Month: October 2009

Backlash?

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Backlash?

In Part II of the “Dangerous Victims” trilogy I quoted something I found over at Samizdata:

Discourage self-help, and loyal subjects become the slaves of ruffians. Over-stimulate self-assertion, and for the arbitrament of the Courts you substitute the decision of the sword or the revolver. – The Law of the Constitution, by A.V. Dicey (MacMillan, London 1885).

Yesterday I found this story (sorry, I don’t remember where I found the link that took me there) from Saturday’s Daily Express:

TIME TO TACKLE AN ACUTE CRISIS IN BRITISH POLICING

REPORTS of the law-abiding being serially neglected by the police when their property comes under attack are proliferating. Every day brings new stories about people who have been let down by constabularies that always seem to have higher priorities than protecting the public.

It appears that far from being an occasional aberration, such neglect is the norm in many parts of the country.

Too many forces have fallen under the command of politically correct top brass who think officers should be at best neutral when they intervene in altercations between harassed householders and gangs of thugs.

The latest examples are all too typical. In Lincolnshire, Ted Nottingham has felt compelled to advertise a reward for the capture of yobs who have vandalised his car more than 40 times and have now wrecked his neighbour’s vehicle.

In Stourbridge, disabled widow Brenda Hill has been forced to put up notices in her car, begging vandals to stop smashing it up after five attacks in the past year.

She knows who the culprits are and so do the police but nothing has been done to stop them.

We cannot go on like this. The current public outcry must be the catalyst for fundamental change. There is no more important task facing the police and the courts than reclaiming the streets from young hoodlums.

There must come a point when offering understanding and support to the fractured families of the underclass is not enough.

The time has come for the police to get tough and give decent people their neighbourhoods back.

I’d like to think the unspoken next sentence reads “Or we’ll take them back ourselves,” but I’m not sure there are enough dangerous victims left in (formerly) Great Britain.

But I can hope.

UPDATE: Reader “teqjack” links in comments to the latest bit of insanity from across the pond:

You can’t expect the police to be heroes: Public want too much, says health and safety report

The public have ‘ unrealistic expectations’ that police will put themselves in danger to protect ordinary people, according to new safety guidelines for officers.

The Health and Safety Executive caused outrage by declaring that officers confronted with dangerous situations-while fighting crime or trying to guard the public ‘may choose not to put themselves at unreasonable risk’.

Its guidance published yesterday firmly plays down the need for officers to show bravery in the course of their duty if they make a ‘personal choice’ not to.

It states: ‘There is often an unrealistic public expectation that officers and staff will put themselves at risk to protect the public.’

The document concedes that ‘very occasionally in extreme cases’, police may be justified in putting themselves in jeopardy – in which case they may be let off without being prosecuted under health and safety laws.

The report – which has the backing of senior police chiefs – prompted anger and astonishment last night.

Paul Beshenivsky, whose police officer wife Sharon was shot dead by armed robbers in 2005, condemned the HSE as ‘meddling do-gooders’, saying: ‘At the end of the day a police officer’s job does involve putting your life on the line. Sharon knew that, and she got killed.’

He told the Mail: ‘The public are not allowed to take the law into their own hands, and now the crazy health and safety brigade want to stop the police dealing with criminals as well.

“Where would you draw the line? Would you say, “That shoplifter that looks on drugs, he might have a knife, I’ll walk away from that one?” The whole thing is madness.’

Police forces have been subject to health and safety legislation since 1998.

But it is the latest document’s advice on risk-taking by individual officers that has caused anger.

The report says police officers ‘may, very occasionally in extreme cases, decide to put themselves at risk in acts of true heroism’.

In these ‘rare circumstances’, the HSE adds, ‘it would not be in the public interest to take action against the individual’.

But it adds: ‘Equally HSE, like the Police Service, recognises that in such extreme cases everyone has the right to make personal choices and that individuals may choose not to put themselves at unreasonable risk.’

The guidelines have been backed by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the rank-and-file Police Federation.

But Sid Mackay, a retired Met Police Chief Superintendent whose daughter, PC Nina Mackay, was stabbed to death on duty in 1997, said: ‘They claim it is “unrealistic” for the public to expect the police to face danger, but that’s what the public believe the police are for, and rightly so.

