Death of the working schlub

To the leftist elite, we are Willy Loman — “Death of a Salesman’s” hapless everyman clinging to the myth of the American Dream — exploited, weary, and woefully embittered when the promise proves false.

How they pity our lot in life, sweating day in and day out for a nebulous reward. Such a drag. But now, we don’t have to worry anymore, thanks to the wonders of Obamacare!

A new Congressional Budget Office report estimates that up to 2.5 million people will leave the work force by 2024 as a result of the Affordable Care Act. That’s equal to the number of people who live in Vermont, Montana and South Dakota. Combined.

That’s a good thing, according to the Obama administration. “Because of this law, individuals will be empowered to make choices about their own lives and livelihoods,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, “…As part of this new day in health care, Americans would no longer be trapped in a job just to provide coverage for their families, and would have the opportunity to pursue their dreams.”

Got that? Feeling newly empowered, tomorrow you can walk into your boss’s office, lean over his desk and tell him to take this job and shove it! You can go home, no longer trapped, and realize your dream of opening a kite shop in Telluride.

There’s only one problem with that romantic scenario. What middle-management schmuck is going to agree to sitting in smog-choked traffic for 10 hours a week so you can skip through the mountain air flying kites? Who is going to clean toilets, bus tables, collect garbage and change bedpans if people are, in Carney’s words, no longer “trapped” to endure such undignified toil?

Anyone…anyone?

Only a fool or a fraud would claim that able-bodied adults chucking work is good for society. That said, reframing yet another ugly outcome of Obamacare as a lifestyle benefit is all that remains in the left’s depleting bag of tricks.

That the White House and its supporters are openly selling this twaddle also speaks volumes: They think enough bumpkins will gullibly buy their snake oil cure for the daily grind. They believe, rightly, that some will be elated that their personal indulgences will be funded by the sweat of others, like those nasty conservatives so enamored with hard work and responsibility.

Empowered to make choices. Opportunity to pursue dreams… Unless, of course, you aren’t among the chosen ones who will receive an Obamacare subsidy; unless you’re the person who’s expected to pull the sled.

“You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away. A man is not a piece of fruit!”  ~ Willy Loman, “Death of a Salesman”

Sixty-five years ago, Arthur Miller’s protagonist was victimized by a heartless system, which in the socialist playwright’s eyes, was capitalism.

How ironic. More than a half century later, it is actually the entitlement dream of progressivism, not greedy capitalists, that is destroying the upward mobility of industrious men and women. It is, quoting Loman, a “ridiculous lie” that devours the fruit of the American worker, leaving nothing behind but an empty peel.