Cosmic Con

Barak Obama is sitting down with a bi-partisan group of lawmakers today to discuss health care reform. It is probably just coincidence that his first attempt to bring the two parties together happened after his gang lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. After all, candidate Obama insisted he was willing to listen to good ideas from all sides of the issues. I'm sure his previous attitude of "my way or the highway" was only due to the lack of good ideas from his loyal opposition.

Things have certainly changed in Washington since Obama's poll numbers started to slide. The loss of Ted Kennedy's senate seat to the Republicans really accelerated the mood swing. The change has been on the wind for several weeks, as I noted in this space back in January. Now it is beginning to look like a floodgate has been opened. Democrats everywhere are starting to duck and run from association with their dear leader, Evan Bayh being a recent startling addition to the deserters.

Barak Obama and the Democrats (for the most part) still believe they deserve absolute power in Washington. He and his partisans remind us constantly of the mandate they received in 2008. This claim rings a bit phony; as I remember, only forty-something percent of the electorate voted for "change." Still, all we hear from the sultans of change is how out of step the opposition is with the sentiment in the country. Even the eruptions of the town hall meetings last summer didn't convince them. The protesters were a small minority, they claimed, stirred up by partisan Republican forces.

The faulty assumption here is that they think they can get what they deserve. We humans are conditioned to think that way in modern society. Get a college degree; get a good job; get a lot of money. Get elected; get a mandate; get an agenda rolling. I am not sure the serfs in feudal Europe would have seen this correlation, nor would the common laborers in the pre-union days of the industrial revolution. The nobles and owners probably did though, droit de Signor and all that.

The real issue underlying the health care debate is, in fact, determining what Americans deserve with regard to their medical care. Completely absent from the current discussion is a voice proclaiming that access to everything medical science has to offer is not a human right. I made that point in an letter to Congresswoman Debbie Stabenow last year, but she did not respond. Much to my dismay, none of the conservative legislators I have heard speaking on the subject bring this up either. They seem to be granting the assumption that health care is a right.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised; the concept of entitlement is not something new in human history. That mindset is precisely what the Serpent said to Eve in the Garden: "God is not being fair. You deserve to know what He is keeping from you; you're entitled to eat from the forbidden tree." The downside of our remarkable prosperity in the West is that we come to think we are entitled to limitless prosperity as individuals. The cosmic con artist is still at work duping the human race. I really shouldn't blame President Obama for simply trying to give us what we think we deserve.