Antebellum America

The battle over the Affordable Care Act will probably go on forever. It will undergo attacks by amendment and by lawyers. People will be outraged, constituencies created and defended as it progresses along to become a distorted legislative monolith, wounded but ennobled by its trials. Yet there is an element of the discussion that probably will get little attention but might be the law's most important revelation. We are changing as a culture in how we view work as is shown in a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assessment.

Most cultures, even revolutionary Marxism, have had regard for work. Indeed, Marx felt it was how man defined himself and one of his demands on modernity was that it bring man closer to his production. The Affordable Care Act creates some problems with work; first, it redefines what a real job is. The effect of the law can be muted under some circumstances; it is less burdensome if the business has less than 50 employees. And an employee is defined as someone who works for more than 30 hours. It is easy to see how companies would decrease the number of employees to 49 or effectively do that by decreasing employee working hours to less than 30. Either way the company ducks the ACA hammer.

This disincentive to full employment has become a talking point since the CBO's published estimates of job losses. But there is more here; one of the factors in the CBO's calculation was voluntary unemployment. Since the great objective of decoupling work from employment has been achieved, some are expected to take their insurance and tell the boss to 'take this job and shove it." Thus the government support of insurance--with other supports--makes working relatively unnecessary for some. Some have escaped the demands of a job.

This has been embraced by many. The peculiar Nancy Pelosi has gushed, "Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance." Jay Carney, when pressed on this topic, said that the Affordable Care Act gave people the "opportunity" that "allows families in America to make a decision about how they will work, and if they will work."

So work is an option for these people. And there is the assumption that those others, those without the creative muse, should and will continue to get up every day, go to work and contribute their fair share--which in this instance is 100%--to the well-being of those who do not find the reward of work necessary.

This disrespect for work, this facile reading of the nature of man, this unsubstantiated rewriting of man's historical makeup is a revolution in what passes for thought. It will be interesting to read what the reflective and knowledgeable world has to add to the thoughts of the less than profound Pelosi.

More, if one group of people working to support the comfort of another does not strike a familiar memory cord, it should.