It's a Done Deal

Socialized medicine has passed the House of Representatives. Now the House and Senate hammer out their differences in secret and give us what they want to give us.

And the Republicans? They are proudly proclaiming that they managed to slip in two amendments that prohibit Government funding of Abortions. Aside from the obvious detail that they will be slipped back out in the backroom negotiations - no, that's the wrong word. There is no negotiating going on. There is just wheeling and dealing, carving up the spoils. The real tragedy is that it passed at all. The Government should have its sticky fingers out of ALL MEDICINE, not just abortions. If you had worried as much about that, you could have had your cake and eat it too. No government funded medicine, therefore no government funded abortions. Sometimes I think there are only the pro-abortion Progressives and the anti-abortion Progressives and there are no Republicans up there in Washington at all.

This Republic was the United States of America, not the Peoples Republic of America. There was a reason this is not a democracy. The founders of this country loathed democracy as tyranny of the masses.

Trust

When I indicate my dislike of the changes to our country President Obama is ramrodding through our Congress, there is a standard answer I get - "Well, your boy Bush did {this or that}" with the implication that I like whatever Bush did. As a libertarian, I find little difference in the strong-central-government policies of either man save for the speed and enormity of President Obama's changes. There is another implication - it is that the questioner does find a difference between the two and prefers the strong-central-government of President Obama.

What I do not understand is the trust they have that his accumulation of power in the Oval Office is benign even though the lesser accumulation of President Bush was malignant. Despite decades of every interaction with the federal government being incompetent at best. And despite being those interactions always being uncaring, impersonal, disinterested, aloof and arrogant; somehow they anticipate that this time will be different.

And further, since my interactions with Obama supporters are with the working class, those who get up in the morning and earn a paycheck and not those who professionally rely on the beneficence of others, the only conclusions I can reach are that somehow they expect that:
1) They will increase their condition when they receive the redistribution of someone else's labor;
or,
2) They believe that the government is better able to see to their needs than they themselves are.

As an example, consider health care. With number one, they are expecting the Government to steal the labor of Doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and ,oh yes,the evil rich i.e. the people with higher incomes than you, and give it to them. Folks that ain't gonna happen, not long anyway. And even if it does for a while, when you strip away the smoke and mirrors you are looking at nothing more than common theft and slavery with only someone else doing the dirty work for you.

With number two? I have no simple answer other than - go stare into a mirror a while.

Trust that his time it is going to be different? Yeah, right.

Armed Robbery By Proxy

"Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others."

Ayn Rand

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The purpose of our Government as proposed by our founding fathers was not keep our banks solvent. In fact, our founding fathers opposed having any kind of National Bank, feeling that the control of our money was the control of our lives.
Nor was the purpose of our Government the prevention of poverty. The 'welfare' of general welfare is that which benefits us all, not that which benefits individuals. You do not want to be poor. Live right. This is also applicable to bailing out companies. Waving the truth that bailing out a company is wrong to begin with, bailing out one company and not its competitor is even worse. Do not reward a company for its bad choices and do not reward a person for bad life choices.
The Constitutional purpose of Government is certainly not to provide cheap medical care. Medical car is often the product of sowing wild oats and praying for crop failure. Enslaving the taxpayers and the medical community was never a goal of our Constitution.
No, the purpose of our Government is to protect us from enemies, foreign and domestic. A thief would be our enemy. A politician using my money to buy his votes is a simple thief. And since taxes are collected under threat of violence, that theft is armed robbery.

Every national elected position is sworn in with a promise to 'Protect and Defend the Constitution'. Most politicians have little or no intent to do that. There is a word for that - treason. Why is this the least prosecuted crime in the whole Federal Government? It is because integrity is rarer even than honesty. And neither are appreciated virtues in our society.

The first thing that you learn is you always must wait

There was a song by the Velvet Underground and Nico in the seventies, a real Lou Reed sub-culture description piece called I'm Waiting For My Man in which he describes a junkie's life. The line the hooked my memory was "The first thing that you learn is you always must wait." Trying to remember how I got to this ear worm, I know I was thinking about what changes we really will have after next month as we enter into the epoch of Obama. And I thought of every contact I have ever had with any branch of Government and at any level of Government. The first thing that you learn is you always must wait. There is no competition so there is no customer service. Post Office? Unemployment Office? VA Hospital? (Or County owned for that matter) Driver's License Office?
So as 51% of our population of deliberately dumbed down Americans deliberately aduterated with only the lowest class of illegal immigrants hands everything in our lives over to the Government to run for us(?), contemplate the Government's efficiency and remember.

So what has America become? A land of Government hand-out junkies; so,

The first thing that you learn is you always must wait.

Civics Test

My friend Connie over at Pieces of Thought pointed me to a wonderful civics test.

I took it. I did miss one, and the irony is that I am not sure why I missed it. I didn't like the answers offered to number two. I knew Freedom of Religion was a correct choice. And I thought that the right to bear arms was one. I knew that the right to vote WAS NOT a correct choice. But my choices were all or just one, and I am not sure what logic or semantics they were using not to have that count as the Second Amendment.

