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However, more than a year after its passage, and before 2014, when its most onerous provisions kick in, the PPACA remains unpopular with the American people.84 But rather than be deterred, the utopian masterminds are moving fast to institutionalize the law in the administrative state, making it much more difficult to disentangle should they lose control of the elected branches in subsequent election cycles. More than $100 billion was secreted into the bill to fund its start-up, bypassing the usual congressional appropriations process.85

An analysis by Peter Ferrara of the Heartland Institute revealed that the PPACA establishes more than “150 new bureaucracies, agencies, boards, commissions and programs” that “are empowered to tell doctors and hospitals what is quality health care and what is not, what are best practices in medicine, how their medical practices should be structured, and what they will be paid and when.”86 The Congressional Research Service reported, “The precise number of new entities that will ultimately be created pursuant to PPACA is currently unknowable.”87 Consequently, oversight will be practically impossible and the health-care system, and particularly the individual patient, will be overwhelmed by an administrative monstrosity. What is certain is that the individual will lose control over his own health-care decisions—his physical well-being and survival—since the purpose of the PPACA is to centralize health-care decision-making over all of society.

Yet the most pernicious aspect of the PPACA has nothing to do with health care per se. Specifically, the statute dictates that an individual who does not have health insurance but who can afford it must purchase a private health insurance policy, whether he wants to or not, or face federal fines and penalties.88 In response to litigation challenging the constitutionality of this “individual mandate,” the Obama administration argues that the mandate is nothing more than Congress exercising its authority under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. However, the Commerce Clause provides, “The Congress shall have Power … To regulate Commerce with Foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”89 The plain meaning of this language provides no support for the authority the federal government demands. Congress can tax interstate commerce, regulate interstate commerce, and even prohibit certain types of interstate commerce. But there is nothing in the history of the nation, let alone the history of the Constitution and the Commerce Clause, empowering Congress or any part of the federal government to regulate inactivity and compel an individual to enter into commerce—that is, to enter into a legally binding private contract against the individual’s will and interests simply because the individual is living and breathing.

Should such a specious and brazen contortion of fact and history prevail in the courts as a constitutionally recognized and legally enforceable imperative, the contours of utopian society and the mastermind’s authority would seem unconfined. Thereafter, the individual’s free will ceases to be free or his will. The mastermind’s duping becomes an unnecessary artifice, for the federal government can now flatly dictate the individual’s behavior, and the individual is without lawful recourse. Tyranny, then, will reveal itself, unvarnished and unequivocal, with future governmental trespasses on individual sovereignty both certain and more onerous.

EPILOGUE

MY PREMISE, IN THE first sentence of the first chapter of this book, is this: “Tyranny, broadly defined, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political utopianism is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology.”

Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Marx’s workers’ paradise are utopias that are anti-individual and anti-individualism. For the utopians, modern and olden, the individual is one-dimensional—selfish.