Not since the late, great Milton Friedman has a professor of economics done as much to advance the conservative cause as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Jonathan Gruber. In Gruber’s case his contributions have been entirely inadvertent, but we appreciate them nonetheless.
In case you haven’t heard the nationwide grumbling, Gruber is the “architect of Obamacare” who has been caught on several different videotapes gloating about the numerous deceptions that were built into the bill in order to assure its passage. To compound the public’s outrage he has also been caught snickering about the stupidity of the average American on whose behalf he was supposedly practicing the deceptions, which neatly epitomizes the arrogance of modern liberalism, and it further exposes exactly who are the stupid Americans.
A clear majority of Americans were never fooled into thinking that Obamacare was a good idea, even as the bill was being ramrodded through the Congress by means of questionable legality, and conservatives were wise to its deceptions all along. Gruber takes a peculiar pride in the bill’s unprecedented tax on not buying health insurance being disguised as a mandate, a bit of semantic legerdemain that the Congressional Budget Office was obliged to honor lest the bill scare off even Democrats, but all along conservatives were pointing out that it made no difference to the people who would be paying the bill under either name. When the Supreme Court upheld the dangerous notion that government can compel citizens to buy something they do not want it did so on the grounds that the mandate was indeed a tax, conservatives’ only consolation was that the government had at least been forced to acknowledge its lie. Gruber also told his fellow academics that the average American was too stupid to understand that the tax on insurers would inevitably be passed along to the insured, but the very simple concept that a tax on corporations is always paid by its customers has been a staple of conservative economics since Adam Smith. Only liberals believe that corporations pay taxes, and we are grateful to Gruber for pointing out how very stupid they are to believe such nonsense.
Gruber’s kindnesses to conservatism do not end there, however. Efforts by the likes of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats to disavow their association with the professor allowed the conservative press to point out the $400,000 and the “architect of Obamacare” title he received from them, which can only stoke the indignation of the insulted American public. He also pocketed several million dollars giving advice to the states on how to deal with the law, and his videotaped instructions include repeated warnings that the law quite deliberately insists that citizens of states which do not set up their own health care exchanges will not be eligible for Obamacare’s generous subsidies. Now that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the King v. Burwell case, which could result in the enforcement of that provision and deny subsidies to citizens of the 37 states that declined to set up their own exchanges despite Gruber’s warnings, the administration is arguing that it was merely an unintentional typographical error and not at all the intention of Congress. The testimony of Obamacare’s acknowledged architect, along with a few other choice items from the congressional record, could effectively debunk that deception and create all sorts of welcome havoc for the law.
The formerly brilliant Gruber was also credited with creating the Obamacare-like “Romneycare” plan enacted in earlier Massachusetts, and has helpfully admitted that its brief survival was due largely to federal assistance, so his association with eponymous former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney should help the more rock-ribbed sorts of Republicans in staving off any attempt by Romney or any other northeastern moderate to win their party’s presidential nomination. Gruber might yet provide further service to the conservative cause, but his astoundingly stupid admissions that only the stupid believed the claims of Obamacare has been such a boon to the self-esteem of conservatives that he has earned our eternal gratitude. One can only hope that the liberals will take umbrage at his insults, but we suspect they’re too stupid to realize he was talking about them.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 