“There Ain’t No More Middle-Ground”
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That is what we are up against. We confront the Great Solvers of the Human Problem who are determined to arrange everyone and everything to their liking. They began by controlling everything that people did. Now, they have moved on to controlling what people don’t do. If you live, if you breathe, if you stir, move your muscles, track moving objects with your eyes, then there are obligations imposed on you.
ObamaCare is one of the final declarations that there is no opting out. Even if you don’t drive, own a home, own a business, own a dog, or do one of the infinite things that bring you into mandatory contact with the apparatus of your local, semi-local, trans-local, national or global government, you are committed to a task from maturity to death. Your mission is to obtain health insurance, and, in a system in which you become the ward of the government as soon as you taste air, it is the price that you pay for being alive.
In a free country, you are not obligated to do things simply for the privilege of breathing oxygen north of the Rio Grande and south of Niagara Falls. But this isn’t a free country anymore; this is a country in which you get things for free. And there is a big difference between those two things.
We are a nation in which everyone is entitled to everything, except the right to opt out of all the entitlements and the cost of paying for them. We may not have the Bill of Rights anymore, but we have a hell of a bill to settle and, every year, the deficits keep making it bigger and bigger. Our forefathers passed on to us a Bill of Rights, and we shall pass on to our descendants a Bill. A tremendous Bill which can be unrolled from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam… and all the way across the ocean to China.
The Bill of Rights was a list of things that the government could not do. The Bill is a list of things that the government has done. It’s an endless bill, because we have an endless government that is doing things all the time. And though we didn’t do any of them, we are still stuck with the bill. Even if we could reach into our pockets and settle the bill with a couple of loose trillion dollar bills, this Bill doesn’t just demand money, it demands power.
If all that government officials did was go to Vegas, give each other prizes and sing silly songs, then the Bill would be large, but it wouldn’t ask for a piece of our soul. But the amount of money that the government spends is almost beside the point. The amount may bankrupt us, it may destroy our economy, it may turn us into debt slaves– but it’s secondary to how the money is being used. It’s bad enough to be eaten out of house and home– worse to be forced to feed the occupying army that is taking away your freedoms one by one.
People often talk about the First and Second Amendments, the Fifth comes up, and even the Fourth. But how often do we think about the Third Amendment, that old relic of a time when we were ruled by a distant power with no concern for our lives or our freedoms? “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner“. It’s one of the few amendments that goes unnoticed. No one challenges it. No Supreme Court blots it out with the stroke of a pen or rephrases it to mean that there is a Constitutional right to abortion or a ban on executing juveniles.
There is no occupying army quartered in our homes. They have sizable barracks with marble floors, gleaming chandeliers and metal detectors through which you must pass in order to meet with even one of their lower officers. They aren’t quartered in your living room, they rent hotel names and build buildings and send the bill to you. And then they send you another bill, which informs you that they have decided that the War on Obesity, the War on Health Care or the War on the Economy requires you to do a set number of things, the costs of both the doing and the enforcement to be borne by you.
tell a friendAbout the Author: Daniel Greenfield is an Israeli born blogger and columnist, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His work covers American, European and Israeli politics as well as the War on Terror. His writing can be found at http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/. The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of The Jewish Press.
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