Maggie's Farm

Healthcare, via Powerline:

The essence of this bill is quite simple: It makes the health insurance industry an arm of the federal government by mandating (not regulating to be clear) the terms, conditions and comparative rates health insurers can offer. In short, it tells them how to run their business and then picks up the cost where those conditions prove uneconomic.

We tried this experiment before. It is called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it is a major reason for the collapse of the financial system under the weight of $2T of bogus AAA securities.

Arizona getting tough on illegals. I guess it feels to them like an unarmed invasion and, in a sense, it is. Armed too, in many cases.

Why Mexico cannot make their beautiful warm country a place where people want to live, or even to immigrate to, is beyond me. I do not know why they make it so difficult, if not impossible, for people to move or work there either. They would benefit immensely from 100,000 genius techies, finance wonks, and engineers from India and China and Singapore.

I don't want you to bail out my mistakes, America, and I don't want to bail out yours. Take your lumps! It's the free market; prices have to find their real level. I'm underwater in my stocks, and nobody cares. It will come out OK in the end.

Paraphrased from Larry Kudlow, on the radio this morning re government support of artificially high housing prices.

As VDH observed on the John Bachelor show the other night, the O administration offers succor and submission to our enemies and enmity and insults to our friends. Obama Refuses to Dine With Jewish Leader.

According to this plan, we end up with emboldened, unrespectful enemies - and no friends. Brilliant...if you dislike America.

VDH, via Vandy: (link fixed)

Some people screw up or are unlucky. We're here to ensure they end up the same as you who don't screw up or are luckier. We can't say they are in any way culpable, so we blame either the system or you who are better off. The best way to level the playing field is to tax all we can, take our percentage, and redistribute the rest. Lots get hired to administer to even more. The rules don't apply to ourselves, who are wealthy but not the targeted culpable. We know privately all this is not sustainable, but assume the better off will find a way to save themselves and thus us, before we bankrupt ourselves - after we are gone. And we don't care really whether this is always legal, or fair, or workable, because we know it is moral and we are far more moral people than you.

What I most value in websites and commentary is to be given a new idea to ponder.

It's fine to have your own ideas reinforced and expanded, but a fresh thought or image is a precious thing. I'm sure everybody agrees that, since the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the government's solution to any problem or issue is more government. Government is a like a handyman with only one tool - a hammer.

So I liked our link to Mead this morning: Why can't DC think outside the blue box?

Sure, the Repubs have had some good ideas about health care which entailed less government, like permitting interstate insurance purchasing, but, in general, policy ideas from DC entail simply more governance, and stale ideas of government power and control, and government largesse, from the late 1800s and the 1930s (see Rep. Dingell's astonishingly honest statement posted today: It's taken a long time to 'control the people').

We need more new ideas to unleash the powers of the people to make their own way and to make their own choices. Prosperity and opportunity comes from the new/old ideas of freedom.

Government hammers and government cheese are not fresh ideas: they go back at least to the Pharaohs. What our Founders came up with is revolutionary today.

We have experienced one more giant step towards becoming a boring, worn-out, lazy, demoralized and weary European-style welfare state.

VDH at Pajamas begins:

President Obama has crossed the Rubicon with the health care vote. The bill was not really about medicine; after all, a moderately priced, relatively small federal program could offer the poorer not now insured, presently not on Medicare or state programs like Medicaid or Medical, a basic medical plan.

We have no interest in stopping trial lawyers from milking the system for billions. And we don’t want to address in any meaningful way the individual’s responsibility in some cases (drink, drugs, violence, dangerous sex, bad diet, sloth, etc.) for costly and chronic health procedures.

No, instead, the bill was about assuming a massive portion of the private sector, hiring tens of thousands of loyal, compliant new employees, staffing new departments with new technocrats, and feeling wonderful that we “are leveling the playing field” and have achieved another Civil Rights landmark law.

And the smart and savvy Paul Ryan predicts the future. One quote:

What about the practical consequences of Obamacare? “Soon, we’ll see individual-market insurance companies go out of business and dump their people,” Ryan says. “Tax increases on capital are going to hurt the economy in 2011. These arbitrary Medicare cuts will adversely affect the providers and therefore their beneficiaries. You’ll have the Internal Revenue Service beefing up its enforcement of this new mandate, which people have no clue is coming. And you’re going to have employers dump employees in this exchange once it’s up and running — funneling everyone into a government-run rationing system. Then we’ll see a big spike in insurance rates, and the Democrats are going to wager that they can just blame the insurers for that, and therefore that means they will need to institute insurance price controls or have a public option. Our side is going to say, ‘Look at what you just did to ruin our health-care system,’ and focus on repeal.”

Same for me, Coyote: My Health Insurance Policy Just Became Illegal

Am Thinker: Is Obama the new FDR? 

Let's hope not, because he got everything worng.

One Longs For 1776, The Other For 1936. It is true.

When our Dr. Bliss writes on the topic, she tends to put it in terms of peoples' dependency and security wishes which are placed on government, while imagining government as an altruistic, caring, "ideal" parent (as if an ideal parent were a constantly gratifying one without realistic limits, who can make everything right), or Santa or a god.

I know what she means, but I do not think of these things in those terms. I think of it in terms of power. Governments tend to accumulate power. People who work in government tend to enjoy power and, for reasons I cannot comprehend, tend to think that they are smarter and wiser than us regular citizens. Unlike wealth, however, power is indeed a zero-sum game. Any power our federal government accumulates comes from your own personal supply of it, or your town's, or your state's.

