Social Security is the single biggest program in the federal government. In 2010, it paid benefits to almost 54 million individuals.57
So successful was the Social Security deception that in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson used it as the basis for establishing Medicare and Medicaid. As Twight noted, it is not widely remembered that in 1960, Congress had already passed the Kerr-Mills bill—a needs-based medical program to assist the aged poor.58 But a welfare program instituted exclusively to subsidize medical care for poor patients cannot be convincingly presented as an insurance program. Nor can it engulf enough individuals in the utopian cause.
Johnson insisted on a new entitlement that would cover nearly all individuals age sixty-five and older. The opportunity arose in 1964 with the Democratic Party’s landslide victory. When he signed the Medicare bill, Johnson said, “In 1935, when … Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, he said it was, and I quote him, ‘a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but it is by no means complete.’ … And those who share this day will also be remembered for making the most important addition to that structure.…”59 Johnson added, “Through this new law … every citizen will be able, in his productive years when he is earning, to insure himself against the ravages of illness in his old age.…”60 Like Roosevelt, Johnson understood the import of misleading the American people by packaging Medicare’s taxes and costs as insurance and dissembling about its economic viability. As Wilbur Mills, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told Johnson when informing him that his committee had passed the Medicare bill, “I think we’ve got you something that we won’t only run on in ’66 but we’ll run on from here after.”61 In 2010, Medicare covered 38.7 million people over age sixty-five and 7.6 million people with disabilities.62
Again, in 2010, the CBO estimated that unfunded obligations for Medicare and Social Security are $25 trillion and $21.4 trillion, respectively.63 Both programs are economically unviable.
An analysis by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation of the 2011 Social Security Trustees’ financial report found that Social Security is in a weakened financial position in the short run and in an unsustainable condition in the long run. “Social Security is now operating with a permanent, annual cash flow deficit. Within seven years, the Trustees estimate that Social Security will not be able to pay full disability benefits scheduled under current law. The Disability Insurance program will begin running permanent cash deficits. Its trust fund will be exhausted in 2018. Absent reform, Social Security will only be able to pay approximately 77 percent of scheduled benefits under current law after 2036. After this date, the program will only have the legal authority to pay benefits equal to the amount of revenue generated by the payroll tax and the taxation of some benefits.”64
The chief actuary for Medicare, Richard S. Foster, stated that the shortfalls facing Medicare are even worse than reported by the Medicare trustees. He wrote that “the financial projections shown in [the 2011 trustees’ report] do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations.”65 The trustees had reported that Medicare will be unable to meet its obligations starting in 2024.66
The economic impossibility of these programs was never a utopian concern. Although cost-cutting, price controls, and benefit denials are instituted haphazardly, there can be no retreat from the overall mission and the centralized control and planning of the masterminds. Instead, further consolidation is nearly always the answer. Centralized control over health-care decisions in particular has been a utopian priority from the earliest for it maximizes government authority over the individual. In the Republic, only those who were otherwise healthy, but suffered either an injury or seasonal malady, were entitled to medical care. Those who were chronically ill, old, or infirm were of no benefit to the Ideal City and denied treatment (407d, 406b–c). In Utopia, magnificent hospitals were located near each city. “These hospitals be so well appointed, and with all things necessary to health so furnished … there is no sick person in all the city that had not rather lie there than at home in his house” (79). However, those who suffered from incurable diseases or fatal conditions were urged to kill themselves to alleviate their pain and their burden on society (107).
In America, for more than one hundred years, the utopians have insisted on the institution of government-run universal health care, promoting it in egalitarian terms. It was among the “rights” listed in Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights. Every person, he argued, has “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.”67 In his 1948 State of the Union speech, President Harry Truman asserted, “The greatest gap in our social security structure is the lack of adequate provision for the Nation’s health.… I have often and strongly urged that this condition demands a national health program. The heart of the program must be a national system of payment for medical care based on well-tried insurance principles.… Our ultimate aim must be a comprehensive insurance system to protect all our people equally against insecurity and ill health.”68 Proclamations and proposals of this kind have littered the political landscape, and successful legislative efforts have moved America piecemeal in this direction.
