Romney the Health Care Commie
Posted by Anthony Gregory on May 16, 2011
Mitt Romney is on constitutionally legitimate ground when he mounts the federalism defense of Romneycare while still criticizing Obamacare as harshly as any Republican worth his tea must do these days. His point that in a free republic, the states could serve as laboratories of democracy but the federal government should butt out, is valid, so far as it goes. American socialism is indeed more constitutionally sound and less damaging on the state level.
Yet there are still at least two problems with this position, one of which hints at why the GOP might reject him in the primary, and the other of which actually points toward the opposite fate for this man.
First of all, socialized medicine is still bad policy—morally and economically—even if done on the state level. American conservatives deride “Taxachussetts” for its state-level government interventions all the time. It is questionable that a conservative can favor such massive violations of free market and individualist principles as are involved in Romneycare, even on the state level, and yet offer a principled critique of Obamacare on anything other than purely practical or constitutional grounds.
Second of all, the constitutional argument carries no weight coming from a big-government Republican anyway. Does Romney oppose Medicare, Social Security, national education standards, plenary federal regulation of industry, the Federal Reserve, the FDA, and the war on drugs? None of these programs are any more constitutionally sound than Obamacare. Even in the area of health care, Romney, like practically all nationally prominent Republicans, comes off as a hypocrite in the extreme for attacking Obama’s socialism on constitutional grounds, since under the Tenth Amendment almost none of his federal proposals would fare much better. Thus, it’s better to attack Obama’s program on substantive economic grounds—but on this Romney in particular has no credibility because of what he did for to his state.
And yet, this second problem with Romney’s critique—that it is inconsistent with the rest of his philosophy on what the federal government ought to be doing—will probably not hurt him in the long run. This is because most Republicans are equally hypocritical. Ron Paul and Gary Johnson might have more believable and consistent criticisms, but this is exactly why they are not taken as seriously.
Unfortunately, most American conservatives have become snookered by the mild socialism of both parties. The New Deal/Great Society/Compassionate Conservative agenda of considerable domestic interventions, entitlement guarantees, cascading deficit spending, and federal support for the old, sick, needy, and indeed most of the middle class is a fixture of every political program to be advanced in a Republican presidential bid in a general election since the 1960s. Goldwater was the last one who didn’t sound like he was talking out of both sides of his mouth and much of his party was uncomfortable with him. Unfortunately, Romney’s weak critique of Democratic statism is par for the course.
Huckabee bailed out over the weekend, but conservatives shouldn’t have been any more enthusiastic about him. He favors horrendous government intrusions into our financial and personal lives. Gingrich just jumped in the race, and we should all be frightened at the prospect of his grabbing the levers of power, for he too is a dedicated interventionist. Same with Trump, Palin, Bachman, and practically everyone else being discussed as a likely contender in 2012.
So what to do if you’re a conservative with higher standards than this? Don’t be a pushover. Don’t support the lesser of evils, especially if it is a completely dubious claim that the candidate is any less evil at all. The budget spectacle of last month should have told us all we needed to know. The Republicans control the purse strings in the House of Representatives, and they are doing absolutely nothing to slow down America’s descent into socialist bankruptcy. When all the smoke cleared, the Republicans failed to “cut” enough spending even to take each American to the movies once—forget about the soda and popcorn. This is fiscal conservatism today. This is the Republican Party: Medicare D, No Child Left Behind, new national bureaucracies, endless unfunded wars, deficit spending to finance the welfare-warfare state of FDR, LBJ and George W. Bush. Romney is not a RINO (Republican in Name Only). He is in fact a quintessential modern Republican, and that is the great tragedy.