Wise adults are not prodigal with their funds, nor should they be with their far more precious freedoms: our funds are got by labor, but our freedoms from external powers are given by God but got by blood. America is uniquely formed on the ideal of limited government and maximum individual freedom. What is idealized, so to speak, is the genius of the individual - not the ancient notion of the divinity of rulers and government and their powers.

America is not for sissies, and was never meant to be. She was designed for the brave, the bold, the resourceful, and the independent. Designed for the New Man of the Enlightenment, rather than for the weary and government-oppressed and controlled of the rest of the world. People who wanted a chance, not to be ruled and "governed" and "helped" by their betters.

That's why people came here from all over: to take their chances for their dreams in a New World of freedom from the Powers. But how much of their - our - depressing history came with them?

What if the founding idea was wrong? What if most humans are more serf-like, dependent, and willing to be ruled than our founders thought? Our founders, after all, were not exactly ordinary people (whatever "ordinary people" means - I've never met one).

How many Lefties would be standing at the 1775 Concord bridge today with a squirrel gun to resist a "tyranny" which was peanuts in comparison to an admittedly elected American government of today? This is why I write here on occasion about the danger of selling our birthright of freedom for a lousy bowl of lentils (not to disparage the lowly lentil - lentils with chopped carrots, shallots, etc makes a fine bed for a medium-rare breast of Ruffed Grouse with a generous drizzle of gibier sauce over it all).

This CS Lewis quote is always worth repeating:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. 

By its built-in logic, Obamacare will cause the health care industry to go bankrupt within months.

This is entirely deliberate, and straight from the playbook: make such a mess that people beg for government help.

Caterpillar says Obamacare will cost you (the users and shareholders of this mighty American company) $100 million/yr.

If you have an opinion, email these folks in DC. Even if you think they are hopeless, let them know how you view things. It cannot hurt.

Readers know why I hate the Dem plan: It will make my privately-purchased, permanent, and inexpensive major medical policy illegal. Illegal. Who are these jokers in DC to make my insurance of choice illegal?

I do not want insurance to pay my doctor's bill when I have an ordinary bronchitis or an earache. I want it to cover me when I get hit by a truck and break 12 bones.

Liberals and atheists are "more evolved." Everybody knew that already, didn't they? We ignorant uneddicated knuckle-dragging throwbacks nonetheless persist in clinging to Jesus and our firearms. Why they let we Neanderthals vote and have websites is beyond me.

Just like Crichton's novel: Warming goes on trial. It could be another Scopes trial: The warming religion vs. skeptical science

I suspect that it is a genetic defect specific to married women which causes them to object to the heavenly fragrance of the finest legal and illegal cigars.

Before you marry the gal, she will have no problem with the habit. After you marry them, all you hear about is how the smoke gets in the draperies and upholstery and the insanely-expensive "window treatments."

I have a friend who installed an old 12" brass ship ventilator next to his desk in his library containing a powerful fan, exiting out the wall. A custom design with a baffle to keep snopw from blowing in, and very cool.

In order to preserve an otherwise acceptable marriage, many hedonistic fellows have thought long and hard about how to smoke indoors, and to avoid the humiliating and less-than-relaxing experience of having your smoke out in the rain and blow and snow like a naughty child who has been banned from home and hearth. As a commenter on a relevant site says:

I smoke cigars and can only indulge once in a blue moon and that is basically because I have to go outside to smoke them, I can only smoke during seasons when it's not too hot or too cold, there's nothing to do while smoking, etc. I'd like to have a room where I can smoke a cigar while sitting in a leather chair and watching some TV or a movie or listening to some music. Also I'd like a place where I can play poker with my friends and not have to force them out of the house to smoke cigarettes.

Well, OK. I guess every married guy is pussy-whipped to some extent (and often enough for good reason - many males seem not to domesticate well).

The cheapest solution is to create a negative pressure in your home smoking areas with a cheap window fan like this.

A more expensive solution is a powerful ceiling vent, like a kitchen fan.

The so-called "air purifiers" are a joke, in my view - and especially if you are the sort who likes to have some windows open in your house.  Unlike Al Gore, you cannot purify the planet.

If you have a basement man cave, something like this makes sense.

If readers have any useful ideas short of evicting the spouse or of provoking one's own eviction, please share them.

From Env Econ:

The sound of meditation for some people is full of deep breaths or gentle humming. For Marc Umile, it's "3.14159265358979..."

The guy knows 15,135 of the numbers - and he's only #10 in the world.

WSJ: Climategate Was an Academic Disaster Waiting to Happen - "The notion of objective truth has been abandoned and the peer review process gives scholars ample opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies." (Sorry - whole thing is behind their new pay wall)

Indeed. Corrupt Big Academia.

A real, regular American. Not slick, no preaching, no condescension, straight talk, common sense:

Number and Percent of Nonpayers At Record High; More Tax Filers Now See IRS as a Source of Income.

Remember when being called a "taxpayer" was equivalent to being called a "solid citizen"? This trend is not good for America. Every voting citizen should pay their dues to the club of America.  

The issue of salt seemed to link with our post on Woodrow Wilson and all of our routine posts about Brit Nanny-Fascism.

Just skim this Tierney piece on the salt "controvery" in the NYT. "Advocates" are promoting their dire data, and the other side is promoting their own - or debunking that of the advocates. (Reminiscent of global warming - and salt, like CO2, is essential to life on earth.)

My point, though, is that the assumption seems to be that if excess salt intake is bad for some small minority, then the government should regulate it. That's the technocratic, government-by-expert thing we have been seeing lately.

Is there anything the scientific technocrat busybodies don't want to control in my life?

Where is individual choice, individual responsibility, and freedom in the equation? Whence a government's power to determine the salt in my food?