Maybe if I were smarter I wouldn't be so mystified by how liberals think, but, given my limitations, I really am often puzzled by the things they say. Earlier this week the CBO announced what I thought at first was terrible news: Obamacare would result in over 2.5 million full-time workers leaving the work force over the next decade.
My first thought was that it's surely a bad thing to have fewer people working. Work ennobles the people who do it, gives them a sense of dignity and accomplishment, and generates greater wealth and more tax revenue. Unemployment, on the other hand, is a bad thing. It results in people becoming dependent on government, it causes them to lose necessary job skills required for reentering the workforce, it tends to diminish their self-esteem, and it reduces the revenues coming into local, state, and federal coffers.
Evidently, though, I only think this way because I'm not liberal enough. It seems that everyone on the left from MSNBC to Harry Reid to Nancy Pelosi to the New York Times to the White House is trumpeting this CBO report as positively wonderful news. It means, if I understand them aright, that lots of people will no longer have to work just to be able to afford health insurance. Under Obamacare, people who don't want to work can now quit their jobs and have their insurance paid for by ... us. What a deal.
I wonder how these liberal folks would have responded to the news that 2.5 million people would be dropping out of the labor force if the CBO had announced it under a Republican administration. I guess I shouldn't wonder about such things, though. I'm sure they would still have declared two and a half million fewer full-time workers to be a genuine blessing.