Now that Progressives have control over our healthcare, they want our retirement accounts as well. Using what Linda Gorman calls the “health care playbook,” progressives are aiming their snare guns at one of the final untouched frontiers in American individualism, the retirement account.

“Progressive activists are in the early stages of attempting to create a retirement security crisis. Using the health care playbook, they claim that people lack access to ‘adequate retirement security’. The lack of access is said to impose large costs on everyone else because people without ‘retirement security’ consume more public assistance payments. Government must ‘solve’ the problem because only government can provide secure retirement investment options for all by mandating that people purchase them.”

Under the guise of “security” and led by the false identification of a “public good,” the Left will tout any retirement reform much the same way Obama and the Left sold Obamacare to the public. The “public good” is in danger because a lack of coverage by too many will drive up costs. Meanwhile, this ignores the economic reality that universal access destroys market access, which drives up costs while greatly diminishing quality. More importantly is that the notion of a “public good” is not definable. Rather, it is merely clever jargon to disguise the coercive nature of wealth redistribution schemes. In the words of Ayn Rand, “since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that ‘the public interest’ supersedes private interests and rights, can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.” (my emphasis) The Left has used this jargon as their rallying cry since before LBJ’s Great Society experiment began, and whether accepted or rejected, the “public good” provided the largest of Obama’s soap boxes when campaigning his healthcare reform. They will assuredly use it here if such legislation makes its way out of Colorado onto the national political scene.

Before you write this off as a close call and go about your day, keep a couple of things in mind. First, passage of House Bill 1377 in Colorado failed by only 1 Senate vote. And second, Colorado was also the staging ground for many aspects included in Obamacare. Ari Armstrong over at The Objective Standard Blog says this:

“Three years before the 2010 passage of the national ObamaCare law, a “blue ribbon” commission in Colorado explored—at the behest of the state legislature—ways to expand government involvement in health care. Among other proposals, the commission recommended forcing ‘all legal residents of Colorado to have minimum insurance coverage’, ‘providing sliding-scale subsidies for low-income workers to purchase private coverage’, and creating a government ‘Connector’ to assist individuals and small employers to understand and choose among insurance options.”

In true statist fashion, the government claims the rights of some to fix problems itself creates. From the Great Recession to the entitlement crisis, government solutions for government-created problems are becoming the hallmark of U.S government.