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Sunday, October 6. 2013

Kentucky told the truth, the lying parental State, and related topics

But then they had to backtrack: Kentucky Marketplace: ‘WARNING: No Explicit or Implicit Expectation of Privacy’


Also interesting: China employs more than 2 million people… just to monitor the Internet


Is government power benign, malevolent, or neither? I tend to think that concentrated power is dangerous, regardless of its intentions or of whether it is elected or not. Those who pursue power tend to want more. People like Colbert King see nothing but benevolence. He thinks I am a bad sort of rebel (maybe I am a rebel in opposition to either slavery or serfdom) and doesn't even consider the case for freedom or the dangers of power.


Dan Greenberg gets it:



We confront the Great Solvers of the Human Problem who are determined to rearrange everyone to their liking. They began by controlling everything that people did. Now, they have moved on to controlling what people don't do. If you live, if you breathe, if you stir, move your muscles, track moving objects with your eyes, then there are obligations imposed on you.


ObamaCare is one of the final declarations that there is no opting out. Even if you don't drive, own a home, own a business, own a dog, or do one of the infinite things that bring you into mandatory contact with the apparatus of your government, you are committed to a task from maturity to death. Your mission is to obtain health insurance, and, in a system in which you become the ward of the government as soon as you taste air, it is the price that you pay for being alive.


In a free country, you are not obligated to do things simply for the privilege of breathing oxygen north of the Rio Grande and south of Niagara Falls.



Some people seem content with being subjects of a potent parental State which they trust will be filled with wisdom and care. Some (the aspiring adults, in my view) do not. There is a division there. It seems partly psychological. Old John Dean recently commented somewhere that he had become a Dem because Conservatives were the authoritarian party. I think he has it backwards, but he always did.


Nixon was a neo-Liberal. Goldwater was a good guy, as I read my recent history, a Don Quixote or a voice crying in the wilderness.

Posted by The News Junkie in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects, Our Essays at 11:23 | Comments (12) | Trackbacks (0)

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'neo-Liberal' is a good way to describe Nixon, but was he ever anything else?
#1 feeblemind on 2013-10-06 12:55 (Reply)
Finally, I've burnt out all my reactions to BHO, aka Barry. I reached the point where nothing he did or could do would inflame me again. I watched him, I've (painfully) listened to him and though I chafe under his "national leadership" I know what to expect. "Long spell of Bad Weather.", as my grandmother would have said.

I'll have to deal with this medical fascism as best I can, avoid it like the plague if possible. Do no more than I must if it starts to hurt me more than resistance is worth. (If I can find some way to convert my assets into something that is liquid but can't be feasibly seized by the government, better yet.)

Rino's aren't the problem, Democrats aren't the problem. That a plurality of American Voters (or american's allowed to vote) would elect and re-elect such a picture poster poser to office, THAT is the problem. BO is Rodney Dangerfield in that movie where he given lots of inherited money, and then he acts badly. Rod never questioned if he should have the money, he just started enjoying himself and bad things happened. Barry isn't Darth Vader, he's Rodney Dangerfield.

We are the problem. We put forward an unworthy man, no one questioned his fitness enough or widely. And then we re-elected him because millions of the voters that knew he was the wrong man stayed home and didn't vote. And I don't know how we fix that.
#2 John the River (Link) on 2013-10-06 13:31 (Reply)
What Dan said.

However, the credit, or blame depending on your point of view, belongs as much to John Roberts, Chief Justice of the SCOTUS, who rewrote the original law in order to save it from oblivion, as to BHO, who outsourced the original law's passage to Reid and Pelosi. I am now inclined to dispense with ObamaCare and instead call it what it really is, RobertsCare. Don't let John Roberts off the hook: he's the guy who saddled us with this abomination.
#3 Agent Cooper on 2013-10-06 14:59 (Reply)
Possibly. Or Roberts felt it was more important to define the Commerce Clause more explicitly and force the Democrats to call the 'fee' what it was - a tax. Unfortunately, the press has not cooperated with that, and I believe in the long run Roberts may well have done us a favor.

Obamacare will fail, eventually. Either now or later. It can't survive.
#3.1 Bulldog on 2013-10-06 21:46 (Reply)
Y'know Colbert King could have brought up the Articles of Confederation (which left most things to the States) as a Tea Party aspiration instead of the CSA but then he won't be able inject/not inject race into his essay. BTW, doesn't "... more humane society that extends justice for all." sound like a Ming the Merciless quote?
#4 walt moffett on 2013-10-06 16:47 (Reply)
Dan Greenberg left out, and never get sick, never use a hospital, never see a doctor.

For those who can afford to pay their own way (i.e., self insure), more power to them. Right now every patient at a hospital has to pay for all the people who end up there who don't have insurance and don't pay.

