Supreme Court Enacts Public Option Health Care Act

Here’s where we’re going now.

Employer will save money by eliminating their employee health care programs, pay the penalty and be done with that mess that the human resources people hate the most.  The employees will be forced into their state insurance exchange at which there will be exactly FOUR policies on offer.  Those policies vary only on premium charged and deductible/co-pay terms, and they are pre-priced by Dept of HHS.  If they don’t buy one of those policies, they are subject to a fine/penalty (now known, thanks to the Supremes, as a ‘tax’).

Most everybody knows that part.  Many more people are going to start to learn this part.  Some bleeding hearts in Congress cried about the penalty, saying “we can’t force poor people to pay a fine just because they can’t afford to buy the insurance we ordered them to buy.”  To buy their votes, the drafters of the law wrote a provision that says there is NO civil or criminal penalty for failure to pay the fine.  The fine has no teeth; none.

So, by pretending to solve the ‘free-loader’ problem (the straw-man they stood up as part of the rationale for the law) they created a system which encourages everyone to be a free-loader.  The law artificially reduces the price of insurance on the state exchanges so as to encourage employers to drop coverage.  There is no penalty for not having insurance.  Couple that with forcing insurance companies to sell policies to sick people at the last minute (i.e. people with ‘pre-existing conditions’) and most people will say, “I guess I’ll buy ‘insurance’ when I get sick and need someone else to pay doctor’s bill.

The problem is, eventually there’s no money in the the bank accounts of what used to be called ‘insurance companies’ because they no longer have a business model that works.  Everyone shows up sick with a check for the first month’s premium and buys UNLIMITED health care services.  Soon there’s no way to pay the doctor or the hospital or the drug maker or the pharmacist.  Soon with the industry on the verge of a melt down, the government steps in with the mother of all bail-outs, and, voila, we have the government single-payer system that Obama/Pelosi/Reid wanted from the beginning.

Remember the meeting the Dems had with Bill Clinton behind closed doors during the final days of the debate.  Nancy came out of the meeting with the biggest cat-ate-the-canary grin she’s ever had.  Clinton had told them what I’ve just written and told Nancy, et. al. to stop insisting on getting single-payer, government option by an act of Congress.  “Just be patient Nancy, let the disaster we’re teeing up just happen, and they’ll beg us for single-payer.  It’ll be more like an act of God.”  (See the clip here > Nancy Speaks – she said the ‘they’ll cry out’ part herself.)

We’re one giant step closer to the ledge.

Can the Government Love Anyone?

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.
          -Martin Luther King, Jr., civil-rights leader (1929-1968)

A left-leaning, pro-bigger government acquaintance posted that quote on Facebook recently, presumably suggesting that our ‘edifice’ needs restructuring in the direction of more entitlement spending for the poor. A right-leaning friend suggested that the Reverend Dr. King’s words might be read differently and wrote “So, we can’t just take Mitt Romney’s money and toss it to the poor and believe we have helped them with that superficial deed. Great forethought on MLKs part.  The current system has produced that edifice. We have public housing projects that are nothing but 21st century slave quarters. The hope and change those people need has yet to come in the form of a government check, and it NEVER will. MLK’s statement explains one reason why it won’t.”

The American edifice does not produce beggars; the bastardized, collectivist, progressive version of the American system produces beggars. The history of the real American system – a history of free markets, liberty, individual rights and limited government – shows an unprecedented level of success at minimizing beggary. The restructuring that is needed is the rejection of government largesse as the purported solution to a problem that is not susceptible to being solved by political/government actions. Politics, the art of governing and ruling a civil society, by its very nature serves always the powerful and never the weak. On the other hand, free men/women love and nurture life, including the lives of others and including the lives of the displaced and the unfortunate. When we attempt to have government bureaucrats play the life-sustaining roles of free men/women, the care-taking of those who deserve our charity becomes a haphazard and superficial act instead of an act of love, the only acts that matter. The government CAN NOT love anyone. You can not outsource love to Uncle Sam. You can’t force someone to love someone else, and when you try to do so, you kill love and resentment rushes in to fill the vacuum.

