Posted by
KsReaganite on Friday, March 19, 2010 7:55:55 PM
Ten billion. Twelve thousand.
Those are two lesser known but yet vitally important numbers to keep in mind in this ongoing healthcare debate as those two figures underscore a centrality that runs through any ‘reforms’ that come from the intellectual Left:: expansion of bureaucracy.
The latest version of the national healthcare plan allocates and additional ten billion dollars to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for the purpose of enforcing the individual mandates in the law. This money will be used for hiring twelve thousand additional highly paid IRS enforcers, extra audits, surveillance tools, office space, and junkets to bureaucratic conferences. It is all for a good cause, I am sure; after all, why shouldn’t the government want to make sure that I have health insurance, and of the proper kind? If all that important sounding paternalism involves hiring more civil servants, so what, right? I mean only the wrong doers need to fear big government…as successive bevy of control freaks of both parties keep telling us.
Euphoria, hope, or anger aside, there is very little chance that the healthcare overhaul will be repealed even if the GOP returns to strong majorities in both chambers this November. It is an axiom of democratic politics-and of human nature-that power and purse once voted to the government are never taken back. If anything, the powers given to the IRS in this bill will soon be used by other federal agencies to meddle more into private lives on the pretext of some form of security or another. Liberals who champion the healthcare bill will soon thus rue the unintended consequences of their ‘reform'.
Unintended but hardly unforeseen. Moderately intelligent people well know that individual freedoms are never lost in a representative democracy unless the trade-off includes promises of social security, economic security, or national security. I use the term ‘promises’ because the reality is always different, if history is any guide: Ben Franklin said it well when he warned us that those who trade a little liberty for a little extra safety deserve neither and will end up with neither. Freedom is the surest bulwark of security while bureaucratic power is a mirage masquerading as safety.
Sadly for America, when it comes to the pursuit of security, both parties consider highly paid bureaucrats to be preferable substitutes for individual liberty.