada ) . Every time you seem Republicans arguing about this stuff, recently, they seem to be accepting the idea that government needs to be involved with this process. It’s about time the Republicans started arguing that government needs to be removed from the process.
The real problem here as Steyn points out, is the illusion on the part of many of the American people about all this:
The Frosts are not emblematic of the health care needs of America so much as they are of the delusion of the broader Western world. They expect to be able to work “part-time” and “intermittently” but own two properties and three premium vehicles and have the state pick up health care costs. Who do you stick with the bill? Four-car owners? Much of France already lives that way: A healthy, wealthy, well-educated populace works a mandatory maximum 35-hour week with six weeks of paid vacation and retirement at 55 and with the government funding all the core responsibilities of adult life.
Certainly, in France, as in Boston and San Francisco, and apparently Washington DC, “rich” is defined as “Anyone making dollar one more than I do”. The problem is, that the system in France is about ready to implode on itself, given the overwhelming costs involved. Costs which even massive tax increases could not cover. Thus do we have Sarkozy running things over there these days, and trying to rein in the governmental intrusion into private concerns, such as health care. The Swiss, similarly, are swinging right. [4].. but possibly too late to matter much. Our beloved press isn’t giving us the truth about this, and so the argument continues to originate from fantasyland, where everything is free, nobody ever has to work for anything, nobody ever has to make hard decisions, and whatever hard decisions and up being made, are paid for by the magical mystical government for whom money grows on trees.
[5]Europe is starting to realize that it has dug its own grave with this stuff. They’re currently fighting for their lives, as they try to get out from underneath the huge debt mountain they’ve buried themselves under. We haven’t found out about that yet, apparently. Yes, our leftist press. However, if we let the Democrats anywhere near the White House, I suspect we’re going to get a rapid and painful education in the matter.
And think about this, for just a moment; The explosive costs involved with the kind of programs that the Democrats are proposing are going to be imposed on our children in the form of interest payments. Our children will be forced to figure out how to unravel the socialistic nonsense we’ve saddled them with…. just as the French are doing just now.
Tell me again, if you will, Mrs Clinton, whom it is that has declared war on children.
(BBCT: Michelle Malkin [6] , Memeorandum [7])