Byron York of The Washington Examiner has done us all a great service. His column draws on the unguarded statements of Sen. Max Baucus and former Gov. Howard Dean. (Well, Baucus, maybe. It’s hard to say whether Howlin’ Howard has ever made a guarded statement.)
Both of these men’s statements might have been lost in the clamor following the passage of President Obama’s historic healthcare bill. What York has done is to dash into the fire and pluck out some of these red-hot quotes. “Health reform is ‘an income shift. It is a shift, a leveling, to help lower income, middle income Americans.’” Baucus, normally seen as a Democratic centrist, let the Marxist cat out of the liberal bag.
Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is no marginal figure.
He told CNBC: “The question is, in a democracy, what is the right balance between those at the top…and those at the bottom? This [health care bill] is a form of redistribution.”
Sen. Baucus and Gov. Dean perhaps unintentionally revealed the real reason for ObamaCare. It was not to bend the cost curve (price controls) or to provide access to health care for all (they already have it, cannot be denied care.) It was to level.
During the English Civil War, 1641-49, the most radical of the Parliamentary forces arrayed against the King were called “Levelers.” They, too, wanted to drag down the top earners of their day. They, too, wanted to create a Utopia. And those Levelers were willing to use force to bring about their vision of Heaven on Earth. Small wonder generations of Marxist profs have idealized the English Levelers.
Winston Churchill was not only not a socialist; he was England’s greatest historian. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Churchill also knew what was wrong with socialism. “Capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
Baucus was not alone in his “victory lip.” Howard Dean confirmed what he was saying. When he ran for President in 2004, Dean claimed to be representing “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” In a real sense, he did. Only when the liberal media took a sober look at Dean’s radicalism—and realized Americans would never accept such an open avowal of socialism—did they pile on.