The AARP Meeting

This video exhibits exactly what is going on everywhere regarding the issue of health care. PEOPLE ARE NOT GETTING HEARD!



My position given that I'm over 65 and have Medicare is that I will gladly take freedom over Medicare.

The health care market is wildly regulated - at the federal and state level. Years ago doctors sewed up a monopoly for doctors by getting the states to license them. Through professional exams, the doctors are able to control the number of practicing physicians which yield big incomes for doctors. To this day, doctors, via the AMA's lobbying in Congress and the states, fight all kinds of ideas for health care to be easily and inexpensively accessible at pharmacies, from Sam's Club to grocery stores.

Insurance company competition is controlled and regulated by the states. Politicians get benefits of financial support by the approved insurers or those wanting to be approved. If you move to another state, you may have to get a different insurer and you certainly are subject to the laws and government imposed costs of that state.

The tax code further complicates matters. People who get their health care insurance through their work get a tax credit, those who don't have to pay in after-tax dollars.

Hospitals are tied hand and foot.

And then there are law suits. Law suits yield outrageous amounts for plaintiffs who suffer at a medical care professional's or institution's hand. The tort laws and potential lawsuits put tremendous pressure on doctors and hospitals to have multiple tests to prepare in advance should they be sued. Liability insurance is outrageously costly and we have to pay for that when we go to the doctor. This whole mess unleashes a cavalry of ambulance-chasing lawyers.

Medicare and Medicaid are runaway programs that punish the healthy to pay for the sick through taxation.

All of this obscene control, regulation and taxation has one source - the government. The health care industry is tied in a bureaucratic knot and it costs a fortune.


Now they have ruined the industry, they expect it to be fine once they take it over completely? Are you kidding? They are not addressing any of the real problems and President Obama won't even talk on that level. As government's head he takes no responsibility, always finds someone to blame and makes unfulfillable promises. He lies and thinks if he does it in the right manner, it works.

There is no way in hell he will be able to make happen what he says. Watching his older video clips, you see that he has no intention to make his promises happen. Rather he has something else in mind - a single-payer system. Here. It's socialism or bust for Obama - maybe baby steps for now, but always to the same end. (Now he says that "if we were starting from scratch" he would advocate a single payer system. Since there are always some health care services in existence in a society, no one starts from scratch.) For an advocate of political freedom, the truth is, he IS the joker.

If we cannot get heard now, why will the government have any interest in hearing us once they have final control of our very bodies?

The real issue is as the 61-year old gentleman in the video states.

L I B E R T Y

It is LIBERTY that is threatened and to place the government between you and your body is the most threatening of all threats to our liberty.

Abundance is a product of liberty. Liberty is the answer for health care abundance. Health care was not in crisis prior to 1965 when it got fastened onto the American public. The AMA had already gotten its lock on doctors but that was it. (They are the only major medical organization that has sold its soul for Government Health Care. And this even though it means pure slavery for its members. I heard minutes ago that 14,000 doctors are now organizing against the AMA's position.)

The Democrats say the boiling anger over health care is an orchestrated mob. (Hmmm. Who except people who think in terms of community organizing would think that way?)

No one has called me and tried to orchestrate anything but I am certainly in the market for a full-throated, sign-bedecked protest. You bet!

Is it Race or Class? Both Collectivist!

I read this article by Sultan Knish. You can go to the website by clicking on the title of the article below which is a link.

I think this interpretation of the Gates episode makes the most sense of any I've read. The issue of race which Obama seeks to keep in place covers a much deeper power issue - not the earned power, be it economic or intelligence, of individual citizens developing themselves, but the political power of a some individuals over others. Obama has, in every way he can, manifest the trappings of an imperial presidency. The one thing he cannot see and will have to learn the hard way is that he has to earn it - not by rhetoric, but by results which work. He's not merely weak in this area, he eschews it as necessary. Why? He won.

Race, Class and Henry Louis Gates in Obama's America

In the wake of the Gates arrest heard 'round the world, the media, Obama and of course Henry Louis Gates himself, have done their best to position this as a black and white incident, the collision of two men divided by race. But in fact the arrest of Henry Louis Gates was not about two men divided by race, but two men divided by class.
Henry Louis Gates was not arrested because he was black. He was arrested because he was a famous man who felt entitled to tell off a middle class police officer, warning him, "You don't know who you're messing with." Those are not the words of a powerless victim of America's racial oppression. They're the words of an important man who was warning the low paid city employee he was dealing with, that he was too prominent to be touched.

And indeed the remaining narrative, which moved from a media firestorm over a simple arrest, to a supportive statement from the White House, proved Gates right. Crowley indeed didn't "know who he was messing with". He was messing not with a black man, but with a rich and important man. A man who was above the law.

Had Gates been arrested because he was a black man, there would have been no media response and no attention from the White House. Had Henry Louis Gates been a plumber or an associate professor whose name wasn't listed in Who's Who in America, with three names, and a list of titles and awards long enough to choke a whale-- his arrest would never have made the news. Nor would Gates have acted the way he did.

Once arrested, Gates and his defenders cynically used race as a smokescreen to conceal the real issue, which was class. Henry Louis Gates was not the victim of racism, he was the beneficiary of it. And all the media's huffing and puffing about race in America cannot successfully transform a wealthy and prominent man who felt free to warn a police sergeant, "You don't know who you're messing with" into a victim.

Gates' arrest elicited sympathy from Obama, not because Gates shares a race with him, but because Henry Louis Gates shares a class with him. Like Gates, Obama has cynically done his best to exploit a racial guilt that has nothing to do, not only with him, but not even with his ancestors, to provide cover for his arrogance and sense of entitlement. Like the collision between Obama and Palin, the collision between Gates and Crowley, was a blatant clash of class, not race.

So too when Obama felt free enough to complain to his fellow upper class elitists at a San Francisco fundraiser about the middle class and lower class folks, "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion", it was not a racial complaint, it was a typically upper class liberal complaint. That same sense of class entitlement would feed the Obama campaign's fury against Sarah Palin for stepping outside her class, and proceed to portray her as ignorant white trash. So too Obama's media cult and Gates were eager enough to portray Crowley as thuggish and racist, only halting when they realized that their narrative had been disproven and was actually producing a backlash.

When black officers blasted Gates and in turn Obama, it ripped away the mask of race, and revealed the underlying issue of class. It was no longer one white man and one black man, but the middle class hardworking police officers pitted against the wealthy and powerful Henry Louis Gates and Barack Obama. And that was a dangerous narrative, particularly after Obama had run up a tremendous deficit bailing out Wall Street banks and car companies.

Obama's condescending gambit of a beer summit was meant to appeal to what he thought were the sensibilities of the middle class white men he had offended. Of course that in turn served as a forum for Elizabeth Gates, Henry Louis Gates' daughter to pen an essay snidely commenting on Crowley's daughter's eyeliner, "she was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner on her lower lashes", again a comment denoting a class putdown, rather than a racial putdown.

In the famous photo of Crowley helping Gates walk, Americans may have seen compassion, but Gates only saw a lower class city employee providing service to a prominent civic figure. It is how Gates truly saw the conflict all along.

