The general rule is that nothing must be accepted on any ancient or admitted authority, but everything must be accepted on any new or nameless authority, or accepted even more eagerly on no authority at all. – G.K. Chesterton
The Congressional Budget Office released a report early last week which stated that by 2024 the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time workers will be missing from the United States economy because of the effect of Obamacare. The spin chosen by defenders of the law is that 2.5 million Americans will now be “liberated” from the confines of employment sought, apparently, for the primary purpose of having health insurance.
While this argument is, in America, largely unprecedented on such a scale, it is but one more step down the bottomless rabbit hole that is the perpetual childhood that liberalism pursues.
Like an adolescent on a weekly allowance supplied by a parent, the liberal subject is to live a blissful life, free of responsibility.
While such a system can surely be desirable up to a certain age, when extended too long, the adolescent in question is never given the opportunity to appreciate what it takes to provide the money comes from that enables his carefree existence. Such detachment doesn’t create innovations that prolong our lives: It gives birth to occupiers who tweet inanely about their protests from their iPhones.
The so-called (and increasingly misleadingly-titled) Affordable Care Act offers another example: the requirement that plans allow young adults to stay on their parents’ health insurance until they are 26.
At that age, the Americans who built this country would have been married for five, maybe eight years. According to average expectancy, their lives would have been half over. It is a good thing that no one today has to travel the Oregon Trail to make a life for himself and his family, but it is not because of a government-prolonged childhood that America became the greatest nation on the face of the Earth.
It is this mentality that breeds the man-boys that women complain are increasingly common in comparison to the desirable grown, mature man. I mean the type that in his mid-twenties sits in the basement and plays video games writes poetry, instead of getting a job, going to school or getting a career together.
The divorce rate, not to mention the amount of co-habitating relationships that don’t last, put forward the question of how much adults outgrow the dating adolescent’s penchant for breaking things off when the going gets tough. Liberals of yesteryear, decrying the probably overly-strict and male-dominated culture that almost never allowed for divorce, insisted on relaxing the laws.
The resulting legal over-compensation, along with our online dating culture, has created a mentality that when times get hard, we must remove the “incompatibility” from our lives, since it no longer makes us happy, rather than choose to work through it like grown men and women.
But isn’t this what liberalism is? The mentality of someone with too little experience to appreciate what it took to get here?
The lack of perspective to realize what must be pulled down to make room for a new liberal edifice? The naïve rejection of “any ancient or admitted authority?” History began before each of us was born. To put it another way: you didn’t create the free and prosperous nation in which you live. Someone else made that happen.
Perhaps I am being too harsh. Perhaps it is too much to expect most Americans to make something of themselves while avoiding abject poverty in the period of the greatest prosperity the world has ever known (an outcome largely the result of a virtuous independence, responsibility and reliance on institutions besides government, but I digress…).
But don’t worry. If you can’t, Daddy Government will help you live your carefree lives on the backs of those who built America.