I asked friends to explain their rationale for voting before and after the recent Massachusetts election that sent Republican Scott Brown to fill a U.S. Senate seat that had been held by Democrats since 1954. Opinions of Coakley ranged from “mediocre party hack” to “evil opponent of citizens’ rights to, for example, videotape the police making arrests.” Nonetheless, all voted for Coakley with the expectation that she would hold the Senate seat until her death or retirement. The main reason cited was that they wanted her to be in the Senate to vote for the latest $1 trillion health care spending bill. I.e., they were electing her for decades, regardless of her fitness for the job, because they thought that her one vote on one bill would be so important.

I pointed out that the health care bill wouldn’t change anything in Massachusetts. We already have a similar state law that requires residents to purchase health insurance and, if they can’t afford it, sticks taxpayers with the bill (this increased demand for health insurance has resulted in insurers raising premiums to the highest prices in the U.S., and probably the world). “But people in other states won’t have guaranteed insurance,” was the response. I pointed out that the federal bill would still leave tens of millions uninsured (earlier post). “It will be a lot better than what they have now.”

I then reminded the Coakley voter that Massachusetts gets back only 82 cents of every federal tax dollar (source). Did he or she really want to pay for health insurance for some guy in Alabama ($1.66 back for every dollar put in)? The answer was a resounding “Yes!” If we wanted to be altruistic, was it truly better to buy gold-plated medical care for people in other states than to help out folks in Haiti who have nothing? The answer was that we can easily afford to do both.

Separately, a look at the election results map revealed that there was a fairly strong correlation between being bled by the government and voting for the Republican and being fattened by the government and voting for the Democrat. Economic basketcase towns such as Springfield, where the primary sources of income are Welfare or government jobs, were solidly for Coakley. Inner city districts where people live in public housing (perhaps next door to Barack Obama’s Aunt Zeituni) voted for additional government expansion; suburban districts where people work long hours at private employers and pay heavy taxes to support 35-hour/week government workers voted for Brown. What can the Democrats learn from this? If they can somehow ensure that 51 percent of voters are collecting Welfare, working for the government, or somehow else being net beneficiaries of government spending, they should be able to control the U.S. indefinitely.