While American liberals insist on exploiting the arrest to argue that race remains a serious issue for Americans, the fact that large numbers of Americans were willing to vote for a black man into the top post in the nation suggests otherwise. It is not race that haunts America, but class. Yet what class is Henry Louis Gates?

Gates is not a captain of industry. He did not make money or gain fame inventing anything that people needed, or marketing a product that millions of Americans want. Instead Gates is a racial profiteer. A cleaner more academic version of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, running an institute named after W.E. Du Bois, a well known Communist who supported virtually every atrocity the USSR carried out, and was even willing to back Imperial Japan's massacres in China, in the name of race.

That is something which Gates has in common with Obama. Neither of the two men honestly came by their fame, fortune and positions. They came by them by exploiting racial guilt, not for any larger benefit, but for their own class standing. Behind all the twaddle about role models, is the elitism of two men, neither of whom have worked for a living, but who built up images of themselves as representing a race, in order to partake of the benefits of a class.

The rise of Obama, like the rise of Gates, is a story not of race, but of political parasitism. It is also the larger story of an America in which hard work no longer matters, in which it is safe to sneer at the middle class values of a Crowley or a Palin, because they represent an old fashioned dedication to achievement and duty, that is no longer meant to be relevant in the "New America".

In the "New America" you don't get recognized for hard work. You get recognized for being the squeaky wheel. For turning yourself into a brand. For finding an identity and marketing it for all you can. Race, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity are only counters in a larger game of media politics that everyone can play, but only a few can succeed at.

It's not about the 9 to 5 anymore. It's about the 12 to 3 in a four day week. It's about the triumph over the middle class by people who excel at talking, but not at working. It's about playing divide and conquer with a multicultural America, certain that no matter how it goes, you will always pocket the winnings. It's not just about class, it's about the new class. The one that doesn't earn money, but has it transferred over from the coffers of the taxpayer. It's not about America. It's about the New America. It's about the Obama's America.

And if you're "unfortunate" enough to still believe in hard work and doing your job as best as you can, you don't belong in it anymore. Here have a beer. Then help Henry Louis Gates, Jr, down the stairs.
___________________________________________


This picture has been circulating on the web today. I found it on an NBC website. While I'm sure that some people see this as appropriate in the "Royal Style," I see it as bad taste. It is one more indication of Obama's desparate need to possess the trappings of importance.

A couple months ago I saw a video where O was going for burgers and fries. The limo pulled up, he got in and the first thing he did was throw his feet on the seat opposite as would an unknowing or disrespting child. I was offended to see a 47-year old adult do such a thing. I'm one of the taxpayers that own that limo. I wouldn't want him coming into my house treating my stuff that way and I didn't like it he treated "my" limo that way. This attitude is endemic to his presidency, if not his life.

What am I learning from all this? Disgust is more formidable than fear to move beyond.

Why Are We Moving Toward Socialized Medicine?

By Yaron Brook

Government intervention in medicine is wrecking American health care. Nearly half of all spending on health care in America is already government spending. Yet President Obama's "reforms" will only expand that intervention.

Prior to the government's entrance into medicine, health care was regarded as a product to be traded voluntarily on a free market--no different from food, clothing, or any other important good or service. Medical providers competed to provide the best quality services at the lowest possible prices. Virtually all Americans could afford basic health care, while those few who could not were able to rely on abundant private charity.

Had this freedom been allowed to endure, Americans' rising productivity would have afforded them better and better health care, just as, today, we buy better and more varied food and clothing than people did a century ago. There would be no crisis of affordability, as there isn't for food or clothing.

But by the time Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, this view of health care as an economic product--for which each individual must assume responsibility--had given way to a view of health care as a "right," an unearned "entitlement," to be provided at others' expense.

This entitlement mentality fueled the rise of our current third-party-payer system, a blend of government programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, together with government-controlled employer-based health insurance (itself spawned by perverse tax incentives during the wage and price controls of World War II).

The resulting system aimed to relieve the individual of the "burden" of paying for his own health care by coercively imposing its costs on his neighbors. Today, for every dollar's worth of hospital care a patient consumes, that patient pays only about 3 cents out of pocket; the rest is paid by third-party coverage. And for the health care system as a whole, patients pay only about 14 percent.

Shifting the responsibility for health care costs away from the individuals who accrue them led to an explosion in spending. In a system in which someone else is footing the bill, consumers, encouraged to regard health care as a "right," demand medical services without having to consider their real price. When, through the 1970s and 1980s, this artificially inflated consumer demand sent expenditures soaring out of control, the government cracked down by enacting further coercive measures: price controls on medical services, cuts to medical benefits, and a crushing burden of regulations on every aspect of the health care system.

As each new intervention further distorted the health care market, driving up costs and lowering quality, belligerent voices demanded still further interventions to preserve the "right" to health care: from regulations mandating various forms of insurance coverage to Bush’s massive prescription drug bill.

The solution to this ongoing crisis is to recognize that the very idea of a "right" to health care is a perversion. There can be no such thing as a "right" to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services. Rights, as the Founders conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but to freedoms of action.

You are free to see a doctor and pay him for his services--no one may forcibly prevent you from doing so. But you do not have a "right" to force the doctor to treat you without charge or to force others to pay for your treatment. The rights of some cannot require the coercion and sacrifice of others.

Real and lasting solutions to our health care problems require a rejection of the entitlement mentality in favor of a proper conception of rights. This would provide the moral basis for breaking the regulatory chains stifling the medical industry; for lifting the tax and regulatory incentives fueling our dysfunctional, employer-based insurance system; for inaugurating a gradual phase-out of all government health care programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid; and for restoring a true free market in medical care.

Such sweeping reforms would unleash the power of capitalism in the medical industry. They would provide the freedom for entrepreneurs motivated by profit to compete with each other to offer the best quality medical services at the lowest prices, driving innovation and bringing affordable medical care, once again, into the reach of all Americans.

Yaron Brook is the executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights in Washington, D.C. ARC is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Freedom: Our Protector

Something unfamiliar has descended on this nation. As Americans, it is a feeling we have never known. It is a fear of men.

Never has there been such an assault on people - as human beings - as we are experiencing now. The assault is coming from all sides at once. Every day there is a new assault.

The personification of this massive assault is President Obama. Behind him are all the men who seek new powers over us, who seek to force or profit from the force of our every action. Government men are leading the way. Businessmen and dependents of all kinds who want to use or have what they are handing out are standing in line to work with them. Whether by outright directive as in the forcing of banks to take government money; government orders and intrusions into their very hiring, firing and pay; stripping people of their lawful contracts, i.e., assets, and the risks and benefits associated with those contracts; or by telling you, directly or indirectly through taxation, what you can take into your body, be it nicotine or nourishment - everywhere, we live under the threat of moral directive and compulsion.

