"If it's for your own good, then it's not a tax increase...

Found on Jerry Pournelle's blog:

President Obama's health care plan includes an enormous tax increase, but he doesn't call it a tax. There's a discussion with considerable quotes from the President's interview with George Stephanopoulos Sunday. It's quite revealing. http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB100014240529702044883
04574425294029138738.html?
mod=googlenews_wsj

For the interview itself see: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=rL7ak__MGyw

The interview is revealing; indeed, astonishing. I will let you draw your own conclusions regarding Obama's abilities to operate without a teleprompter. (I am presuming he doesn't have a teleprompter; I can't believe an intelligent staffer was feeding him these responses.)

The President established this point: If it's for your own good, it's not a tax increase.

Apparently Obama believes that this admission will help his campaign for the health care bill. He certainly wasn't trapped into saying this. He chose to conduct these very revealing interviews; and they were revealing indeed.

His view is that the state has every right to require you to buy health insurance, and thus it is not a tax. It is not a tax, and thus he is not breaking his oath not to raise taxes on the middle class. He is merely requiring you to act in your own interest. Now I can think of quite a few things that authority may believe to be for our own good and therefore we ought to pay for. I make no doubt we will see many of them proposed in the near future.

The notion of individual responsibility, and what we used to call freedom, seems far away. Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.