Smoke and Mirrors

That would be too good a term for what Congress may be about to do to our health. Thomas Sowell notes the complete lack of correspondence between the facts of reality and scoring of Obama's physician slavery proposal by the Congressional Budget Office.

The CBO, alas, must rely on information provided by Congress:

I can say that I can afford to buy a Rolls Royce, without going into debt, by using my inheritance from a rich uncle. But, in the real world, the question would arise immediately whether I in fact have a rich uncle, not to mention whether this hypothetical rich uncle would be likely to leave me enough money to buy a Rolls Royce.

Not only is this "rich" uncle bankrupt, but Sowell correctly notes that the whole precess is about not thinking:

Fraud has been at the heart of this medical care takeover plan from day one. The succession of wholly arbitrary deadlines for rushing this massive legislation through, before anyone has time to read it all, serves no other purpose than to keep its specifics from being scrutinized-- or even recognized-- before it becomes a fait accompli and "the law of the land."

So much for what's making me pine for some good, old-fashioned smoke. On to what makes mirrors look like good, clean family fun. Pelosi's latest scheme involves pretending to pass socialized medicine by pretending not to vote on it.

The tactic -- known as a "self-executing rule" or a "deem and pass" -- has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.

If counting nonexistent money as an asset is acceptable budgeting, then I suppose this kind of voodoo-vote for a proxy for ObamaCare doubles as making a brave stand for one's convictions and standing tall for the interests of one's constituents. As Myrhaf recently put it, "Who needs the new Alice In Wonderland movie when we've got the 111th Congress?"

If more people held the view that knowledge is integrated, and all of it is ultimately based on the facts of (objective) reality, we would, furthermore, have near-rioting by now by a public well aware that if this is how Congress wants to run our medical sector, this is also how it will ultimately make our health decisions for us. But then, such a public would never have voted for such a Congress in the first place.

And so we see that the phrase "socialized medicine" refers not just to the political theory behind ObamaCare, but to the epistemological theory, primacy of consciousness, underlying it. Specifically, too many people feel that reality is merely a social construct. Too bad the nature of government prevents the damage from being contained to just those people.

-- CAV