“We as a society” Does Not Exist
3rd December 2013
A popular leftist trope debunked.
Speaking about Obamacare, MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber said, “We’ve decided as a society that we don’t want people to have insurance plans that expose them to more than six thousand dollars in out-of-pocket expenses.”
What does it mean that “we” decide something “as a society”? It’s an important question: This sort of statement gets used frequently as a justification of government of intervention. When, in the same fashion, Obama says “we as a nation,” he is just using a variation of the same expression and talking like the average politician.
“We as a society” or “we as a nation” is generally used as an incantation with no scientific meaning. If it has any ascertainable meaning, it means “we who want to impose our current and perhaps changing whims on others.”