-- T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

 

 

-- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

 

This morning a few seemingly unrelated stories caught my early-morning eye, and brought to mind certain melancholy lines from two of my favorite T. S. Eliot poems--poems that, no matter how often I read them, or how chipper my mood when I start, never fail to depress. You know civilization is headed for a cliff when current events provide a kind of reverse-exegis for the works of dead poets. Especially, for some reason, these poems by Eliot.

 

The first was a story about Colorado insurers, warning of loopholes in the current health care plan (the one that doesn't exist yet, because it's being mashed together from five irreconcilable approaches behind closed doors). Of particular concern is one that, in their view, may literally lead to "system collapse." Naturally, they were attacked by our favorite anonymous but somehow ubiquitous "critics," as all bourgeoise must be attacked, for trying to work the proletariat into a lather over a few minor details on the road to the glorious revolution, just over the horizon.

 

It seems some actuarial-types blessed with a more than casual familiarity with the concepts behind basic arithmetic have concluded that there is an incentive for people to cheat the system, baked right into the plan. In other words, the whole thing is a sham, and not even a very cleverly concealed one at that. Specifically, they contend that the penalties for not having insurance -- and we'll set aside the issue of the Constitutionality of the federal government mandating, under penalty of law, that each and every citizen buy a particular product, since I haven't imbibed all my coffee yet this morning -- are lower than the projected premiums for buying it, such that people will only buy the insurance when they know they're sick, and their outlays will be higher than the penalties.

 

I don't know about you, but this whole discussion reeks to me of the kind of dishonesty on all levels that you'd expect in backwater republics. Clearly, the insurers want the government to put bigger teeth in the mandate, which as I said sort of begs the constitutionality issue. They want this because they need enormous gobs of cash from people who don't need insurance at all to pay for the services provided to those who now must be covered, though they can't afford it. Even more clearly, the proponets of "health care reform" want to run the insurers out of business so that they can finally usher in the wonderful, perfect, simply unbeatable "public option." You know, the one that's made Cuba, Albania, and Russia the envy of the world.

 

I'm trying to figure out whose argument is more insidious in its intent, that of the insurers, or that of the legislators. It's a tough call, but I'm leaning on the side of the legislators, because the insurers at the end of the day are business people who have to make a profit to stay in business, and the subtleties of law and morality are always, shall we say, seen from their perspective through a glass, darkly. But legislators are supposed to uphold and defend the Constitution, and serve their constituents, a balance pure democracies never get right---and they are plainly here serving an ideology instead. One that is about as hostile to our constitutional republican form government as it can be without necessarily crossing the line into treason or conspiracy to subvert.

 

It's obvious to me, and should be obvious to any other sentient being, that they actually want the system to collapse, and are giving it a not-so-invisible-hand right into its freshly dug grave, so the big epiphany of the insurance industry on this point is more of a "Well, duh!" moment than an alarmist ruse. Why waste a crises by solving the problem or allowing the market to correct it itself, when you can use it as an excuse to break the whole thing once and for all?

 

Speaking of backwater republics, the other story was an interview on CNN of the Right Hon. Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), in which he joked, ominously, that we're headed for "banana republic" status if we keep accelerating the rate of debt accumulation, as is now indisputably the policy of the Obama administration, no matter how much scorn (not to mention blame) they heaped on Dubya for, uh, relatively less recklessness. The magnitude of Obama's audacity (read: hypocrisy) on this point of fiscal responsibility in particular is shocking even to cynics like me, and I'm pretty jaded lately by the numbing deluge of Hopenchange.

 

If so-called "health care reform" passes as currently designed, and/or cap-and-trade legislation manages to squirm through the Congress despite the inherent dishonesty of the debate over the causes of climate change, we're toast. Stick a fork in it.

 

Instead of a fistful or even a barrel full of dollars -- because, as Ben Bernanke apparently has concluded, only devaluation followed by hyperinflation has a prayer of one day rescuing the republic from these profligate deficit spending policies -- we will soon have little more than a handful of dust to show for what was once the greatest, freest republic in the history of human civilization. This is, apparently, the sum of our fears, and the way of all flesh.

 

It was a nice republic, while it lasted. And so it goes.