You think I'm exaggerating when I say, as I have for years, that Hillary Clinton has the soul of a dictator? Then check out her recent acknowledgement--unapologetic and blunt--that yes, the government, under her health care plan, will be empowered to garnish wages to require people to buy health insurance.

Like all dictators, she has a rationalization. She says this is the fair thing to do for yourself. If John refuses to buy health insurance, then your medical bill is higher. Why is this? She won't tell you, but I will. Because the government forces hospitals to treat everyone they see, with or without health insurance. Since this federal law passed, emergency rooms have become free health care for millions of people. But this law doesn't have to be. If the government stopped regulating health insurance, it would be much cheaper. For example, if you and I were allowed to buy health insurance in other states; or if states were not required to insure everyone who applied; or if health insurance companies were not required to cover all health services for all people, rather than offer different types of coverage -- if these and other regulations went away, health insurance would be much cheaper.

I doubt that health insurance would ever be cheap, even in a completely deregulated market. But nothing valuable is ever free. Government has become more and more involved, over many decades, in the health insurance industry and the practice of medicine. With each passing decade, the quality of medical care (aside from technological innovation) has decreased as the cost has risen. Government has never been held accountable for its interventionist actions. It only screams louder that still more controls are needed.

So this is what decades of government involvement in medical care and insurance comes down to: Hillary (and her storm troopers) showing up at your office and demanding more money for what their own policies have made unaffordable. To them, having this power is a beautiful and sensuous thing. To any remaining remnants of freedom and individual rights in this country--to the heritage of limited government bestowed by our founders--it's sheer poison. All of today's politicians are, to one degree or another, guilty of it. Hillary embodies it.