Why Is Jonathan Gruber A Big Deal?

It's not so much to me because I was born in the Show-Me State and rarely believe anybody anyway.  Is it really a shock to anybody that politicians routinely lie to gain power?

Obama and the Democrats knew that they had to get away from the idea that Obamacare would result in higher premiums.  They had Gruber, an "MIT healthcare economist", gin up bogus numbers to support the idea that passing their massive health care power-grab bill would result in lower premiums.

This is the fact about "studies" whether they are about climate change, health care, immigration, food pyramids, ethanol, gun violence or whatever else has the potential to give more power to the federal government.  Sure, we expect politicians to utter convenient lies, but we still have an expectation of truth from the "experts", whether in meteorology, biology, economics, medicine, chemistry, or statistics.  We may not care too much to see how the sausage is made, but we want it to be beef or pork and not Soylent Green.  Many of us still had -- prior to Gruber's admission -- a reasonable expectation that these so-called experts were trying to give us the truth, even if they were often mistaken.  And we assumed they were mistaken rather than malicious.

The outright, intentional, and pernicious lies exposed by Gruber tell us that we can no longer trust just any "outside authority" to speak the truth. 

The good news is that, for the most part, we don't need to know what they tell us.  Most of us can do basic arithmetic -- even if we have to use a calculator.  Most of what we need to know we can verify ourselves.  We can generally trust tradition because it became tradition by being proven over time and multiple generations.  We can trust, most of the time, our own experience.  We can have some faith in those authorities that, so to speak, show their work. 

We must carefully and thoughtfully examine any claims made by anyone, remembering the admonition of Mark Twain that a man's opinions are often determined by the source of his corn pone. That pretty much excludes accepting anything put forth by anyone getting money from the federal government.  If your livelihood depends on a government grant, it's going to take more than a white paper to convince me your research hasn't been doctored.

Gruber has exposed how the system works, the insidious, incestuous, and parasitic relationship between government, academia, media, and the corporations.  Insurance companies saw in Obamacare the potential to force the young and healthy to buy insurance -- even when it meant taking on pre-existing conditions in others.  They also saw the potential to have the federal government bail them out -- like the Postal Service -- if they were unable to turn a profit. 

Obama, Reid, Pelosi and the rest knowingly and deliberately deceived the nation.  In a more enlightened era, they and Gruber might be dragged out in the street, executed, and their corpses nailed to power poles.  Fortunately for them, they live in what is still, at base, a Christian culture.  We are not going to do that.  I do hope, though, we learn not to get fooled again.