3 December 2020 Thomas Frank Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank While Democrats fussed with the details of health care reforms, conservatives spent months telling the nation that the real issue is freedom, that what’s on the line is American liberty itself.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank There is much to dislike about President Obama’s approach to the financial crisis. But opposition, it seems, will have to come from somewhere other than conservatism. The party out of power is also a party out of touch.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank Mr. Obama still has time to reverse course. A great deal depends on it. To fail on health care yet again might well be the ‘Waterloo’ Republicans dream of.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank Acknowledging class was always difficult for ‘New Democrats’ – it was second-wave, it was divisive – but 2008 made retro politics cool again.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It’s authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader-types from consultant-directed puppet-boys.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank Yes, Democrats can prove that America pays more for health care than other countries yes, they have won the dispute that private health insurance is needlessly expensive. But what they’ve lost is the argument that we are a society.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank When the entertainers of the Right aren’t declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates, they’re pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug, an exemplar of what they call ‘the Chicago way.’
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank Concerns about the size and role of government are what seem to leave reformers stammering and speechless in town-hall meetings. The right wants to have a debate over fundamental principles elected Democrats seem incapable of giving it to them.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank The only truly individualistic health-care choice – where you receive care that is unpolluted by anyone else’s funds – is to forgo insurance altogether, paying out-of-pocket for health services as you need them.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank Selling public property is the true Chicago way. Had Mr. Obama not been elected president, the nation’s business journals would be falling over one another to praise his city for its daring, market-friendly innovations.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank In America, we no longer have an institutionalized, organized way of calling business to task – of taking them to account for what they’ve done – and this is especially true in the cultural realm.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank Money has transformed every watchdog, every independent authority. Medical doctors are increasingly gulled by the lobbying of pharmaceutical salesmen.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank What is at stake in the debate over health care is more than the mere crafting of policy. The issue is now the identity of the Democratic Party.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank As you watch the world crumble, try taking your Armageddon with this sprinkling of irony: Over the last three decades, business has got virtually everything it wanted, and its doomsday scenario from the 1970s has come true because of it.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn’t work on this mirror principle, you don’t have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn’t work that way.
3 December 2020 Thomas Frank For-profit higher education is today a booming industry, feeding on the student loans handed out to the desperate.
