IT’S A BIG RIVER IN EGYPT

I was raised a Democrat. Democrats are not idiots, though they're almost universally ignorant in one field of human endeavor, which unfortunately is an important one.

Democrats, generally, have never launched and run a small business in today's smothering regulatory environment. Most of them don't even know, for example, that the withholding tax is twice what you see on your paycheck stub -- your employer could otherwise by paying YOU the tax known as the "employer match." (What is the justification for this penalty, imposed on anyone who dares create a job, right down to the smallest pizza shop? If Democrats want to launch a "jobs program," why not just repeal the "employer payroll withholding match"? In fact, what is the justification for forcing any employer to serve as an unpaid tax collector? Why not just repeal any and all "payroll withholding" obligations, instead requiring each worker to simply mail in a check for his or her $10,000 — or whatever — each April 15?)

Nor have most Democrats learned, nor do they appear to have any interest in learning, business or economic realities which could also be acquired — at considerably less cost — by studiously reading such celebrated observers of human action as Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, or Henry Hazlitt.

This wouldn't matter much if it did not fatally combine, in the souls of most Democrats, with an unquenchable thirst to restrict the freedoms of others to better themselves, their families, and their nation by seeking to work for profit, an undertaking which Democrats condemn as "greed," as opposed to what they see as their own high-minded charitable instinct, which they seek to express by forcing the "greedy rich" to hand over their "greedy profits" to unionized Democrat bureaucrats, under threat of fines or jail time, supposedly to distribute to the poor (though for some reason the Democrat bureaucrats and politicians, upon early retirement, always seem to live far better than the "poor" whom they've supposedly spent their lives aiding with all this purloined loot.)

And Democrats surely would not elect the dimmest bulbs from among their number to serve in Congress. So, while they are doubtless very nice people in their private dealings, and not idiots, I'm forced to conclude that such leading Democrats as Barack Obama and two of our own Nevada congresscritters, Shelley Berkley and Dina Titus, are self-deluded to an extent commonly referred to in clinical journalistic parlance as "nuts."

The Democrats didn't just lose an off-year Senate election Tuesday. They didn't just lose their 60-vote filibuster-proof majority. They lost TED KENNEDY'S SEAT in MASSACHUSETTS, a state so liberal it was the only one of 50 to go for George McGovern, another nice and well-meaning man whose presidential platform was pretty much "Acid, Amnesty, Abortion, and my first important choice on the public stage was a vice presidential nominee who's undergone electro-shock therapy for his alcoholism, at which point my second through 14th choices for the job — including the mayor of Boston — turned me down." Tuesday's Massachusetts vote wasn't even a squeaker. In a race which BOTH candidates identified as a referendum on Obamacare and the rest of the record-setting tax-and-waste Demoleftist agenda ("Cap-and-Tax," anyone?), a little-known state senator named Scott Brown beat an established statewide Democratic officeholder by, like, 100,000 votes. In MASSACHUSETTS.

DOUBLE-TALK

Even Barney Frank (did his district just go Republican, by any chance?) says Obamacare is dead.

So President Obama said Wednesday there's been a failure to communicate. "We lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values," Mr. Obama told ABC News.

No. That's wrong. Your year of having no one but Rush Limbaugh call you on this kind of happy double-talk is up. When you insist on having a bill raced though Congress fast enough that no one can read it — remember, Mr. Obama wanted the scheme to build a vastly expensive new federal health-rationing bureaucracy enacted by the FOURTH OF JULY — you're not "failing to communicate." You're trying to ram through your far-left socialist agenda, largely in secret, before anyone notices.

You haven't just "forgotten" to speak to Americans' core values. Americans' core values are freedom and trying to get ahead by working hard and let us keep our earnings and leave us pretty much alone — don't tell us what to eat and what kinds of light bulbs and toilet tanks we should buy and whether we can smoke and drive V-8s and carry guns — and Mr. Obama and company want to tax us into poverty and subservience and run our lives "for our own good." Their values are the OPPOSITE of ours, and they've been lying about that not just for one year but ever since he started running, and if they've wised up in the land of the Boston Tea Party, wait till you see next years' election results from Alabama to Alaska.

When you promise eight times on the campaign trail that the negotiations will offer "seats at the table" for doctors, insurers, and hospitals, and that they'll be "broadcast on C-SPAN," and then ignore and pretend never to have received a letter from the president of C-SPAN offering to cover the secret, crooked congressional negotiations free of charge, instead allowing Harry Reid to make all your corrupt, vote-buying payoffs behind closed doors, you are not then free to say you tried to keep Americans posted on what you were doing and just messed up a bit on your follow-through.

