Socialized Medicine

The headline in our local paper today, February 26, reads: “Obama: Raise Taxes on the Wealthy, Revenue to Pay for Health Plan”.  Enough read.  I have heard Mr. Obama’s support for wealth redistribution, so why am I surprised that El Presidente is putting his socialist plan into action?  It is a sense of how politics are done in America that gives me pause.

America, like ancient Rome, is essentially conservative.  Rome rejected the Athenian model of democracy when she established her Republic, as America held a much more conservative revolution than did the blood-letting French.  It was the Gracchi who initiated a political agenda which started to swing the Republic into violent shifts on the political pendulum.  Both Gaius and Tiberius ended their political careers in death: the oligarchic establishment refused to recognize the sanctity of their tribunal offices, not so much because of their left-wing programs, but more so due to the celerity with which they implemented their political revolution.  The old guard feared that the Gracchi brothers were making a grab at absolute power by uniting themselves to the lower classes.   

Mr. Obama runs the risk of radicalizing the right.  In his first month’s spending blitzkrieg, he has disregarded the stock markets and the taxpayers.  This most recent of headlines, the beginning of the fulfillment of the promise to socialize our nation, is in-your-face collectivism.  How will the oligarchs respond?

I am not a rich man, by President Obama’s definition, though I am rich in ways that the deflating dollar cannot measure, but I do not think that it is right for the wealthy to be forced to foot the medical bill for the rest of the country.  We do need to lower costs and increase availability, but socialism and rationing are solutions worse than the problems they pretend to solve.