Sunday, July 5. 2009
At  American Digest.
Semi-sort-of kinda related: More tea parties. Who would not attend a tea party, when invited? I am sympathetic, but, as a red-neck Yankee, I might be more in favor beer parties, meself. Hold the Chardonnay, but I will not despise the baked - or grilled - Brie.
Yankee Doodle, keep it up!
Saturday, July 4. 2009
 The men who signed the Declaration of Independence represented the absolute opposite of "interest group politics" so slavishly worshipped in political science departments. They pledged their lives, their wealth, their liberty, and their honor -- everything -- on a toss of the dice. Often, even if the revolution won, these men personally lost. The game was not about them, their economic interest, or their political ambition. They won if America became a new order of liberty in the world. Interest politics would have led them all to make peace with the Crown. Moral principles led them to what Churchill would later call "blood, toil, sweat, and tears."
The brave men in Philadelphia were engaging in unconstitutional action. Britain had a constitution, albeit a largely unwritten one, and Jefferson knew that he was defying our equivalent of the Supreme Court. He and his colleagues defied the moral power of a system which no longer treasured liberty above advantage or caprice. Rulers making decisions which did not really affect them, living thousands of miles from their subjects, lacked the moral authority to wield law.
Moral authority was the heart of the Declaration as well. It lacked a separation of church and state and instead there was a unity of God and government. All men were created equal by God. That is the foundational point of the Declaration from which all else flows like the spring of liberty. If all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, politics is clear and simple. If that is true, then -- of course! -- protecting these inalienable rights is the only reason that governments are instituted among men. These were truths which, in the magical pen of Jefferson, the brave authors and signers held to be "self-evident." There is a Creator. He made us. He made us, specifically, free in body and in conscience. We are not sheep or some sort of oddly self-domesticated animals. We are creatures in the image of a Creator, unique in reality, and given the power to choose.
Thursday, July 2. 2009
VDH struggles mightily to identify some theme to make sense out of the ways moral flaws and hypocrisies are played out in the politics of today.
While I admire his effort and enjoy his examples, I think he mostly misses a simple point, the one Lyndon Johnson made about some Central American dictator: "He may be an SOB, but he's our SOB."
It's pure politics, VDH. Politics is not the place to look for moral consistency, moral energy, or intellectual integrity. This is why many believe a degree of sociopathy and narcissism are required in politics.
(As Ace puts it re Sanford: "You can get away with being a bastard, but you can't get away with being a buffoon.")
To the Left, at least, politics is war in which, as they often brag, the ends may justify the means because they like to believe that they are well-intentioned. "By all means necessary.." etc.
I always grant more trust to those who claim to be self-interested - even if they are lying - than to those who claim virtue.
Update: More on public virtue from Rick Moran.
Tuesday, June 30. 2009
"Orwell was right. It was Wells who made it respectable, even before World War I, for liberals in England and America to demean their own native democratic culture in the name of an imagined antidemocratic World State. And it was Wells, with his stature as the prophet of the future, who taught upper-middle-class liberals that they were entitled to govern in the name of social evolution."
 Fred Siegel, writing on HG Wells, via Samiz.
Readers know that we proud gun-and-Bible-clinging redneck Northeast Yankees hate it when Chardonnay-sippers who see themselves as our betters try to tell us how to live. We ain't stupid neither - cuz we been government-eddicated! At great expense!
BTW, we do love chevre - to the point that our editor wants to keep some goats. The meat is quite tasty, too. What's the PC term for a she-goat? A goatess? Goatette? Help me out.
Monday, June 29. 2009
President Obama has received much, well deserved, criticism in the US and Europe for meekly abandoning the anti-regime protestors in Iran. We’re still not sure how well the new Iraqi army will do, although performance is promising, as was ARVN's before we cut off its armament supplies. Much of our confusion or doubts about what’s the correct and best things to do are rooted in our Vietnam experience or, rather, how it is now viewed, by President Obama and many Americans. (I last wrote in December here about the current situation in Vietnam. The repression has gotten even worse, since.)
Robert Kennedy told us: “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.” That’s more hopeful and better lesson for President Obama than the course seemingly he’s on as told by Karl Marx: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
A core issue in our recollections of Vietnam is the performance of the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam), our South Vietnamese allies. My good friend, R.J. DelVecchio, fellow former Marine in Vietnam, able student of Vietnam, and humanitarian, just sent me an email about the “Evolution of the ARVN” that is a particularly good overview and corrective to many’s view. Let me share it with you:
R.J. DelVecchio email 6-29-09
I have had comments from other vets, especially the ones who served in
'65-'67, about the very poor quality of the ARVN troops they encountered.
No doubt those recollections are valid, as were some of the news
programs and other reports that were severely critical of ARVN units.
This has led to a general belief that the South Vietnamese soldiers were
always overall a poorly trained and badly led bunch, who tried to avoid
fighting whenever they could, and didn't fight well even when they had
to.
But this is actually an unfair and false legend, for reasons many of us
just don't know about.
