Bad Laws and Unintended Consequences, part 1.

This post is a draft. Read at your own risk.

A bad law is one that sets off a cascade other laws to qualify, modify or nullify its provisions. Bad laws grow government the way Peter's grows flowers. Bad laws are crafted out of a complete disregard for the concept of "limited government," which is the founding principle of the United States of America.

Following is a musing on one of what will surely be innumerable unintended consequences of Obama's Law. This post is entitled "..., part 1" because we suspect that there will not be enough books in the whole world to catalogue them all. The law's been law less than a day. Wait until people actually read it.

Our brave congressmen have begun holding pressers about their legal “challenges” to the Obama Healthcare Takeover, which amounts to a de facto enslavement of the entire nation to the government.

Here’s just one way: one of the “challenges” ballyhooed would prohibit the “healthcare system,” of which the government has asserted itself as steward, from providing drugs that are alleged to enhance or enable male sexual arousal to convicted sex offenders.

Perhaps we must be reminded that this issue would not even have been raised had not the government become the personal, intimate assistant of every living American; indeed the arbiter of their lives and deaths. And while, in a society as accustomed to debasement as ours, it might seem a perfectly routine issue to take up, it still illustrates perfectly how the growth of statism is the mother of all slippery slopes.

Aside from the relative merit of the hamstrung logic of such a proposal, its adoption would require the government to know each and every sex offender in the nation and somehow prevent him/her from obtaining the forbidden medicine. And so is nationalized “healthcare” destined to become nationalized surveillance.

For the government, as steward over the lives (and deaths) of all Americans, is now compelled to guard itself against the sort of liability that an army of tort lawyers, deprived of their prey by the nationalization of the industry, would be eager to set upon. And too, it must comply with its own anti-discrimination laws which essentially forbid it from offending anyone, anywhere, at anytime, unless it absolutely feels like doing so.

It should therefore not be too difficult to imagine all the other safeguards against negligence in perfect policing that the government will automatically and mechanically be forced to guard itself against. Attemting to do so will of course require the employment the most comprehensive database on your personal life – all our personal lives – that has ever been amassed (we discussed GE’s bragging about this, before the bill was even passed, here). Who is to know, ultimately, who won’t be allowed what treatments for reasons that can only be attributed to the twisted logic of an absolute bureaucracy?

What about the use of this monster as a tool of coercion or retribution by non-governmental thugs? Suppose Group A decides to craft an argument against the eligibility of Group B to receive treatment provided by taxpayer funds. Won’t that be rich.

The power to influence and intimidate and oppress and control that information and the power to use it held by central authority is the very antithesis of “limited government.”

None of these open-ended horror stories would have been thinkable on Sunday morning, before congress passed this bill.

When the government merely asserted jurisdiction over commerce in material things, it still hadn’t asserted itself over your very existence – but because the care of your body is the care of your very self, and because everyone at some time needs healthcare services, the government has now made that leap to absolute rule.

In a previous post we mused as if from a distance of light-years whether the passage of the healthcare laws was an act of totalitarianism. Now the distance seems to have closed substantially. This IS totalitarianism in the making.