Hold on to your hats, it’s coming!

“Great changes should not be forced on slim majorities.”
-Thomas Jefferson

This is Saturday, and they say a vote on Obamacare could be tomorrow.

Though polls show majority public disapproval, Intrade Prediction Markets is selling bets it’ll pass by July 30 at 82.7 as of right now.

You can think of that as a percentage prediction. I trust Intrade more than any poll, because you actually have to put your money where your mouth is there. Since it was established, it’s had a phenomenal record in predicting election results.

I hasten to add it’s not a static picture, you have to keep checking. The Intrade figures on the last Massachussetts election only shifted to favor Scott Brown within a few days of the vote.

But as it stands now, it looks like the socialization of one-sixth of the American economy will be well underway next week. And not just any sixth, it’s the one which grabs a significant fraction of the population by the short hairs. The only better method of social control I can think of off hand, would be socializing grocery stores and gas stations.

From what I’ve seen of the plan, it looks like the jiggery-pokey with the numbers provides for collecting money for a few years before the plan actually goes into effect, so it won’t go broke for another couple of years after that.

Some predict immediate effects, such as doctors and facilities refusing to take Medicare patients anymore and doctors leaving the practice of medicine.

This is an awful thing to say, but I hope so. I hope it collapses before I’m old, sick, and caught up in the system.

Some say it’ll be repealed in a wave of disgust after next election sweeps the Republicans to power with a supermajority.

Lots of luck. That majority will have to be pretty super to override a presidential veto.

I don’t have anything more to say that I and others haven’t said before, but I do have an anecdote I’d like to record for posterity.

A few weeks back, while covering a non-health care related event*, I had the opportunity to sit in on a conversation between a county official, active in local Democratic politics, and the aid to one of our senators.

I know, like, and respect the county guy. He’s a retired farmer and truck driver, and attends to county business very well.

He was giving the D.C. guy absolute hell. He called the D.C. Dems “gutless” for not passing a public option. Actually, what he said was they were gutless for not “ramming it through.”

His argument was that it should have been rammed down the throats of the people, against the “opposition” – and don’t worry, they’ll learn to like it like they like their medicare.

His personal bitch was that he’d recently had to pay 10 grand for a knee joint replacement, if memory serves. And he couldn’t understand why he saw people in wheelchairs protesting socialized medicine at Tea Party rallies. Didn’t they know what’s good for them?

I did not contribute to the conversation. I was there wearing my reporter hat, and when you show up with that hat on, you kind of can’t take it off till you leave. The D.C. guy kept glancing at me, and it seemed to me he felt a little constrained in what he was saying. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but I do have reason to believe my articles and op-eds get read by the NoDak congressional delegation, or at least by their aids.

That’s the attitude folks. You’ll take it and you’ll like it.

Another thing, I know the local Republican chair too. He’s a cheerful, laid-back, live-and-let-live sort of guy, who likes to do his job and go home to his family and his hobby of making lots of different varieties of home-made wine.

In short, he hasn’t got the fire in the belly the local cause junkies have. He seems to be Republican chair by default.

That’s what worries me. The natural, non-ideological libertarian-leaning folks who just want to live their lives and mind their own business and live their own lives just aren’t motivated to the extent the “opposition” is.

There are highly motivated activists in various libertarian organizations – but long experience has shown they’re incapable of founding or working together within large organizations. The largest and most successful are ones which have financial angels and are run, often in an weirdly dictatorial manner, by long-time career staff.

Further, libertarians tend to drop out of activism whenever they succeed in getting a life. (Hint, it’s roughly an 80% male movement.) And when they don’t succeed in getting a life, they tend to drift away on floating abstractions as their contact with reality grows increasingly tenuous.

Among other things, this tends to call their credibility into question when they say they know how to organize and run a nation-sized polity. That and the fact they have trouble answering their mail.

I believe at this point there has never been a greater chance of our nation declining to something like the economic level of pre-Soviet collapse Eastern Europe.

I believe at this point there has never been a greater chance of our nation breaking up altogether since the Civil War.

And I believe at this point there has never been a greater chance our descendants will someday look back at this era as the time a great nation committed suicide at the height of its power.

*FEMA presentation on flood insurance.