Many minions write to the Czar in an overtly supplicating tone, apparently terrified that the Czar will unleash some horrific punishment onto them. Ridiculous! The Czar encourages and welcomes all manners of correspondence with his minions, for he truly respects and loves them all. Unless of course, they annoy him to even the slightest unforeseen degree, in which case the Czar will capriciously erupt in an uncontrolled fury, subjecting them to either a non-medical, base trephination using a heavy object or have them participate in an unassisted solo rappel out of a Castle window.

The point is to keep those letters coming in, kids.

The Czar loves letters and emails because quite frankly this website has the smartest freaking audience of any website around. And when you write in, the Czar knows he will get a quality observation, comment, or analysis that will delight him. And if it delights the Czar, it will delight the forty-thousand readers we get a month. And that is something special. Plus, it means the Czar doesn’t have to cough up another new topic today and can take it easy.

A person who truly gets this is Island Dweller, who says:

Most Noble Potentate of the Permafrost,

With trembling spirit I approach the throne of your august Majesty to report an instance of loyal disagreement with an imperial opinion rendered a few days ago about previous unassailable Laws of the Land, and how they have over time been repealed. Memory may be playing tricks on your waterlogged minion’s mind, but I seem to recall the Volstead Act (Prohibition) was another “law of the land” that lasted 14 years before it finally went down the toilet thanks to FDR.

I beg to further differ slightly on your majesty’s opinion of Obamacare joining the ranks of the other repealed and considered “unassailable” laws of the land. When reviewing the other statutes mentioned in your posting, it was obvious they were outright odious to at least a sizeable minority of the populace of the land. One wonders how Prohibition passed Congress and got into law except that somehow the country was distracted by WWI and Wilson’s League of Nations antics afterwards.

Obamacare is different. Now you have a sizeable and vocal minority of the populace that stands to profit from this statute, unlike the others that were listed (Dredd Scott – beneficiaries: tiny proportion of slaveholders, plus Congressmen wanting to put off this argument between the states for a few more years; Prohibition : Carrie Nation descendants, clergymen and a few others who thought they could control reprehensible behavior by eliminating its fuel). Obamacare is different because it is an entitlement program rather than a punitive measure or something that is morally questionable. People – a lot of mis/uninformed people – stand to gain from this, plus the congressmen that voted for it in an effort to court votes within the communities that think they will be helped by this atrocity.

Your humble subject prays you are right, but this time there is room for doubt. Unless some members of the Senate can reverse their castration or grow up quickly, we may be stuck with this thing at least for a while.

ID

The Czar thinks ID might be referring to a post last August, rather than a few days ago, but who knows whether ID is reading an essay from our past, or knowing this audience, its future.

The closest approximation to Obamacare the Czar manages to cough up is legalized slavery. Hear us out: the parallels are that each disgusted the majority of the population and clearly provided immense material benefit for a chosen few.

But slavery provided an economic backbone to a region of the country. An unnecessary one, to be sure, as the South could easily have sustained itself without slavery because, in fact, it does today. However, ending slavery proved to be a severe hit on the economy of the entire United States except for some carpetbaggers and scalawags.

Obamacare differs in this respect because it goes into existence as a drain on the economy. Slavery, at first, was a source of cheapest labor that brought immense profits to the slave holders; over time, of course, it proved to be non-viable. Obamacare begins with economic ruin and pretty much stays there or goes worse.

Another critical difference between the two is that slavery was initiated by business people who knew what they were doing. Obamacare was written by people with little knowledge of medicine or insurance who had no clue what they got us all into, other than it felt good to do.

Can Obamacare be ended? Eventually, it will have to end itself. American cannot sustain any of its current welfare programs for very much longer, and there is even a well-argued book about that.

The more serious thought question for our readers: did the authors of Obamacare not understand its built-in failure? Or did they know exactly it would fail, and that’s what they want—a collapsed insurance industry ripe for complete takeover by the government?

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.