As constitutionally offensive as the "individual mandate" concept may be, you've got to admit it can look pretty good compared to the horrors of a British-style top-down nationalized system. After all, at least the mandated purchase of private insurance keeps some semblance of capitalism and competition in the picture... for a little while. It wouldn't last. Those onerous government mandates tend to drive private insurers out of business, dumping more and more people into centrally managed "public exchanges" at budget-busting expense – until one day, in the not-too-distant future, we would be told that a top-down single-payer nationalized system was the only way to salvage the wreckage created by ObamaCare.
Americans should be angry that our choices are being framed that way. It's common to describe the United States as a "center-right" country, but the "center" has moved so far left that it's almost a cruel joke to talk about orbiting to the "right" of it. Statist impositions that would have been laughed off as the paranoid fantasies of the far Right are commonplace "centrist" ideas today.
Among the worst and most dishonest hammers used to whack the "center" of our discourse so far to the Left are mandates. We're swimming in them. They're dishonest because they allow the government to compel private citizens to fund the statist agenda, without any tax money changing hands. Under the tax-and-spend liberalism of yore, it was – at least, theoretically – possible to analyze whether a particular government program was working, and hold somebody accountable if it wasn't.
In our mandated future, few political fingerprints will be left at the scene of the crime. Massive government programs, with the power to warp our society in terrible ways, will be presented as virtually "cost-free" and "deficit-neutral," because the government won't be spending the money. It will be telling you to spend the money. In this way, the ruling class of the most indebted nation in history will be able to wield even more power than it can afford.
—John Hayward
Read more here: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=49404
