The passage of health care reform -- with its unprecedented individual mandate, a form of economic conscription that greatly expands the reach of the federal leviathan's tentacles -- is being hailed as historic. Which it is. But then so was Pearl Harbor. So while many Americans are greeting passage with glee, others find themselves in sympathy with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

"To be governed," Proudhon wrote, "is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled . . . by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed . . . . It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited . . . then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused . . . and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."

Those who do not yet feel as Proudhon did should wait. Even before the gargantuan bill was passed, progressives were insisting it fell short -- it is "not the end of health reform," as Sen. Tom Harkin said some weeks ago, but merely "the beginning." When this government intervention fails to achieve the stated aims, liberals will blithely and obtusely insist the cure is yet more government intervention. They are like the carpenter who complains he has cut a board three times and it's still too short.

Meanwhile, the increased federal involvement in health care will become a pretext for increased federal involvement in -- well, everything. The reasoning will be that individual health affects health care, which is now a federal enterprise. And everything can be said, with more or less sophistry, to affect individual health. So "managing" the "system" will become the all-purpose excuse for dictating the manner in which you live your life. Witness the campaign against obesity: Because obesity causes health problems, and because the government spends money to treat those problems, you should put down that doughtnut, ma'am or sir. And hit the Stairmaster while you're at it.

Liberals might feel complacent about all of this. But their complacency amounts to complicity in the one-way ratchet that tightens the yoke of government around the public neck.

Throughout the Bush years, progressives howled as the administration exploited a national-security crisis to expand executive power, while conservatives egged the administration on. Yet neither paused long to note that Bush did not even try to roll back expansions of federal power undertaken in the name of social policy. To the contrary, the administration accelerated the process with the Medicare prescription-drug benefit and the No Child Left Behind Act.

During the past year President Obama has dashed progressives' naive hopes that he would roll back authority claimed in the War on Terror. He has done quite the opposite -- supporting extension of controversial Patriot Act provisions; fighting in court for warrantless wiretapping; and adopting wholesale Bush's policies on indefinite detention without trial, rendition to torture abroad, military commissions, and the state-secrets privilege.
Yet Obama also has pushed relentlessly for expansions of social welfare and the regulatory state. Every administration expands power where it wishes, but no authority is ever repealed. And so the ratchet tightens. Click, click, click . . .

With the health care fight having peaked for the moment, Congress will now begin debating whether to heap another indignity on the public for the sake of another ostensibly noble cause: preventing illegal immigration. Sens. Charles Schumer, a Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a Republican, have introduced legislation proposing a spiffy new way to make sure undocumented aliens don't take jobs from U.S. residents who have their government papers in order. Schumer and Graham want to make every American citizen and legal immigrant carry a biometric identity card proving eligibility to work.

This is, in short, a national ID card. It is also a perfect distillation of Washington's approach to problem-solving -- an approach William S. Burroughs once summed up in a sardonic comment about gun control: "After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it." Because the federal government cannot control its borders and stop non-citizens from entering the country illegally, law-abiding American citizens should be forced to carry biometric ID cards as a condition of employment.

That's just what America needs right now: another individual mandate.

If Washington had wanted merely to provide universal health coverage, it could have done so the same way it provides universal food coverage: by allowing unfettered marketplace competition and giving vouchers to the poor. Instead, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, all Americans will now be required to purchase insurance as a condition of existence.

Washington always seems to be proposing unlimited solutions to problems of limited scope. Many people might wonder why this is so. Proudhon would not.

Click, click, click . . .