Stop killing love. Keep the federal government out of all of the business of making life ‘better’ for some people. It makes a mess of pretending to be kinder and gentler. Let it concentrate on war, post offices, enforcing contracts and punishing crime. The people will do the rest much, much better without guns, the threat of jail or the IRS.

If you outsource your loving to the government, you’ve sold your soul, and the government will, with the money you send to the IRS, smother the life out of everyone it chooses to “love” so much better than you could. If you think the government can love better than you can, send in your checks. If not, join me in resisting ever-bigger government.

Love one another, no government subsidy needed.

A Personal Declaration of Independence

I am willing to be the last freedom-fighter in America, if, and only if, I must and at least one other person agrees with me.  In other words, like George Washington and his compatriots, I will not leave my country, and, again like Mr. Washington, I ask to be left alone, free and independent.  Anyone who wants to stay with me is welcome, even the leftists who keep suggesting that I pack my bags for a trip to Somalia, but only if they let me be free of their intrusive government tentacles.

Let me explain the reasons for my personal declaration of independence.

I’m in favor of smaller government.  I believe that individuals and private, voluntary associations of free men/women are better at addressing life’s challenges (and ameliorating the pain and sadness that attend to some of life) than is a government body possessed of the power to compel certain, preferred behaviors.  That is particularly true of government agencies in, say, Washington, DC, that are necessarily and naturally disengaged and disconnected from the culture and circumstances in, oh, Topeka, Kansas.  That belief is the rationale for suggesting that the federal government should tax/spend less of its citizens’ money.

As a consequence of expressing that preference, I’ve been called many names (ingrate, selfish piece of #^*#, stupid-ass libertarian, ignorant Faux News watcher, etc).  I can not count how many times a fellow citizen has suggested that I emigrate to Somalia since I am ‘against government.’  It is as if they believe that I, like they, have forgotten all the numbers between $0 and next years federal budget, $3,800,000,000,000 and that the only government in the world that is smaller than ours is in Somalia.

I have addressed big-government supporters’ disdain and intolerance of thinking that is contrary to their own (here and here) in the past, but a recent exchange causes me to return to the question:

Will I move to Somalia?

My answer; my final answer is NO.  Here’s why.

Yesterday, in response to a person having made that suggestion to me – making the relocation to Somalia rant – a good friend wrote in a Facebook comment thread:  “The guy [me] who just wants to be left alone is the one who has to leave?  Shouldn’t the people who want to impose their wishes on him and others be the ones to form their own new society?  Nobody is stopping them from creating a collectivist system, but pretty please leave me out of it.  I won’t sanction or participate in your self- destruction.”  They can have their way, just let me have mine.

Now, I’m sure some will suggest that my friend had it backwards – some will suggest that if I want to be left alone, I should leave and start my own society.  Problem is, the American way of organizing life (free markets made up of men/women with certain, inalienable individual liberties that are protected by a government with limited, finite powers) is the basis for all of the good things that surround us.  The collectivists (the liberals and progressives) who preach the ‘for the common good’ line over and over, want to confiscate for themselves all those good things (roads, damns, schools, laptops, all the single-malt Scotch) and insist that the rest of us have a choice:  adopt and live under their perverse, anti-human, anti-freedom way of thinking . . . or leave.

Well, I’ve had enough of it.  I’ve had enough of being told to goose-walk with the left or get out.  I’ve had enough of being told that I have to pay for abortions, some other parents’ kids’ school lunch and the new-age fuel experiment that I suspect is being conducted in Al Gore’s basement in Belle Meade, TN.  None of those things has to stop or be made against the law.  But the collectivists do have to give up control of the IRS.  To fuel their world, they will depend upon a collection of voluntary donations to fund all their special, common-good programs, and I will not, nor can I, stop them.

Meanwhile, the rest of us shall be free of their demands on our lives, because we can survive without them.  They, parasites all, will miss us dearly, as they try to divy up what will be illusory donations while we, the producers who want to force no one into our realm, will survive, even if there are only two of us left.

