Posted on 12/17/2014 6:35:41 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Jonathan Gruber should have been Time’s Person of the Year. The magazine gave it to the “Ebola Fighters” instead. Good for them; they’re doing God’s work. Still, Gruber would have been better.
Time’s Person of the Year designation has lost a lot of its stature over recent years. Part of its decline can probably be attributed to the fact that it’s come to be seen as an honorific. It was originally conceived to recognize the person who, “for better or for worse . . . has done the most to influence the events of the year.” So Adolf Hitler (1938) and Josef Stalin (1939 and again in 1942) qualified. In 2001, however, the editors couldn’t bring themselves to bestow the title on Osama bin Laden, even though he certainly deserved it. (New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani got it instead for his heroic response to the evil deeds of the person who influenced the events of the year most decidedly for the worse.)
The other conceit of the P.O.Y. is to capture some theme or trend that lends itself to end-of-the-year thumb-sucker columns (like this one). That’s why the computer was hailed as the “Machine of the Year” in 1982 and our “Endangered Earth” was dubbed “Planet of the Year” in 1988. In 2006, “You” won the contest because of all the wonderful work you do in creating Web content. (Congrats, by the way.) And in 2011, “the Protester” won in recognition of tea partiers and Wall Street occupiers alike.
For similar reasons, I think Time missed an opportunity in not putting Gruber on the cover. Tea partiers and Wall Street occupiers disagree on a great many things, but there’s one place where the Venn diagrams overlap: the sense we’re all being played for suckers, that the rules are being set up to benefit those who know how to manipulate the rules. The Left tends to focus on Wall Street types whose bottom line depends more on lobbying Washington than satisfying the consumer.
But Gruber is something special. He was supposed to be better, more pure than the fat cats. Touted by press and politicians alike as an objective and fair-minded arbiter of health-care reform, the MIT economist was in fact a warrior for the cause, invested emotionally, politically and, it turns out, financially through undisclosed consulting arrangements. The people who relied on his expertise never bothered to second-guess his conflicts of interest because they, too, were warriors in the same fight.
In speeches and interviews, Gruber admitted he helped the Obama administration craft the law in such a way that it would seem like it didn’t tax the American people when it did. Using insights gleaned in part from his status as an adviser to the Congressional Budget Office, Gruber helped construct an actuarial Trojan horse that could smuggle a tax hike past the CBO bean counters — because if the individual mandate had been counted as a tax, it would’ve been a big political liability for President Obama. (Fortunately for Obamacare, the Supreme Court saw through the subterfuge and called it a tax, rendering it constitutional.)
Gruber then mocked the “stupidity of the American voter” for not seeing through the camouflage he helped design.
Last week, in a congressional hearing that came as close to an auto-da-fé as our politics can manage, Gruber apologized for his “arrogance” as a way to duplicitously deny his previous duplicity. It was a brilliant and cynical public-relations ploy. By making the issue his personality, he could avoid the tougher questions about the substance of what he said — and did.
It worked, in part, because Gruber really is arrogant. But Gruber’s arrogance goes beyond the personal. He represents the arrogance of the expert class writ large. They create systems, terms, and rules that no normal person on the outside can possibly penetrate. They make life and living more complicated and then get rich and powerful off of their ability to navigate that complexity. Time and again they sell simplicity and security and deliver more complications and insecurity, which in turn creates demand for more experts promising simplicity and security the Gruberians never deliver.
It’s not that Americans are stupid, it’s that the experts have been geniuses at creating a system that makes normal people feel stupid.
— Jonah Goldberg is a senior editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
One of my favorite dreams is Gruber in prison being passed around for a pack of cigarettes.
Either people like Jonathan Gruber are identified, exposed and denied access to power or a beurocratic ideologue class will succeed in transforming and destroying American culture.
They had a sudden and unrecoverable decline exactly about the time they were rumored to have considered Rush Limbaugh as the “person of the year” and instead wussed-out like a bunch of cowards and picked The Pope.
Rush CLEARLY had a more pronounced effect on The World that year than The Pope.
RE: Rush CLEARLY had a more pronounced effect on The World that year than The Pope.
What year was that again?
‘94, I believe - the year The GOP took over congress for the first time in 40 years, and 2 years into Clinton’s first term.
If not for that we would have had Hillarycare instead of Obamacare.
One or two rotations, and his jail-name would be "Loosey"...
The duplicitous Gruber before Congress, calculatedly apologized---aided and abetted by his lawyer....then avoided the tougher questions about the Obamacare monster he helped create.
Gruber’s arrogance was honed in MIT elitism.
Americans are forced endure the arrogance of these so-called "experts" ... .govt factotums who get paid w/ tax dollars to create govt systems, terms and rules that no normal person can possibly penetrate.
These self-described "experts" exist to burden the working classes......while they get rich and hob nob w/ the powerful in secret sessions to burden the taxpayers w/ even more govt flim-flam.
One Michigan lawmaker that endured Gruber said it best: “Mr. Gruber appears to be a very devious man – perhaps with a proclivity for fraud,” Michigan state Rep. McMillin said in an email.
You should have seen “Family Guy’s” episode of “The Three Kings” Parodies of three Stephen King stories....Shawshank was one of them. Funny.
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