If you want to sum up everything wrong with the way our arrogant Ruling Class looks upon its child-citizens, you could use Michelle Obama’s deep thoughts about why young people should be racing to sign up for the Affordable Care Act.  The young have largely turned up their noses at ObamaCare thus far, despite one of the most massive, expensive advertising campaigns in history, including gigawatts of volunteer star power from Hollywood celebrities (who would not, of course, be caught dead relying on ObamaCare for their health care or fighting through the bug-infested $600 million Healthcare.gov website, any more than Michelle Obama would.)

So maybe what the kids really needed to get the lead out, with just a few weeks remaining before the individual mandate cut-off date, was to have the First Lady call them a bunch of clumsy knuckleheads likely to maim themselves during their feeble efforts to cook food, once they officially become adults at the tender age of 27, and Mommy isn’t cooking for them any more:

So the next time you feel like dancing on a bar stool, kids, remember it’s your civic duty to sign up for King Barack’s idiotic health care scheme, so you can get government-approved coverage when you slip and crack your head open on the tavern floor.  Granted, since those lousy ObamaCare policies have deductibles of eight or ten thousand dollars, you’re going to need neurosurgery before seeing much of a return on your $300 premium payments, but who knows, you might fall off a really tall bar stool.

The Queen has given us a perfect Rosetta Stone to deciphering the dishonesty and nanny-state contempt behind ObamaCare.  Let’s start with the inconvenient fact alluded to by those sky-high deductibles and premiums.  ObamaCare doesn’t want to take care of you, knuckleheads.  It wants to pick your pockets.  It needs your money (and the spigot of taxpayer cash your represent through subsidies) to offset the cost of covering older, sicker people.  The opportunity to fleece you is what made the insurance industry willing to support ObamaCare, along with the upcoming “risk corridor” bailouts.

Young folks used to have access to affordable insurance policies that took proper account of their general good health, while providing reasonable protection against catastrophe.  Those policies are gone now, mandated out of existence by thousands of pages of ObamaCare regulations that have nothing to do with injuries sustained by falling off a bar stool.

As Moe Lane explained in these august pixellized pages earlier today, a young person who passes on paying huge ObamaCare premiums for a virtually useless insurance policy, choosing instead to suffer a trans-constitutional tax/penalty 80 or 90 percent smaller, is not  a “knucklehead.”  He’s making a rational decision.  If the ObamaCare scam artists had been honest about the size of the trans-constitutional penalties necessary to effectively force kids into the program, the whole stupid law would have died in flames, whether Democrats controlled Congress or not.

As with the options of refusing the Medicaid expansion or refusing to set up a state exchange – lawful options now blamed by Administration flacks for causing all the problems with the system – a pretense of freedom was included through the tax/penalty, because even Democrats hungry to grab at the brass ring of socialized medicine understood their constituents would bolt from obvious tyranny.  It shouldn’t really surprise anyone that people have chosen to exercise those freedoms in manners that displease statist planners.  People will do that, which is why statists hate them so much.

And what better way to express contempt and hatred than the language Michelle Obama has used here?  She doesn’t think of it that way, of course.  She thinks she sounds maternal.  Everyone is supposed to laugh, admit “yeah, man, she’s right, we’re knuckleheads,” and applaud her hipness for saying it so bluntly.

But the people she’s talking about are in their twenties.  Consider that for a second: you just heard the First Lady of the United States describe 26-year-olds as hapless, irresponsible children who can’t even cook meals for themselves without dousing the kitchen counters with a spray of blood.  We are not far removed from a generation that would have been stunned and outraged as such an imputation of helplessness, as well as rebelling against the idea that giant, coercive government programs are necessary to save young adults from themselves.

ObamaCare keeps coming back to this essential view of twentysomethings as witless naifs who just tumbled out of a papoose – from the notorious “brosurance” ads depicting young ObamaCare customers as drunken frat boys and sex-crazed coeds waving boxes of condoms, to Pajama Boy sitting on Mom’s couch in a onesie and sipping cocoa.  So much for personal responsibility, or even a family’s responsibility for the young men and women they send into the world.  So much for recognizing the dignity of a generation that has fought with valor on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Michelle Obama famously said the election of her husband was the first time she was ever proud of her country.  You’d think she could show a bit more respect and gratitude to the young people who put him there.

It’s not just the young who get treated as knuckleheads by the Left, of course.  Every aspect of Obama philosophy is based on contempt for individuals and their voluntary associations.  We can’t be trusted to reach employment agreements with each other, purchase energy, decide what kind of cars we want to drive, or shape the education of our children.  The Federal Communications Commission has even decided we cannot be trusted to consume information without guidance from government commissars.  It’s hard to think of a single aspect of our lives we are fully trusted to manage without political control.  It is not surprising that the controllers look upon us and see, not a mighty sovereign people they serve in awe, but a pack of knuckleheads who can scarcely feed themselves.