‘The HSE will never understand, because they are completely risk-averse, but they have got their fingers into operational policing and they think they’re the experts.

‘The police are choking on paperwork, carrying out endless risk assessments for every operation, and then we wonder why they have become so cautious.’

Anthony Ganderton, the stepfather of ten-year- old Jordon Lyon who drowned in Wigan in 2007 after he jumped into a pond to save his stepsister, also attacked the guidelines.

Two police community service officers who arrived at the scene stood on the bank and radioed for help instead of jumping in to rescue the children, because they were not appropriately trained so risked breaking health and safety rules.

He told the Mail: ‘The point is they should do whatever they can to help people in trouble, especially when there are children involved.’

HSE chairman Judith Hackitt said yesterday: ‘This statement will assist senior police officers in balancing the risks involved in their duties to fight crime with meeting their health and safety obligations to their own employees and the public.’

The Home Office said: ‘Health and safety laws are there to protect the police as well as the public, but they must never hinder officers in the execution of their duty.’

They’ve gone completely batshit fucking insane over there.

Get out. Get out now.

Quote of the Day – Socialism Edition

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Quote of the Day – Socialism Edition

The architects of the State can have all the good intentions in the world – they can be paragons of selfless virtue – and it doesn’t change a thing. The nature of the system they create will inevitably corrupt it, because the nature of the people trapped in the system doesn’t change. They want more for themselves and their families, and if they can’t earn it, they will band together to demand it. There is only one reliable way to hold those bands together over the long term, only one predictable response to the diminishing returns gained by each sacrifice of liberty… and only one emotion the leaders of each collective entity can easily encourage, to maintain their own power: hatred.

When everything you have is provided by the State, you will easily come to hate anyone whose demands take priority over yours. They are not your competitors. They are your enemies. Even now, in what may prove to be the last days we can regard ourselves as a free nation with a bloated government, we can see how much anger simmers among those who believe the urgency of their demands outweighs any consideration of the cost to others.

— Dr. Zero – Socialism: A Hate Story

Coincidence?

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Perusing through some old posts and their comments, I ran across something I found . . . interesting.

Remember this Quote-of-the-Day from John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education?

I lived through the great transformation which turned schools from often useful places (if never the essential ones school publicists claimed) into laboratories of state experimentation. When I began teaching in 1961, the social environment of Manhattan schools was a distant cousin of the western Pennsylvania schools I attended in the 1940s, as Darwin was a distant cousin of Malthus.

Discipline was the daily watchword on school corridors. A network of discipline referrals, graded into an elaborate catalogue of well-calibrated offenses, was etched into the classroom heart. At bottom, hard as it is to believe in today’s school climate, there was a common dedication to the intellectual part of the enterprise. I remember screaming (pompously) at an administrator who marked on my plan book that he would like to see evidence I was teaching “the whole child,” that I didn’t teach children at all, I taught the discipline of the English language! Priggish as that sounds, it reflects an attitude not uncommon among teachers who grew up in the 1940s and before. Even with much slippage in practice, Monongahela and Manhattan had a family relationship. About schooling at least. Then suddenly in 1965 everything changed.

Whatever the event is that I’m actually referring to—and its full dimensions are still only partially clear to me—it was a nationwide phenomenon simultaneously arriving in all big cities coast to coast, penetrating the hinterlands afterwards. Whatever it was, it arrived all at once, the way we see national testing and other remote-control school matters like School-to-Work legislation appear in every state today at the same time. A plan was being orchestrated, the nature of which is unmasked in the upcoming chapters.

Think of this thing for the moment as a course of discipline dictated by coaches outside the perimeter of the visible school world. It constituted psychological restructuring of the institution’s mission, but traveled under the guise of a public emergency which (the public was told) dictated increasing the intellectual content of the business! Except for its nightmare aspect, it could have been a scene from farce, a swipe directly from Orwell’s 1984 and its fictional telly announcements that the chocolate ration was being raised every time it was being lowered. This reorientation did not arise from any democratic debate, or from any public clamor for such a peculiar initiative; the public was not consulted or informed. Best of all, those engineering the makeover denied it was happening.

