RUSH: Let’s go back to September 20th, 2009, This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Obama was being interviewed by a fellow member of the ruling class, George Stephanopoulos, who says, ‘Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines tax as ‘a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”
OBAMA: George, the fact this you’ve looked up Merriam’s dictionary, that — uh, the definition of tax increase indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, no!
OBAMA: I mean, what —
STEPHANOPOULOS: I —
OBAMA: If what you’re saying —
STEPHANOPOULOS: I wanted to check for myself. Your critics say it is a tax increase.
OBAMA: My critics say everything’s a tax increase! My critics say that I’m taking over, uhh, every sector of the economy. You know that. Uh, eh, eh, eh, eh… Look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we’re going to have an individual mandate or not, but —
STEPHANOPOULOS: You reject that it’s a tax increase?
OBAMA: I absolutely reject that notion.
RUSH: Now, here’s what’s interesting about this. He ‘rejects’ the fact that this individual mandate, the fact that we have to go buy health insurance, is a tax. So there’s a lawsuit out there. Attorneys general from various states, a bunch who work in a law school saying, ‘Hey, the federal government cannot mandate the American people buy anything. It’s the Commerce Clause. You can’t do it.’ So what has the Obama administration now said? In defending that lawsuit, the Obama administration says that the individual mandate is a tax, that they have the authority to levy and raise taxes. So Obama lied through his teeth. Everything about health care that he said was an out-and-out lie! Small firms are now no longer able to provide health insurance.
Small insurance companies no longer able to provide it, and they’re gonna send people in Massachusetts, the state, to do it, and that’s coming in the federal version of health care as well. The private sector insurance companies are hanging by a thread. They’re not going to be around long. On purpose. But Obama now has to go out and say, in order defend this lawsuit against the individual mandate, ‘No, it’s not a mandate. We’re not mandating everybody buy health insurance. It’s a tax, and we have the authority to levy and raise taxes.’ All the while denying as he just did to Stephanopoulos (that’s back in 2009) that it was a tax. So now back to Mr. Codevilla: the 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class’s economic modus operandi. ‘The 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class’s economic modus operandi: the government taxes citizens to pay for medical care and requires citizens to purchase health insurance.
‘The money thus taken and directed is money that the citizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care. In exchange for the money, the government promises to provide care through its ‘system.’ But then all the boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures, and ‘best practices’ that constitute ‘the system’ become the arbiters of what any citizen ends up getting. The citizen might end up … dependent on all the boards and commissions that his money also pays for and that raise the cost of care. Similarly, in 2008 the House Ways and Means Committee began considering a plan to force citizens who own Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to transfer those funds into government-run ‘guaranteed retirement accounts.’
‘If the government may force citizens to buy health insurance, by what logic can it not force them to trade private ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as the government itself? Is it not clear that the government knows more about managing retirement income than individuals?’ Is it not clear? Who says they do? Yet this is how the ruling class operates.