Keep your eye on the ball.

Ever get the feeling that Democrats can’t possibly be this stupid? To increase deficits to unmanageable levels on purpose under the guise of ‘fixing’ the economy? To cram health care ‘reform’ legislation through congress without even bothering to understand what it means let alone whether it will actually reform anything or make things infinitely worse? Purposefully putting in place “climate” legislation like “cap and trade” that will knowingly bankrupt our coal industry all because of Al Gore’s cuckoo and demonstrably false environmental fantasies?

It’s so easy to sit back and let it all wash over you. They’re smart people. They know what they’re doing. Someone, somewhere, deep in the party, wants the economy to actually work and for our health care system to be better. Eventually, Obama will listen to these better angels and “do the right thing”. Even if you don’t necessarily agree with the means, if it ends up fixing things, then who cares in the end, right?

That all wouldn’t be that bad a plan if Obama and the Liberals currently jerking the levers of government had the same idea of “fix” as you did. You may be a Yankee fan (I won’t understand it, but you may) and you may hate their manager, Joe Girardi. He may hit and run in the wrong spot. He may not position his outfielders well. But you know that regardless of all that, he basically wants to win baseball games. And because of that, you root for him to succeed, despite the methods he uses. If he can bring your guys the rings in October, he can play the outfielders in Monument Park if he wants. Just win, baby. As well it should be.

What does it mean for Obama to “win”?

Recall that the single thing that all his policies to date have in common is that they are very expensive.

That’s it. Whether it be cap and trade, the Recovery Act or health care reform, the bills (where there are bills) have all been hastily (and poorly) written, rushed through the legislative branch, and believed by experts to do little to “help” the situation that they were ostensibly launched to remedy. What everything was sure to have, however, was a steep price tag.

So if the object of these bills was not to actually fix anything or help anyone, then what was the point?

The point was to take your money.

Expensive things need to be paid for. By inking these legislative promises to pile up enormous debt, Obama is guaranteeing that the federal government will be in your pockets into the foreseeable (and unforseeable) future to repay. So it doesn’t matter that none of this legislation will “work” to “fix” the stated “harm”. What matters is that we will have guaranteed a commitment to tax. And tax. And tax.

Victor Davis Hanson lays some groundwork as to why:

The point [of the deficit-exploding legislation] . . . was the consequence of the resulting deficits, which will require radically new taxation for generations. If on April 15 the federal and state governments, local entities, the Social Security system, and the new health-care programs can claim 70 percent of the income of the top 5 percent of taxpayers, then that is considered a public good — every bit as valuable as funding new programs, and one worth risking insolvency.

Individual compensation is now seen as arbitrary and, by extension, inherently unfair. A high income is now rationalized as having less to do with market-driven needs, acquired skills, a higher level of education, innate intelligence, inheritance, hard work, or accepting risk. Rather income is seen more as luck-driven, cruelly capricious, unfair — even immoral, in that some are rewarded arbitrarily on the basis of race, class, and gender advantages, others for their overweening greed and ambition, and still more for their quasi-criminality.

“Patriotic” federal healers must then step in to “spread the wealth.” Through redistributive tax rates, they can “treat” the illness that the private sector has caused. After all, there is no intrinsic reason why an auto fabricator makes $60 in hourly wages and benefits, while a young investment banker finagles $500.

Spread the wealth.

We heard that from Joe the Plumber during the campaign and the Left went into near hysteria trying to convince America that the term didn’t mean exactly what Obama meant it to mean. Because the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist. But the term is real. It has meaning. Socialists embrace this meaning. They’ve been running (and losing) on this platform in United States elections for 100 years. Obama would have lost too if he’d been honest about his plan to reorder America according to his  disproved theories of Social Justice. Americans reject the notion that happiness should be guaranteed. We reject the notion that anything other than the “pursuit” of it is mentioned in the “mission statement” of our nation–the Declaration of Independence. We reject the notion that “luck” determines outcomes and that there is anything “arbitrary” or “capricious” about a hard-working family’s salary that needs to be “adjusted” to permit a non-working person to achieve something he didn’t work for.

Obama embraces all those things, and has pushed through terrible legislation designed not to fix anything except the scales of “social justice”.

Again, from Mr. Hanson:

[W]hy would intelligent politicians try to ram through, in mere weeks, a thousand pages of health-care gibberish — its details outsourced to far-left elements in the Congress (and their staffers) — that few in the cabinet had ever read or even knew much about?

Once again, I don’t think health care per se was ever really the issue. When pressed, no one in the administration seemed to know whether illegal aliens were covered. Few cared why young people do not divert some of their entertainment expenditures to a modest investment in private catastrophic coverage.

Warnings that Canadians already have their health care rationed, wait in long lines, and are denied timely and critical procedures also did not seem to matter. And no attention was paid to statistics suggesting that, if we exclude homicides and auto accidents, Americans live as long on average as anyone in the industrial world, and have better chances of surviving longer with heart disease and cancer. That the average American did not wish to radically alter his existing plan, and that he understood that the uninsured really did have access to health care, albeit in a wasteful manner at the emergency room, was likewise of no concern.

The issue again was larger, and involved a vast reinterpretation of how America receives health care.  Whether more or fewer Americans would get better or worse access and cheaper or more expensive care, or whether the government can or cannot afford such new entitlements, oddly seemed largely secondary to the crux of the debate.

Instead, the notion that the state will assume control, in Canada-like fashion, and level the health-care playing field was the real concern. “They” (the few) will now have the same care as “we” (the many). Whether the result is worse or better for everyone involved is extraneous, since sameness is the overarching principle.

Read that last bit again.

“Whether the result is worse or better for everyone involved is extraneous, since sameness is the overarching principle.”

It’s like the Joe Girardi suddenly running the Yankees like a little league coach, making sure that everybody got a chance to play, regardless of how such acts impacted the results of the game. Would Yankee fans still root for him to win if he did that? Would they still believe that, regardless of means, he was still interested in winning the game? Of course not.

They’d want his ass out of there.

What is Obama’s end game? To get health care, the environment and the economy right? Or is it something more sinister—to pronounce that it is ‘unfair’ for people ‘with’ money to ‘have’ it anymore, and to ‘take’ it away through ‘taxes’ and ‘give’ it to others?