In the comments to The George Orwell Daycare Center, written two months before that QotD, I found this from reader DJ:

I remember well the math lessons of the 3rd through 6th grades. During the 3rd through 5th grades, the textbooks used were a series for those grades by the same author and publisher. They taught arithmetic by explanation, example, and drill, and overwhelmingly they applied those lessons to the real world through innumerable story problems, as they were known at the time.

I dearly loved those story problems. They taught us to think. They taught the real-world use of arithmetic to answer questions and solve problems. They taught the use of algebra in simple, practical, useful ways, thereby making its later formal study easy.

Then came the sixth grade. We had a brand new textbook, with no curled page corners, no writing in the margins, no dirty fingerprints, and damned little in common with what we had used before. Your contrast between the classroom example of 1960 and 1970 (new math) is spot on. We were perhaps ahead of our time, as I was in the sixth grade from September, 1964, to May, 1965.

What I remember most about that textbook is that I didn’t like it, the rest of the class hated it, and the teacher complained about it to us, in class. She did her best to teach what she would have taught had she still used the old textbooks, so we learned much more from the blackboard than from the book.

I recall a meeting between all the teachers of our school (grades 4-6) and the school board one afternoon just after class let out. I heard the voice of my teacher as she shouted at someone, which she rarely did, so I sneaked into the dark back of the auditorium where it was held. (I walked to and from school, so it didn’t matter if I stayed late.) She ate out the board for having forced this textbook on us, and the Superintendent, a family friend whom I knew well, as he lived across the street from us, was bleeding from the ass before she was finished. The other teachers listened to her for about ten minutes, and then, when she sat down, they gave her a standing ovation. She kept her job. We kept using the textbook.

Coincidence? I think not.

I Guess I’m Not… HUMAN

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Normally I don’t comment over at Markadelphia’s blog. He does enough of that here, but yesterday I couldn’t resist. Read his very short post, Yep.

I was the first to comment:

Great! Let him and his organization provide that coverage, and let’s see how long he and his organization stay in business.

Health care is not a RIGHT.

There were, of course, responses to that, but here’s the one I’m going to respond to with an Überpost:

blk said…

From the preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

A basic education is a right in this country. It wasn’t always. Most people would agree that protection by the fire and the police departments is a right. It wasn’t always that way.

Why isn’t health care a right? What else would promote the general Welfare of our population than ensuring that everyone has a long and healthy life? What could be more Just than making sure that every child, worker and elderly person can see a doctor when they’re sick?

National health care would promote domestic Tranquility by giving everyone peace of mind, knowing that if their kid comes down with some awful disease they can get treatment. If you have cancer, the emergency room just ain’t gonna cut it.

To enjoy the Blessings of Liberty you have to be alive. Many people die in this country because they don’t have health care.

We are a rich country. As we’ve become wealthier and as technology and science have advanced the notion of what is a right has changed. Now that we can afford them, education, police and fire protection are rights. The way health care costs are exploding, we are going to go bankrupt. We have to change the way the system works to reign in costs. By covering everyone we can make it cheaper for each person. When everyone is covered and everyone is paying, we’ll finally have the leverage we need to prevent the explosive rise in costs.

That will mean squeezing out unnecessary middlemen who get between you and your doctor. The most expensive and least useful middlemen are insurance industry execs. By eliminating them we can squeeze literally billions of dollars from health care overhead (health care company execs pull in salaries, bonuses and options in the range of tens of millions, to hundreds of millions to a billion dollars).

Where to begin? Why, at the beginning!

A basic education is a right in this country. It wasn’t always.

No, indeed it was not. Back when I started this blog, one of the very first posts I published was an essay entitled What is a “Right”? That essay has, over the years, drawn a lot of commentary and inspired a six-part exchange with a professor of mathematics on just that very topic. (Check the left sidebar if you want to read the whole discussion. I recommend it.) The original essay was written to win me a year’s membership at AR15.com, and that contest required that I limit myself to, I think, 800 words, but the core point of the essay was this:

A “right” is what the majority of a society believes it is.

