The reaction to this proposal illustrates an excellent reason to oppose all expansions in government entitlements: Once the government starts giving people money for some reason, they can never stop. They can't even reduce how much money they give for that reason, even if the reason no longer exists, or never existed to begin with.

Entitlements are a ratchet, costing ever greater amounts of money until they finally cause the government to go bust. This is why expansions of entitlements are dangerous.

People like Saul Alinsky and his student Obama know this. In fact, they depend on it as part of their philosophy.

Alinsky teaches that one way to bring about large-scale change in a society is to overwhelm its systems until they collapse. At that point, you can institute new systems that are more along the lines of what you want. The fact that government entitlements are a ratchet are what make this possible.

In the specific case of Obama, he intends to use this technique to destroy the free enterprise-based American health care financing system and replace it with a socialist system. To do that, he created Obamacare, which institutes a government-driven ratchet intended to make health insurance unaffordable. At the same time, he creates government-sponsored "exchanges" (a weasel-word for "collectives") where people can buy insurance.

The plan: Obamacare floods the system with mandates that make health insurance unprofitable, such as mandating no preexisting condition exclusions, no lifetime benefits caps, ruinous taxes on medical equipment, etc. It also floods the system with people who can't afford to buy insurance and require government subsidies, which the government can cap at below the rate the insurance companies need to charge, thus making them lose money on millions of new customers.

Once the government is fully in charge, they keep ratcheting up the number of people covered unprofitably and the cost of medical care. That results in skyrocketing insurance premiums, forcing employers to cancel their insurance coverage. The workers are then forced to seek medical insurance from the collectives. This continues until virtually everybody is buying health insurance from the collectives.

The private insurance market eventually crashes. When that happens, the government is "obligated" to step in and create a socialist medical system. The government then nationalizes and combines the exchanges into a single new government agency, and merges that agency into the gigantic new National Health Department, along with Medicare and Medicaid.

Goal achieved: Another doomed-to-fail socialist medical program created.

Again, this scenario is possible, in fact guaranteed, because a new entitlement was created, Obamacare, backed by a government ratchet. It can't fail.

And that's another reason that new entitlements should be resisted. Leftist politicians have figured out how turn an entitlement into a new branch of socialist government.

What's next? Retirement. There's $17.5 trillion in private retirement plans.

Yes, this is very possible. They did it with health care, why not retirement?