Author: Sebastian

I agree with what Uncle says here:

Aside from my moral objection from congress mandating that I have to purchase goods and services, the US is creating a dependent class along with a vast entitlement program. That, in addition to the fact we can’t afford the two entitlement programs we already have. Yes. I see the pattern. A government creating a dependency on a significant portion of the population. This, folks, is the issue. And they’ve done it before with Social Security and Medicare. They’re creating a group beholden. A group that will vote a certain way or risk losing benefits. Another lobby group rivaling the AARP can spring from this and be a player under the guise of preventing what I talked about earlier from happening. But still complicit in the dependence.

The bill is so long there’s bound to be a lot of crap it in it that are really going to piss off voters. There’s even vending machine requirements that require posting nutrition information. That could be a problem for my club, who has a machine for members. I suspect given federal requirements, we’d just as soon scrap the whole thing. Nice thought, you see, but we don’t want to risk offending the federal requirements. You’d think the vending machine industry would be against such practices, but probably not. It’s regulatory capture. Vending providers will make out because they’ll be the only ones that can afford to deal with the regulations. Vending machine makers will make money on an entirely new class of machines that meet the requirements. How many other nanny state requirements are in this bill? Plenty, I’m sure. The people need to get pissed, and ride these mothers until things change. You can’t depend on the free market to save you. Corporations are now in bed with big government, and it’s all of us who will be the losers.

As for vandalizing private property, it would seem the three percent movement has adopted the tactics of Palestinian school children, and I expect all this to work out just about as well for liberty in this country as it has for the Palestinians. The brick hurlers can wrap themselves in the imagery of the founders all they like, but the founders deplored this kind of mob violence:

Some modern scholars have argued that this interpretation is a myth, and that there’s no evidence that Adams had anything to do with the Stamp Act riots.^[58] After the fact, Adams did approve of the August 14 action because he saw no other legal options to resist what he viewed as an unconstitutional act by Parliament, but he condemned attacks on officials’ homes as “mobbish”.^[59] According to the modern scholarly interpretation of Adams, he supported legal methods of resisting parliamentary taxation—petitions, boycotts, and nonviolent demonstrations—but he opposed mob violence, which he saw as illegal, dangerous, and counterproductive.^[60]

The mob violence was mostly instigated by a gang leader and well known rioter and instigator Ebenezer McIntosh. Fortunately for this country, the movement against the Stamp Act would be taken up by cooler heads. There will always be “herds of fools, tools, and synchophants,” as Sam Adams once said, in any movement. The trick is identifying them and distancing yourself from them. Vandalizing private property is not civil disobedience, or righteous protest. It is, to borrow a term from Sam Adams, “mobbish,” and is not at all within the realm of what the founders would have viewed as legitimate action. If you want to stand with the founders, use the system they created and join us in helping vote these bastards out come November. Then we can see what our options are in terms of getting rid of the monstrosity.

The Belmont Club has an excellent post up about this health care bill, and points out:

The obvious difference between Roosevelt’s position in 1940 and Obama’s in 2010 was World War 2. That global conflict destroyed practically the entire productive capacity of the industrialized world with the exception of the US. It allowed for an unparalleled economic expansion and was followed by a burgeoning demographic explosion we know as the Baby Boom. Those two factors together made Roosevelt’s entitlements appear to be sustainable. Even Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society 20 years later could still count on riding those two trends. Today’s crisis is largely the result of the final exhaustion of those twin booms. Where FDR found himself at the beginning, Obama finds himself at the end.

Read the whole thing. Tomorrow we return to our regularly scheduled gun blogging, but I thought this health care vote was historic enough to warrant a day’s coverage.

From Eric at Classical Values:

I was born in 1954, and ever since my brain began laying down memories of what was going on, I have watched the relentless, steady, constant growth of Big Government – regardless of which party was in power.

Yet in all that time, this country has never had an honest debate over socialism. The word has been avoided for decades, but now that it is upon us, there is no avoiding it.

We need to have this debate. Badly. It’s so long overdue that I could scream.

My sincere hope is that the passage of Obamacare will bring it on.

This is not doom and gloom. Far from it. I welcome the debate, and I think it will be clarifying. Perhaps there will be a genuine fight over whether America wants want to go the socialist route, instead of phony and pointless haggling over diversionary peripheral issues (like whether abortion should be socialized right now or temporarily privatized).

I couldn’t agree more. Sadly the main stream media is still living in the world of bread and circuses. To the extent we have this debate in society it won’t be in the traditional media.