That’s the pragmatist in me coming out. What people believe is a “right” they will agitate for and defend against encroachment. Conversely, if they don’t believe, they won’t defend. Is universal education really a “Right”? Philosophically, no, it’s not, but we’ve had it hammered into us for so long the majority believes it is. They believe that it is the job of the government to educate our children to the point that many parents no longer take any responsibility for that education on themselves, and don’t pay any attention to what their children learn (or don’t) while those children spend six to eight hours a day under the control (or not) of our public education system.

I’ll come back to that.

Most people would agree that protection by the fire and the police departments is a right. It wasn’t always that way.

Obviously I’m not “most people.” I know better. I’ve lived where residents had to pay a local private fire company to get them to come to their homes if there was a fire. If they chose not to pay, the firefighters could choose not to come. Or if they did, the homeowner would get a big damned bill for their appearance afterward that would represent a lot more than a few years of subscription to their services. If the homeowner chose not to pay that bill, they’d be taken to court.

Does that sound like a “right”?

I also understand that I have no “right” to police protection. That happens to be just one of many reasons I’m an activist for the right to arms. As I said, I’m a pragmatist. I try to deal with the way the world works rather than how people think it ought to be. And given your assertion that police protection is a “right,” you ought to read both pieces of that essay. You might be surprised.

Why isn’t health care a right? What else would promote the general Welfare of our population than ensuring that everyone has a long and healthy life? What could be more Just than making sure that every child, worker and elderly person can see a doctor when they’re sick?

Let’s take these one at a time, because they’re not a set. This is a textbook example of argumentum ad consequentiam – the proposition that belief in X will lead to good consequences, therefore X is good.

Why isn’t health care a right? For the same reason having a fire engine show up at your door in the event of a fire isn’t a right – it demands that someone else do something for you. One thing I try to do with this blog is make sure that if someone can say something better than I can, I let them. Let me quote Dr. Pat Santy, a psychologist and MD on the topic:

Let me be clear. I don’t believe that people have a “right” to health care; because, what advocating such a “right” basically means is that you believe you have a “right” to my mind; you have a “right” to my professional competence; i.e., you have a “right” to enslave me.

In that six-part series on ‘What is a “Right”?’, I concluded that there is only one fundamental right, and all others are corollaries of it, but one defining factor is that YOUR rights end when they require DEMANDING something of another. That’s the idealist in me.

And I’m able to tell the difference between idealism and pragmatism.

What else would promote the general Welfare of our population than ensuring that everyone has a long and healthy life? Excuse me? Everyone? What do you do with the chronically ill? The disabled? The terminally ill? Define “long” and “healthy.” Who gets to be the arbiter of what is and what isn’t a “long and healthy life”? You? Or some bureaucrat? You’re postulating a utopian outcome as achievable fact when it is obviously fantasy.

What you’re doing is appealing to emotion: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful…” Why yes, it would. But back to reality. Life doesn’t work that way, Sparky. Some people get roses, some get fertilizer. Wishing it weren’t so won’t make it not so. If you are incapable of dealing with what is, you shouldn’t be advocating change.

What could be more Just than making sure that every child, worker and elderly person can see a doctor when they’re sick? And they can’t? This is Argumentum ad Misericordiam – the appeal to pity. Let me quote the author of the blog Bloodletting, an up-and-coming doctor now doing his residency training, from a post he wrote in 2004 back when Bush was pushing for expanded Medicare drug prescription entitlements. Fisking Nancy Pelosi’s response to a Bush speech:

HEALTH CARE AND MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUGS
Third, our “opportunity society” is built on the belief that affordable, available health care is not a luxury, but a basic foundation of a truly compassionate society. [OK, now we are going to get into the real nitty-gritty about the difference between “want” and “need.” Healthcare is denied to nobody. NOBODY. Nobody is denied a ferrari, either, but most people do not want to spend the money on one.]

This is from a man in the system, providing that care – what Markadelphia calls “a primary source.” And let’s stop playing semantic games. What you’re advocating is universal health care insurance – the method of paying for health care. If health care is a right, why should anyone have to pay? What we’re debating about here is the level of that care and its cost. I’ll come back to this, too.

Next up, National health care would promote domestic Tranquility by giving everyone peace of mind, knowing that if their kid comes down with some awful disease they can get treatment. If you have cancer, the emergency room just ain’t gonna cut it. I’m tempted, but let’s wait until I come back to the “level of care” question.