Other than that - perfect score. So my total is 29. If you take the test feel free to come back and post your score. Of 43000 who have taken the test as of now, a little more than 1000 had perfect scores and about the same number missed only one (And I am curious how many missed question number 2 like I did).
About four thousand and change missed about 8 (a little more than one quarter of the questions) and the same missed nine of thirty. Missing nine would be a score of 70% -- passing when I went to school (versus 60 now).

The statistics were woefully lacking, only showing the mean for each age group that took the test.
But they did break out the curve for the total population.
30 1,066 Perfect Score
29 1,058
28 1,282
27 1,501
26 1,938
25 2,304
24 3,054
23 3,543
22 4,010
21 4,140
20 3,992
19 3,445
18 2,922
17 2,280
16 1,938
15 1,483
14 1,067
13 848
12 568
11 344
10 225
9 130
8 65
7 30
6 23
5 15
4 7
3 6
2 3
0 19

43,306

Sense of Proportion

Thinking of Henry Waxman's television posturing reminded me of something that drives me crazy every time I see an example of it, something endemic to our culture. That is dealing with any problem at the highest level possible rather than at the lowest level we can. You have a problem with your neighbor's lawn needing to be cut? You call the Zoning enforcement at your county commission. What you should have done is call him and see if his lawnmower might have died, or as in my case if he was massively ill with cancer and was unable to deal with the lawn right now. Hell, you might even help him.

The teacher sent home a note that your child was not behaving in school? Obviously start with a complaint to the Principal or maybe the School Board.

Things that should be dealt with at the city level are attacked at the state level; and those items that are legitimately the state's authority and responsibility routinely end up, at the United States Supreme Court.

There are things that are routinely the province of the Federal Government. But how are you going to usurp that authority? Is that why the whiny want us under the authority of the United Nations and theWorld Court?

If you like the Unemployment Office,

For some reason, the American public is hell bent on leather not to have to write their own checks to pay for their medical care. Do they really think that they don't have to pay for their medical care if it comes from the U. S. Government? Or do they all think that they can get more than they pay for? Apparently, the state of our education system is that, YES, they all think they can get something for nothing.

There are a number of serious problems with the idea of putting the Government in charge of our health care, and none of them seem to matter in our headlong rush to commit medical suicide. It seems inevitable at this point that we will let the Government Bureaucrats have this potentially fatal control of our lives. I am not saying that there are not flaws nor need for improvement in our current system; but handing control of your life to someone further removed from you in never the solution to your problems.

First - think of every contact you have ever had with the Government -- The Post Office, the Driver's License office, jury duty, the military, taxes, the Veteran's Administration, your school board, the Unemployment Office -- Is there any of them where you or your opinion mattered? Was there any of them that ran efficiently? Was there any of them that had the latest equipment? Was there any of them where you were even remotely comfortable during your wait? Were there any of them where you felt the employees cared the least bit about you? WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THIS ONE WILL BE DIFFERENT?

Second - Do you think you will see you Congressmen, Senators, or other big-wigs at the same clinic you will be at? Dream on. their plans are for you, not for themselves.

Who are these people without healthcare? And to what extent are they without healthcare. In the United States anyone who comes to a hospital, private as well as public, will be treated. Ostensibly for "life threatening conditions", but we all have experience with people using the emergency rooms for non-emergency conditions. Why don't they have treatment at a regular doctor's office? Because they don't have insurance. Why don't they have insurance? Because they have chosen to spend their income on lifestyle -- color TVs, spinner wheels, and other "bling". And because they don't have to. The system enables, even prefers, foolish behavior. Also, the poor have Medicaid and the elderly Medicare.
In addition to the non-working poor, they are also young adults who have again consciously gambled and chosen a more advanced lifestyle than they would otherwise have banking on the statistical health of a young person. Why are we expected to insure someone who will not insure himself?

Is it even possible for the Government to allocate resources to the people without favoring one group over another? By this I do not mean just the political favorites groups that the Liberal Democratic proponents of Nation Health Care normally take care of. I mean the rationing of resources that will, of necessity, come with a government budget.
It has been said that the bulk of medical expenses come at the end of your life. This is not a coincidence. It comes because as we get older our bodies fail. But it also comes because as we get sicker our bodies fail. What better place for the Government to begin trimming expenses than to deny "Heroic care" to the old and terminally ill. After all there are irresponsible (friendly) voters to reward.
You think this will never happen? Ask a British senior citizen. Ask a Canadian cancer patient waiting 4 months for a sonogram that my 85-year-old mother got the same evening.

And what of the doctors? I know, they do it for the love of humanity. NOT! It is eleven or twelve years of hard work to become a doctor. They delay the gratification of a good salary for a better one later on. What incentive is there if they have only a uniform Government pay grade, however good, waiting for them? They would do better becoming lawyers. (Just what we need more hungry lawyers). Do you think you can enslave doctors to serve? Ultimately, we will, like Great Britain, have a shortage of physicians.

I could rant on and on about this (and probably will), but this blog is much too long to read.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!