However, in 2009, with Barack Obama as president and a supermajority Democratic Congress, the utopian counterrevolution reached a new pinnacle, for there were no legislative obstacles and few remaining constitutional impediments to stop or even slow its advance. The utopians seized the opportunity they had long craved to centralize and consolidate control over the entire health-care system. Late on March 22, 2010, despite much arm-twisting, deal-making, and secret negotiating, the Democratic-controlled House barely passed the nearly three-thousand-page-long “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (PPACA) by a margin of 219 to 212. As with the initial adoption of Social Security and Medicare, there was no great clamor for the PPACA when it was adopted. Indeed, it was opposed by the public. A few days before its passage, Gallup found that “more Americans believe the new legislation will make things worse rather than better for the U.S. as a whole, as well as for them personally,” and its latest poll was “consistent with previous Gallup polls showing a slight negative tilt when Americans are asked if they support the new plan.”69
Most in Congress who voted for the bill had not read it, not only because of its length and complexity, but because the final version had not been made available to them, or the public, until shortly before it was voted on in the House. As intended, its concealment prevented critical scrutiny of its particulars. As then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, just a few weeks prior to the vote, told the Legislative Conference for the National Association of Counties, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.…”70
In a letter to his close friend James Madison after the Constitutional Convention adopted the Constitution and sent it to the states for ratification, Thomas Jefferson warned of the diabolical nature of this kind of legislating, which has as its purpose to keep both the diligent representative and the citizen in the dark. He told Madison, “The instability of our laws is really an immense evil. I think it would be well to provide in our constitutions that there shall always be a twelvemonth between the ingrossing a bill and passing it: that it should then be offered to its passage without changing a word; and that if circumstances should be thought to require a speedier passage, it should take two thirds of both houses instead of a bare majority.”71
But the particulars were less important to the utopian lawmakers and the president than the universality of the law. Its size and reach, in all its iterations, were known to be enormous. As former president Bill Clinton insisted, “It’s not important to be perfect here. It’s important to act, to move, to start the ball rolling. There will be amendments to this effort, whatever they pass, next year and the year after and the year after, and there should be. It’s a big, complicated, organic thing. But the worst thing to do is nothing.”72 In other words, it was important to exploit the recent election to diminish the
outcome of the next one, should it be lost to the opposition, and install a universal health-care scheme as quickly as possible. It was left to favored “experts” and special-interest third parties to work out most of the details. The routine is a familiar one: temporary politicians establishing permanent societal changes by using the law to seize the individual’s sovereignty and transfer control over it to the administrative state.
Meanwhile, like Roosevelt and Johnson, Obama used deception and manipulation in hopes of rallying popular support from the very individuals whose sovereignty he sought to control. During the health-care debate, Obama claimed that “no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”73 However, McKinsey and Company’s “early-2011 survey of more than 1,300 employers across industries, geographies, and employer sizes, as well as other proprietary research, found that … 30 percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering [health care] in the years after 2014,” once the PPACA has been fully implemented.74
Obama insisted that “the underlying argument … has to be addressed, and that is people’s concern that if we are reforming the health care system to make it more efficient, which I think we have to do, the concern is that somehow that will mean rationing of care, right? That somehow some government bureaucrat out there saying, well, you can’t have this test or you can’t have this procedure because some bean-counter decides that is not a good way to use health care dollars.…”75 He went on, “So, I just want to be very clear about this.… You will have not only the care you need, but also the care that right now is being denied to you [by insurance companies]—only if we get health care reform.”76 But Professor Martin Feldstein pointed out at the time that “[a]lthough administration officials are eager to deny it, rationing health care is central … to Obama’s health plan. The Obama strategy is to reduce health costs by rationing the services that we and future generations of patients will receive. The White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report in June explaining the Obama administration’s goal of reducing projected health spending by 30% over the next two decades. That reduction would be achieved by eliminating ‘high cost, low-value treatments,’ by ‘implementing a set of performance measures that all providers would adopt,’ and by ‘directly targeting individual providers … (and other) high-end outliers.’”77
Obama argued that health-care reform “will slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.” He declared, “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficit, now or in the future, period.” However, Hewitt Associates and Mercer both reported that the PPACA was contributing to premium hikes;78 the Congressional Budget Office disclosed that it will cost 800,000 jobs;79 it reported further that the program will likely cost $115 billion more than originally estimated;80 and the secretary of Health and Human Services admitted that $500 billion in supposed savings resulted from double-counting funds cut from the Medicare program.81
Plato, in the Republic, would have approved of Obama’s mendacity, as he would have approved of Roosevelt’s and Johnson’s earlier. “The noble lie,” as Plato called it, conditioned citizens to surrender their personal desires and happiness to the needs of the City and the common good. He wrote that it also promotes patriotism and eliminates political factionalism (415d). Of course, there is nothing noble about it. Obama knew full well that his pronouncements were distortions. Former Harvard University professor Donald Berwick explained in 2008 that “[a]ny health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributionist.”82 Obama demonstrated his agreement with Berwick’s sentiment when, in 2010, he appointed Berwick to oversee the federal government’s massive Medicare and Medicaid programs. As Obama said in 2008, “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”83
However, more than a year after its passage, and before 2014, when its most onerous provisions kick in, the PPACA remains unpopular with the American people.84 But rather than be deterred, the utopian masterminds are moving fast to institutionalize the law in the administrative state, making it much more difficult to disentangle should they lose control of the elected branches in subsequent election cycles. More than $100 billion was secreted into the bill to fund its start-up, bypassing the usual congressional appropriations process.85
An analysis by Peter Ferrara of the Heartland Institute revealed that the PPACA establishes more than “150 new bureaucracies, agencies, boards, commissions and programs” that “are empowered to tell doctors and hospitals what is quality health care and what is not, what are best practices in medicine, how their medical practices should be structured, and what they will be paid and when.”86 The Congressional Research Service reported, “The precise number of new entities that will ultimately be created pursuant to PPACA is currently unknowable.”87 Consequently, oversight will be practically impossible and the health-care system, and particularly the individual patient, will be overwhelmed by an administrative monstrosity. What is certain is that the individual will lose control over his own health-care decisions—his physical well-being and survival—since the purpose of the PPACA is to centralize health-care decision-making over all of society.