To enjoy the Blessings of Liberty you have to be alive. Many people die in this country because they don’t have health care. No, they may die because they don’t have sufficient or sometimes competent health care, but health care is available. If you’re deathly ill and call 911, an ambulance will come, an EMT will examine you, you will be transported to a hospital, and (assuming you live long enough) you will get looked at by a doctor, and probably admitted somewhere. Might be a crappy hospital, might not be enough to save you, but it’s a lot more than our Founders got when they wrote the Constitution you quoted.

Now to the meat of it.

We are a rich country. Well, I’d say we were a rich country, but not any more. You are aware of the thing called “the national debt”? As of Monday the Treasury reports that our national debt was $11,919,879,121,739.54. That’s $11.9 trillion dollars. That’s the total of what the government has spent in excess of its income and not paid off. Per the CIA World Factbook the 2008 US GDP – defined as “the sum value of all goods and services produced in the country valued at prices prevailing in the United States” – was $14.26 trillion. On Sept. 30, 2008 (end of the 2008 fiscal year) the national debt was $10,024,724,896,912.49. According to this site, the total federal income in 2008 through taxes, fees, etc. was $2.524 trillion, or a mere 17.7% of GDP, and each and every year our federal government spends several hundred billion dollars more than it takes in – thus making the national debt ever larger.

Are we a “wealthy nation” or are we a debtor nation, living on money we don’t have? Could you run your household that way? Can you spend, each and every year, more money than you earn, borrowing to make up the difference? EVERY year? Do you owe more than five times your annual income to creditors?

As we’ve become wealthier and as technology and science have advanced the notion of what is a right has changed. That’s the only thing you’ve said that I agree with without reservation. We certainly have “advanced the notion,” but that doesn’t change the reality. As we’ve changed the notion of what is a right, we’ve spent ourselves into the poor house. “Entitlement” spending – and “health care” is just an expansion of entitlement spending – makes up about 45% of the federal budget now. (PDF)

Now that we can afford them, education, police and fire protection are rights. Really? Police protection isn’t a right. The courts say so. Fire protection isn’t a right. Education isn’t a right either, but I will agree that the majority certainly believes that it is.

But can we still “afford” it? I invite you to read The George Orwell Daycare Center. Pack a lunch.

The way health care costs are exploding, we are going to go bankrupt. Regardless of what health care costs do, we are going bankrupt. All you have to do is look at the numbers to see that.

We have to change the way the system works to reign in costs. Who’s this “we”? You want the government to do it, no? An army of bureaucrats appointed by our elected officials. Lots of GSA employees with great benefit packages, administering health care claims or monitoring those evil health insurance companies to ensure no one (especially Uncle Sugar) gets ripped off?

By covering everyone we can make it cheaper for each person. Really? Show me the data. Then explain, using small words, why a healthy 25 year old should be made to pay for the dialysis of an 86 year old (s)he has never met and will never meet? Explain to me how making that healthy 25 year old pay will make it cheaper for him/her.

When everyone is covered and everyone is paying, we’ll finally have the leverage we need to prevent the explosive rise in costs. Again, really? Everyone? So you’re going to make the poor pay too? I thought the deal was to cover everybody including those who can’t pay. Who picks up their tab? I’ve heard various numbers bandied about, but we’ll use 47 million, since that seems to be a popular number. You honestly are going to tell me that adding 47 million people to the health care system is going to make it work better? That it’s going to reduce costs? How long does it take for you to get an appointment with your regular doctor, and when you go, how long do you spend in that doctor’s actual presence? You’re playing in fantasy-land again. It sounds wonderful, but it doesn’t pass the smell test.

That will mean squeezing out unnecessary middlemen who get between you and your doctor. And here we go. Who decides who is “unnecessary”? And won’t this add to unemployment? Why do those “unnecessary middlemen” exist in the first place? How about this example: What if lawyers had to bill like doctors do? (Stolen without shame from Dr. Westby G. Fisher, MD.)

