The Dictatorship Begins on Jan. 1st, 2014

On January 1st, 2014, the Individual Mandate contained within ObamaCare goes into effect. This mandate will make a dictator out of the US President overnight.

I do not make this claim lightly. For a power being granted to a leader to be considered dictatorial, there are three requirements that must be fulfilled:
The power must give absolute power to one individual.
The power must be totalitarian in scope.
The power must be irrevocable.

Absolute Power for One Individual

When the Individual Mandate goes into effect, all Americans will be required to purchase “proper” health insurance plans, or will be forced to pay a tax. All health insurance companies will be forced to only offer “proper” plans to their customers. It will be considered illegal to offer an insurance plan that is not considered “proper.”

So you ask, what’s wrong with proper insurance? There’s a catch: The Secretary of Health and Human Services has sole authoritative power to determine the contents and requirements of a “proper health insurance plan.” The Secretary of Health and Human Services (currently Kathleen Sebelius) reports directly to the President, must follow all of his Executive Orders, and can be fired by him at any time, so that he can appoint a new one of his choice.

In other words, the President maintains a dictatorship over the definition of the “proper health insurance plans” that we are all forced to buy. The President can also force health insurance companies to boycott any health care providers (doctors and hospitals) that try to cater to individuals who choose not to buy health insurance. They already use this method to force health care providers to offer major discounts to Medicare patients, and they could easily use this method to prevent those resisting the Individual Mandate from obtaining any form of health care at all.

So the choice we all end up with is: buy one of these “proper” health insurance plans defined by the President, or be punished through the complete deprivation of health care. This is the enforcement mechanism.

Totalitarian in Scope

But this only affects health care, and health care is special, right?

Wrong. There is no legal requirement in the ObamaCare law that the definition of a “proper health insurance plan” must only include measures relating to health care. Already, Obama has declared that every health insurance plan must provide contraception, which is only as relevant to health as our choice of food, car, home, or any other choices we make in our lives.

The President can easily decree any other purchasing mandate, requiring us to buy a GM car, or buy broccoli, or buy houses in specific areas, or buy certain newspapers, or subscribe to a propaganda newsletter touting the president’s achievements, or join a union. The President can also use his power over insurance coverage to retaliate against groups who do not support him. For instance, the President might put clause in your insurance plan that states that you lose coverage for some number of conditions if you buy a gun, or spend too much money supporting his opponent, or live in a wealthy neighborhood.

From a legal perspective, this law gives the President the totalitarian power to force any activity, or punish any activity, under the threat of loss of health care. All he has to do is say that it’s a part of your insurance plan (which would rapidly lose all relation to health care other than through its enforcement mechanism).

Irrevocable Power

What about the separation of powers? Checks and balances? Congress has already surrendered its power by delegating the power to define “proper” insurance plans to the President’s appointees. The Supreme Court has already taken a whack at this law, and bizarrely ruled the Individual Mandate constitutional so long as it only makes use of economic incentives, rather than prison sentences to enforce its goals. But of course, those economic incentives can be just as damaging as prison sentences. The only branch of government that has the power to stop this law from becoming a dictatorship is the Executive Branch. Only the dictator can prevent the dictatorship (or a 2/3rds majority in both houses of Congress to override vetoes, but that’s the stuff of legend). The separation of powers and all the checks and balances have been thwarted.

As humans have learned throughout history, once a leader gains dictatorial power, it is extremely difficult to remove him, even if he is subjected to periodic elections. Under a dictatorship, information is controlled, and political opponents are destroyed, as in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. The means of production are given to political allies, and elections are stolen, as in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and Chavez’s Venezuela. The citizens may even begin to worship their leaders out of a sense of dependence, as in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Maoist China, and North Korea.

Our only hope for avoiding dictatorship is to get ObamaCare repealed before January 1st, 2014. Obama will not do it. If we cannot remove Obama from office, either in the November election, or through impeachment prior to 2014, the United States government will become a dictatorship.

If you’ve been wondering what would drive a libertarian like myself to support a conservative like Mitt Romney, this is why. After the Supreme Court upheld ObamaCare, the gravity of the situation became clear: it’s all on us to pick the right president. Unlike Gary Johnson, Romney can beat Obama, and unlike Obama, he has pledged to repeal ObamaCare. Certainly, there is always the chance that Romney is lying and would keep ObamaCare. But if he does, he loses the support of his base, and the legendary 2/3rds majority in Congress may manifest and repeal the dictatorial powers over his veto.

This is our last chance. We, the People of the United States, must remove Barack Obama from office in order to save our freedom from an untimely death.

Social Darwinism in the GOP?

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “if one of the current crop of Republican hopefuls becomes president, Social Darwinism is back.”