I don't think there's been a state that still leaves insurance on cars optional anymore, even though not everybody has accidents. Not everyone has to have auto insurance, as not everyone has a car. I guess you shouldn't have to have health insurance if you don't have a body.
#5 bluespapa on 2013-10-06 19:40 (Reply)
I think you are right in principal, but wrong in fact.
In the past, if you owned a car, you were expected to have a minimal amount of insurance, or post a bond to that effect. But enough people still didn't, which is why we pay a line item of Uninsured motorist (at least in Washington)
In the past, If you went to the doctor, you had a bill or you had insurance to help pay for the bill. But the costs were rising because you still had a lot of people or companies not paying for Their care.
Now, we have a requirement that everybody have insurance, demands that things be covered that people didnt want or need (ie pregnancy for men), and the cost, to begin with, has gone up 37%.
That's only the beginning of rising cost.
#5.1 Jerry on 2013-10-06 22:08 (Reply)
Just because the government forces you to have car insurance doesn't mean the government is correct in forcing you to purchase something you may not want to have.
On the other hand, when you make the choice to purchase a car, you make the choice to purchase insurance, because the government forces you - it's part of the purchase agreement, basically.

There is no reason a healthy 20 year old may want to have insurance. Why force them to buy something they don't feel they need?

A car is slightly different since you, behind the wheel, are a potential threat to others. The only insurance I must have is liability insurance, not replacement insurance.

Personal health insurance is protecting you from yourself, whereas the threat of you behind a car wheel is what causes the government to force you to purchase insurance.

Why should the government force you to protect yourself from yourself?
#5.2 Bulldog on 2013-10-06 23:23 (Reply)
"Personal health insurance is protecting you from yourself "

Sorry, but the argument ObamaCare supporters use---even if it's wrong---is that (1) someday everyone uses the healthcare system, and (2) if you have a serious healthcare emergency but don't have insurance, you WILL pass the cost of your care along to "the public." The individual mandate in the ACA is supposed to protect "the taxpayer" from having to pay for your healthcare should you get seriously ill. Of course, when other, healthier Americans who are forced into an all-encompassing public insurance pool end up paying for your expensive care, the distinction between "public" or "taxpayers" and "co-insured pool members" is pretty much a meaningless distinction. Anyway, protecting people "from themselves" is not the point.

The only dumber argument such people sometimes give is that even by NOT using the nation's healthcare system, you affect how it works, so you should have to buy insurance. Oh wait, isn't that the "logic" the SCOTUS has repeatedly used to let the federal government (ab)use the Commerce Clause in order to regulate people who do NOT engage in any commerce? IMO, BD, CJ John Roberts had a chance to carefully define the limits of the Commerce Clause by ruling against ObamaCare, but he instead fell back on the court precedents that give the feds a free hand to define what commerce is, even when it's not commerce.

Of course, another distinction is that car insurance is not in the federal bailiwick, but is regulated by individual states...which a lot of people think should also be the case for matters concerning healthcare.
#5.2.1 Agent Cooper on 2013-10-07 03:54 (Reply)
But the distinction in car insurance (and costs):
Post a bond or Prove a minimum of liability insurance.
Where the insurance buyer chooses to "Supersize It" is when you have high personal equity and you don't want It to become the other persons lawyers object of affection (ie you had the minimum level the state required ($50,000?) but since your net worth was $1 mil, they went after that too.)
The difference of Obamacare is it forces everybody to buy like they're trying to put full coverage on a Ferrari, even though most people are still driving a Yugo.
#5.2.1.1 jerry on 2013-10-07 08:27 (Reply)
I'm well aware of the argument THEY use. I've had it with my liberal lemming friends over and over again.

Here's another doozy.

I've stated that the current system may be broken, but part of the increased costs of healthcare is related to the subsidization of pro-bono work. A very good friend of mine recently cut his finger off. The doctor, upon hearing he had no life insurance, put the finger back on, and while he has limited motion, he has his finger. That's a huge win for him. But who paid?

Well, in essence, you and I did through higher fees. I have absolutely no problem with this. If emergency care is required, and those receiving it can't pay, it shouldn't be denied based on ability to pay. We should subsidize it through the market.

My friends, in their insanity, have stated "well, if you're willing to pay THAT way, why wouldn't you want to codify the structure of payment so we all get equal economic treatment?"

My reply is simple. You can't get equal economic treatment (witness the care the politicians will receive versus you or I), but if you leave it up to the market, you can at least let the doctors determine the level of treatment that can or should be provided in order to manage their offices and routine. In addition, by removing the government as a middleman, you reduce the deadweight loss and potential for abuse of the system which is inherent in any government run program. Finally, if you think about the nature of how politicians do things, at some point you or I may be denied care simply because of what our opinions are. That's very likely to happen.

Democrats like to believe if 'the right person' is in charge, all those issues go away. Demosthenes, of course, was never able to find that right person.
#5.2.1.2 Bulldog on 2013-10-07 12:00 (Reply)
The state is not to be trusted, lacks wisdom, and cannot care enough about me for me to care about it.

I have friends (natch, I live in the NYC area) who believe in the omnipotent and unassailable power of the state. They truly believe it is (or can be) a force for good. I do not suffer from such delusions.
#6 Bulldog on 2013-10-06 21:44 (Reply)

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