There’s an irony in the GOP complaining that ACA lets people quit jobs. I mean, what’s wrong with freedom?

– (HT: The Huffington Post)*

So what is wrong with freedom? I’m not sure. There hasn’t been too much of it running around loose lately. Most people who think otherwise haven’t gone through DCA around 1PM any time in the last 12 years. I kid. It’s a quote from the Huffpo. I had a hard time taking that rhetorical question above any more seriously than I’d take an old Andy Kaufman routine. The important question to ask would be this: “What in the name of Glorious and Sacred Obamacare has brought forth such a bilious wellspring of Progressive brain waste?”

It all began when a reasonably decent and well-meaning bureaucrat from the CBO pointed out they projected a net job loss of 2.5M man years over the next decade as a result of Obamacare. Net job losses are like impacted molars. Nobody likes them and they must be redefined. So we now have 2.5M individuals who will stop being workers (or 2.5M man years worth of work hours lost) because they have become differently incentivized. The President gave them the freedom to quit. It’s a Positive Liberty – Let’s go celebrate with fireworks!

Well no. Let’s all put the doobage away and not celebrate. Being differently incentivized and having the freedom to sit on your butt and do nothing at some other sucker’s expense is the epitome of evil for two reasons.

1) The freedom to sit on your butt and do nothing at another citizen’s expense is expressly parasitic and malignant.

2) Behind the deliberately freighted Orwellian term Positive Liberty there hides a hideous form of evil. It turns citizens into subjects and preys upon their desire for comfort and ease. Fred Reed describes how over the last eight decades this process has changed the fundamental character of the American man on the street below. The first paragraph describes what we were.

A staple of American self-esteem is that we Yanks are brave, free, independent, self-reliant, ruggedly individual, and disinclined to accept abuse from anyone. This was largely true in, say, 1930. People lived, a great many of them, on farms where they planted their own crops, built their own barns, repaired their own trucks, and protected their own property. They were literate but not educated, knew little of the world beyond the local, but in their homes and fields they were supreme.

Behold the power of the Positive Liberty! Here’s what having the “freedom” of getting to sit around on your sorry posterior and have the government confiscate elements of your livelihood from others turns Americans into below.

Thus much of the country morphed into helpless flowers, narcissistic, easily frightened, profoundly ignorant video-game twiddlers and Facebook Argonauts. As every known poll shows, even what purport to be college graduates do not know who fought in World War One, or that there was a Mexican-American war, or where Indochina is. Serving as little more than cubicle fodder, they could not survive a serious crisis like the first Depression. And they look to the collective, the hive, for protection. The notion of individual self-defense, whether with a fist or a Sig 9, is, you know, like scary, or, well, just wrong or macho or something. I mean, if you find an intruder in your house at night, shouldn’t you, like, call a caring adult?

So behind all the benevolent language about being free to quit is a call to greater personal dependence instead of responsibility. Why isn’t this relief from responsibility good? It is antipodal to good because it takes a free-minded, productive and independent citizens and turns them into the human equivalent of intestinal parasites. These parasites then degrade and eat out the sustenance of others.

So what is wrong with The Huffpo version of freedom? The fact that calling it freedom is about like Uncle Tom being grateful that the new master isn’t behaving like Simon LeGree. When freedom is defined as your masters in DC tweaking the rules a bit so that it’s less constricting to live in your bondage, you are not free. Unless of course you define freedom as nothing left too loose…

*-Because anything that profoundly retarded would almost have to be The Huffington Post.