Ray Harvey

The following is Barack in 2008, campaigning hard against Hillary Clinton. Note how Barack comes out swinging against an individual mandate to purchase health insurance, stating (correctly) that Hillary would garnish workers’ wages and that Massachusetts’ individual mandate has left many residents “worse off.” Watch:

Then, in the following video, he says (and I quote): “If a mandate was the solution, we could try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody buy a house”:

Were it not for the obvious fact that Barack Obama is a chronic liar, the fact of him signing the individual mandate into law would be virtually incomprehensible. And of course he told us a few short months ago (at around the 3:00 minute mark of the following exchange) that the individual mandate is not a tax:

But that was then, and this is now. From the New York Times:

When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”…

Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.

Says Cato’s Michael Cannon:

The next time Obama is in the mood to reverse himself on the individual mandate, he might consider this statement from June 2009:

When the government makes health insurance compulsory, that is socialized medicine. (Why else would ObamaCare win plaudits from Fidel Castro?) It would be nice to hear the president admit it.