Ends That Justify Dissembling

Habitual Liars

Every so often politicians or those active in legislative chambers "show and tell".  They let us know what is (or has been) really going on.  One such moment has taken place in the United States.  One of the architects of deeply unpopular Obamacare has acknowledged (to a select audience) that at a critical point the language of the bill was crafted to disguise the truth.  The truth being disguised was that Obamacare, at its heart, is an enforced application of socialised medicine, where the more wealthy pay for the healthcare of others, through a taxing mechanism.

One of the architects of Obamacare said the law was written in a deliberately “tortured” way and relied on the “stupidity of the American voter” to ensure its passage.

In a newly unearthed 2013 clip, Jonathan Gruber, the MIT health economist who helped craft parts of the Affordable Care Act, got fairly candid about the tactics used to get the Affordable Care Act passed during a panel at the Annual Health Economists’ Conference last year.  “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber said in one 52-second clip. “If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. OK, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.”

Gruber then trumpeted the value of a “lack of transparency” — and called American voters stupid.  “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass.” [Emphasis, ours]

Lack of transparency--or dissembling, deceit, lying--is ever a favoured device amongst the enemy, for they are children of the Father of Lies.  Ideologues, for whom a cause justifies all means to achieve it, will ever resort to lying and duplicity to get their way. 

In New Zealand our recent history provides a classic example.
  The former Labour Government was led by a cabal deeply committed to ideological feminism--the extreme kind--which wanted to see all women freed from the "shackles" of motherhood and parenthood.  Freedom would come from the State as it replaced mothers as the primary care-givers of young children, thereby allowing women to get into the work force soon after giving birth.  Women would then take a giant leap forward in the struggle to become "equal" with men.  The strategy was to develop the Israeli kibbutz model on a grand scale.  State-run day-care centres on every corner.

But Prime Minister, Helen Clark and her co-conspirators realised the electorate would never go for it.  So, it had to be "disguised".  Very cleverly Clark began to trumpet early childhood education as critical to seeing children become effective students and scholars later in life.  Formal schooling would no longer begin at five years old, but would start from the cradle--at Early Childhood Education ("ECE") centres, funded by the State (since the State in New Zealand has always funded education--well, at least ever since the end of the nineteenth century).

Who would ever deny every child a decent start in life?  But it was all a smokescreen.  The real objective was to liberate post-partum women so they could to get into the work force as soon as possible.  If people knew this from the outset, the measure would have been deep-sixed before you could count out the numbers.  But Clark and her mob were cunning dissemblers.  They succeeded handsomely.

But now the lie has become as  plain as the proverbial on one's face.  The State, having set up ECE centres everywhere (and still going for it pell mell), and having blown the budget from an initial costing of around $400m per year to over a billion and climbing--has turned around and declaimed anyone teaching anything in ECE centres.  The official essence of education in a state Early Childhood Education centre is to teach nothing, nada.  If you are an ECE centre and you dare to attempt to teach four year olds anything, the educational authorities will have you in the principal's office quick smart for the bollocking of your life.  Try teaching the alphabet.  Try instructing children in how to hold a pencil and draw letters.  You would be guilty of doing immeasurable harm to the poor wee ones.  Any more of that and your state license will be removed.

ECE centres are not about early childhood education at all.  That proposition was and is pure propaganda.  They are really about state-run baby sitting centres, enabling women to get into the workforce to live the feminist "dream", thereby achieving "equality" with males.

Now, to be sure, not all who take advantage of the ECE rort are buying into the propaganda, nor the ideological vision of the secular feminists.  Some are using ECE centres for enabling contact with other children and neighbourhood parents.  Others are using them as day care centres whilst they go out to work, and so forth.  Each may be perfectly legitimate reasons.  But to pass all this off as early childhood education to enable children subsequently to succeed in schools, achieving high educational qualifications is a rort of gargantuan proportions.  Once again we are in Alice's Wonderland.

But's what's a little lie amongst co-conspirators, if it achieves the greater goal, eh?