Conservative Donnybrook

The president unveiled his plan to free the credit markets. SURPRISE! It appears it will costs about $1.5 trillion. It is not clear how much of that will be government expenditures and what percentage will be from coerced rich folk. I just wonder what happens if there are not many rich folks who want to buy failed debt. As I see it, if that happens, there are two possibilities. First, the government to force them to make the purchase anyway with threats of some sort of sanction (think: tax code). Second, the government could entice them by guaranteeing their contributions with promises of increased returns to offset the risk they are taking on. Both versions entail tyranny on a level that America has never seen. The second would cost taxpayers significantly more than the $1.5 trillion estimate that Geithner is touting.

Details are sketchy at this point, so you can be sure that the push to pass whatever legislation is required will begin now. At this point, truly, what is another trillion give or take. We’re equally screwed whether we spend it or not.

With the defection of Specter, Snowe and Collins, the Senate passed Obama’s stimulus package. If the House can reconcile its version with that passed by the Senate, there is little doubt that Obama will sign it into law. As time goes by, more of the details of the package become known.

And those details are alarming. For instance, buried in the fine print is some fundamental changes to the way health care is handled in the United States. One such change is the formation of a new bureaucracy called the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. That organization will be charged with tracking the decisions and treatments of your doctor to ensure that he is doing everything possible to reduce the costs of health care. The idea, it seems, was cribbed from Tom Daschle’s book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis. In that book, Daschle said of your family doctor, that he should give up the notion of autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

Toward that end, the stimulus package institutes a new nationwide electronic health records system, its use hospitals and doctors will have to be “meaningful users” of. What that means, nobody knows, nor does anybody know what the penalty for transgressing the new requirements might be. What is known is that the Secretary of Health and Human Services will be empowered with progressively stronger measures to see to its enforcement.

In his book, Daschle remarked that the elderly will have to be “more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them.” Nonetheless, who wants to bet that the liberal AARP laps this up?

With items like this buried in the fine print, we can only urge our Senators and Representatives to rethink their votes and to block reconciliation. It is the only hope that this travesty can be stopped. I am not optimistic about that.