Hillary's Iron Fist Shows

Hillary Clinton has been trying to cast herself as the 'mommy' for these United States. However, even when she is trying her best to assume a persona of the loving mommy, she cannot entirely hide her statist, big-government motives. Further proof, if any were needed, that Hillary is at heart a socialist Big Sister was provided by the New York Times this morning. According to the Times, Hillary is proposing to enforce her universal health-care ideas by garnishing the paychecks of any workers who choose not to participate. The Times writes,

Mrs. Clinton, who did not answer Senator Barack Obama’s question on the topic in a debate last Thursday, was pressed repeatedly to do so Sunday by George Stephanopoulos on the ABC program “This Week.” When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked a third time whether she would garnish people’s wages, Mrs. Clinton responded, “George, we will have an enforcement mechanism, whether it’s that or it’s some other mechanism through the tax system or automatic enrollments.”

Although the Times use of actual analysis (though very little) in revealing Clinton's intent was a small shock, it should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed Clinton's career. From the very first, she is an unabashed big-government promoter, who believe that the government can do better at making individuals' decisions than those individuals themselves. Clinton tried to foist a massive government-run healthcare plan on the Untied States in the 1990s, and now she wants to try again, despite the fact that many Americans simply do not want to buy insurance- especially younger single people who do not see the need and choose not to spend the money. As the Power Line crew so correctly writes,

The least-acknowledged fact in the present debate over health care is that many millions of Americans have no good reason to buy health insurance. This is especially true of single young people, above all single men. They rarely become seriously ill, and they know that if they are unlucky enough to be in an accident or contract a serious illness, they will be treated anyway. So, quite properly, they see no reason to pay for health insurance or--the same thing--place a high value on health insurance as an employment benefit.

Pizza Hut learned this a few years ago when it pioneered a program that made health insurance available to its part-time workers at remarkably advantageous rates. To the company's surprise, few of its part-time employees--fewer than ten percent, as I recall--signed up for the plan. Even at subsidized rates, the vast majority of young, single employees had no interest in spending money on health insurance.

Thus, the crocodile tears that are shed over "the uninsured" are by no means entirely genuine. One of the basic purposes of just about anyone's "health care plan" is to find a way to force those millions of young, single people to pay for the health care required by their elders.

This is quite correct. And I for one, do not see anywhere in our Constitution that the government, especially the federal government, has any rights or power to force people to buy things they simply do not wish to purchase. If we were living in a Communist country, then the government would indeed have that power, as we see in China and other such countries. However, the United States is quite different- we deliberately chose to limit the government's power to force us to do things we don't wish to do. And forcing younger people to pay for their elders' healthcare is a particularly egregious abuse of that power. If Hillary wants to try that, then she ought to at least be honest about her intent to abuse the power of the federal government in ways that it was never intended. Hat tip to