I generally avoid talking about contemporary politics. It isn't that I don't have opinions. Its simply that my pro-commerce perspective would have to be explained each time. Moreover I have no desire to antagonize my sympathetic readers. I knowingly antagonize ‘Lefties” but I only have few who are pro-commerce to begin with.
I am no better at making comments on the contemporary political issues than anyone else. I only do so when I have some uniquely relevant experience or information. In this case I do.
This is all by way of pointing out to you that in the current Obamacare debate, where some legislators want to defund Obamacare, this raises a point about the Great Society legislation that has been forgotten.
First and most importantly, Pres. Johnson passed both the two key Civil Rights laws as well as a vast array of government expansion known as the Great Society.
Johnson is not esteemed very highly as a president. He passed far more legislation that was far more appealing to Lefties than Pres. Obama and Nancy Pelosi.
That should be a warning to anyone who thinks that Obamacare will help give the Obama presidency any stature in the future.
Secondly, the Great Society is almost totally forgotten. It is forgotten because so many parts of it failed completely.
It did generate the specific individuals who later created neoconservatism. They had worked on Great Society programs.
Most of the Great Society programs have technically survived but are non-functioning today, including all of the preschool education programs and the work subsidy programs. Most of the Great Society was dismantled slowly. It was finished when President Clinton signed the Republican legislation to force welfare recipients to work.
It is well to remind my blog readers why Obamacare has a unique cluster of dysfunctional regulations that will help send it into oblivion.
It was passed by only Democrats in the Senate in Dec. 2009 immediately after the voters of Mass. voted to end the Democrat super majority. It never went to conference committee where errors and contradictions are always removed. The current implementation problem is what happens when you circumvent government due process. Also the public kicked out Pelosi and her legislature in the 2010 Congressional election, making it impossible to go back and correct the many errors..
When I did research on the health care issue a few decades ago I found that 80% of all people were very happy with their own medical services. Most loved their doctors. To the extent that this is disrupted under Obamacare, hostility to the legislation will grow.