In the '60-'68 time frame, there were many units that were poorly trained
and poorly led, officer commissions were obtained through politics and
bribes, intra-military politics ran rampant, and only a minority of the
units, such as their Rangers, Marines, and some others, were really good,
tough soldiers. (A unit of their Rangers held part of the line at Khe
Sanh, and performed very well there.)
However, during Tet '68 they seemed to pull together and fought well
against the attacks. (ARVN units actually retook more of the territory
of Hue than Marines did, in fighting just as nasty as the Marines went
through.)
After Tet, a lot more South Vietnamese came off the fence and decided
that they really didn't want the North to come down and take them over,
enlistments in the Army went way up, training got a lot better, and the
general quality of the South's military began to improve noticeably in
'69-'71. Of course, that was when the number of Americans serving up
front was declining all the time, so there weren't that many
opportunities for us to see the ARVN doing better.
By '72, when we were gone, the number of subpar units in the ARVN had
become a minority, and many units were excellent, their 1st Division for
one. And when the Easter Invasion hit from the North, 200,000 NVA
regulars in several divisions, with 400 tanks, much better artillery than
we'd left for the ARVN, and AA missiles and guns to shoot down the
South's planes, they wound up in a series of large pitched battles that
were as intense but a lot longer lasting than any we ever fought. The
siege of An Loc was a kind of ARVN Alamo, went on for weeks and weeks,
destroyed the city completely, but the cut off ARVN fought like tigers
and refused to surrender. They stopped NVA tanks by jumping on them
under fire to stuff grenades in the view slits. US Advisors were there
to witness it all, and there are some good books about it.
But of course by then the media (both US and international) didn't have
that much interest in what went on, there were very few reporters on the
ground any more, so the coverage of all this was minimal at best.
But by the final invasion of '75, with NVA forces twice as big as in '72,
superbly equipped and supplied from massive bases in Cambodia, the ARVN
were on limited fuel and ammo, half their tanks were down for repairs
that depended on spare parts they couldn't get any more, and they started
to fold under the blitzkrieg. Their President made a poor decision to
start an unplanned retreat, and things when to hell in just a few days,
leading to the panic scenes of soldiers running after planes and hanging
onto chopper rails in Da Nang. (What you didn't hear about were the
radio calls from VN Marine units in the hills, who never surrendered and
fought to the death.)
So it all went to pieces, but there were still some heavy duty battles,
such as the 18th Division under General Le Minh Dao at Xuan Loc holding
off three times their number of NVA and inflicting massive casualties on
them as they tried to get past them to Saigon. Finally the NVA bypassed
them, and when ammo ran out, the General surrendered them and himself
(even though the US would have gotten him out), and he became one of the
longest prisoners of the war, 18 years in "re-education".
These are the things not many of us heard about, but in all fairness have
to take into account now. I know personally more than a few South
Vietnamese veterans, who fought hard and have the wounds to prove it,
many of whom also spent a lot of time in the terrible camps after the
war, where the death rate was 30% from starvation, overwork, and disease.
They deserve our respect, and after all, they were our comrades in some
sense, who got left in the lurch when Congress cut off their critical
supplies and we broke the promise made at the Paris Accords to come to
their aid if there was an invasion again.
For anyone who doesn't know it, I go back to Viet Nam to help the
crippled ARVN vets who lead really tough lives there, still under laws
that discriminate against them, their kids, and grandkids. Go to
www.thevhf.org if you have any interest in this.
Del
For those who may want to look further about the ARVN, here’s some useful sources:
- A bibliography, slightly dated
- Another overview of the evolution of the ARVN
- A fine book on the ARVN’s “Patton”
- A critical look at the ARVN’s social difficulties, not battle worthiness, review by a professor at the US Air Command and Staff College
- Much valuable writings, photos, and links
- A promising new book on ARVN and US Marines prowess during the Easter Offensive of 1972
- The Battle of An Loc at Wikipedia
- The fate of the ARVN soldiers post-1975
- Jules Crittendon adds to this bibliography. Thanks Jules.
Also, I just added in the Comments some emails I received from witnesses to performance of the ARVN.
VDH wonders. We are both of the above, as were the Victorians.
We also love to externalize our inner conflicts and confusions, and to see them played out on the stage of life.
Do “Democrats Present Hurdles for Obama,” or do basic truths?
Those who say they’re confused or that some issue is complex usually are avoiding seeing basic truths. This is the case with health care “reform” and with the broader matter of government spending and regulation of the market economy. In a big and fast-paced world, it’s difficult to cut through to root causes but basic truths still emerge and overcome the chatter clutter.
For examples of basic truths:
- Government spending is tilted toward social goals and shifting political power and its rewards moreso than productivity outcomes.
- Taxes tend to reallocate resources from the private sectors’ productivity and personal choice goals toward the goals of the less productive.
- Government debt costs and can tend to become excessive and crowd out other government and private social goals as well as basic responsibilities.
