“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive!” ADVERTISING “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive!” — Sir Walter Scott It really should not have been a revelation that
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive!”
— Sir Walter Scott
It really should not have been a revelation that the plan to establish a huge government health care bureaucracy and insure millions more people while supposedly reducing costs was much too good to be true. People have already seen for themselves how their health care premiums have increased substantially, and many have had their health plans eliminated due to the Affordable Care Act’s dictates.
But the depth of the deception and the brazenness and arrogance with which one of the law’s key designers revealed the Important People’s contempt for the rest of us plebes — with our quaint notions that we are better suited to run our own lives than those in far removed capitol buildings, government cubicles and ivory towers — did raise some eyebrows.
Obamacare and Romneycare architect Jonathan Gruber achieved notoriety when video emerged of him crediting obfuscation and “the stupidity of the American voter” for the passage of the health care law. It is a theme the MIT health care economist repeated many times, as evidenced by a number of videos of his speaking engagements in recent years.
“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber asserted. In a separate appearance, he noted that the ACA was “written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the [individual health insurance] mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”
But even more offensive than the sneering boasts of getting the health care law passed by pulling the wool over the eyes of the American public — or, more accurately, over the eyes of Democratic politicians, for Americans were deeply divided and, if anything, more opposed to than supportive of the ACA at the time — is Gruber’s justification for doing so. “I wish,” he said, “we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.” That thinking and morality (or lack thereof) is typical of so many of the politicians and policymakers who consider themselves our betters — and more revealing than all the lies they tell to advance their agendas.
Will those supporters of the health care reform learn from this? For many, the answer is “No,” since it was their guy (or gal) doing the dissembling for reasons they thought were well-intentioned. Will they just as ardently support their leaders the next time politicians, bureaucrats and academics try to sell them a bill of goods? Probably, so long as the statists claim to have a similar worldview to theirs, but perhaps some will now have their eyes and ears opened to the siren call of advocates for more government control over our lives.
Unless the “ends-justify-the-means” ethic is discarded in favor of a genuine search for truth and respect for individual liberty, the shysters know prevarication will continue to be a winning strategy. This is all the more reason not to concentrate so much power over our everyday lives in the hands of a relative few in the first place.
— From the Orange County Register
