When in the fight for liberty should one give up?
Never. Contrary to deterministic notions of social change, there’s nothing inevitable or permanent about any loss of our freedom.
What then should we make of the words of Daily Debate scrivener Robert Tracinski? Noting criticism of Florida Governor Rick Scott for reversing his stand against the Democrats’ health care reform package, Tracinski, also a foe of Obamacare, asserts that the battle to either repeal or block it “was effectively over with November’s election, when Democrats retained the presidency and control of the Senate.”
A bad blow is not a permanent conquest, however.
Scott’s opposition was central to his 2010 campaign for governor. As governor, he led a lawsuit against Obamacare. After the Supreme Court’s anti-constitutional decision upholding it, he said he would keep fighting by declining federal funds to expand Medicaid.
Alas, Scott has now thrown in the towel. (We don’t know yet whether state lawmakers, whose acquiescence is also required, will similarly discard their drenched terrycloth.) Proponents of greater government hegemony over the medical industry crow that all other hitherto recalcitrant governors will, in the words of David Firestone, “soon knuckle under and do exactly the same thing. . . . By investing a relatively small amount of their own money to cover the poor, states get a huge increase in federal Medicaid funds.”
You see how the bribe to the states is made. Cave in to a usurpation, and some of the apparent increased burdens will be borne not at the state level, but by the already insolvent, debt-ridden, deficit-addicted federal government.
It’s a sick system. And I’m not talking about just Obamacare.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
4 replies on “How to Surrender Freedom”
The “huge” quantity of “free” federal funds are only available for a few years, long enough to get a new entitlement class hooked and voting to keep their freebies, then, unknown. Possible that the feral government keeps printing more imaginary dollars to keep things “going” while continuing to devalue the dollars already printed. Also possible that the ferals will just let it lapse. Adios Yoyo. Your on your own.
The incremental subversion of liberty is a tactic which is being applied to almost every Constitutional right & to almost any concept of individual liberty that we all have known for our lifetimes.
Standing up to this incremetal subversion takes a committed patriot. The fact that federal Medicaid dollars do dry up & then state taxpayers must pony up the money the fed is no longer sending them, never seems to impress folks. They figure someone will deal with that problem then, but for now, “its free money!”
Yeah, right! Sure it is! LOL
It gets harder and harder not to just give up. For now, I’m doing the only thing I can: reduce my withholding tax so as to minimize the amount of money the IRS can latch on to next year. (As a temp employee, I have zero benefits and I won’t pay for what they expect me to carry.)
While we go down the tubes China thrives. Maybe somewhere there is a hero that will save what remains of the great nation America once was.