"We are in revolutionary times in which the government will grow to assume everything from energy use to student loans," Victor Davis Hanson writes. "We are in the most partisan age since Vietnam, ushered into it by the self-acclaimed 'non-partisan.'"
He writes that he expects "a lot of the following in the next three years":
Greedy and Not-So-Greedy Capitalists: And there are "bad" and "not so bad" capitalists too. The CEOs for GM are trying to help America out with green designs and fair wages — so unlike those at Ford and Toyota. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are the model execs, quite unlike the yokels who run Caterpillar and whine about health care. George Soros is not really a money speculator that ruins banks, but a transferer of capital to progressive causes. In every statist society, large corporations either resist or join. For the latter, the machinery of government reinvents them as part of the solution rather than the problem — in the way that Al Gore really doesn't really guzzle electricity, or John Edwards never really lived in a mansion. The transition to a Ministry of Industry requires a Ministry of Truth. With the Obama media we are already half there.
I actually think Professor Hanson overstates the significance of the health care vote -- government already controlled almost half of health care spending before President Obama took office, and the share was headed higher because of the aging of the population into Medicare -- but the "revolutionary times" language is being heard increasingly on the right these days. The president of the Heritage Foundation, Edwin Feulner, was out this morning with a letter:
In December of 1773, to protest unjust taxation, a group of American colonists dumped tea in Boston Harbor. The punishment for that first Tea Party was a series of intrusive laws passed by Parliament that were so oppressive that they could only be described as the "Intolerable Acts."
Obamacare is today's Intolerable Act. And just as the colonists banded together to enact change after those acts were passed, so should America respond to Obamacare. This law must be repealed.
It should be good for sales of my biography of Samuel Adams.