The ‘Fat Lady’ Is Mute.

A recent online article opined “It Is Over” for the Democrats in Washington: they are about to experience a crushing defeat in upcoming midterm elections. Unfortunately, after the words “It is over,” we must insert a very big BUT. As the saying goes, “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” but I hear no singing.

Most Americans oppose what the Democrats have done. Over 50% want Obamacare repealed. How, you ask, can any clear-thinking American reject President Obama’s free health care for all? Answer: Americans are good capitalists, at least outside the Beltway. We know that anything “free” is a chimera that ends up being grossly too expensive. We get less for more whenever something is supposedly free.

Further, we observe the failure of ‘free health care’ in Europe. Yet, that is precisely what the President and his Director-designate of Medicare, Dr. Don Berwick, want to enact here.

The British NHS has been forced to cut back drastically on health care services. If you are British, over 60 years old, and need either kidney dialysis or heart surgery, the NHS says too bad, no care for you. If you are a terminal British citizen (any age) and need hospice care, government-run health system will no longer provide.

Americans like neither what Congress has done so far nor the direction the Democrats are taking us: toward socialism. The Democrats and the President would vehemently deny that charge but what else do you call government control of resources as well as “redistribution” [President’s Obama’s word] of wealth?

The Democrats and their agenda will be repudiated. But, where is the fat lady? [No aspersions are intended on the body mass areas of either Republicans or Democrats. I am trying to be poetic.]

While the Republicans spout the right words about limited government and fiscal responsibility, they seem poised after November to do…nothing. It appears as though they are about to waste a great opportunity.

If they do not repeal Obamacare, then their words have no meaning. If they do repeal it, what substantive plan do they recommend to begin actually fixing healthcare? I see none. What we hear is minor adjustments to the existing system rather than what must be done: radical change.

In medical terms, the Democrats took a sick patient named healthcare and made the patient worse. That is malpractice. The Republicans suggest stopping the bad (Democrat) medicine and placing a band-aid on the cancer. That too is malpractice.

The Democrats claim they have fulfilled three of the five promises they made in 2008: Healthcare (and all we got was a tee-shirt exclaiming how great Obamacare is if we were only smart enough to understand), Education, and Reregulation. Education remains mired in confusion as the Democrat party continues to serve their actual constituencies: the unions. What do the Republicans propose that will inject a truly results-based education system instead of what we have now. The ‘result’ we want are educated citizens and productive workers. Do test scores correlate with those outcomes? Where is the data? What has been proven to work? THAT is what the Republicans should be offering us.

The Democrats claim that the reason for our present economic doldrums is Bush-era deregulation. Their cure is therefore Reregulation, which is code for greater government control over our financial lives. Americans want neither de- nor re-regulation. We want an environment that encourages (and rewards) hard work and entrepreneurial activities. We want more (and more and more) rich people, not turning rich people into poor people. Thus, anything that discourages business from taking risks – hiring people and expending capital – is exactly what we DON’T want. The Democrats have done that. Will the Republicans reverse this trend?

In the past, I have written that what we want is a level playing field on which good capitalists can compete to everyone’s advantage. The President wants to level the players with his “redistribution” approach. The problem with a sports analogy is that all such games are zero-sum: in order for someone to win, someone else must lose.

The American financial system called capitalism is NOT a zero-sum game. More and more people can ‘win’ without necessarily more and more losers. That is the beauty of capitalism. Though we have a large discrepancy between haves and have-nots in our country, we have many more “haves” than any other country in history, ever!

When we say to the Democrats ‘it is over for you,’ we need to say with equal force to the Republicans replacing them, give us solutions that work, not minor adjustments of what we have now.

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