After America - Mark Steyn [24]
And you can understand why they drag on a bit. If you attempt to devise a health-care “plan” for over 300 million people, it’s bound to get a bit complicated. But a health-care plan for you, Mabel Scroggins of 27 Elm Street, didn’t used to be that complicated, did it? Let’s say you carelessly drop the ObamaCare bill on your foot and it breaks your toe. In the old days, you’d go to your doctor (or, indeed, have him come to you—that’s how insane it was back then), he’d patch you up, and you’d write him a check. That’s the way it was in most of the developed world within living memory.
When did it get too complicated to leave to individuals? “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System—or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.
Ah, but government health care is not about health care, it’s about government. That’s why the Democrats spent the first year of a brutal recession trying to ram ObamaCare down the throats of a nation that didn’t want it. Because the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make small government all but impossible ever again. In most of the rest of the western world, it’s led to a kind of two-party one-party state: right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless. All such “technocratic” societies slide left, into statism and stasis.
Many Americans are happy with the government monopoly. The monarchical urge persists even in a two-and-a-third-century-old republic. So, when the distant Sovereign from Barackingham Palace graciously confers an audience on his unworthy subjects, they are eager to petition him to make all the bad stuff go away. “I have an urgent need,” one lady beseeched King Barack at a “town hall meeting” in Fort Myers early in 2009. “We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom.”11
He took her name—Henrietta Hughes—and ordered his staff to meet with her. Hopefully, he didn’t insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant secretary of whatever instead of flying in one of the bigtime tax-avoiding cabinet honchos to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence, with a swing set hanging where the drive-thru ATM used to be. The audience roared their gratitude. “Yes!” they yelped, and “Amen!” and even “Gracious God, thank you so much!”
As Bing Crosby said to Bob Hope in The Road to Utopia, “Leave your name with the girl, and we may get to you for some crowd noises.” That’s the citizen’s role on America’s road to Utopia: Leave your name with the girl and, after the background check, you may qualify for the crowd scenes.
Early in his term, President Obama called in some fellow smarties to test out some slogans. FDR had a “New Deal,” so Obama thought he’d wrap up his domestic innovations under the umbrella title of “New Foundation.” The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin cautioned against it. “New Foundation,” she said, sounds like a lady’s girdle.12 Actually, it’s more like a whalebone corset. When the American citizen climbs into the “New Foundation,” the stays get cranked tighter and tighter, but incrementally—so you barely feel it, till you realize the bottom’s dropped out, and you’re coughing up blood, and they’re still cranking.
THE STATIST QUO
FDR was the first American president to pass off Big Government as technocracy. He had a so-called “Brains Trust.” As with so many pious liberal concepts, the term started as a throwaway joke. Back in the trust-busting days of the 1890s, a wag at The Daily Star of Marion, Ohio, mused: “Since everything else is tending to trusts, why not a brain trust ... ? Our various and sundry supplies of gray matter may as well be controlled by a central syndicate.