{"id":8307,"date":"2015-04-30T14:09:18","date_gmt":"2015-04-30T18:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=8307"},"modified":"2015-04-30T17:20:31","modified_gmt":"2015-04-30T21:20:31","slug":"fff-obamacare-racketeering-intellectual-knavery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/30\/fff-obamacare-racketeering-intellectual-knavery\/","title":{"rendered":"FFF: ObamaCare Racketeering & Intellectual Knavery"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"jpb<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

From the Future of Freedom Foundation’s <\/a>February 2015<\/a> magazine –<\/p>\n

ObamaCare Racketeering and Intellectual Knavery<\/strong><\/h3>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

Paternalism is a desperate gamble that lying politicians will honestly care for those who fall under their power.<\/strong> This axiom has been made stark with the controversy arising from a video of Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare, in which he admits that the administration conned the American public and blames dumb voters for the flimflam.<\/p>\n

Gruber, an MIT economist, received a $297,000 contract for his 2009-2010 work on health-care reform and helped lead the charge for the Affordable Care Act. In a video from an October 2013 panel at the Annual Health Economists\u2019 conference, Gruber explained how Obamacare was sold to the public: \u201cLack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that was really, really critical to get this thing to pass.\u201d In another 2013 appearance, Gruber declared that one provision of Obamacare was included because \u201cthe American people are too stupid to understand the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gruber also expressed his disdain for Americans\u2019 intelligence with a comic book he co-wrote on the virtues of Obamacare. In one panel, he boasts that \u201cI was part of the team that came up with the reform that changed the way Massachusetts handles medical coverage for the uninsured.\u201d Congress should investigate whether Gruber\u2019s emails and comments as part of the Obamacare legislative team explicitly advocated deceptive packaging or expressed derision for the American public.<\/p>\n

The real problem wasn\u2019t voter stupidity \u2014 it was the systemic deceit at the highest level of the Obama administration<\/strong>. Gruber admitted that the Obamacare \u201cbill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gruber told his fellow economists that \u201cif you had a law which \u2026 made explicit [that] healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.\u201d So the Obama team covered the bill in smokescreens to hornswoggle people into acquiescing to the right-eous result. Thanks to sovereign immunity, neither Gruber nor other Obamacare authors need worry about being prosecuted for fraud.<\/p>\n

Obamacare was enacted before the president\u2019s supposed idealism became a laughingstock.<\/strong> Shortly before he signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Barack Obama told a University of Michigan audience, \u201cWhen we don\u2019t pay close attention to the decisions made by our leaders, when we fail to educate ourselves about the major issues of the day \u2026 that\u2019s when democracy breaks down. That\u2019s when power is abused.\u201d Obama also declared that \u201cwe need an educated citizenry that values hard evidence and not just assertion.\u201d<\/p>\n

What we really need is a citizenry that recognizes that politicians are often far more devious than their friends in the media portray them. As comedian Lily Tomlin quipped, \u201cNo matter how cynical you become, it\u2019s never enough to keep up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama sold his health-care bill by promising dozens of times that people would be allowed to keep their doctor and health plans. Millions of insurance cancellation notices later, no one believes the president. The mainstream media was far more gullible on Obamacare than average voters. The administration\u2019s slippery assertions were perennially reported as \u201chard evidence\u201d when they should have been portrayed as political spin.<\/p>\n

While Mr. Obama\u2019s \u201cbest and brightest\u201d have openly derided average Americans, it wasn\u2019t \u201cstupid\u201d voters who built the Obamacare enrollment website that crashed and burned last year. It wasn\u2019t \u201cstupid\u201d voters who vastly overestimated Obamacare enrollment. (The administration conceded in November that enrollment in 2015 will be far less than forecast.) It wasn\u2019t stupid voters who threw private health planning into chaos with a deluge of often senseless, politically motivated federal mandates.<\/p>\n

The selling of Obamacare was uncannily similar to Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s huckstering on Social Security. The Roosevelt administration railroaded the bill creating Social Security through Congress in 1935 by portraying it as an insurance program that gave citizens vested property rights akin to a private contract. However, in a 1937 Supreme Court brief, the Roosevelt administration confessed that Social Security \u201ccannot be said to constitute a plan for compulsory insurance within the accepted meaning of the term insurance\u201d and characterized Social Security as a \u201cpublic charity\u201d program under the \u201cgeneral welfare\u201d clause of the Constitution.<\/p>\n

The Brookings Institution\u2019s Martha Derthick observed, \u201cIn the mythic construction begun in 1935 \u2026 Social Security was a vast enterprise of self-help in which government participation was almost incidental.\u201d In 1979, Social Security Commissioner Stanford Ross conceded that \u201cthe mythology of Social Security contributed greatly to its success\u2026. Strictly speaking, the system was never intended to return to individuals what they paid.\u201d When the feds default on Social Security payments promised to current and future generations, citizens will learn too late that 10,000 political promises are worth less than one wooden nickel.<\/p>\n