Okay, I think a history lesson is in order. The claim in this article is that Social Darwinism consists of the belief that “life was a competitive struggle in which only the fittest could survive – and through this struggle, societies became stronger over time.” But wait a second- that’s natural selection, not Social Darwinism. There’s a world of difference between the statistical inevitability that is natural selection and the social philosophy that is Social Darwinism.

Natural selection happens whether you like it or not, adapting populations to survive as efficiently as possible. If you create a society that lets individuals survive without doing any work, then very few individuals will do work and that society will collapse.

On the other hand, Social Darwinism is a philosophy which suggests that society should actively seek out and destroy the elements considered “weak” or “inefficient.” Who makes that judgement? Generally, the government. Social Darwinism is a philosophy of letting the government pick winners and losers, NOT the philosophy of letting societies naturally evolve towards adaptability.

For example, consider Nazi Germany. How do we envision Hitler’s version of Social Darwinism? Was Hitler a proponent of laissez-faire policies, giving people the liberty to make their own choices and live with the results? No, of course not! Hitler was a totalitarian who usurped the power for his own administration to decide who gets to succeed (or even survive) based on their own narrow judgements of who deserves it. Hitler was no free-market advocate, and free-market advocates are no Social Darwinists.

So if you want to find the Social Darwinists, look for the politicians who are trying to give government the power to arbitrarily pick winners and losers according to the judgements of appointed bureaucrats, rather than letting people make their own fortune in an unbiased market. Can you think of anyone who this description fits? I’ll give you a hint: it starts with “O” and ends with “bama.”

Here’s what Obama is gonna do if he stays for 4 more years

He will continue doing much of what he’s done for the last 2.5 years. That means:

More indefensible bureaucratic expansion. [link]
More regulation of company mobility to prevent profitable enterprises from fleeing Democratic majority states to search for more freedom elsewhere. [link]
More economic failure, leading to Carter-style stagflation. [link]
More debt growth, as he resists all attempts to steer the country away from an imminent Greek-style crash. [link]
More moralistic nationalization, enforced through militarization of the US police forces, pushing us towards a Soviet-style police state. [link] [link] [link]
More corrupt abuses of executive power, bordering on illegality. [link] [link] [link]

If you want to continue these disturbing trends, to disregard liberty in favor of a Soviet-style socialist nation under a government with totalitarian control over your personal life and endeavors, then by all means, vote for Obama in 2012. But if you want change- economic recovery and the restoration of the values of liberty -then for your own sake, vote against the Democrats!

Future Leaders of America Express Reservations About Freedom of Speech

This is a little scary. My generation isn’t too fond of the right to freedom of speech. And when I say “Future Leaders of America,” I don’t mean it in the trite and meaningless way it’s normally used- I mean it literally.

Georgetown University is famous for producing many of the political leaders of this country. Notable alumni include Governor Mitch Daniels, Pat Buchanan, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, George Tenet (Director of the CIA), John Podesta, M. Ashraf Haidari, Justice Antonin Scalia, Senator Dick Durbin, Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Representative Steny Hoyer, Lt. General John Allen, our 42nd President, and many others. You’d have a hard time finding a committee or bureaucracy in Washington without at least one Georgetown alum.

Isn’t it a little bit disturbing that the youngest generation capable of voting has become so complacent about the concept of liberty that those of them who may one day be running this country seem to think it’s a good idea to censor those they disagree with? How do we put an end to this dangerous complacency?

In a World Where the Government Provides Health Care to Everyone, Nobody Gets Abortions

Liberals and socialists across the country are celebrating their victory in the passing of this health care legislation. It may not be exactly what they wanted, but it’s a first step towards nationalized health care. But what if they had gotten that final goal in this piece of legislation? What if this had been the legislation that created a national health care plan which enrolled everyone?

Well, if that had been the case, then I say that nobody but the rich would be getting abortions in this country from here on out.

See, in order to pass this legislation, Obama had to make a deal with anti-abortion Democrats:

In the late afternoon, he made the decision to take one more chance. He agreed to issue an executive order declaring that the healthcare measure would not change the existing ban on federal funding for abortions. That brought over Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), leader of the last Democratic holdouts, even though the order risked infuriating some of Obama’s most important supporters.

In all their lust for a national health care plan, liberals seem to fail to realize that when the government controls the funding for a service, they control that service, and they get to decide what services are provided. When the government controls health care, all abortions will be paid for out-of-pocket.

You see, an unintended effect of all this progressivism is that the more dependent we become on the government to provide our needs, the more control the government will have over our lives. The more they pay for us, the more decisions they can make for us. This is always true.

And so I make a plea to every citizen in this country:

Do you want to give the government that kind of power over all of our lives?