The Healer - America's Telocratic President

Michael Oakeshott coined the dichotomous terms telocracy (not teleocracy as I have erroneously written in a post) and nomocracy - the former denoting an understanding of the office of government as defining and achieving specific goals for society at large, the latter standing for a government enforcing the rule of law which places primacy in personal freedom, individual initiative and responsibility.

Credit.

In August 2009 I wrote in a post entitled Obama on the Enemies of the People:

I was surprised to encounter almost no outrage when Obama talked about his unconstitutional, autocratic goals during his appearance at Jay Leno's show, of which I noted here:

A president should conduct himself in line with the dignity one wishes his office to command. The mere wish that the presidential office should be one of dignity does neither ensure that it actually is nor that a president proves capable of meeting that standard.

Obama's performance at Jay Leno just showed that neither the office nor its holder are committed to the kind of dignity the Constitution intends them to embody.

Obama jumped from one socialist ukase type of pronouncement to the next, explaining how he would see to it that people will take up the sort of jobs he thinks they should be doing (socialist and unconstitutional), that the country will use the kind of energy resources he thinks it should be employing (socialist and unconstitutional), that it is his responsibility to steer the economy (socialist and unconstitutional), that the more well-to-do should be taxed differentially (socialist and unconstitutional) and ... and ... and.

Four years later, Thomas Sowell explains another major case reflecting the conceit of America's president:

Like so many things that seem new, ObamaCare is in many ways old wine in new bottles.

For example, when confronted with the fact that millions of Americans stand to lose their existing medical insurance, as a result of ObamaCare, defenders of ObamaCare say that this is true only when those people have "substandard" insurance.

Who decides what is "substandard"? What is older than the idea that some exalted elite know what is good for us better than we know ourselves? Obama uses the rhetoric of going "forward," but he is in fact going backward to an age when despots told everybody what they had better do and better not do.

ObamaCare is old in yet another way. One of the fundamental reasons why private medical insurance has gotten so expensive is that politicians in state after state have mandated what this insurance must cover, regardless of what individuals want.

Insurance covering everything from baldness treatments to sex-change operations is a lot more expensive than insurance covering only major illnesses that can drain your life's savings. Now these mandates have moved up from the state to the federal level.

The entire article.