Nor are my doctor, my hospital, or my insurance company "institutions," Mr. Obama. You were just TRYING to turn them into federal bureaucratic institutions.

So those are lies, aren't they? Just as it's a lie to keep claiming the opposition are paid agents of the insurance companies, when in fact the insurance companies were among the first outfits bought off to join this scheme with promises of lots of new customers forced by law to buy their products — it was the insurance companies who poured millions of dollars into Martha Coakley's DEMOCRATIC campaign in Massachusetts, not Scott Brown's ... right?

OBAMACARE LITE?

But if you want isolation and delusion, how about Nevada Democratic Congresscritters Shelley Berkley and Dina Titus telling Steve Tetreault of the Stephens Washington Bureau Wednesday that they may now have to settle for forcing through a somewhat trimmed-down secret health care bill, which would focus on such more modest goal as requiring insurers to offer health insurance for pre-existing medical conditions.

Letter-writers keep insisting health insurance isn't like auto or fire insurance, because health is more important.

Well, food is more important than health care. People have lived for decades without health care; not without food. But if Congress were to require insurance companies to offer us "food insurance" which would require them to pay for our food, at premiums less than the cost of the food we're likely to eat this year, the insurance companies would go out of business — which would probably be seized on by Democrats as "requiring" the creation of some vast new government bureaucracy to provide us with our food, which would turn out to have been the whole idea, in the first place. (One line to pick up your rationed weekly dollop of bread and lard; a second line to pay for it. It's a "jobs program," see?)

If you race into the offices of an insurance company and insist they sell your fire insurance for a home which is already on fire, the insurance agent will refuse. If you inform him or her that Congress just enacted a law requiring them to insure your "pre-existing fire," they will do so as soon as you write them a check to cover your "first month's premium," said check equaling the replacement value of your house plus a 10 percent handling charge — say, $245,000. If Congress says they can only charge you the same rate as everyone else, EVERYONE'S fire insurance rates will go up to cover the cost of all the burned-down, previously uninsured houses the insurance firm will now be required to "cover" at a loss. If Congress refuses to allow them to raise ANYONE'S rates, they'll go out of business real soon — which will turn out to have been the point of the whole exercise, in the first place.

The laws of economics and the actuarial tables cannot be repealed by an act of Congress. Insurance is a pooling of risk for unhappy potential future events whose odds of happening can be approximated fairly well in advance. Force "insurance companies" to "cover" the health care of people whose diseases were already known before they sought "insurance," and Congress is merely requiring that insurance companies, in addition to selling actual insurance, must suffer losses by paying for the health care of those already ill, which any schoolchild can tell you will cost more than any "standard annual health insurance premium." It's socialism, it's mandatory income redistribution, hidden by requiring the "insurance companies" to collect the necessary taxes from the young and healthy, instead of Uncle Sam.

But we're supposed to now "trust" the Democrats to go back behind their closed doors and put together a "more modest" health care bill which will just have the same result of imposing government-mandated socialized medicine, leading to the eventual bankruptcy of any private insurance firm that agrees to become the equivalent of a government-regulated utility company, at which point Big Government will be "forced" to ride in on a white horse and take over the whole shebang?

The congresscritters remind me of the child who, having been told there is no Santa Claus, sits thinking about it for a few minutes, and then goes back to his mom and asks, "Is that true for the Easter Bunny, too?"

Santa Claus was unmasked in Massachusetts Tuesday, but the ladies are still holding out hope for the Tooth Fairy.

Ladies, I hope you've got other life activities planned starting in Feburary of 2011.

And by the way, when we on the Review-Journal editorial board interviewed GOP Senate hopeful Sue Lowden a few weeks back, she said she'd favor more modest health care reform that just concentrated on "a few things we can all agree are needed, like requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions." I gave her a chance to tell me I'd heard her wrong. She passed up the chance.

Sue Lowden is a fine lady who has shown some political courage in the past — voting in the Nevada state Senate to allow Nevada parents to decide whether to immunize their own kids, and to keep health insurance affordable for all by limiting state mandates. (The Democrats and their carefully nuanced labor hitmen interpreted those votes, of course, as votes "in favor of childhood disease and in favor of breast cancer.") She has a big enough checkbook to worry Harry Reid (though at this point I suspect Dario Herrera could beat Harry Reid.) But I'll hazard a prediction right now, that if Ms. Lowden sticks with that socialist, anti-business, anti-capitalist position on "pre-existing conditions," our next U.S. senator from Nevada will be either Brian Krolicki or Sharron Angle.

If you want to help cover the medical costs of those with "pre-existing conditions," ladies, set up a charity and donate all you like.

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