Beginning July 1, 2010, under the Legal Billing Obfuscation Act of 2009, lawyers will receive their payments for services rendered after approval by a central US government Payment Distribution Authority (USPDA). To receive payment from the Authority plaintiff and defendant complaints must be coded and filed electronically using the International Classification of Legal Complaints, 10th edition (ICLD-10), copyright © 2009, American Bar Association and Legal Proceeding Terminology (LPT) codes, copyright © 2009 American Bar Association. The full publication of each of these codes will be available in print March 1st 2010 and in electronic form on DVD in July 2011.

To familiarize lawyers with the new coding scheme requested by the USPDA, a small sample for the complaint of “Spilling” is shown below:

  • Spilling 200
    • Spilling, Water – 210
      • Spilling, Water, Hot – 211
        • with blisters 211.1
        • without blisters 211
      • Spilling, Water, Warm – 212
      • Spilling, Water, Cold – 213

      . . .

  • Spilling, Coffee – 240.1
    • Spilling, Coffee, Hot – 240.11
        • Spilling, Coffee, Hot, With Cream only – 240.12

        • with blisters – 240.121
        • without blisters 240.122
      • Spilling, Coffee, Hot, With Regular Milk only – 240.13
      • Spilling, Coffee, Hot, With 2% milk only – 240.14
      • Spilling, Coffee, Hot, With Skim Milk – 240.15
      • Spilling, Coffee, Hot, With Soy milk only 240.16
      • Spilling, Coffee, Hot, With Sugar only – 240.17

        • Spilling, Coffee, Hot, With Artificial Sweetner (of any type, including, but not limited to Nutrasweet, Splenda, Sweet ‘n Low) – 240.18

    • Spilling, Coffee, Hot, With Cream and Sugar 240.16

      • . . .

Pairing of improper complaint codes with legal proceeding codes will result in non-payment. “Up-coding” of legal proceedings shall constitute grounds for prosecution with some additional fines imposed by the IRS, as determined by the Office of Health and Human Services. For instance, pairing a legal complaint of “Spilling, Coffee, Hot, with blisters” to and of those of Divorce, same gender, living apart, male (or female) (shown below) will result in non-payment.

  • Divorce: 100-199
    • Between husband and wife 100.1
    • Between same gender couple, living together, male, 100.011
    • Between same gender couple, living together, female, 100.012
    • Between same gender couple, living apart, male, 100.021
    • Between same gender couple, living apart, female, 100.022

      • . . .

Valid code pairings for spillage include Accident codes (0010-0059), Assault codes (4400-4499), or Battery codes (5500-5599) provided documentation supports the requests for payment.

You’re talking about adding another layer of government oversight to a system already buried under paperwork. You won’t be “squeezing out unnecessary middlemen,” you’ll be replacing them with government drones. Yet you think that will make the system more efficient?

What planet do you live on, because it isn’t mine.

And, finally: The most expensive and least useful middlemen are insurance industry execs. By eliminating them we can squeeze literally billions of dollars from health care overhead (health care company execs pull in salaries, bonuses and options in the range of tens of millions, to hundreds of millions to a billion dollars). Ah, yes: Argumentum ad Invidiam, the appeal to envy.

Total health care expenditures in fiscal year 2009 are estimated to reach $2.5 trillion, according to the National Coalition on Health Care. (Edit: Did, in fact, reach $2.6 trillion in 2009 according to this site.) According to Crooks and Liars, the compensation of the top 10 highest-paid insurance company CEOs totals out to $85,429,970. Assuming the top 100 insurance company executive’s compensation is ten times that amount, you’re still looking at less than a billion dollars total. Hell, lets assume that the top 1,000 is 100 times that amount, you’re looking at $8,542,997,000 You’re talking about cutting – at most – 0.3% of total expenditures, even if you don’t include what the government employees that replace them will cost.

Whoopee-fucking-doo.

Halving total health care expenditures would increase that savings to a whopping 0.6%! Be still my beating heart! But by G*d those greedy fucking fat-cat executives won’t have three vacation homes!

You believe that everyone should have a right to health care. How noble of you! Another example of self-congratulations as a basis for social policy. You asked, What could be more Just than making sure that every child, worker and elderly person can see a doctor when they’re sick? You’re concerned about Justice? OK, here are some questions for you: How much health care is “Just”? Who decides, and on what basis? Is it “Just” that someone who can afford to pay gets more care than someone who would be dependent on government provided insurance alone? Or do we “level the playing field” and require everyone to accept the same level of care? Would that be “Just”? Or should everyone get every single bit of care that modern medical science can provide? What would that do to the costs you’re so concerned about?

