Eric Holder’s Money Shot
28th May 2014
Mark Steyn is upset.
It’s not just Obamacare. In many other areas of life, Americans now enjoy considerably less freedom of maneuver than Europeans do. If it doesn’t seem like that, it’s because we’ve come up with a more cunning form of statism. In France a third of a century back, Mitterrand nationalized the banks. That’s what socialists do. And people would kick up a fuss if Washington tried anything like that. So instead we’ve wound up with a kind of third-party statism, in which the zombie husks of private industry are conscripted as the front men for de facto nationalization. Except for the check design and debit-card color, it doesn’t make any difference whether you go to the First National Bank of Deadsville, the Deadsville Savings Bank, or the Deadsville Community Bank: The answers are all the same, because they’re all just operating the federal guidelines. It’s like going to the North Deadsville DMV and thinking you’ll get a different answer from the South Deadsville DMV.