Freedom is slavery, up is down, right is wrong . . . and Obamacare is wonderful

There’s an old Doonesbury cartoon that features a college professor lecturing to a hall filled with students who seem ready to accept anything he says as gospel. As his statements become increasingly incendiary with no reaction from them, he finally blurts out, “Jefferson was the antichrist! Democracy is Fascism! Black is white! Night is Day!” The students continue scribbling away, with one turning to another and saying, “Boy this course is really getting interesting.”

I thought of this when I read the reaction from the left to the CBO report that claims Obamacare will lead to 2.5 million people working less or leaving the workforce by 2024. The claim is based on the fact that subsidies for health insurance decrease as income goes up, so many people will choose to work less or not at all in order to keep the subsidies. Casey Mulligan, the University of Chicago economist whose work influenced the CBO prediction, put the point in simple terms to the Wall Street Journal: “when you pay people for being low income you are going to have more low income people.”

As David Harsanyi wryly points out, there was a time when it would have been considered a bad thing for government to discourage work. Alas, times have changed.

Commentators on the left responded almost in unison, not to deny the report’s claim, but to celebrate it. It’s a good thing that this will happen, they argue, because now those people will have the freedom to stop working without worrying that they might lose their health insurance. That this “freedom” is being subsidized by taxpayers who are forced to pay for it doesn’t seem to faze any of these people.

Many conservatives find this attitude outrageous, and I agree. But I’m not surprised by it. For starters, it isn’t the first time supporters of Obamacare have reacted to a negative consequence of the law by claiming that it’s positive. When the President’s claim that we would be able to keep our insurance plans turned out to be false, supporters were undeterred. That was supposed to happen, they said. The policies you had before were subpar. You should be happy the President lied to you.

More fundamentally, restricting choice, forcing us to support others, and creating incentives for people not to work are inherent in Obamacare and all welfare programs. When people claim that a market isn’t working, they mean they don’t like the choices people are making and want to forcibly override them. When they claim government should support those in need, that necessarily means taxpayers should be forced to support people who aren’t supporting themselves. Some of the people who choose not to work because of Obamacare may be making rational choices given their alternatives. But the fact remains that Obamacare and all welfare programs create perverse incentives.

All of these consequences follow logically from the welfare state and its underlying premise, which is the idea that we are our brothers’ keepers. It shouldn’t surprise us that the most committed supporters of welfare are starting to look like the students in the Doonesbury cartoon—ready to accept any consequence no matter how absurd it seems. We’ve known for decades that welfare programs forcibly override private choices and create perverse incentives. Maybe the surprising thing is that anyone still thinks these consequences are unintended.

As Ayn Rand once said, “The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other—until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology. That is the way welfare statism came to be accepted in this country.”

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