Mandatory Contracts & Other Stupidities

Sometimes things just come together. The most recent is this item from the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web:

We Have Always Been at War With the Individual Mandate

The email we got yesterday from the Obama campaign is a real humdinger. Signed by campaign manager Jim Messina and carrying the subject line "Mitt Romney," it's actually an attack on Rep. Paul Ryan, this month's Emmanuel Goldstein. We especially love this point:

5. Romney [i.e., the Ryan budget] would end Medicare as we know it--replacing it with a voucher scheme that would drive profits for insurance companies by forcing seniors to purchase private insurance.

Imagine, forcing someone to buy private insurance! Oh, the horror!

That takes a lot of brass, coming from the same people that rammed down our collective throats a bill forcing everyone — not just seniors — to purchase private insurance. That's why, as already noted, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid couldn't get their bill passed without ramming it down everyone's throat, against the will of a substantial majority of the people.

Making matters even more absurd is that ObamaCare was and remains so unpopular that it could not be passed without bizarre procedural shenanigans and extreme legislative bullying. As a formal matter, ObamaCare's enactment was an exercise in representative democracy, but as a substantive one, Congress has seldom acted in a more unrepresentative way.

And now we find out that, far from being cost-effective, Obamacare is bending the medical cost curve up and will add trillions to the national debt once it comes into full effect. So Nancy Pelosi was right — they had to pass the bill so we could find out what's in it — and everything we've found out has said it's a lot worse than we thought.