President Obama is working overtime to undermine every working relationship we have. He tells us that our doctors prescribe unneeded surgeries (I'm sure there are A FEW unscrupulous ones that do.) and prescribe the more expensive pills (Red or blue, I can't remember which.). He tells us to fear the cops when they come to our aid. He tells us that he knows or his young appointee knows how to run a car company. He does not stand up for people seeking freedom in foreign lands but instead plays buddy-buddy with the world's bloody-handed dictators. He forsakes our allies for the world's criminals. He wants to stunt our industry with pernicious and penalizing taxes on energy. He knows what people, especially cops, are thinking (and it's not good) even if they are not.

He seeks to turn black against white, customer against businessman, patient against doctor, investor against Wall Street, worker against management, citizen against cop, and government against the people.

There is one battle he will not allow - us against the government. But that one is coming whether he likes it or not.

And now he wants to be our doctor, our surgeon, and our nurse? On those days when we may be sick or hurting, we are going to be told to wait in line for weeks or months to get the attention and care we need and want, to perhaps save our lives. You will no longer be a patient. You will be a ward. As we see in Canada, a dog has better health care. The same will be true here unless Obama nationalizes animal care too.

If you want to see what your health care will be like under Obamacare, remember how he told you to save gas? That's right, blow up your tires. This past week when asked if an old woman with arrhythmia who has a good spirit should get a pacemaker, he suggested a painkiller. Jeez.

And if this weren't bad enough, he appoints czars with wild ideas such as "population needs to be controlled" if the earth is to live, and animals have rights and can sue humans. I didn't know they could speak, let alone read and write. Is it no wonder we are scared out of our wits?

Add to this his ingenuously telling us that when the government takes over health care, we will save money and the country will be running right once more, that no one will lose the health care they now have and that we will be as free as we have always been to conduct our lives. This we are to believe in the face of the fact that the government has run its health care programs into the ground and that all government health care plans the world over suffer from shortages and must ration their treatments and their time. Is it no wonder doctors and surgeons run from these Animal Farms?

Further he has gone abroad and apologized wholesale for America. Never has he said a good thing about us. When he mouths what America has stood for, it is obvious he lies insofar as his believing that it ever was a good thing. He wants positive rights, he says, knowing full well that he must enslave someone to provide them.

Obama doesn't know what it is to be an equal. Either he's on top or he's making sure he's lower than the king. Meet a man as an equal? Who ever heard of that? This is Obama's problem.

Government's hand is a dead hand - no vitality there - only laws, rules and regulations. You dutifully follow them, or else. Used correctly they support human life. Used as Obama wants to use them, they deaden and destroy it.

So far he has not be able to get us to march in lockstep, but he has his plans for that too: the Obama corps in the form of AmeriCorps. Already set up and being further formulated in the background, he wants to give students money to go to college. For that they will pay with X years of their lives in his corps. He says he wants this as well funded as America's military. Does anyone doubt that this will be an indoctrination machine? By all means, increase the deadness!

We are starting to get in spades that Freedom is Our Protector, and Obama is an enemy of freedom. By our minds and our choices, we sort the good from the bad - the good doctors from the bad doctors, the good teachers from the bad teachers, the good bankers from the bad bankers, the good businesses from the bad businesses, the good friends from the bad "friends" - you name it. Obama says that's bad. He wants to limit choices - outlaw them. Nowhere is this more obvious nor fundamentally destructive than in Government Health Care.

As an American, I have the right to my life, my liberty and my pursuit of happiness. I pursue my happiness by taking the property I own, starting with my own life - body and mind - and developing it and building it to provide for what I need. Seeking values is the essence of being alive. Political freedom is my only requirement.

Other Americans are not my enemies as Obama paints them - neither the doctors, the bankers, the car makers, the cops, the news organizations, the factory owners, the investors, the rich or the poor. All are available to talk to and work with if I need them and they provide what I need. They are the people I seek to meet and learn about so I may be able to satisfy my needs. Obama, on the other hand has turned the poor and the rich and the fat into parasites, the doctors and the bankers into predators and industry into plunderers. All are scapegoats. We are supposed to hate them. They are bad. Obama is no friend of America.

He's no friend of people anywhere. Although his outstretched hand may hold candy, his hidden hand holds a club.

Freedom is MY friend and protector.

The Killer Wedge

At the Moment of Vulnerability

Right now, this Obama Administration is working overtime to pass Government Health Care. What it seeks to do is become the health provider for the nation. What this means is:

YOU CANNOT FIRE YOUR DOCTOR.

You cannot choose your doctor, except for superficial characteristics; you can go nowhere except to government clinics and health facilities. This is the end of you as an independent human being - and right at the moment when you need to have safeguarded your independence the most - when you are the most vulnerable. This is what Government Health Care means.

Only one other time has this country engaged in this kind of activity. That was the institution of slavery. A slave could not fire his employer. He could not go elsewhere to find a place to work.

Above all else, this is the principle that MUST NOT get refastened onto the American people.

And it is not just you the citizen that is the slave. So long as a human being wants to practice in any aspect of the medical industry, (doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmacists, drug developers and producers, alternate forms of health care provision, emergency crews) he must work for the government or leave the country. Otherwise, he must leave this industry. Ultimately these are his only choices under Government Health Care. Runarounds and a black market will be against the law.

This is as evil as anyone can get when it comes to social life for human beings. This is a moral issue and nothing more.

Notice how many people are talking about the best way to create the program and how much it will cost as if the basic premise of slavery is quite all right. No one is talking about the basic issue. Even those who should know better than anyone what slavery is - and I am talking about the American black in particular - are looking at the "candy" in the hand of the politician rather than the club behind his back.

These men offering this "candy" are Barack Obama and all of his Administration, Nancy Pelosi, Teddy Kennedy, and a host of other politicians - liberal and conservative. It also includes corporations and their lobbyists who are trying to get in early on the game to provide the products that the government will need in its programs. They all need to be fought. The very idea of human bondage must be fought root and branch.

Obama has a Science Czar, John Holdren, who is on record with some very draconian methods of population control, wanting to reduce it to below replacement levels and advocating sterilizing men as the means. He has a Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, who believes in "Nudging" people into the right behavior via taxation.

I'm telling you, this is no different than the Progressives of the past. Their mission has always been to "improve" society by force. In the early 1900's, eugenics was their call as the means to this end. (The wildest of that advocacy was Nazi Germany.) Now it is what is called "nudging" - a program of taxation that discourages particular behaviors and fosters others. They think they can use FORCE, the law with taxes, fines and prison in the background, with a smile on their face and righteousness in their heart.

They are wrong. To force a "choice" is to obviate man's possession of volition - the capacity to choose. This negates his humanity at the root. No longer is he able to pursue values, reap the consequences and correct or continue his course of action. Good and bad no longer apply to one forced. Since he had to do it, all he can provide are excuses. He's powerless. Force misapplied by anyone, but above all the institution of government is a primary cause of social deterioration. It negates the mind and the pursuit of values. It kills human life.

I offer Government Education as a prime example. Compelling students to learn is not the same thing as showing that learning is a value to be pursued. Force and enrollment, the presentation of a possibility and its value so one can choose it or not, are opposites. Anyone who wants learning via enrollment, as opposed to indoctrination, has to provide it himself.

