Henry Waxman and the New American Way

by Ben Domenech

One of the dirty little secrets of Capitol Hill is that most politicians – even the ones the horserace-focused media depicts as irredeemably ideologically divided – actually have no coherent driving ideology. The secret is revealed only occasionally. If powerful oversight chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) hadn’t reconsidered his plans this week to call the CEOs of major companies into committee chambers for his version of Beltway blackmail, the American people might have had an opportunity to witness it being revealed.

Waxman originally called the hearing in a characteristic fit of pique. After more than nine months of labor, the House of Representatives had finally given birth to the gargantuan ogre of Obamacare. Yet before the Democratic leadership could finish tousling the hair of the prop children at their signing ceremonies, corporate America started following the law, in the most inconvenient manner possible: they reported to their investors and employees the effects the new legislation would have on their benefit plans.

In each case, the analysts employed by major companies like AT&T, Verizon Communications, Caterpillar, Deere & Co. and others did their job: they delivered reports detailing the ramifications – higher premiums, dropped drug coverage, and forcing their employees into taxpayer-funded plans – thanks to the new bill. Waxman, infuriated, demanded the CEOs of these troublesome companies turn over all internal communications about the predicted results, as if he thought they would reveal some devious Republican plot, instead of the simple mathematical calculations of the green eyeshades and the diligent efforts of company lawyers to ensure that the companies complied with federal disclosure laws.

The inconvenient truth for Waxman – something he would know if he weren’t a dogmatic partisan – is that he’s seeing a feature of Obamacare, not a bug. The ideological basis of the health reform package was never about lowering insurance premiums for the American people, increasing the quality of care, or decreasing the burden of health costs on corporate America. Quite the contrary; it was designed to advance a long-term agenda to cede massive authority to government, and to achieve a permanent social change in the path to prosperity.  And, yes, to use increased costs to limit the options open to large corporations.

The aims of socialism are often misunderstood by most Americans, as the only socialist most know of is that harmless disheveled professor on the local campus. It’s a word which can hardly be considered insulting when an elected Senator of the Socialist party caucuses with the Democrats. While socialism is sold as a way to elevate the underclass, the actual result of its application isn’t to increase the prosperity of the poor – it’s a method of achieving permanent stratification by allowing the more productive members of society to pass any losses onto others.

The reason socialism fails, as my colleague Francis Cianfrocca describes it, is that it socializes losses, not gains. It is an application of the “too big to fail” policy across all levels of society – because the losers no longer face consequences for their mistakes, businessmen are happy to make more of them, morphing into the oligarchs of the Soviet era. The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, and the classless society becomes one where the boundaries of class are nigh impossible to break.

President Obama has drawn many comparisons to Jimmy Carter and Woodrow Wilson, but his agenda is, in its all-encompassing approach, far more ambitious. As Josh Trevino has pointed out, where liberal projects once consisted of focused attacks on either end of the economic continuum – punitive taxes on the wealthy, union enabling, the minimum wage, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty – Obama’s agenda is designed to destroy the ability to transit from one end of the continuum to the other. Every new cushion, apparently designed to ease the pain of losses, means new barriers obstructing individual freedom of action and the expected rewards of risk-taking, resulting in an immovable class society.

What is unprecedented about this agenda is that it fundamentally alters the traditional pathways to prosperity in American life. Social mobility is a distinctive, near-unique feature of America throughout its history. But if you are going to achieve financial success in Obama’s America, you will do so by following the path of these CEOs: passing the costs of benefits onto the taxpayers, spreading the burden of your losses to others, and, ideally, selling something to the government – the customer who never stops buying.

This is our future, designed by the leftist philosophers who inform President Obama’s views, and shepherded into law by partisan politicians like Henry Waxman. Welcome to the new American way.


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Posted Apr 20th 2010 at 4:33 pm in Healthcare | 220 Comments