Mark Steyn is always pithy and usually insightful. He gets his own post
The Liberty Issue
My Favorite quotes:My conservative friends — and even a few media liberals — are agreed: The bloom is off the Obama rose. He’s not the Obamessiah, just another 50-percent president. He tried to do too much too fast, and his numbers are sinking. The Europeanization of health care is dead. Fuhgeddabouddit.
I wouldn’t be so sure. President Obama has no choice but to move fast, in part because the image he presented during the campaign — a post-partisan, post-racial, post-anything-unpleasant-and-controversial, pragmatic centrist — was a total crock. He has a vast transformative domestic agenda and — because most of its elements are not terribly popular — he has to accomplish it at speed, or he won’t get it done at all.
Quite right. Obama was not what he claimed to be, and frankly I am disappointed in many people who bought into the idea. It didn't take much thought or examination to realize this before the election. Well... its not like the Republicans had a decent alternative candidate. Note to Republicans: The quality of your candidate really does matter.
On the price tag: It’s often argued that, as a proportion of GDP, America spends more on health care than countries with government medical systems. But, as a point of fact, “America” doesn’t spend anything on health care: Hundreds of millions of people make hundreds of millions of individual decisions about what they’re going to spend on health care. Whereas up north a handful of bureaucrats determine what Canada will spend on health care — and that’s that: Health care is a government budget item.
Damn, that is an important distinction! The money quote:
How did the health-care debate decay to the point where we think it entirely natural for the central government to fix a collective figure for what 300 million freeborn citizens ought to be spending on something as basic to individual liberty as their own bodies?
This is why I love Steyn. He cuts to the heart of the matter. Republicans fall into this trap time and time again. They allow their opponents to set the framework of the debate and then nitpick the details. The Government has no business in healthcare. They should get out and stay out and let free people make their own decisions like adults.
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