ObamaCare: It will be an unmitigated disaster

It now seems inevitable that the Congress will pass the "healthcare" bill, and we are going to be stuck with a huge financial disaster. I wrote commentary for the website of the Foundation for Economic Education, in which I compare this moment to the 1938 disaster at Munich.

One thing we need to understand is this: the government of the United States is broke. It is as broke as the government of California, of Michigan, and of nearly every other state. The notion that the Federal Reserve and Congress have "stopped" the recession by pouring newly-printed money everywhere is pure foolishness. This government cannot take on a new, multi-trillion-dollar program for which the means to pay is going to be invoking confiscatory taxation.

This will be disaster for the U.S. economy. Americans have come to believe that the government can order anything, and it will be done. That is not how an economy works; if that were true, North Korea would be the world's wealthiest nation, and the Iron Curtain never would have fallen.

Furthermore, we can look for massive numbers of new criminal penalties in this "law," and that means that increasing numbers of medical providers will be arrested and imprisoned. Don't think this won't affect you and your family; as the government criminalizes more and more actions that formerly were legal, an increasing number of people will be caught in the federal maw and have their lives destroyed.

What people forget is that when government criminalizes activity that should be legal, we will see less and less medical care provided, and fewer people willing to risk medical careers. Now, most Americans now approve of the fact that the USA has one quarter of the world's prisoners, but some of them will change their tunes when either they or their friends and loved ones will be paraded before the TV cameras wearing chains and orange jumpsuits.

This will be touted as a huge political victory for Obama and the Democrats. However, I predict that as the reality of this horrible bill comes to the fore, there are going to be some Democrats next year who are going to wish they had voted against it.