I didn’t watch the Democrat debate last night. It’d be too painful. Anyway, the general script for the primary has already been written. The parade of the ambitious are functioning like the old March of Dimes telethon … in reverse. Instead of calling in to donate money, the candidates act like the volunteers in the phone bank announcing the latest request for more of other people’s money. It’s a marathon about how much to give away, not contribute.
In the first cartoon – “Bernie Panders” – Bernie Sanders proclaims he’ll call and raise the bids of the faux indigenous candidate (Elizabeth Warren) and our giddy sophomore class president (AOC) in their demands to write off the student loan debt of people who voluntarily stoked up their debt in their halcyon days on campus, much of it accumulated in grad school. Now they have to pay it back with a payback schedule bent-over-backwards to make it easy.
Who’ll pay for the giveaway? It won’t be the young scions of the upper income and upper middle income families who mostly ran up the debt. The favorite target of our politically ambitious rabble-rousers is the rich, out of which they won’t get anywhere close to retiring the $1.4 trillion price tag. All the while, the targets hide their money or flee the country, and the millstone around the neck of toddlers and the yet-to-be-born – called the national debt – will only get heftier. Too bad. Toddlers and the yet-to-be-born don’t vote. Not yet anyway.
Cartoon #2 brings up another antic of the spendthrifts. Here, the presidential wannabes magically transform an economic good/service into a “right”, resurrecting FDR’s old ploy. FDR, great guy, but occasionally he spouted nonsense. How do you turn something produced with limited resources into a “right”? Answer: you can’t. It’d be like reducing obesity by legislatively repealing gravity. Economic behavior is as natural to us as our teeth. The behavior can’t be repealed.
You make it a “right”, and therefore “free” to the user, and the demand floodgates are thrown open. The concept of a checking account with limited funds has no relevance. You want it; it’s a “right”; you get it. The only real limit is politics, and that is based on how much the people will tolerate the declining quality, the delays, and the denial of services. It plays out whether in the Soviet Union or the British Health Service.
It’s silly beyond belief to equate a “right” to an economic good/service to the right to free speech. Free speech has guard rails (Schenck v. United States, 1919), like a highway, but there is no set limit to the number cars taking the route in the course of its life. Healthcare is limited to the number of people who are capable of providing it and other resources not committed to other necessities. Healthcare isn’t geared to be a “right”.
Don’t tell that to the politically ambitious panderers. Also don’t tell them that “payer” in single payer means “taxpayer”, not “government”.
I heard that there was much Spanish speaking at the pander-fest in Miami. Spanish is a beautiful language, but I suspect the display was identity pandering. If it’s a “dog whistle” (using woke language), it’s one tuned to the ears of the multicultural barkers. Their agenda includes the practical erasure of the border. Thus cartoon #3.
Clause 4 of Section 8 of Article I is about to be read out of The Constitution. Once you eliminate border enforcement by dismantling ICE and turning the rest into a construction battalion to build bridges across the Rio Grande, any person living in a dirt floor hut is a soon-to-be-an-American. Would you ever again be able to connect the word “manage” to the word “immigration”? Would there be relevance of “rule of law” to the subject of “immigration”? Hardly. Where’s the law since you trampled it into the ground?
Cartoon #4 gives a clue about the state of mind of the Democratic Party. Gargantuan offerings of free government stuff is a certain path to ruin. It’s a race to emulate Argentina, or maybe Venezuela, or maybe the Soviet Union. Ruination can be a democratic choice.
RogerG