Why we really need government health care

Until now, Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have suggested a government takeover of health care is necessary because millions of Americans are at risk of death or disability due to being uninsured.

This was the crisis that had to be addressed by this administration and this Congress now.

Lives were at stake.

The health and welfare of children were being neglected because of their inability to get treatment.

This is the bill of goods that was sold to the American people.

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But with the government takeover of health care growing increasingly unpopular as Americans begin to see it as an unconstitutional power grab rather than an act of compassion, one member of this unholy trinity has endeavored to gain support with a new tactic.

Listen to what Pelosi told MSNBC's Rachel Madcow, I mean Maddow, last week: "Everybody has so much to gain from this, small businesses, seniors, young people, women, our economy. Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance or that people could start a business and be entrepreneurial and take [risks]."

In other words, Pelosi sees mandatory, government-run health care as a way for "creative types" to pursue their artistic ambitions without the necessity of working.

Let me speak to this as someone who has been a musician, been a struggling writer and been an entrepreneur. I never expected other Americans to subsidize my dreams of playing music, writing what I wanted to write or starting a business. Neither should any other artist or entrepreneur.

This is such an offensive gesture by Pelosi.

In her dream world, "artists" and "photographers" and "writers" have a right to lead some privileged existence free of the burdens of ordinary working people to support themselves and their families.

Nonsense.

Why should anyone in a free society be given the privilege of leeching off others?

Why should we encourage members of our society, whether they are creative people or entrepreneurs, to pursue dreams irresponsibly at the expense of others coerced to pay for them?

Even more to the point, why should so-called "risk takers" not be expected actually to take risks?

I raise this point to illustrate just how absurd the thinking is behind this power grab by Obama, Reid and Pelosi. These people literally live in another world – a world of unbelievable privilege for an enlightened elite, people like themselves and their friends.

Ordinary Americans who work hard from 9 to 5 every day are the saps. They are merely meal tickets for the elite of society. The masses are in servitude to the elite, as is true in any socialist society, though they would never put it that way.

Rush Limbaugh explained Pelosi's attitude this way: "She lives in Woodstock Nation."

That's about right.

Pelosi has learned nothing since the fall of the Soviet Union. She learned nothing from Mao's long march or the Cultural Revolution. She learned nothing from the gulags. She still thinks smarter and more sensitive people, like she and Reid and Obama, can implement a more enlightened version of socialism where artists and photographers and poets can do their thing without being troubled by the need to feed themselves – at least state-approved artists and photographers and poets.

That's not the kind of world I want to live in. And I dare say that's really not the kind of world most Americans want created.

It's been tried. It has utterly failed every time. It leads only to oppression and tyranny.

I have a feeling Pelosi may be going so far off the deep end in her utopian fantasies that she no longer even serves her constituency in San Francisco. We'll find out soon enough.