It’s a race against time. Obamacare is going into effect, piece by piece, link by link, yard by yard.
The idea when legislating big programs such as this is to push up as many benefits as possible early in the timeline, and shove the burdens as far down the road as possible. The strategy depends on enough voters noticing the benefits before the extravagant costs become clear. (And the full costs never become clear.) Once the program has been around long enough, the benefits will turn enough voters into special interests, and the costs will remain dispersed enough to discourage over-burdened taxpayers from fighting the inertial mass of the program.
About the only thing that can go wrong is that the costs become all-too-clear all-too-soon.
That’s Nancy Pelosi’s realpolitik, as she honestly explained in her proud defense of “the health care law” (as if there were only one!):
We think the more people know about this legislation, you see it has changed even in the past week, the support for it has increased and as people understand what we all heard here today — how it affects their lives directly — that will even grow. So as I’ve said before, the politics be damned. . . .
That line, “the politics be damned,” is disingenuous in the extreme. The politics, here, is everything. And the Democrats have big government’s “home court” advantage, the illusions of interest-group cost-benefit analysis.
And against them? A Republican presidential candidate who had previously supported the same kind of law, supported by the same kind of illusions.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Follow the money.
The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.
On July 12, 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born. He would go on to become one of the leading figures in America’s Transcendentalist movement, most famously writing Walden: or, Life in the Woods [cabin pictured]. His defense of John Brown deeply affected later interpretations of the raid on Harper’s Ferry, and his “Essay on Civil Disobedience,” protesting the Mexican-American War, has become a classic not only of protest but of political theory. 
Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.
On July 11, 1804, U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr [pictured] shot former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who died within days. The shooting was a duel of honor in which Burr had challenged Hamilton. But in a sense Burr lost, for Hamilton had left a letter that made him seem almost a martyr. The letter may have been less than veracious, but it was effective, and popular opinion quickly turned on Burr.
Nothing is wanted to overthrow the whole delusion which has been imposed upon the American people as a wise and judicious course of policy, but a dispassionate and unprejudiced examination of its real character, when divested of the false theories upon which it is built. 
On July 10, 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoes the Second Bank of the United States, ending central banking in America until the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913.