The Patriot Post® · A Liberating Dependency

It is Sunday. Unlike a lot of Americans for whom Sunday is a day off, I am sitting at my desk writing this column. Ironically, what I do is called “freelance” writing. I say ironically, because the word freelance is somewhat misleading. Unlike a lot of other Americans who, according to Harry Reid (D-NV), have been freed from “job-lock” due to the wonders of the ObamaCare, I am as job-locked as any job-locked American could be.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. While there is relatively little monetary reward for this particular profession, there is a lot of satisfaction to be gained from doing something a bit creative and, as most writers fervently hope, useful in the larger sense. That larger sense is contributing to the national conversation in a meaningful way. Sometimes my efforts are more meaningful than others, due to the nature of the subject matter, and/or the quality of my insights. But I give it my best shot, and live with the compliments – or complaints.

As many of my readers might suspect, the steaming load coming from the Obama administration, Democrat party hacks, and the legions of useful idiots in the media regarding the “liberating” effects of ObamaCare – as in the loss of an equivalent 2.5 million jobs over the next decade – does not sit particularly well with me. That’s because the “take this job and shove it” attitude that ostensibly blossoms from the notion that Americans paying less for their healthcare insurance than they did previously can now “focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations," as Nancy Pelosi put it, leaves out a few critical details.

The most critical detail is this: as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that generated this firestorm of "good” news reveals, the federal government will be subsidizing the premiums of an overwhelming majority of Americans, as in five million out of six million this year, and 19 million out of 24 million in 2024.

I suspect the last thing many Americans, especially progressives, would like to do, is dwell on the real meaning of those numbers. That’s because one’s liberation might feel a tad less liberating when one is forced to confront the reality that it comes at someone else’s expense. The word “subsidize” is a far more antiseptic way of saying that the taxpayer, as in someone who is working, is being forced to underwrite someone who is not. Or as Orwell might say, some people will be more liberated than others.

Not that there’s a direct correlation here. Not everyone who gets a reduced health insurance premium will quit his or her job as a result, nor is there anything resembling a one-to-one ratio of subsidizers and those who are subsidized. Taken to the extreme, every American could be equally liberated if the Federal Reserve printed enough money to make work unnecessary. We’d be completely bankrupt with a worthless currency, but once again in a nation where annoying details and their implications can be swept away in frenzy of liberating feelings, such unpleasantness need not be discussed. Nevertheless, until the nation completely takes leave of its collective senses, the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs lost over ten years – so far – isn’t exactly chicken feed.

And I say so far because in 2011, the CBO originally anticipated a reduction of only 800,000 full-time equivalent workers. Three years later, that number has more than tripled. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the projected ten-year tab for ObamaCare itself has nearly tripled. The math here is a little less accurate because the original estimate is based on a 2009 promise by President Obama and Democrats that his “signature achievement" would be "revenue neutral” and only cost $900 billion over ten years. The first CBO estimate following that promise showed the president was right on the money – give or take $500 billion. Now the project ten-year tab for ObamaCare has reached $2.6 trillion. But again, as most Americans are now well aware, Obama’s “say anything” strategy is an integral part of the way the “most transparent administration in the history of the republic” gets things done. That’s because Obama and his fellow progressives firmly believe that a “noble lie” leading to the “greater good” is eminently acceptable.

In short, bet the farm that in a couple of more years, we may discover that millions of additional Americans will be “liberated” from the quaint notion of working for a living.

Naturally, there’s always someone who wants to spoil the progressives’ party. According to the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin, Democrats have become "the party that celebrates subsidies and rewards states for getting more people on food stamps. It opens the door wider for disability payments and fights for unemployment benefits like it once fought for jobs. It does these things not because of an emergency but because of a warped ideology.“

I’d like to agree with Mr. Goodwin, but I suspect he, like me, is behind the times. An ideology is only warped if a substantial majority of people consider it to be so. Does anyone want to bet that such a reality remains the case in 2014? I’m guessing there are legions of Americans who have little concern about being liberated from the increasingly anachronistic concepts known as decency, dignity, integrity, morality and hard work. There was a time within my lifetime when the idea that going on the dole was a liberating event would have been treated as the ridiculous – and pernicious – garbage it truly is. And those promoting it would have been treated like the pariahs they are.

Nowadays? Not so much. Or maybe not at all. As one who observes the trajectory of our culture, I wonder if there’s any kind of behavior short of murder or child molestation that has any stigma whatsoever attached to it any more.

And maybe we can take child molestation off the list. Much of Hollywood has risen to defend Woody Allen against the "scurrilous” claims made by his adopted daughter Dylan, as did Allen himself in his New York Times rebuttal of the allegations. Yet nowhere in that rebuttal did Allen address page 11 of Judge Elliot Wilk’s summation of the custody battle between Allen and Mia Farrow. Sworn testimony given by one babysitter reveals that Allen was “kneeling in front of [7-year old] Dylan, with his head in her lap facing her body.”

Forget child molestation charges, which are unprovable, or as Wilk himself said “we will probably never know what occurred,” a judgement call Allen described as “a very irresponsible opinion.” Anyone OK with a then-56 year old man plopping his head on a 7-year-old girl’s lap facing her body? Everyone remember Roman Polanski getting the same pass from the same crowd when he plied a 13-year old girl with drugs and liquor prior to having sex with her? After all as Whoopi Goldberg opined, Polanski wasn’t guilty of “rape rape.” Yet the addled comedienne did put her finger on the essential reality that gets us back to where we started.

“We’re a different kind of society, we see things differently,” she said.

That would be a different society that indeed sees things differently. One where government dependency is liberating. "What the White House wants you to think is, if a person chooses to make less income, they must be doing something that makes them better off,“ said former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin. "What conservatives would have you ask is, is it an appropriate use of someone else’s money to put you in that position to choose?”

I think there are far more important questions. In the divide described by Holtz-Eakin, on which side of the line do the majority of Americans stand? Even more important, what is long-term trend? One thing is certain: the “fundamental transformation” of our nation into the Slacker States of America has a limited shelf life. Here’s hoping that the political party promoting such a poisonous ideology has even more limited shelf life.

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