Low information experts<\/p>\n

Democratic politicians and the so-called liberal media scrambled to curtail the damage from Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber\u2019s proclamations on stupid voters and deceitful legislative tactics. A New York Times editorial dismissed Gruber\u2019s comments as \u201cimpolitic,\u201d while The New Republic largely exonerated him as an \u201cindependent-minded professor\u201d devoted to the public good. However, the \u201cnothing to see here, move along\u201d defense is doomed to fail.<\/p>\n

White House spokeswoman Jessica Santillo responded to Gruber\u2019s comments: \u201cThe Affordable Care Act was publicly debated over the course of 14 months, with dozens of congressional hearings, and countless town halls, speeches, and debates.\u201d Obama exonerated the process by declaring that \u201cwe had a year-long debate\u201d over the proposed law.<\/p>\n

But to assume that the process was transparent because \u201chearings were held\u201d is like claiming that political campaigns are honest because \u201cspeeches were made.\u201d<\/strong> It doesn\u2019t matter how many hearings occurred if the administration conned Congress and the American people on the key assumptions underlying the law. That is akin to prosecutors who withhold exculpatory evidence from a defendant and then insist that a wrongful conviction must not be overturned because \u201ca trial was held.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gruber has been christened \u201cthe Oracle of Obamacare,\u201d and he boasted in 2009 of the \u201cblack box\u201d computer program he used to gin up the numbers to support the Obama legislative agenda. The Washington Post reported that one official involved in crafting the Obamacare legislative package \u201csaid Gruber and his staff of three could provide answers overnight, when it often took weeks to run the same questions through the Office of Management and Budget or the Congressional Budget Office.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gruber was hired to provide intellectual cover for one of the greatest power seizures of modern times. He was endlessly touted as a genius from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology \u2014 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid labeled Gruber \u201cone of the most respected economists in the world.\u201d If he had hailed instead from Appalachian State University, politicians and pundits would have asked far more questions about the \u201cblack box\u201d that spun out the numbers to make the Obamacare legislative proposal seem nondisastrous.<\/p>\n

Invoking a secret computer model is more suasive in today\u2019s Washington than the tricks Merlin the magician practiced in King Arthur\u2019s court. Econometrics has long been a tool to sanctify almost any half-witted intervention politicians favored. For instance, the farm lobby has never lacked arcane models crafted by government agricultural economists proving that America benefits from paying farmers more than their crops are worth.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, contemporary Washington is calibrated to defer to experts who defer to politicians, providing an intellectual Praetorian Guard for the constant growth of Leviathan. As Denver University professor David Ciepley noted, \u201cStarting in the First World War, and much more so during the New Deal and World War II, American social scientists became part of the autonomous state themselves, helping staff the mushrooming government agencies.\u201d The closer intellectuals get to politicians, the more weaselly they usually become.<\/p>\n

Playing off Gruber\u2019s derision of average Americans, one wag suggested a new acronym \u2014 L.I.E. \u2014 for Low Information Experts. Gruber and many other professors have gotten rich by pretending that government is far more competent than it actually is. Economist Robert Skidelsky, writing about the history of modern socialism, observed that \u201cthe collectivist belief system existed independently of the facts of modern life.\u201d The same is true of the academic cadre who profit by vindicating endless government interventions that breed chaos and dependency.<\/p>\n

The shenanigans by which Obamacare was enacted vivify how far this nation has fallen from the Founding Fathers\u2019 ideals. We increasingly have a caretaker democracy in which rulers dupe and punish citizens for their own good. Supposedly, voters still enjoy self-government because they are permitted a token choice in who will deceive and shackle them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Politicians do not have a divine right to deceive those they intend to benefit \u2014 or at least to control. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as retroactive self-government. Laws are not nullified after the exposure of the deceits that led to their enactment.<\/strong> Will the new Congress have the courage and wisdom to repeal Obamacare before it further ravages Americans\u2019 freedom and health care?<\/p>\n

On Twitter @jimbovard<\/p>\n

Thanks to Greg Groesch of the Washington Times for the zesty artwork at the top<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Future of Freedom Foundation’s February 2015 magazine – ObamaCare Racketeering and Intellectual Knavery by James Bovard Paternalism is a desperate gamble that lying politicians will honestly care for those who fall under their power. This axiom has been made stark with the controversy arising from a video of Jonathan Gruber, one of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7769,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[415,704,15,485,497,194,209,45,163,690,503,164,27,662,136,38,273,272,692,165,55,506,151],"class_list":{"0":"post-8307","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"tag-boondoggle","9":"tag-congress","10":"tag-corruption-2","11":"tag-economics","12":"tag-epigrams","13":"tag-fraud-2","14":"tag-freedom","15":"tag-intellectuals","17":"tag-jonathan-gruber","18":"tag-leviathan","19":"tag-lying","21":"tag-nanny-state-2","22":"tag-obama","23":"tag-obamacare-2","24":"tag-obamacare","25":"tag-paternalism","27":"tag-secrecy","28":"tag-subsidies","29":"tag-waste"},"yoast_head":"\nFFF: ObamaCare Racketeering & Intellectual Knavery - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8307"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8311,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8307\/revisions\/8311"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}