Here’s the deal, from my perspective. The government does only two things well: nothing, and overreact. (Thank Congressman Adam Putnam for that pithy observation.) You want the federal government, which took in only $2.54 trillion last year, to expand by another $2.5 trillion, and you expect me to believe that it will do better than what we have now. You honestly expect me to believe that the federal government, currently responsible for the administration of Public Education, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, will run America’s health insurance system better?

Go ahead, pull my other leg. And read today’s Quote of the Day.

Don’t deny that what you are advocating is the doubling of the amount of money flowing through Washington D.C. You hold up Education, Policing, and Fire Protection as equivalent “rights” yet all those are all paid for through taxation. You claim that the U.S. is a “rich nation,” yet you ignore the fact that at our current level of national debt, every man, woman, and child in the country is on the hook for over $39,000 to pay off that debt – far more, in fact, since we’re doing it on time and paying interest.

Do you have a spare $39k laying around? I don’t know about you, but my VISA card limit is pretty far below that, and I don’t think I could float a loan for it, either. And if 47 million people can’t pay for health insurance, how many can pay their portion of the national debt?

You’ve interpreted the Preamble of the Constitution to require the federal government to do a lot of different things. You’re hardly alone. FDR put forth the idea of an Economic Bill of Rights that I’m sure you’d love, but have you read the rest of the original document? It’s quite short. As P.J. O’Rourke put it,

The U.S. Constitution is less than a quarter the length of the owner’s manual for a 1998 Toyota Camry, and yet it has managed to keep 300 million of the world’s most unruly, passionate and energetic people safe, prosperous and free.

That document spells out, with brevity and clarity, how the federal government is arranged, how it is to be staffed, and what the powers of each branch are and are not. As you’ve noted, the public’s perception of what are and aren’t “rights” has certainly changed over the years, and I put the blame – yes, blame – on our education system. The founding documents of our nation were based on the idea of limiting how much government could do, both for us and to us, yet we’ve been taught for decades that it’s the job of government to take care of us, that only government is big enough to do certain jobs, that we’re not qualified to do things for ourselves. In fact, we should be actively discouraged from doing so.

Alexis de Toqueville wrote long ago, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Congress discovered that little trick some time back, and the bill is now coming due.

And that’s brought us to where we are today, $14-plus trillion in the hole and digging ever faster. Yet you and millions like you want us to redouble our digging in the name of “Social Justice!”

No, health care is not a right. Fire protection is not a right. Police protection is not a right. And pretty damned soon if we don’t get our shit in one sock and our heads on straight with the nose in front, just living is going to become damned difficult because Reality won’t be ignored forever.

And I guess I’m just not human for realizing and articulating that fact.

(Ah, well, only 3,500 words or so in this one. I may be losing my touch.)

UPDATE: Marko writes on the specifics of why health care is not a right. It is, typical of Marko, crystal clear and precise.

Quote of the Day – Socialism Edition

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In comments, GrumpyOldFart linked to an excellent piece by “Dr. Zero” at Hotair.com – Socialism: A Hate Story – with the admonition,

I imagine Kevin can pull a QotD from there easily. The difficulty will be in choosing.

How right he was. Here’s my choice for today:

One of the most persistent and dangerous illusions of socialism is the belief that money becomes magically virtuous when government handles it.

I think I’ll be pulling QotD’s from this piece for the next several days.

Quote of the Day – Milton Friedman Edition

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Quote of the Day – Milton Friedman Edition

Is there some society we know that doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy; it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy.

The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the auto industry that way.

In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, they have had capitalism and largely free trade.

If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. The record of history is absolutely crystal clear: that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

(Hark! Was that the sound of someone’s head exploding?)

And the Dominoes Continue to Fall

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And the Dominoes Continue to Fall

The demise of the dollar

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

RTWT.

Gold prices should continue to climb . . .

UPDATE: This is interesting – Whodunit? Sneak attack on U.S. dollar. RTWT, too. Did we just get played?