The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money-Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future by David Horowitz & Jacob Laksin

Author:David Horowitz & Jacob Laksin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Political Science / General
ISBN: 9780307716477
Publisher: Crown Forum
Published: 2012-06-11T22:00:00+00:00

6.

SOCIALISM BY STEALTH

Barack Obama entered office amid the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Financial markets were tumbling, unemployment was rising, and a $1.2 trillion deficit loomed. In this dismal economic climate, leading Republicans and Democrats alike urged the new president to make the economy his chief domestic policy concern. Democrat Steny Hoyer, then the House majority leader, observed that “Whether you’re a Democrat, Republican or an Independent, all the polls reflect that the economy is the major issue.”1

Polls did indeed bear this out. A January 2009 Pew poll found that 85 percent of the American people wanted Obama to make the economy his top political priority, with registered Democrats even supporting a focus on the economy ahead of other issues in slightly higher numbers than Republicans. By contrast, health care ranked eighth on their list of priorities.2 By almost any measure, the economy should have been first and foremost on the incoming administration’s agenda.

Yet it was not. In February 2009, just a month after the Pew poll was released, Obama gave his first address to Congress and declared that his focus would be on … health care. Even as the country was urging the president to focus on the nation’s ailing economy, Obama declared that “we can no longer afford to put healthcare reform on hold.”3

This was not the first time that Obama had made news on this subject. While running for the US Senate in 2003, he had revealed his support for single-payer universal health care where government is the sole insurer—a socialist plan that would come back to haunt him as the health-care debate unfolded. Nonetheless, the president’s decision to make health care a top policy priority—in a time of pressing economic problems and in defiance of the will of the public and members of his own party—signaled a dramatic victory for those elements of the political left who saw socialized medicine as a foot in the door on the way to a socialist state. In short, what neutral observers might have regarded as a case of spectacularly misplaced priorities by a president faced with an economic crisis was in fact a top priority of the Left and a testament to its unrivaled ability to form powerful issue-focused coalitions and build advocacy campaigns that would succeed in “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” as the president himself had promised on the eve of his election.4

Historically, government-run “universal” health care has been a hard sell in the United States. Nor has a “right” to health care ever been recognized in America.5 It is unmentioned in any of the country’s founding documents, whether the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. That is no coincidence. When the founders wrote of citizens’ “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” they were referring to natural rights, which exist independent of government,6 and the rights they enumerated in the Bill of Rights were conceived as limits to government—prohibitions on what government might seek to do. The claim that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.