'Can't see the trees ..."

Our son and I were standing at the entrance to a high rise office building in downtown Miami a few days ago, when I turned around to look at a stunning panoramic view of office buildings.

I focused on one floor of one building in the distance and then narrowed it down to one office. Suddenly it struck me - and I said to my economics/philosophy major college student son, "Look at that office way up there. Can the government do anything for that business to keep it profitable or make sure that someone working there doesn't lose their job tomorrow?"

What about the rest of those office buildings off in the distance. Multiply this by all the cities in the U.S. and you engaging in a "can't see the forest for the trees" exercise. It works both ways: "You can't see the trees for the forest."

It is the height of governmental conceit for bureaucrats to believe they can micromanage the myriad activities, the entrepreneurship, the planning, the creativity - all the components of "free" enterprise - which may be but a single business venture in Des Moines, Iowa.

But this is exactly what bureaucracy does, and in the process they get so caught up in arcane minutia they lose sight of the big picture. (They can't even locate the forest.) On the other hand, their bosses - some legislative body - put them into this impossible position by some sweeping pronouncement in a newly minted law without considering the regulatory details that will follow, because legislators are often completely unfamiliar with the complexities of what they are trying to regulate. It's almost like the blind leading the blind. This is what is so devilishly difficult about the free enterprise capitalistic system.

So we returned home from Miami just as the health care summit started with another "forest/ trees" exercise. "ObamaCare" at its core presupposes that the federal government has the wisdom to regulate all the pieces of health care - including insurance - from the get-go - that they have the ability to back off and see the forest. Conservatives are scared to death that this may turn out to be another legislative disaster. They want to go at this incrementally because they believe no human being can wrap their his mind around all the complexities of health care reform. (So let's start with one stand of trees in the forest, and go from there.)

ObamaCare is but one piece of a massive undertaking to reorder our entire economic structure. It also includes the entire energy sector with cap-and-trade legislation designed to destroy the coal and oil industries - and initially nuclear power. This opens up another can of worms with Obama flip-flopping on many issues, even some near and dear to his own base; e.g., during the campaign he was against coal, oil and nuclear. Now he is for all three. His base is also upset with perceived changes in policy over Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, bailing out Wall Street, etc.

Looking at the larger issue, we know that the left wing of his party is inclined towards socialism - and perhaps Obama - not that labeling matters. Many argue that Obama and is inner circle are statists - not socialists. O.K. So what? Statism is defined as a concentration of economic control and planning in the hands of a highly centralized government, and sometimes extending to government ownership of enterprise.

Obama may be waffling because of political pressure, but this is what he is, and he may stick to his guns in the heath care debate. Like progressivism, statism and socialism favors the creation of an elite class that would exercise control and micromanage the economy on our behalf. Statism parts company with a free market economy; and that may be the single most concern a majority of Americans have with the current administration.

Rasmussen conducted a recent poll to choose the better system between capitalism and socialism. Only 13 percent of respondents over 40 choose socialism; as opposed to 33 percent of those under 30. Democrats, not surprisingly, were almost evenly split between the two systems.

Once the federal government gets even modest control over our health care, it will be on its merry way to a single-payer system, perhaps even socialized medicine as in the U.K. where government owns all the hospitals and all health care providers are government employees. After all, the U.S. has been caught up in the soft incremental socialism of Europe for decades. Obama simply accelerated the pace with his endorsement of socialized health insurance.

An early campaign speech speaks volumes about Obama's politics: "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program ... That's what I'd like to see. But as you all know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we've got to take back the Senate, and then we've got to take back the House."

It's all about an elite group taking total control; not representative democracy.

This is eerily like old time Chicago-style machine politics, when the elder Richard Daley was the last of the Democratic big city bosses. With the passage of time he had complete control over all aspects of Chicago governance.