Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake has been one of the few avowed progressives willing to speak out against Obamacare.
As I have explored before, Hamsher’s central objection is my central objection, the mandate. We object to the mandate on very different grounds; she because it makes the government the bill collector for insurance companies, me because it alters the relationship between government and citizen by taxing and penalizing the failure to engage in economic activity.
Hamsher reacted to Dennis Kucinich’s capitulation this morning by stating that Obamacare amounts to fascism:
The claims made by the administration about the virtues of the health care bill are outright fabrications. As Marcy Wheeler has documented in her post entitled “Health Care and the Road to Neufeudalism,” it does not control either insurance premiums or health care costs. Forcing 31 million people to buy a product they don’t want and can’t afford to use does not constitute health care reform. Once again, the poor get used as human shields so corporations can be the beneficiaries of massive government bailout.
Rather than actually helping the poor, this bill is a dangerous and unprecedented step on the road to domination of government by private corporate players who use it to suppress competition and secure their profits — the textbook definition of fascism.
Hamsher suggested that Obamacare will blur the lines between left and right as people reject the Obamacare system:
If indeed this bill passes, people across the country will have to start examining the basic assumptions with which we have heretofore approached politics. The thing I have learned above all else in this campaign is that the corporate control of government is much more extensive than I ever imagined, and the tools we have to fight its influence are ineffective.
We need to develop new partners in the fight, because there is tremendous public will to resist and the old ones can’t be trusted. We also need a new language to describe it, because the old “right-left” paradigm is firing past the true opponent.
The rejection of statism (whether corporate or otherwise) in favor of individual liberty and economic freedom is at the heart of the Tea Party movement and the changes taking place slowly in the Republican Party.
Perhaps it is time for Hamsher and those who blog with her to re-examine their derisive attitude towards the Tea Party movement.
We may not agree on desired outcome of what our health care system should look like, but we do agree that Obamacare represents the worst aspects of government control over society.
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Related Posts:
Get Rid of the Mandate
Taxing Your Mere Existence
IRS The New Health Care Enforcer
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