As an architect, I know what force is. Before Handicap Access became the law of the land and when I was in architecture school, books on handicap access were everywhere. If one had a client who wanted handicap access, one learned how to best provide it. There were many possibilities and there was much competition regarding solutions to various problems.

Once Handicap Access became law, the building code reduced all of this to a single section with rules and layouts. The investigation and search for better means not only for access but for handicap mobility largely ended.

When handicap access was just beginning, I had a doctor client who had need for it in his office. This was a remodel project and there was a bathroom present. The question arose as to whether a handicapped person could use the bathroom. I rented a wheelchair and investigated the matter for myself. I then took the results of my study and my solution to the building department and they were quite happy to approve it given that I actually knew how it was going to work.

Today that is impossible. Now with the rigid codification of everything regarding Handicap Access, it is way too costly to go after a better solution. Who wants get a variance with all that entails and/or go before a board to fight for something that may not be approved even if it works. Better to just do what the code says and be done with it. As a consequence, we see the repetition of the same plans over and over.

Further, rather than business who want to appeal to the handicapped offering the benefits of their facilities as an attraction for customers that they want and appreciate, all business and public buildings must provide the access whether they will ever need it. This results in a huge expense where not needed and deprives the business who welcome the handicapped to show that they welcome them. All of this is how society becomes gutted of its differentiation, values, and even beauty and charm. So much for the government and its influence.

Needless to say all of the innovation regarding handicap access has dried up. It doesn't exist. There is no longer any excitement around the subject.

And this is exactly where Government Health Care is headed but with a far worse aspect. You will be the government's slave unable to exercise your own mind and your own free will, the two fundamental aspects of remaining fully human. And this relative to the most personal aspect of yourself - your body.

One further note. Already, we are seeing the inhumanity in which the government will indulge itself to effect its programs. Here is an article entitled, Tough Love for Fat People. Because our society is unwilling to allow people to experience the consequences of their actions, most Washington voices think there is no choice but to coerce their behavior. The new scapegoats are going to be fat people - and, of course, smokers. Where are the articles on drug users, alcohol drinkers, and all the other things that people use to excess? What about those who binge on sugar? Or those who eat only protein? Or those who exercise to the point of hurting their bodies? You name it. Is this the direction you want society to head?

If not, you had better get on your high horse and soapbox. Government Health Care is the killer wedge on this matter.

Doesn't sound like a group of people I want to live around. See my previous post.

Euthanasia by Default

A Government Health Care system means that everyone is paid for, seen and treated by the government. In such a system, there may be many different doctors, clinics and hospitals, but at bottom there is only one customer - the government. Ultimately it is the government's tune to which all dance.

Since health care is supposedly free, people will not choose whether they want to go to the doctor based on any number of reasons, one of which is cost. They will take advantage of the benefits since they are there to be used. With no apparent cost to them over which they have control, why not?

But nothing man must do to maintain his life is without cost. It is an enormous fantasy to think otherwise. Because in a nation the size of the United States there is infinite demand for these benefits, the government will soon see that the expenses far outrun their tax revenues. They will have no choice but to raise taxes and/or cut benefits.

Raising taxes has its limits. Taxes on the populace cut into their standard of living. As taxes rise and the standard of living lowers, people carp and complain. The health care people take the brunt of this because they are the leading edge of Government Health Care. But they will have their excuses. After all, they are not ultimately responsible. (With Government Health Care the health care people will suffer a huge loss of good will and trust from people. Who can trust someone who is ultimately powerless in the matter and is not hired by your own judgment?)

The Government will then be attacked. The rising cost of living will prevent the Government from calling for more taxes. They will try to hide them in everything, but to hold down taxes, they will cut benefits. There will always be those who say that all the waiting, forestalling, shoddy methods and reduced benefits are worth it. They will be wrong. It doesn't have to be this way.

As the benefits are downsized, it must come out of someone's hide. There must be priorities. Of course it only makes sense to favor the productive taxpayers over the unproductive tax users. And the latter are the handicapped, the mentally incapacitated, the elderly, to name a few obvious categories of people. They will be left to die. Not in so many words, of course. Maybe they will be given some palliatives, but nothing that can really make a difference and cost the system money it doesn't have. Call this euthanasia. This is what it is - by default.

Actually euthanasia means a gentle and easy death. But some of the suffering will not be eased. "I'm so sorry. That's just the way it is," they say, and besides, that costs money too.

The real crime is that it doesn't have to be this way. Just recently drug stores wanted to bring in nurses and medical practitioners of various kinds to look at people who needed some medical advice. Given their knowledge they could help those they could and if not, recommend to them someone with more advanced knowledge. This idea, a product of economic freedom, was fought tooth and nail by the doctors. They don't want the competition.

Of course the doctors went to the law makers. "Outlaw such a solution," they said. The problem is that the law makers should not have the right to limit competition and new ideas. Their job is to catch criminals who violate authentic rights, not the false "economic rights." This is where the current mess of the health system goes off the track. Instead of freeing people to come up with new ideas on how to deliver health care, they kill it. As a result they indirectly kill people.

I got an email letter this morning from John Lewis, my Congressional Representative. He says, "I believe health care is a right." He presents no argument. He just believes it. In the wacko ethics of our culture, he sounds like a good man. But he is not.

Nothing can be a right that has to be produced by some other men. What is Mr. Lewis going to do? Take their labor and their property and give it to you? In days past, the plantation owners did the same thing except they were honest. They had slaves for their purposes. Now we have "The Great Pretenders" who enslave others for your purposes, they say. John Lewis is one of "The Great Pretenders."

Slavery is the darkest, most evil kind of advocacy and John Lewis is advocating it. A is A no matter how you dress it.

What is the antidote to the great problem of health care? Freedom. Freedom to think, to come up with new ideas for treatment and care, and freedom to deliver goods and services to people - those willing to trade something for them.

Freedom! Let it ring! From the Stone Mountain of Georgia to the foothills of Santa Barbara.

Some say, "We have to do something about this health care mess." That's true. But let's get to the cause of the problem and not rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. We are in this mess because the industry is tied in a knot. Government regulation and control is ubiquitous. Free it. Let our people go.

The other reason we have this mess is because people like John Lewis are telling people that health care is a right. He has to poke out his own eyes to not see the slavery in this.

People want to solve these problems. Being bound hand and foot they only have narrow avenues for action. Slave masters are hounding them.

Government is not the answer. It is the problem. Some of you will lose your loved ones because euthanasia will be its result. Death is final.

Nothing was more graphic than a piece I saw on TV. In Canada the medical industry is government run. A human has to wait at least a month for an MRI no matter what his ailment. It could be serious and need quick attention or not. In Canada, on the other hand, veterinary medicine is practiced in a free market. An animal can get an MRI the next day.

Wake up!

What a Disappointment

I've been trying to put my finger on what I felt as Obama got himself entangled in Gates' racial outburst. Irritation, betrayal, disbelief - all of it amounted to a big disappointment.

But what exactly was betrayed? I didn't vote for Obama. I have never agreed with the Marxist/socialist ideas he steeped himself in for many years prior to his running for office. Further I didn't trust nor like his character. I saw him as duplicitous - creating a public front for a man that didn't exist.

