Anthony Esolen on the real problem with Obamacare

At Inside Catholic he writes:

What I want to suggest here is that the bill represents but a late stage in the transformation of the relationship between the individual and the state. To do this, I must insist on a fuller definition of the "political" than we have become accustomed to. We now consider politics to be the realm, principally, of national legislation, executive order, and court decision. But what is lost is the life of the polis itself, a community of free people who live together, celebrate together, work together, and provide together for the common good. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, who held a generally sunny view of the polis, the community is a natural outgrowth of man's capacity to reason: to participate in divine law by enacting measures in accord with the natural law, with an aim toward providing goods that embrace but also transcend the individual.

The Thomistic view of the polis underlies the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity, which asserts that communities closest to the issue at hand should be allowed the freedom to tackle it. That is not simply because they do a better job of it, as some conservatives insist. It is because the fullness of community life is essential to our being human. It is doubtful that the state, much less the federal government, is better at educating children than were the fully engaged American townsmen of old, who hired and fired their own teachers at will, and had a fairly clear idea of what their children ought to learn. But even if it could do the job well, its assumption of that role would take from the community one of the most important responsibilities it possesses. It would overstep its own zone of authority to usurp another. Supposing some state agency could, with wonderful efficiency, feed children and make them do their homework and put them to bed; still, its exercise of this role would rob from the people one of the great challenges and joys of life, the raising of children according to one's own best lights.

When Alexis de Tocqueville observed America, he saw a democracy, for the time being, both bolstered and buffered by free associations of people -- by families, community schools, churches, fraternities and sororities, beneficent organizations, and so forth. These made for a vital public life -- and were correctives against both the ambitions of the state and the radical individualism that democracy can encourage. There was still the strong sense that government at all levels was but the creation of free citizens, who possessed, in their families and in other associations, their own duties and even their own rightful giving of laws.

But what we have seen, in the last century and more, is the progressive centralization of power, allowing the functions and the authority of communities to wither and, paradoxically, freeing the individual from the constraints once imposed upon him by his neighbors, his church, his workmates, and his family. It is the strange collusion of a certain kind of libertarianism with a supine submission to the authority of the suddenly all-competent state.