The Golden Goose is Almost Done

The President compared the Affordable Care Act to the Apple Corporation yesterday while attempting to defend the flailing of the new and expanding Obamacare bureaucracy. A few days earlier, he had invoked the Runaway Slave Act in a similar confused analogy. In the frenzy of trying to defend the indefensible, Barack Obama is starting to sound like Mrs. Malaprop. Unfortunately, Richard Sheridan enriched culture with humor; there's nothing funny about another incompetent federal monolith midst an economy already corrupted by social excess, debt, and deficit spending. In the first instance, Apple Corporation is a money maker, an unalloyed entrepreneurial success. Obamacare only consumes, it will not create wealth. Just as surely it will create jobs -- another army of inert government apparatchiks, a world where the phrase "public servant' can never be more than half true.

Steve Jobs actually fired corporate deadwood to reform Apple and return it to profitability. He also furloughed corporate philanthropy until Apple recovered. Comparing Apple to any government agency is a little like confusing fruit with onions. Government programs, like public schools, are permanent sinecures with tenure. The Affordable Care Act is not about health anyway. It's about politics; winning and losing -- and the spoils that victors distribute. In short, Obamacare is another vote-buying scheme where taxes and debt are used to reward an expanding base of intemperate dependencies. What Communists could not achieve by force of arms, Social Democrats have won with giveaways and the ballot box. When you tally government educators, government bureaucrats, and government dependents; more than half the American population is receiving a government check of one sort or another. The folks who actually pay the bills are a shrinking minority. As comics like to say: "You can't eliminate poverty by giving people money." The problem with all political largesse, indeed someone else's money, is that more is never enough. The Affordable Care Act is neither affordable, nor is it caring. Were it caring, Obamacare would make no exceptions for political elites. Alas, when the piñatas are exhausted, no one gets paid in "150 different languages". Indeed, stick a fork in it, our golden goose is almost done. G. Murphy Donovan writes occasionally about the politics of national security.