Another episode of Gangster Government

The adoption of Obamacare and related nationalization of health insurance represents the abandonment of limited government in many respects. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius put an exclamation point on this observation last week as she warned health insurers not to pipe up regarding the consequences of Obamacare if they knew what was good for them.
When I read the news account of Seblius’s letter letter to the national association of health insurers, I thought immediately of Michael Barone’s frank description of the May 2009 column on the Chrysler bankruptcy. “We have just seen an episode of Gangster Government,” Barone wrote. He added: “It is likely to be part of a continuing series.”
He got that right. Who better than Barone to address the Seblius letter? He turns to it today in “Gangster government stifles criticism of Obamacare.” Obamacare needs to be repealed and Obama needs to be defeated.
Abraham Lincoln decried the Know Nothings in his famous letter to Joshua Speed. The Sebelius letter puts me in mind of Lincoln’s lament: “When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].” We’re not going anywhere, but the point stands.