A lot of people voted for Obama because they hoped he would take us beyond the racial pain of our past - that he would transcend race. These were black, brown and white. Hope sprang from the ideal of a world where one's race is not the issue - like the MLK ideal.

Even I held a certain hope at the beginning of his presidency - that he would be someone I could admire - surely not in all things, but in some things.

With Obama's thoughtless reaction, we could see that he did not hold this ideal, the one that many hold. He's not a Reverend King; he's a Reverend Wright.

Immediately people took sides and began to hone their story. The black distrust of the police has a long history as does the white feeling of being unfairly accused. My disgust with this drama covered my real loss - which I now think was just a fantasy.

This was the source for the betrayal and subsequent disappointment.

This is a big deal. And I see no indication that Obama will be able to put this Humpty-Dumpty back together. He simply does not have the character for it. He would actually have to believe and speak a vision of man that he does not possess.

(For a satire on Gates' view of race, go here. This came out July 31.)

For that read Rand. I suggest Andrew Bernstein's recent Objectivism in One Lesson, particularly the chapter "Man the Hero" which follows six chapters on the basics that give rise to her view of man.

Types of Government - Image

Click on image to enlarge or read below

Perfecting the self.
"We" by voluntary association.
Life by agreement and contract.

All property privately owned.
Unlimited resources; Wealth created.
Free trade for mutual benefit.

The conquest of nature.

Emancipation of human energy.

Capitalism
Limited principled Government

Limited by a Constitution.

Constitution protects individual rights, freeing men from men.
Separation of church and state; separation of economy and state.

Morally justified by the Right to Live for One's Self - Life as an End in Itself.

Unstable Mix -- Welfare State

Morally justified by the Greater Good - Life as a Means to Another's Ends.

Theocracy
Man of God

Socialism
Dictator
Oligarchy

Monarchy
King

Unlimited arbitrary Government.

Searching for Saviors.
All forms of "us vs. them."

All property owned or regulated by the State.

Resources limited - Perpetual war.
Society devolves to battling ethnic and racial groups.

The conquest of men; Live by permission - slavery.

The control of human energy.

Also see here.

The Real Issue of Universal Health Care

The real issue in Universal Health Care is moral.

When I say MORAL, what do I mean? I mean the actions you take to live your life the best you can live it which in turns gives you more desire for life. These are moral actions and they do not come from just anywhere and they are not arbitrarily socially constructed. They come from the fact that you are a living being who must act to maintain your life.

My concern is not what Universal Health Care will do to your pocketbook. Of course it will be expensive - far more than Medicare. And that in itself can undermine a person. My concern here is what it will do to your motor, the engine of your energy that generates everything you do. What will it do to that?

It kills it. Drip, drip, drip. And it kills it at every level and in every person who is involved in government controlled health care. Even those who want it.

Why?

Because it places an arbitrary, irrational factor between you and your actions to achieve the health care you want to live and not physically/mentally suffer. That arbitrary factor is the government.

Why is it arbitrary?

Because its interests are not aligned with your interest in pursuing health care. To be alive, you must value. You must take actions that keep your life in existence. These are YOUR values.

Today you go to a doctor and he diagnoses your condition and prescribes one or more alternatives to help you. His interests are your interests.

But this isn't true with the government. It has a plan and a gun, force, to cause the result it wants. You will get whatever it decides you should get and it won't necessarily be what you want or what works. When the government controls anything, it is the law and politics which control how that will go.

The government drives you out of integrity with yourself. This will be Obama's scar on every soul in the country.

Speaking of politics, if you want corruption, universal health care will bring it in spades. Cronyism and bribes of all kinds and at every level of society will suddenly be abundant. What wouldn't you pay under the table for something that would save your life or relieve your suffering? And if you don't understand that there will be a kind of black market of those who will take bribes, I know you are crazy.

This gets no more clear than what the government plans to do with the elderly. (Section 1233 of H.R. 3200) When you get to a certain age, you will have to set up all the paperwork for your final days. And the government will determine what it will give you in the way of care when the time comes. This does not have to match what you want, what a real medical doctor would recommend or you are willing to work for. It is completely arbitrary. For anyone who wants the best for their parents, their grandparents, their children and above all, themselves, this is bone-chilling in its lack of concern. (Some people are discussing this here.)

The day will come that you will not trust anyone in the government health care system. Once it is cut off from your interests, it will become a threat to your life. You will go to a quack in a back alley who you think is aligned with your interests before you subject yourself to someone you know is not aligned with your interests.

In this video which I have featured a number of times, the resignation of the people under the Canadian system is present for you to see. They accept it. Some make excuses for it. All they can do is whine. They don't demand better because it is useless to make such demands. Their moral fire is gone.

And this is what is going to happen to America if universal health care is passed. It will be the end of America as the home of the independent spirit.

What will be left? A moral grayness that is inconceivable to most Americans. It is the end of what you so take for granted being American. The bureaucracy will be so big and so all-powerful that most people will never be able to fight it. They will just give up. That's what I see in the Canadian video.

This will happen to every strata of society as well as the health care industry, except those who can escape it. The politicians have themselves insulated from this, of course.

It will happen to your doctor. Many will leave the profession. The Hippocratic Oath will no longer be operative as his ideal. It will happen to nurses too as they watch people waste and suffer pain before them because they cannot be treated as they would otherwise have been. It will happen to hospitals, ambulance drivers and secretaries as the evidence will accumulate that strips away the pretense of the universal health care plan.

Pretense?

Oh yes, pretense will become more important. Health care workers will be coached on how to "serve" and present themselves in a way that you can tolerate. This will become the new industry. All to maintain and grow the pretense.

Is it really a pretense? Yes. It was never intended to provide better health care. It can't. It was only intended to concentrate power in the hands of the government and to ride the wave of an immoral moral which says that it is your duty to take care of your neighbors. There is nothing that distinguishes this from that hideous institution of slavery that it took centuries for America to get clear of. There were plenty of reasons for it too, but it is no advance to make everyone slaves.

Has Obama become America's Jim Jones luring us to our death? It's the same immoral moral that he used. Hmmm.

Wake up!

Destroy the Economy to Save the Economy

Biden is explicit about it.

Where are the intelligent? Where are those that understand that the economy is an integrated whole? Where are those that understand that money stolen from those who have it and given to those who don't does not put money in the hands of the creators of businesses and jobs? Why is there so much emphasis put on the destruction of wealth and none on the principles to be be followed in order to create it?

Is this stupidity or intended? And who should pay rather than who will pay for this reversal of cause and effect?

Will someone please tell me where this has ever worked?

S e a of D e b t

The Coming Leadership Vacuum

I think Obama has just about worn out his rhetoric.

The things he is willing to say about how great universal health care is going to be, how it won't cost us anything, how it will save our economy, on and on, is over the top - WAY over the top. I can no longer listen to him without involuntary yelling BULLLL SHIT! There is simply no way he can have what he says come true except at a tremendous cost to America and to his authority in every way other than "he got it done" - if he does.

