Politics & Power Quote by Sarah Palin

“Common sense” is doing the heavy lifting here, not evidence. Palin’s line is a populist masterstroke: she frames a complex policy fight as a simple, almost instinctive judgment that “any regular person” can supposedly make. If you disagree, you’re not just wrong on health-care mechanics; you’re deficient in common sense. That’s the quiet coercion inside the phrase.

The intent is less to debate health-care design than to delegitimize the very posture of technocratic governance. “Large problems” and “top-down” are elastic villains, broad enough to catch everything from Medicare rulemaking to the idea of federal standards itself. By warning that solutions “more often create new ones,” she turns unintended consequences into a default presumption, making government action feel like a gamble you’d be foolish to take.

Context matters: this is Palin operating in the late-2000s/early-2010s conservative backlash to Obama-era reform. The “one-sixth of our economy” statistic is a neat rhetorical pivot. It sounds like sober seriousness, but it functions as a fear amplifier: if health care is that big, then any federal intervention is not merely misguided but economically reckless. Scale becomes a reason to avoid action rather than a reason to coordinate it.

Subtext: the market (or local control) is the natural order; federal policy is an intrusive experiment. The line works because it offers emotional clarity in a domain designed to overwhelm, swapping policy complexity for a moral drama of citizens versus planners.