I wish this story were some kind of satirical fantasy

I've been thinking all day about how to do a post on this.  It's just so pathetic it makes you embarrassed to be a member of the human species.

What it is, is the latest and most ridiculous example of a meme that's developing in response to the CBO report about post-America losing 2 million jobs or the equivalent thereof.

To prepare us for today's level of ludicrousness, we've had the column by the Indiana University pediatrics professor, who treated us to this glistening chunk of dog vomit:

Giving some people Medicaid and others subsidies to help them pay for insurance would leave some people more flush with resources. They might choose to work fewer hours, or not at all. A number of people just under age 65 might have liked to retire before the ACA, but they knew they couldn't get insurance without a job. Since the ACA now would guarantee them more affordable options, they might choose to retire earlier. Also, a number of would-be entrepreneurs might have liked to have struck out on their own, but feared they wouldn't be able to get insurance for the same reason. The ACA would protect them. They might leave their jobs to start businesses.

No mention of who the f--- pays for this subsidized array of life options.  





 And there's the sad presser appearance of Jason Furman - the chair of the stinkin' Council of Economic Advisors, for cryin' out loud.

“This is a choice on a part of workers,” Furman told reporters Tuesday. “I have no doubt, if for example, we got rid of Social Security, and Medicare, there are many 95-year-olds who would choose to work more to avoid potentially starving or to give themselves the opportunity to get health care, I don’t think anyone would say that’s a compelling argument to eliminate Social Security and Medicare.”

The Obamacare law provides insurance subsidies and expands Medicaid allowing people to avoid “joblock,” or working somewhere just to maintain health insurance, Furman said.

“Similarly, here, CBOs analysis itself is about the choices that workers are making in the face of new options available to them by the Affordable Care Act, not something that about firms destroying jobs,” Furman said.

Now comes a University of Iowa professor of - I kid you not - leisure studies, with a Politico piece on how Pubs want people to work all the time.  Cites the Industrial Revolution as the point in human history when people developed the concept of going to a job, and when such jobs entailed most of one's waking hours.  Cites the labor movement as the force that shortened the work week and raised wages.  Says that now we can enter an age in which

 Instead of perpetual consumerism and the infinite increase in material wealth, we would naturally turn to improving the human condition, learning how to live together “wisely, agreeable, and well,” as Keynes put it. Progress would then take the form of healthier families, communities and cities—the increase of knowledge, the enjoyment of nature, history and other peoples, an increasing delight in the marvels of the human spirit, the practice of our beliefs and values together, the finding of common ground for conviviality, expanding our awareness of God, wondering in Creation.

These lofty sentiments mixed with the ordinary delights: slow meals together (Ralph Waldo Emerson), conversations in the evening (Henry David Thoreau), dancing the night away (William Ellery Channing), singing in the choir (Jonathan Edwards), “observing a spear of summer grass” (Walt Whitman), reading and talking about books (Robert Hutchins), playing amateur sports (Fannia Cohn) and walking around Central Park in the dead of winter (Elizabeth Hasanovitz).

Sheesh.  Where to begin?  No mention of individual vision and drive to see the vision become a reality. No mention of the basic fact of human societal organization that the money has to come from somewhere.  No mention of the fact that people already enjoy the lofty pursuits and ordinary delights he mentions.

I'm occasionally taken to task in comment threads here at LITD as well as in Facebook snits for my assertion that the aim of the Left is to create a nation of creatures having more in common with cattle than with human beings - and that the Left is succeeding quite nicely in this aim.

What else are we to call it?  I'm not the first to see the comparison to H.G. Wells's Morlocks and Eloi.  The overlords really are that power-mad.  They want the citizenry as shallow, as sexless, as devoid of vision as possible.

Yesterday, my wife and I happened upon Dr. Zhivago on the TCM channel.  IT was a while since I'd seen it.  It's clearly a powerful movie, in some cases cinematically quite beautiful.  It's also quite grim.  It's about the Communist takeover of Russia, for heaven's sake.  Particularly powerful is the scene where the doctor returns home from the front to a house he'd lived in with his wife and son and his wife's father.  A big house, with many rooms.  He comes back to find that the Bolsheviks have divided into thirteen apartments and moved in families who are total strangers.  Strange people are making off with his belongings, right under the nose of the Red Army guards.

That and several other scenes made me squirm with an uncomfortable realization:  I identify with this way too much.  The diminished expectations, the forcible redistribution of money and property, the scorn for the notion of the private citizen.

Leisure studies professor Hunicutt must not have thought through the full implications of his idyllic Eloi vision.  There will be no poetry written worth reading, no books worth discussing, no sports worth playing in the grimly level post-America of life with no point.

Or maybe he did and it's fine with him.