The cost will be in the results. The relationship with your doctor will be gone. The costs of health care will skyrocket because when it is free there are no brakes on its use. And with that, the clampdown necessarily will descend upon us. How that will look, I don't know. I just know that the quality we now have will decrease, and decrease, and decrease. Of course, those politicians got to get paid - they and their bedfellows. That part will increase. The best and the brightest in that industry will do something else more rewarding than being under the gun of an Emergency Room pace every day for the rest of their lives and not get paid enough in money or respect and appreciation.

Maybe that decreased quality will look like the English where they don't use anesthesia for dental work. Or maybe it will look like the Canadians where you have to wait at least a month for an MRI that may make the difference between living and dying. And if that isn't enough to gall you, your pet can get an MRI the next day because freedom and competition reign in pet health care. One thing that will happen is that old people will be flushed. They are not the productive ones doing most of the paying for the system. And speaking of paying, the wealthy will have moved their wealth elsewhere so it cannot be taxed and insofar as America is concerned, they will have gone Galt or maybe just "gone fishin'."

And health care is just a piece of it. Where are Obama's triumphs in foreign policy? Isn't democracy, the term he does use, meaningless unless people are free? Where was he when the dissidents of Iran were putting their lives at stake for freedom? Oh, I know, not meddling while desiring to shake the bloody hands of their dictators in what he hopes will be some agreement about nuclear weapons. Am I supposed to believe that if Iran's dictators tromp down the lives of their own people their agreements with us, Satin incarnate, will amount to anything?

I haven't heard any hosannas regarding his foreign policy ideas, have you? I see there are some Russians and some Arabs that don't think much of them or apparently, even of him. Now let's see, is that him as his role or him as a person? Maybe they smell the same thing I smell.

And where was he when Honduras realized that its leader was going to install himself as their dictator? When the people stood up to his actions, Obama supported the future dictator. Great. Obama is someone you want in your corner? Right? Wellll - not if freedom is at stake.

John Cox, 2009

From what it looks like, a recession which normally takes about two years to correct will likely last much longer - maybe ten years. Obama is doing all the same kinds of things FDR did to stretch that recession into ten years. Tell me that the best thing to do if you lose your job is to go out and borrow as much money as you can and spend it? Oh really?

And don't get me started on Cap and Trade and Gore's fantasy. Now that is a scam. I expect the Congress to fund, with billions, research and then a program to teach cows to not fart. On the other hand, maybe they will teach them how to light a fart.

At some point, Obama is going to be only a voice desperately trying to be listened to. The people will look elsewhere for leadership - real leadership - not this posturing kind of leadership. The leadership vacuum will then be manifest. How long until then? Not sure. But I am picking up a vibe.

Postmodern philosophy tells us that the truth is a social construction and that everything is political. Politics is how the truth is determined, they say. Obama thinks he is The Truth and The Way (that's why we and every other country around the world suffer his constant moralizing) and that he can control that social construction. To my way of thinking, he's a fool trying to control a fickle master, given his way of being. Much better to ground himself in reality and construct truth on that. It doesn't shift and suddenly wash out from under you.

Worrying about the consensus and leadership don't ride in the same boat. And this boat is headed for a vacuum in leadership.

John Cox, 2008

As painful as it is to watch this happening up close and personal, my hope is that it ends postmodernism and the socialist ideal forever. There are no good people nor right way to make socialism work. It is founded on a false premise. You simply cannot change a man to a being that will systematically sacrifice his own life without gutting him of his will to live or drive him into rebellion. And that is true even if he holds the ideal. I don't know of any Blacks in America touting the wonders of slavery. I don't expect them nor the Whites nor the Hispanics nor the Orientals nor any human being to be touting it this time around.

Does America have a true leader that can step into this vacuum? You know, the one that understands that America's Constitution was a breakthrough in human history that set forth the rights of the individual as primary and constructed the state to protect those rights? The one that understands the progress of human history and gets us back on the right track? Where is that leader?

Called on Race-Baiting

I'm posting this vid because it is the FIRST TIME I have seen a black man call out a Congressman on race-baiting. It's about time. I can't help but think that any self-respecting black person who has a mind quite capable of ascertaining facts and making his/her own choices is getting real tired of always being cloyingly categorized as nothing more than a member of collective called BLACK. This is evidence for how racist the Democratic Party really is. It USES blacks as a group whenever it needs to trot out its moral superiority. It’s disgusting. Here it is so clear that for Barbara Boxer, human beings are not ends themselves – only something to be USED for her purposes. Besides that she behaves like an agenda-driven Panzer. Wake up America.

If you are interested in this topic, you will enjoy a black man's post on the subject: Boxer vs. The Uppity Negro.

Are You Crazy?

Have Americans completely lost their minds?

America is the best producer of goods and services the world has ever known. Right now it has the best Health Care available for the most citizens of any place in the world. It produces more procedures and medicines and has more facilities to cure or ameliorate the ailments of mankind than anyplace else. There are some problems, but a poor person is rich in America compared to the poor around the world.

And you want to trade that for someone telling you what, how much and who you can go to for your health care? ARE YOU NUTS?

Every place that has GOVERNMENT Health Care must, by necessity, move to the lowest common denominator of health care. The GOVERNMENT harnesses, i.e., ENSLAVES, the doctors and all others in the system by refusing to pay them what they want and would otherwise get in a free market. The best ones leave the business. It controls the pharmaceutical industry and pharmaceutical research so that you get what the GOVERNMENT wants to pass out. It controls the hospitals, it controls the nurses, it controls the ambulance services, it controls every bit and piece of an otherwise complex system with abundant options and practices. It chokes, i.e., asphyxiates, i.e., takes the breath of life away from every doctor, every nurse, every office, every prescription and drug producer, every ambulance service, every person in the industry with paperwork.

And for that reason it will kill people too. Yes, I said kill them - by deprivation, by neglect, by policies which will follow the book, not the needs of the patient.

It will destroy the doctor - patient relationship. You will be a cipher, not a person.

Because the demand for Health Care will go through the roof because it is FREE, which it isn’t, it will be rationed. You will not be able to get the very thing that may save your life. You will have to wait too long or it won’t be available. What you will get are excuses and delays and government policies. None of these will do a damn thing for you!

In the scarcity of Health Care that will be CAUSED by THE GOVERNMENT, guess who will be selected to suffer this scarcity the most? The old, the infirm, the handicapped – anyone who is determined by THE GOVERNMENT to not be in the mainstream of productive citizens doing the work that the GOVERNMENT considers valuable. Of course they will never say that. It will just happen by default. Since you do not get to choose your health care, the GOVERNMENT will make the decisions. And they don't know if you are a genius or an idiot, a producer or a moocher. Why would a bureaucrat care about those things that are not reflected in their numbers? There is no other possibility.

And because Health Care will be costly and scarce, you will be regulated regarding your own life. If you eat a Twinkie, followed to its ultimate conclusion, you will violate the law, can be fined or taken to jail or simply spurned. If you smoke a cigarette, you will violate the law and can be fined or taken to jail or refused treatment. You will be required to diet, to exercise, to sleep the right number of hours, to eat the right things, drink the right things, everything that THE GOVERNMENT says, by fiat, you must do to obtain its health care. It will use ladles of guilt and post millions of banners and signs that no one reads about how you are a good boy if you follow their instructions. It won't be like that you say? Not immediately, but the pressure will always be in that direction.

