Hard Days Ahead For ObamaCare By Christopher Chantrill

 

Hard Days Ahead for ObamaCare by Christopher Chantrill over at American Thinker

Don't bet on ObamaCare.  It's not going to turn into a political winner like Social Security and Medicare.  So writes the excellent Jay Cost. 

Because Social Security and Medicare do not discriminate between citizens, there has yet been no political coalition powerful enough to alter them. Everybody expects to benefit from them, so it has been impossible to implement even common-sense reforms.

But ObamaCare is different.

Obamacare has no such insulation from reformers because it discriminates between classes of citizens. Indeed, Democrats played all kinds of favorites[.]

Some people do better from ObamaCare, and some do worse, writes Cost.

But the bigger problem is the middle class already has health insurance.  Most people will do worse under ObamaCare.

That's the trouble with universal government programs.  You start out with a simple concept, like universal health insurance, and you end up screwing the majority to serve the favored few.  Some people get a special deal because they are helpless victims, others because they are powerful special interests.  Pretty soon everyone is gaming the system.

You end up with injustice.  It's nobody's fault; not really.

Justice requires that equal people be treated the same and different people differently, yet no government bureaucracy has the bandwidth to cater to all the different needs.  Fortunately ruling elites have developed a solution to this problem.  They tell us rubes over and over that their simplification and centralization schemes are just wonderful, and that the problems could be solved if only the rich paid their fair share.  But eventually people start wandering off and discovering nasty things under the rocks.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/07/hard_days_ahead_for_obamacare.html#ixzz20KgA75xh

2012- The Art Of Intimidation By Christopher Chantrill

 

 

2012- The Art of Intimidation by Christopher Chantrill over at American Thinker

 

What a joy it was to watch the Romney campaign executing on the Hilary Rosen flap, launching Ann Romney on Twitter in a heartbeat. And then the Romney war room followed up with the dog-meat play. Liberals thought that the dog-on-the-roof scandal had legs. But it turned out that the legs were Indonesian roast pooch.

 

Of course, as Bill Kristol insists, the candidate himself needs to be presidential and stick to Big Think presidential speeches about Big Issues. That's especially important in 2012 because the community-organizer-in-chief has left the role of national uniter up for grabs while he shamelessly descends into the gutter, dividing the nation up into the Balkan States of America. Let the president be shrill; let him be petty, writes Bill.

Romney can give serious speeches about the Constitution and the Supreme Court, the case for limited government and the threat of bankruptcy and penury, about undoing Obamacare and what will replace it.

But let's not get too good-government about this. Government is force, and politics is intimidation. While every campaign needs a great candidate who rises above it all, campaigns are won mostly in the trenches by the side that doesn't give up first. That's where intimidation comes in. You need your troops to see the opposition taking hits.

 

The name of the game in political intimidation is to delegitimize the agenda of the other side and shut them up. The last national Republican who knew how to play the intimidation game was Ronald Reagan. Liberals tried to intimidate him and read him out of the mainstream as a mad bomber and an extremist, but they never quite pulled it off. Once Reagan had got liberals on the floor, he never let them back in the game. George W. Bush, bless his heart, tried to appease the liberals by running as a "compassionate conservative." That worked about as well as "hope and change."

 

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/2012_the_art_of_intimidation.html#ixzz1sxUinaSX

Let's Stop Obama-ing Apart

 

Let's Stop Obama-ing Apart by Christopher Chantrill over at American Thinker

Just a quick word here to Mitt Romney: would you please take a week out from campaigning, get together with your messaging people, and all read Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 together? The book contains just about everything anyone needs to communicate a practical conservative vision to America and beat the pants off Barack Obama.

 

And Coming Apart shows, if anything can, how Barack Obama is a poster boy for everything that's wrong with America -- everything that got it started Obam-ing apart.

 

About a century ago and more, the educated elite decided that America needed to be governed by people like them: clever, educated, creative, and expert. Progressives, they called themselves. The rest of America wasn't so smart, so it needed to be supervised by this educated elite. The result, a century later, is that life is great for the educated top 20 percent, liberal and conservative -- living ordered, fulfilling lives in SuperZip enclaves -- while life for the bottom 30 percent is falling apart.

 

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/02/lets_stop_obama-ing_apart.html#ixzz1lmwmSCPU