I think the collectivists are projecting.  They dream of living in Somalia, a land where the government controls all that there is to control.  I dream of my America, a land where the people control their government.  The difference in living conditions between America and Somalia is all an undecided voter needs to consider when choosing between those two lives.

Our system, the American system, works because we’re allowed to be free.  The collectivists system works if, and only if, we let the state compel us to act against our will.  Without the power of the state to force EVERYONE to live as commanded, their system will collapse.

Which side are you on?  I just need one of you!  Will you declare yourself free and independent and stay, with me, in America, or go with the collectivists to Somalia?  The collectivists are free to have their own world, but they can’t have my country or my freedom.

Remember Ronald Reagan – Choose Freedom; He Did

A look back 25 years – Ronald Reagan at Brandenburg Gate.

Everyone knows the line  “Tear down this wall.”  But, listen to the lead up to the one line.  Freedom, peace and prosperity are the hope of all mankind.  “Mr. Gorbachev, if you want peace . . . tear down this wall.”

In the Cold War, the war of all wars, the winner did not win by death or force of arms.  The winner won by advocating relentlessly for the profound truth that all men are created equal and deserve to be and will prosper if, and only if, they are free.

Mr. Reagan didn’t threaten to bulldoze the wall or bomb Moscow.  He told the people on the other side of that wall that they’d be welcomed to the world of the free with open arms and, most importantly, bountiful harvests of all the things made scarce by government power directed at producing the common good.

And today, we have the likes of Jeb Bush (son of the man who wasted the legacy bequeathed him in 1988 and, in 1992, could not defeat the unknown Governor Bubba from Arkansas) spreading the lie that President Reagan was Mr. Compromise and would be unwelcome in today’s GOP.  Jeb Bush and many other prominent GOP ‘leaders’ praise President Reagan’s mythical willingness to work with the other side, ignoring all the evidence to the contrary – if RWR was such an easy-going fellow, why did the Democratic party and 99% of the media outlets at the time speak of him as if he were Satan on Earth?

Even though they generally purport to talk about domestic policy when they broadcast this lie about Mr. Reagan, this episode in RWR history makes the point that he was not the run-of-the-mill, reach across the aisle politician Jeb wants to channel.  Everyone in the Reagan administration tried to get these words deleted from the Brandenburg speech; he resolutely insisted on leaving them in.

Ronald Reagan never compromised his belief in the paramount importance of America as the symbol of freedom, the shining city on a hill, the last, best hope of mankind.  At times he gave an inch to get a mile on domestic fiscal policy, but he later regretted and we better learn from those mistakes.  GOP’s steadfast support of a small government for the sake of freedom is the only hope we have.

History does not have to be a gradual move to the left – there is a choice.  That choice is to say NO to moving leftward EVERY TIME the question is posed.  There can be no compromise between good and evil – there is no such thing as mostly free.  You own ALL of your life or you own as much as the government lets you.

The latter is a slippery slope indeed, and RWR knew that as evidenced by 1 minute and 43 seconds in one speech by Ronald Wilson Reagan.  RIP.

It’s our time to choose.  I choose freedom.

The Worst Euphemism EVER

There is on MSNBC a new Rachel Maddow promotional piece in which she refers to “government approved outcome.”

She is referring to a live birth.  She suggests that conservative, pro-life Americans are hypocrites for purporting to be for smaller government while simultaneously advocating for anti-abortion laws.  A government big enough to be in every bedroom and force a ‘government approved outcome for every pregnancy’ is contradictory to a conservative’s support of small government, according to Ms. Maddow.

1.  Ms. Maddow, I nor the government have to be in your bedroom to care about a life that might be conceived there.

2.  The government does not have to be very big to protect life, including the one you want the privilege to terminate because it happens to reside in your womb.

3.  Do you ever think about what you say for longer than the amount of time it takes for it to cross your lips?

Yes, life is a government approved outcome.  How many lives do you want government to disapprove?

OH, and I need you to tell me which ones?  Who do you want to die?  Just the babies who you think were harmed when I smoked a cigar in a room full of pregnant women?