Don't Give Obamacare a Life Raft

By David Limbaugh (Archive) · Tuesday, August 25, 2009

So here I am feeling a lot better about the possibility of rolling back Obama statism, when I come across an AP report that Sen. John McCain is throwing President Barack Obama a health care life raft. It's official; the Beltway GOP simply can't stand "prosperity."

Why can't the senator read the tea leaves for once and realize America doesn't want socialism? Why can't he read history and understand that liberals never stop with socialism lite? Once in the door, the statist pushes it all the way open.

Don't you see, Sen. McCain? To them, compromise is about incrementalism. They are looking for useful idiots on the other side of the aisle to unlock that door and nudge it open.

Just look at the history of Social Security, for one. In his explosive best-seller "Liberty and Tyranny," Mark Levin details how FDR rejected the idea of direct welfare payments to the aged and unemployed because he believed it would result in Social Security's being rolled back by taxpayers forced to fund it. In order to sink in his government hooks fully, he had to make sure that "even the lowest wage earner covered by the program (would) pay the same fixed payroll tax as the millionaire." When criticized about the regressive nature of the payroll tax, FDR unapologetically said, "With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program."

Yet FDR, like Obama, was adept at speaking out of both sides of his mouth. In a message to Congress on Social Security on Jan. 17, 1935, FDR said that "except for the money necessary to initiate it, (the system) should be self-sustaining in the sense that funds for the payment of insurance benefits should not come from the proceeds of general taxation. ... It is proposed that the Federal Government assume one-half of the cost of the old-age pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans (emphasis added)."

Supplanted? You mean, as opposed to having the Social Security system grow to the point that it threatens to bankrupt the national treasury?

The point here is that activist liberals like FDR and Obama mean business. They'll make fundamental change if you are foolish enough to work with them. All the while, they tell you they're implementing reform in the name of the very thing they're destroying: private enterprise.

That's right. FDR couched his statist programs in capitalist terms, too. Just as Obama tells us he is expanding patient and doctor choice under an Obamacare package that would eventually eliminate such choices, FDR told America he was pushing through his statist agenda in order to save capitalism from itself.

Indeed, in his fireside chat of Sunday, Sept. 30, 1934, FDR said, "Private enterprise in times such as these cannot be left without assistance and without reasonable safeguards, lest it destroy not only itself but also our processes of civilization."

But in that same talk, after dumping on unchecked capitalism as a civilization destroyer, he insisted he was trying to save that very system: "It was in this spirit thus described by Secretary (Elihu) Root that we approached our task of reviving private enterprise in March 1933." Since that time, dutiful liberal historians have perpetuated the myth that FDR's New Deal wasn't statist at its core, but capitalist, because statism was necessary to save capitalism. Go figure.

Times change, but liberalism doesn't.

But Obama and his Democratic supermajorities in Congress have done the nation a great favor by showing their true colors and what they will do with unchecked power. And the American people have responded with a grass-roots, nonviolent revolt. Polls now show that the majority of voters in every state are conservative.

The one thing that could undo this public excitement is for moderate Republicans to help these statist Democrats get their feet in the door on socialized health care. There can be no compromise driven by semantic deception, such as co-ops in place of the "public option." The only reforms Republicans should accede to are free market ones. Period. All the rest would lead, through incrementalism and momentum, to full-blown government-run health care.

Besides, you don't compromise with those who are not honest about their intentions. And the Democrats are not operating in good faith when they continue to distort radically the number of uninsured -- which is more than a detail, in that it is the principal driver of their reform efforts. Just as significantly, they claim to be pushing the government program to increase access while reducing costs and expanding choice -- lies wrapped into falsehoods blanketed by deceptions.

Big-government politicians are on the run, and feckless Beltway Republicans mustn't go wobbly now. Now is the time to defeat these statists, not join them.

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