“If you want a
vision of the future,
imagine a boot stamping
on a human face –
forever” – George Orwell.
CBS News has announced that
Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders’ "Medicare for All" bill would,
according to Sanders himself, "get rid of insurance companies and drug
companies making billions of dollars in profit every single year." The
bill is a universal health care, one size fits all, tax financed, proposal. Connecticut's U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, CTMirror reports, was one of 14 co-sponsors of Sanders’s
bill.
“In my view,” Sanders said of his bill, “the current debate
over 'Medicare for All' really has nothing to do with health care. It’s all about
greed and profiteering. It is about whether we maintain a dysfunctional system
which allows the top five health insurance companies to make over $20 billion
in profits last year.”
But, of course, the Sanders bill has everything to do with
health care. If adopted into law, it would effectively abolish insurance
companies. Sanders himself has said that his "Medicare for All" scheme would
"get rid of insurance companies and drug companies making billions of
dollars in profit every single year.”
Reducing the insurance industry to rubble in an effort to
curb profits that Sanders considers obscene is a bit like burning down the
house to rid the living room of a mouse, or cutting off your nose to spite the
fly on it.
For the thoroughgoing socialist however, all profits,
exorbitant or not, are obscene. The two socialist autocrats in Venezuela, Hugo
Chavez and Nicolás Maduro, nationalized profits and, a few years after socialist
hero Chavez had assumed room temperature, toilet paper in Venezuela
disappeared, as did food and medicine. Disappearing products and services in
perfected socialist states are replaced with armed soldiers, a disarmed
populace, brown shirts and fists, not to mention draconian punishments for
anyone who presumes to question an omnipotent and omnipresent state.
Sanders is a socialist by trade and inclination, and
socialists abhor company profits, without which industries could not stay in
business. Adolf Hitler, a white national socialist, solved the profit problem
by incorporating businesses into his fascist program. Like communism, fascism
is a perfection of the socialist idea. Both Hitler and Mussolini were
socialists before they settled comfortably into fascism. Mussolini perfectly
defined the fascist credo in the following terms: “Everything in the state,
nothing outside the state, nothing above the state.” He might easily have been
describing Stalin’s Russia, or Maduro’s Venezuela, or the future utopia of
Bernie Sanders. Mussolini certainly was not describing the average
conservative/libertarian view of the proper role of government, which is to pursue
policies that promote the general welfare – not the same thing as imprisoning
the general populace in welfare penitentiaries.
The perfecting of Sanders’ socialist scheme necessitates a
hostile takeover of the insurance industry by the socialist administrative state.
But this is only the beginning. If insurance profits are verboten to committed
socialists, why should the energy industry, also profitable, survive the attentions
of Sanders/Blumenthal, or the real estate industry, Blumenthal’s own golden
goose? Indeed, why not nationalize every profitable industry?
It might be useful to attempt an understanding of why
Blumenthal, a Greenwich millionaire many times over, supports a scheme of
government that will run insurance companies out of Connecticut and the nation.
Theories abound. One holds that Blumenthal has never had a
handle on how the private marketplace really works. After marrying the daughter of a New York real-estate mogul – Blumenthal’s in-laws own
the Empire State building, in addition to other prime holdings – the
Harvard/Yale graduate went directly into Connecticut politics. As Attorney
General of the state for two decades, Blumenthal used businesses as a foil to
ingratiate himself with the voting public and a fawning state media, both
equally indispensable to his acquisition of political position and power. Blumenthal is now
schmoozing with Sanders, so the theory goes, to further his own political
ambitions. Even Bill and Hillary Clinton, life-long friends of Blumenthal, had
great difficulty keeping down Sanders’ elixir.
The second theory goes like this: The National Democrat
Party is playing with the economic DNA of the United States – only for political
(read: campaign) reasons. Seizing the profits generated by a still relatively
free marketplace in the United States, encumbering it with unsupportable taxes
and regulations, may not advance the general good, but it certainly helps to improve
the lot of political destructors-elect. Socialist Maduros of the world live in opulent splendor, while the people who struggle under Maduro’s
socialist rule in Venezuela, once the pearl of Latin America, are forced to
search through garbage bins for their lunch.
In Blumenthal’s case, both theories may be true -- not that
truth has anything to do with the daily operations of political shysters.
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