And have you seen the GOVERNMENT’S health care facilities? Take a look at the public facilities they have now. Go to your county health department’s waiting room, get in line in a dingy shabby room painted institution green and see how you like it. Or go to the veterans hospitals and watch the tired nurses, who will be on a GOVERNMENT pay scale along with the doctors and secretaries and all the other employees, complain about their job. Or go to the big public hospitals where you wonder why it is not as clean as your home?

When the GOVERNMENT controls everything, there won’t even be the attraction of security that the GOVERNMENT offers to its employees. With everyone employed by the GOVERNMENT that distinction won’t exist. It will be all about we HAVE TO. Whining will be elevated to an art form. This is the result of having no choice.

And are you aware that regimentation via GOVERNMENT control causes stupidity? If you don't think the I-don't-care attitude of government workers will not spill over into their care, you are really crazy. Livers will be accidentally removed, a wrong leg will be amputated, the anesthesiologist will accidentally kill your loved one instead of anesthetizing them. Simple procedures will become complicated and complicated ones will be incorrectly made simple. Instead of keeping their mind on the business at hand they will be thinking about their latest tweet or when they can get back to Facebook.

Here's a video interviewing ordinary people in Canada about their healthcare. And here is an interview with someone who lived under England's single-payer health care system. They don't even get Novocaine when their teeth are drilled.

This is your future. Are you willing to trade the riches that a free system which encourages superb service and good care in order to attract business FOR THIS? What are you thinking?

People do not get that Universal Health Care is a DIRECT ATTACK on them as human being. It attacks everything that gives rise to being human: your valuing nature as such, your particular values, your mind, your reason, your life and those you care about.

An American watching the above video can see how Canadians are no longer people in the full sense of the word. They have given up. They have ACCEPTED the system, its craziness, and their plight. They make excuses for it. Most Americans I know would have said, "Enough of this horseshit. I'm going some place else!"

ARE YOU CRAZY?

Health care is too costly, you say?

Then free it up. Allow more competition, not less. Allow it to meet more needs at all levels instead of less. Already health care is bound hand and foot with regulations that are completely unnecessary. I don’t remember anyone complaining about health care 60 years ago. You had the doctor you trusted and you went to him if you had a problem. You worked out the cost and paid it. Insurance was varied and available at any level you wanted it. If you want better and less costly health care, FREE IT UP! Freedom is the answer, not GOVERNMENT control and regulation.

Here is a conversation about getting the GOVERNMENT out of the way.

Freedom has always been the answer. It unleashes the human engine that produces a torrent of goods and services. It unleashes the ideas and production of the best minds as well as the lesser ones. It unleashes the entrepreneur. There is no waiting in freedom. If you want it, you think about it, you work for it and you pay for it. If you don’t want it, you don’t.

I can’t believe that people are willing to trade abundance for poverty, pennies for the gold they now have and could have more of. But apparently they are about to do so. What has gotten hold of you? Are we now to wear hair shirts for no reason except to prove we are suffering? Are the Liberals, the Progressives, among us as unenlightened as medieval Christians? We have to be gripped by some vast superstition.

When Obama, Reid and Pelosi give up their special government health care program and go stand in line in Canada as an ordinary citizen, I will believe they have something other than pure lies to say to us.

ARE YOU CRAZY?

STOP RIGHT NOW, AMERICA.

WAKE UP!

CALL AND WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN AND THE PRESIDENT NOW. NO UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE. ABSOLUTELY - NO! NO! NO!
ARE YOU CRAZY?

A Cartoon from 1934

Chicago Tribune
1934

Those unwilling to learn the lessons of the past
are condemned to repeat them.

An economic bubble takes an average of two years to correct itself - with one requirement: that the economy is free to make the correction. In the 30s, that correction was stretched to 10 years and even then it was not in the process of correcting itself. It was the war that drafted the unemployed (many to their death) and put the women and old folks to work.

A free economy designs itself to provide whatever the people in the economy need and are willing to work for. It is constantly correcting itself unless the government intervenes and thwarts the corrective process - the mechanism that led to the crash in 1929 and the collapse in 2008 as well as other bubbles between those times. The rational government action is to cut spending, get rid of onerous and irrational regulations, and sell off assets, all in order to lower taxes so that people can use their resources for productive effort. No one, including the individual, the county, the state or the country, can borrow and spend their way out of lost income. The way out is to create and produce some value that one can live on, either directly or through exchange with other people for the things one needs. Political freedom, including economic freedom, is the underlying requirement for this to occur.

Ask yourself: Is this happening now? If not, why not? And the answer is somewhat different than it was in the 30s. Then socialism was an erroneous, but inspired ideal. Its failure was not perceived until the fall of the Berlin Wall whereupon the whole world could see the utter poverty, the imprisoned and tortured people who didn't agree with the system, the starving of millions and the massive waste of resources - all caused by government planning and control. Given that socialism is a failure, what is different now? The motive? Looks like it could be. So, what is the motive now?

Hint: The Greater Good is not the motive. That is the cover, the drapes that soften the window so the unvarnished truth is not realized.

Think about it.

A Citizen's Letter to Her Senator

E. Let us not forget the examples of a not so distant past that illustrate very well the efficiency of free markets and the wastefulness and inefficiency of a controlled economy.

The Soviet Union, one of the greatest empires in the world, collapsed mostly due to economic reasons, due to the inability of the government to predict and control supply and demand or efficiently launch and promote innovations. I myself came from that unfortunate country to the United States in search of freedom, and it horrifies me to see my new home repeating the mistakes of my old one and slipping into the abyss of socialism. You don’t need terrorists or nuclear weapons to destroy a free country. All you have to do is to make the people of a free country embrace socialism and they will destroy themselves and their country.

If we look back at the history of the United States, in the 19th century we see how much private initiative had to do with real progress and technological advances, especially in the energy market. In the 19th century our energy market was developing, as Alex Epstein put it so well, literally with the speed of thought. A new idea was tried as soon as it was thought of, because there were no obstacles in the form of government regulations.

Back then people were afraid that as soon as they ran out of coal they would be doomed. There were many so called scientists and analysts trying to predict the end of the world due to the limited amount of resources. If back then the US government had stepped in and monopolized the energy market and had tried to regulate coal distribution and the production of candles and lighting oils, we would all still live in the dark ages. Yet we were lucky, because that was the time of truly free markets, and in search of profit many innovators came up with the ideas of how to use oil. Those ideas changed history, and we leaped into a new more advanced era because we had oil and knew how to use it.

Do not forget that before oil and before coal people had to use wood. And then coal was a major discovery. What if back then the governments tried to regulate wood distribution and stifled any new ideas about alternative sources of energy like coal?

