Rare News Desk
Ordinary Americans are rounding on our rulers for telling us to go eat cake. In the opinion of rulers like Harry Reid, it’s a wonderful thing that Obamacare will result in 2.3 million less working years, because it means that lots more people will be able to quit their jobs and become free agents.
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In the bad old days, we are to imagine, people had to stick to jobs they hated because they couldn’t afford to give up their health insurance. But now with Obamacare all is changed. Now you can quit work and still keep your Obamacare.
Hey kids, don’t try this at home. You might be really sorry about the kind of health care you get after you have quit your job.
But I think we should understand the culture clash here, and appreciate where our liberal rulers are coming from. They can’t help it; they are blinded by the shibboleths of their class, and really, they just cannot get out of their closed world-view to understand the view of the “other” people like you and me.
Ordinary Americans, I like to say, are “people of the responsible self.” It’s a way of life that goes back to the Hebrew prophets. The idea is that you are responsible in your work and your life to God. It’s the idea that you wait to get married and have children until you can afford it. You do the work to provide for you and yours: not your parents, not the government, not the tooth fairy.
But there is another way of life. I call its votaries the “people of the creative self.” National Review’s Jonah Goldberg dances around the idea on his latest opinion. The creative way issues from 19th century Romanticism and from the idea of “positive liberty” that you can’t be free until you have a full belly. “So when the government gives you stuff you need (or merely want) it is setting you free” to live a creative life.
The point is that you aren’t free to be a creative artist, one of Nancy Pelosi’s poets or Harry Reid’s free agents, unless you’ve got that government grant to keep you going until your inevitable discovery as a talented genius.
These people of the creative self don’t buy the idea that they should be responsible people that provide for them and theirs. They are above all that.
You can see why the Democratic Party works so well as an “over-under” coalition. Both the “overs” and the “unders” think that society owes them a living. The “overs,” the people of the creative self, believe they are owed a living because they are so educated, so evolved, and so creative. The “unders,” the people of the victimized self, believe they are owed a living as members of the tribe, as the loyal rank and file of the liberal army, as “the people.”
It goes without saying that you and I, the people of the responsible self, are in a war to the death with the people of the creative self and the people of the victimized self. The poets and the victims think that someone else should be paying their bills, and that someone is you.
And they believe in using the power of the state to make you pay.
