Give Me Liberty, Not ObamaCare

In Patrick McIlheran's column in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Who's your daddy? Uncle Sam," he explains how the Democrats' overhaul of our health care system enacts more than new policies.

The takeover establishes a new relationship.

McIlheran writes:

What can be given can be taken away. Are you eating right? Exercising? You're not still drinking, are you? Authorities merely nag us now. When we owe them our health care, they can start demanding.

Do not imagine they will hesitate to use this power. The House puts the Internal Revenue Service and all its compassionate flexibility in charge of enforcing the insurance mandate. If you don't buy, there will be penalties. Those penalties can include the slammer, Congress itself points out.

They'll go further. At 1,990 pages, the bill has room for dreams of utopia, and so health care reform demands affirmative action in nursing schools (page 1379), calorie lists on menus (page 1510) and inspections (voluntary, for now) of expectant parents (page 1176). These are not, even now, the restrained ambitions of a modest government.

They are signals of a new relationship. When we all are on the take, voluntarily or not, we are no longer exactly free citizens. We are, in part, dependents. And as dependents are customarily told by Dad, "If you live in my house, you live by my rules."

This is not to call instead for rugged individualism. None of us go it alone in this world. We get help from spouse, family, friends, neighborhood, congregation, village - all the voluntary associations of essentially co-equal parties that a free society fosters. But the trend of decades has been for government to replace them, function by function, to the detriment of society.

And government is not a co-equal partner to you if you depend on it. It is, instead, your daddy.

Now government seeks to involve itself intimately with us by giving us all health care. It grants itself an ever more central place in our lives, necessarily displacing, with its generosity, every other support, including our own backbones.

I don't want the government to be my daddy. I'm a big girl. I'm capable of being on my own, independent.

No offense, big daddy, but I want you out of my life. Not completely out, but there are limits. I do need daddy to manage national security and maintain the military. I don't need daddy intruding in the health care choices that should be made between me and my doctor. I don't want to give up the freedom I now have to determine what's best for me as an individual.

Besides, daddy can't be trusted to take care of me.

Daddy can't even provide me with a flu shot. A SIMPLE FLU SHOT! Daddy makes promises he can't keep.

This forced dependency makes for a very unhealthy relationship.