Yet the most pernicious aspect of the PPACA has nothing to do with health care per se. Specifically, the statute dictates that an individual who does not have health insurance but who can afford it must purchase a private health insurance policy, whether he wants to or not, or face federal fines and penalties.88 In response to litigation challenging the constitutionality of this “individual mandate,” the Obama administration argues that the mandate is nothing more than Congress exercising its authority under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. However, the Commerce Clause provides, “The Congress shall have Power … To regulate Commerce with Foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”89 The plain meaning of this language provides no support for the authority the federal government demands. Congress can tax interstate commerce, regulate interstate commerce, and even prohibit certain types of interstate commerce. But there is nothing in the history of the nation, let alone the history of the Constitution and the Commerce Clause, empowering Congress or any part of the federal government to regulate inactivity and compel an individual to enter into commerce—that is, to enter into a legally binding private contract against the individual’s will and interests simply because the individual is living and breathing.
Should such a specious and brazen contortion of fact and history prevail in the courts as a constitutionally recognized and legally enforceable imperative, the contours of utopian society and the mastermind’s authority would seem unconfined. Thereafter, the individual’s free will ceases to be free or his will. The mastermind’s duping becomes an unnecessary artifice, for the federal government can now flatly dictate the individual’s behavior, and the individual is without lawful recourse. Tyranny, then, will reveal itself, unvarnished and unequivocal, with future governmental trespasses on individual sovereignty both certain and more onerous.
EPILOGUE
MY PREMISE, IN THE first sentence of the first chapter of this book, is this: “Tyranny, broadly defined, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political utopianism is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology.”
Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Marx’s workers’ paradise are utopias that are anti-individual and anti-individualism. For the utopians, modern and olden, the individual is one-dimensional—selfish. On his own, he has little moral value. Contrarily, authoritarianism is defended as altruistic and masterminds as socially conscious. Thus endless inte
rventions in the individual’s life and manipulation of his conditions are justified as not only necessary and desirable but noble governmental pursuits. This false dialectic is at the heart of the problem we face today.
In truth, man is naturally independent and self-reliant, which are attributes that contribute to his own well-being and survival, and the well-being and survival of a civil society. He is also a social being who is charitable and compassionate. History abounds with examples, as do the daily lives of individuals. To condemn individualism as the utopians do is to condemn the very foundation of the civil society and the American founding and endorse, wittingly or unwittingly, oppression. Karl Popper saw it as an attack on Western civilization. “The emancipation of the individual was indeed the great spiritual revolution which had led to the breakdown of tribalism and to the rise of democracy.”1 Moreover, Judaism and Christianity, among other religions, teach the altruism of the individual.
Of course, this is not to defend anarchy. Quite the opposite. It is to endorse the magnificence of the American founding. The American founding was an exceptional exercise in collective human virtue and wisdom—a culmination of thousands of years of experience, knowledge, reason, and faith. The Declaration of Independence is a remarkable societal proclamation of human rights, brilliant in its insight, clarity, and conciseness. The Constitution of the United States is an extraordinary matrix of governmental limits, checks, balances, and divisions, intended to secure for posterity the individual’s sovereignty as proclaimed in the Declaration.
This is the grand heritage to which every American citizen is born. It has been characterized as “the American Dream,” “the American experiment,” and “American exceptionalism.” The country has been called “the Land of Opportunity,” “the Land of Milk and Honey,” and “a Shining City on a Hill.” It seems unimaginable that a people so endowed by Providence, and the beneficiaries of such unparalleled human excellence, would choose or tolerate a course that ensures their own decline and enslavement, for a government unleashed on the civil society is a government that destroys the nature of man.