A Bad Day For Liberty

The soundest, sanest and, as always, funniest, critique of current events, in this case the ObamaCare "win," comes courtesy the simultaneously disgusted and amused Mr. Steyn:

Still, quibbling over whose pretzel argument is more ingeniously twisted – the government's or the court's – is to debate, in Samuel Johnson's words, the precedence between a louse and a flea. I have great respect for George Will, but his assertion that the Supreme Court decision is a "huge victory" that will "help revive a venerable tradition" of "viewing congressional actions with a skeptical constitutional squint" and lead to a "sharpening" of "many Americans' constitutional consciousness" is sufficiently delusional that one trusts mental health is not grounds for priority check-in at the death panel. Back in the real world, it is a melancholy fact that tens of millions of Americans are far more European in their view of government than the nation's self-mythologizing would suggest. Indeed, citizens of many Continental countries now have more – what's the word? – liberty in matters of health care than Americans. That's to say, they have genuinely universal government systems alongside genuinely private-system alternatives. Only in America does "health" "care" "reform" begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine. It is the perverse genius of Obamacare that it will kill off what's left of a truly private health sector without leading to a truly universal system. However, it will be catastrophically unaffordable, hideously bureaucratic, and ever more coercive. So what's not to like?

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." That's etched in stone on one of Washington's impressively monumental buildings. I saw it myself just last week. Too bad Chief Justice Roberts let down his guard, averted his gaze, and allowed liberty to be sandbagged by what will go down in history as the biggest and worst of Barack Obama's very bad ideas.