Posted by
KsReaganite on Tuesday, December 22, 2009 11:19:55 PM
Some of the earliest organized English settlements in the New World were called commonwealths, rather than states or colonies. Even today, four of the states of our Union-Massachussetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky-officially designate themselves as commonwealths rather than states, unlike the other forty six states. The difference in nomenclature is one of pure semantics today. It wasn’t so always. The founding fathers of those entities purposely chose the commonwealth moniker to emphasize the nature of their respective governments’ public trust in looking after the common weal.
That common weal was hardly looked after in the trillion dollar health care bill that has been rammed through the Senate this week, with support from the six senators from the Commonwealths of VA, MA, and PA. It was a naked display of parochial bribery rather than the public trust as hesitant and vulnerable senators were purchased with taxpayer money. The most expensive were Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana who were each bought for almost five hundred million; less expensive were Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Kent Conrad of North Dakota who each had price tags of over a hundred million. Looking at the auction market that has been the United States Senate this Christmas, it is hard to argue with President Reagan’s observation that politics is an undertaking very similar to humanity’s oldest profession.
A trillion dollars is money beyond the imagination of ordinary people. Yet, it is the ordinary people’s money. Much of the amount will be, in the short- and medium term, financed by public debt and increased revenue generation. This is liquidity that could have been otherwise available to the private sector for job growth and trade expansion. Granted, some of it will arguably go towards delivering actual healthcare; but a large proportion will be overhead geared towards bureaucrats with fancy titles and lawyers with kinship to politicians.
This bill is not an example of taking care of the common weal. Rather, it a study in the plundering thereof.