And by the way, carbon dioxide is not a threat. Oceans produce more carbon dioxide than all humans together. CO2 is required for life and in different historic periods more CO2 usually meant more vegetation and more prosperity. And it is not a general consensus of the scientists that the Earth is warming, in fact there is new data that the Earth is actually cooling, One of the EPA scientists, Alan Carlin, tried to express these ideas to his superiors. However this information was suppressed. Doesn’t it look like a conspiracy directed to destroying the USA's independence and competitiveness? Here is an excerpt from the interview with Alan Carlin.

How about instead of regulating our energy sector the government deregulated it? What if we gave the initiative back to private entrepreneurs? Private businesses are always in search of profit and a competitive edge. If we get to the point where oil is no longer viable, the one who finds a better, cheaper and more efficient alternative source of energy will not only beat their competitors but solve another energy crisis problem for the rest of mankind.

A free human mind is always in search of solutions to problems. An enslaved human mind does not function that way. You may force slaves to do physical labor, but you can’t force a slave’s mind to work. It will always be inferior to the mind of a free man. American inventors have always been on top of the world precisely because they were free not only to come up with new ideas, but also to profit from them. No matter how many great scientists worked in the Soviet labor camps, American scientists could always beat them because they were free.

The Cap and Trade bill will enslave American scientists to a predetermined government-controlled paradigm. Instead of being truly free to exercise their minds and harvest the fruits of their labor, they will have to struggle through a limited amount of alternative energy choices (most of which are not economically viable) in their government-created jobs.

How much efficiency do you expect from that? Are you so naïve that you truly believe that this kind of arrangement can help America solve her energy problems? I fear that if we stifle the human mind, if we rob private companies of their profits in order to invest in dubious government enterprises, if we impoverish people through higher taxes and prices in order to force them to convert to more expensive and less efficient sources of energy, we will create more problems than we are now hoping to solve. It will put this country at a huge disadvantage compared to what is possible and to other countries. And what is worse than that is we will destroy private innovation that has always been a source of American wealth and prosperity.

Please, stop and think twice before you vote for any bill (this or any other) that will put private America in government chains. I believe that there are many other Americans who write petitions to you asking to support things like Cap and Trade or public healthcare. You have to remember that any such initiative will enslave one part of the population in order to serve the other part of the population. This is exactly the kind of democracy that our Founding Fathers were warning us against. When two wolves and a sheep decide what is for lunch the outcome is predictable. This country is a republic based on the rule of Law not the mob, and the Supreme Law of this country is the Constitution of the United States.

You have all taken an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States, and these kinds of bills are in complete violation of this monumental document. Stop thinking that more government is the solution to our problems. Stop thinking that you can please the ignorant masses by giving in to their irrational desires while violating the Constitution and the rights of the minorities, with the smallest minority being an individual. Don’t repeat the mistakes of the Soviets. More government is the problem that is now leading America on this path to nowhere.

Take a stand for freedom, this is what all free Americans expect from you. Don’t sacrifice the American principles for the sake of keeping your seat in Congress. You have to care about justice - an authentic justice based in reality, not some idea that does not work and makes no sense. You have to care about freedom and principles. You have to care about the real values that this country is based on, even if the majority sometimes thinks otherwise.

Remember it was not the majority that founded this country and its laws. It was not the majority that made this country great. It will never be the majority!

You have to take a stand. Simply voting or not voting is not enough anymore. You have to take a real stand for protection of the Constitution of the United States, for protection of the American principles and values. You have to take a real stand for the protection of individual rights. These rights do not include a free house, or a guaranteed job, or free healthcare. You have to take a stand and make yourself heard, so that others can join you! We have to save this country and what you are doing now is not helping this cause. You have to take a stand for what is right, not for what is required by the expediency of the moment!

We The People of this great country, the United States of America, are watching you!

Elena Carter

[Elena is a Russian translator and a co-owner of a fitness facility, East Cobb Exercise Excellence in Marietta, GA.]

Private vs. Public Education

The Palin Episode

The news this past weekend featured Sarah Palin quitting her job as Governor of Alaska. What do you make of this?

She said that her being Governor has become a burden on the state. She, having run for national office, has incurred numerous lawsuits for which she has had to mount a defense. Apparently they all were ethics charges and I understand that all of them have been proven baseless. Nevertheless, this has cost Alaska millions of $s and her personally somewhere around a half million dollars.

I think she takes her oath of office seriously and I think she saw that it cost her and the state a lot for her to run for Vice President. With that past and this still mounting up, it makes sense that she would question whether she is fulfilling the purpose for which she took her oath of office.

At this point, I am taking her at her word.

All the facts behind her words could be checked out by any responsible news organization. I have not heard that they have been. All I hear are opinions and speculations as to her motives, her future, her character - whatever. None of it makes a damn bit of difference in my book.

If she lied about the facts, Sarah Palin is done.

If she told the truth about the facts, she struck a blow for honor.

Honor. Now there's something woefully lacking in our public life. I mean, where do you find anyone these days that honors the oath they took or the word they give?

In politics it's deuces wild. Reverend Wright encouraged us to buy into the cynicism that surrounds politicians. "Weeell, Barack is a politician. What do you expect?" The lowlife know that if you are cynical, they thrive.

I'm sure Palin has a purpose. Exactly what it is, I don't know.

I do know she electrified the Republicans and conservatives big time last year. That hasn't really gone away which is why I think the Left is still working overtime to destroy her any despicable way they can. Whether she can capitalize on the excitement she created, time will tell.

In the meantime I'm saying that Palin has some honor to her and I hope she can use that to bring honor to our political and cultural conversation.

I wish her the best.

(I'd like to give her a little coaching on her gravitas, but that's another story.)

And So It Goes When Things Are Upside Down

Why Are Things Upside Down?

[I posted this comment on the Ann Althouse website where she was taking on Maureen Dowd for blasting Palin.]

If you go to a basketball, football or baseball game, you go to see the game. You don't go to see the referees.

The government is supposed to be in the background making sure the players, the individuals in society, are playing the game according to the rules. Government only makes sense as a background activity.

Now the government is a foreground activity. Everything revolves around it. It changes the rules and the score at whim - whatever it wants to do, thinking only of itself, not its purpose.

Of course, MDowd is attracted to this reversal. The government is where the bullies hang out. They love it. And bullies are not nice nor fun people. Few like them, not even the other bullies.

Who wants to play on any team that gets jerked around in this way? Not me.

July 4, 2009

Don't you find it odd that our President, a master manipulator of symbol, and First Lady are spending our national birthday in Moscow, the country most associated with communism? Hmmm.

[I got the news that they were in Moscow this weekend here. But as I was returning from the grocery this evening, I heard he was leaving for Moscow tonight, Sunday. I may be wrong for blasting him for his timing. I will clear this up as the facts become clear.][When I got up Monday, a picture of O and M in Russia was on Drudge. Since Russia is 8 hours ahead of WDC, this meant they had to leave at least 24 hours ahead and most likely more. Probably left on the 4th.]

by Bosch Fawstin

Never have I been so spiritually touched by the gaiety and exuberance of this year's fireworks. For those brief moments, the economic slump and Obama's poor-mouth attitude regarding America were gone. Come to think of it, I think it was good he left OUR country this weekend.