A War on Reality

Paul Hsieh has a very important post up at Noodlefood showing how under the Obama administration, our government will penalize business no matter what they do. This theme was also taken up in an IBD editorial, which includes this passage:

Now it's time to pay the piper, and Waxman doesn't want to pay.

He has decided to haul the executives into yet another round of star chamber hearings to explain just why two and two make four.

This is an implied threat to companies either to cook their books or face legal or political sanctions for embarrassing Congress by revealing the true impact of its health care bill on the private sector.

It has its place with what Stalin did in Soviet Russia, denouncing farmers as hoarders after setting artificially low prices for crops, and what Hugo Chavez is doing today in Venezuela, dictating prices on raw goods and limiting access to money while penalizing companies for passing on those costs to customers.

RealClearPolitics also looks at the issue. Here's one of their observations:

Democrats clearly plan to blame the private sector for all the downsides of their health plan. In a private lobbying session, President Obama told liberal lawmakers that the bill is only "a beginning." Any increase in costs and premiums -- both of which are inevitable -- will be attributed to corporate malfeasance requiring yet more government intervention.

I also liked this snarky comment from an Instapundit reader:

What’s really funny is that among other things Sarbanes-Oxley requires them to make the impacts public, and Waxman voted for that. Apparently he didn’t read that bill either.