As true today as it was then

Oh, the cognitive dissonance

Last week, John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods and hero to the left, wrote a well-considered and insightful column on health care reform for the Wall Street Journal. No doubt his loyal followers were pleased to learn that those capitalist pigs had finally allowed the light of liberal truth to grace their pages and picked up a copy to see what incontrovertible argument their hero had put forth in defense of nationalized health care.

A Margaret Thatcher quotation? But...but...but. This makes no sense. This guy runs an organic grocery store. He supports green energy. He requires humane treatment of animals by his suppliers. How could he stab us in the backs like this?

Turns out, many of Mr. Mackey's customers were none-to-pleased by his break from the party line, declaring their commitment to never shopping at his stores again and seemingly ignoring every point he made in the column, confused by the fact that someone could be an environmentalist who doesn't want socialized medicine.

What they don't get is that it's possible Mackey's beliefs and actions are determined not by a simplistic and all-encompassing philosophy of liberalism, but by a commitment to personal responsibility. Mackey runs his company in an environmentally friendly manner because he believes that's how it should be run and he takes personal responsibility for ensuring that's how it is run. He provides excellent medical benefits to his employees because he believes he should, and he takes personal responsibility for that, and it turns out, it works out pretty well for him and for his employees with no need to get the government involved whatsoever. Mackey rightly recognized that the reason so many companies offer such crappy healthcare benefits is that the government is too involved in the first place, making it far too difficult to run things the way they ought to be run (in both a moral and practical sense) for any company that isn't as focused on personal responsibility as his to come anywhere close to getting it right. The answer to our woes is not and never has been more coercion. It's allowing the markets the freedom to unlock the best and brightest ideas people like Mackey and countless others have to offer.

President promises candy rain, may be lying his ass off

So leftist Democrats finally figured out what it would take to bribe the Blue Dogs into betraying their constituencies and have gotten the health care bill out of committee in the House, setting up floor votes when Congress returns to session next month. In the mean time, the question of how the fuck we plan to pay for this counterproductive monstrosity remains largely unanswered, with President Obama still insisting that he will not do this in a way that will increase taxes on the middle class. This is, of course, ludicrous.

There are a few possibilities here. The first is that he's figured out how ridiculously bad this whole idea is and is open to a substantially scaled down version that will only waste a little bit of money and only make health care as a whole in this country a little bit worse than it is today. We can only hope...

The next possibility, and the most likely, is that Barry is just an outright liar with no intention whatsoever of leaving the middle class unscathed in the money grab required for this plan to destroy American health care. This plan is tremendously expensive, and someone has to pay for it. The political tactic here is likely to get people behind the plan under the false impression that they won't have to pay for it (a remarkably easy task if you can pull off the convincing them it's free part) and then change everything up at the last minute, raising taxes across the board to pay the bills and hope no one catches on to what has happened.

For the moment, however, let's take the president at his word. Let's assume that he really does intend to push through a bill that does all the things he says he wants the bill to do and that he really does intend to do it without increasing taxes on the poor and middle class. So how do we pay for it? Is the president's answer to everything really just going to be "Well, the rich can pay for it. They have the money."? Really? This is astonishingly short-sighted and simplistic for someone with such a reputation for brilliance and vision, and yet it really seems to be the only thing he can come up with to reconcile the insane statements he's made. Then again, he might just be lying.