"Obamacare is something new in American life: the creation of a massive bureaucracy charged with downsizing you — to a world of fewer doctors, higher premiums, lousier care, more debt, fewer jobs, smaller houses, smaller cars, smaller, fewer, less; a world where worse is the new normal. Would Americans, hitherto the most buoyant and expansive of people, really consent to live such shrunken lives? If so, mid-20th-century America and its assumptions of generational progress will be as lost to us as the Great Ziggurat of Ur was to 19th-century Mesopotamian date farmers."
Nobody is thinking a few minutes, days or weeks into the future. Steyn is right. The reason that a nationalized medical system for 300 million has never been done is not because it "probably" can't work, it's is because it cannot work. It is the biggest socialist enterprise in the history of mankind and therefore, like socialism itself-will be doomed to fail.
However, that matters not to the social engineers. What matters is their noble, lofty intentions and not things that are as silly as "facts".
More from the Forbes article by Avik Roy here. You know-full of those nasty facts.
UPDATE: "Barack Obama, Fabian Socialist".
This article is from 2008! Hat tip: Correspondence Committee.
"Who needs Molotov when you’ve got Saul Alinski?"
"So here is the playbook: The left will identify, freeze, personalize and polarize an industry, probably health care. It will attempt to nationalize one-fifth of the U.S. economy through legislative action. They will focus, as Lenin did, on the “commanding heights” of the economy, not the little guy."
"As Obama said, “the smallest” businesses will be exempt from fines for not “doing the right thing” in offering employer-based health care coverage. Health will not be nationalized in one fell swoop; they have been studying the failures of Hillary Care. Instead, a parallel system will be created, funded by surcharges on business payroll, which will be superior to many private plans."
"The old system will be forced to subsidize the new system and there will be a gradual shift from the former to the latter. The only coercion will be the fines, not the participation. A middle-class entitlement will have been created."
"It may not be health care first; it might be energy, though I suspect that energy will be nationalized much more gradually."