For example of how basic truths emerge:
It is now admitted by all but its fiercest partisans and flacks that the sort of health care reforms touted by Democrats in Washington will not trim overall costs. It will increase national debts, and reallocate control of personal choices and of provider renumeration as to cause rationing and shortages of providers and access. Polls demonstrate that most of the public is opposed to the details that have leaked from the closed doors in D.C. trying to come up with schemes.
Yet, the current Rasmussen poll still finds “50% of U.S. voters at least somewhat favor the Democrats’ health care reform plan, while 45% are at least somewhat opposed,” although the poll “question did not in any way describe the plan as it stands to date. It was simply presented as the health care reform proposed by President Obama and Congressional Democrats.” The poll points at partisanship, and we may add hope, at cause of this survey result.
So, what is the result when hope meets reality, or basic truth? The widely touted Massachusetts health plan offers insight. Prior to its effective date, 67% of Massachussetians supported it. Now, only 26% consider it a success. What happened? This heavily footnoted analysis sums up what happened:
When Massachusetts passed its pioneering health care reforms in 2006, critics warned that they would result in a slow but steady spiral downward toward a government-run health care system. Three years later, those predictions appear to be coming true:
- Although the state has reduced the number of residents without health insurance, 200,000 people remain uninsured. Moreover, the increase in the number of insured is primarily due to the state's generous subsidies, not the celebrated individual mandate.
- Health care costs continue to rise much faster than the national average. Since 2006, total state health care spending has increased by 28 percent. Insurance premiums have increased by 8–10 percent per year, nearly double the national average.
- New regulations and bureaucracy are limiting consumer choice and adding to health care costs.
- Program costs have skyrocketed. Despite tax increases, the program faces huge deficits. The state is considering caps on insurance premiums, cuts in reimbursements to providers, and even the possibility of a "global budget" on health care spending—with its attendant rationing.
- A shortage of providers, combined with increased demand, is increasing waiting times to see a physician.
With the "Massachusetts model" frequently cited as a blueprint for health care reform, it is important to recognize that giving the government greater control over our health care system will have grave consequences for taxpayers, providers, and health care consumers. That is the lesson of the Massachusetts model.
Massachussets is in a budget crisis, as most states, not helped by the far-above estimated costs of its health care law (see this July 2009 comprehensive services and costs analysis), requiring steep cuts in services and increases in taxes. And, as Massachusetts’ Democrat Treasurer points out:
Cahill asserted that those whose legacies are tied to the healthcare initiative failed to take a hard look at the costs when the legislation passed several years ago and now are reluctant to cut costs. “If you’re going to bankrupt one group to help pay for another, at the end of the day we’re all poorer,’’ Cahill said.
For more basic truths, see: Top Ten Reasons For ObamaCare Are Based On False Information
Sunday, June 28. 2009
Revisiting Klavan's brief video message to new college grads from a couple of weeks ago, with the great quote above.
It explains why I believe that any shrink, psychologist (or anyone in the social sciences) should be of a Conservative bent unless they have no faith whatsoever in the human spirit (in which case they should have no faith in their own, either).
Friday, June 26. 2009
No, not really. But, maybe figuratively.
President Obama refused to meet with the representative of the imprisoned in Cuba winners of the National Endowment for Democracy's annual Democracy Award as Presidents Clinton and Bush had others during their terms in office, or even issue a statement until the editors of the Washington Post chided him.
Message to Cuba's democratic opposition: We don't have time for you….They, like the beleaguered pro-democracy movements of Venezuela and Nicaragua, are hoping that the American president will focus his policy on supporting them. Yet for now, Mr. Obama's diplomacy is clearly centered on their oppressors.
We should have been warned during the campaign by Obama’s passivity toward the Russian invasion of Georgia that he’d continue it toward Latin America’s and now Iran’s oppressors.
Another clue comes from that the image of Che Guevara, icon to ignorant T-shirt wearers as a symbol of change rather than as a psychopathic murderer, served as the model for the Obama campaign’s “Change” poster. This T-shirt contest melded the two.
The reviewer of Theodore Draper’s seminal 1965 tome on Castro’s Revolution, in the left-leaning New York Review Of Books no less, pointed out how this psychology works, prescient to President Obama formatively molded by the moral myopia behind the Che iconography:
There is in the United States a school of thought which refuses to recognize that the anti-American policies of a foreign ruler might be motivated by anything so crude as a desire to increase his own power at the expense of the United States. They fail to understand that even in the unlikely event of Washington never making a foreign policy mistake, the sheer wealth and power of the United States would still inevitably arouse the antagonism and cupidity of some. Their invariable explanation for the hostility of a foreign ruler is that the U.S. must have made a mistake—and in their view, it is always the same mistake: lack of trust in that ruler's good intentions, misinterpretation of his legitimate measures of self-defense, and unwillingness to assist him in the promotion of his social reforms. In each individual case, the argument appears convincing to many people. One has to hear it repeated over and over again on different occasions to realize the utter innocence of the underlying assumption—namely that the Stalins, Maos, Khrushchevs, Castros of this world are benevolent, peaceloving social reformers who would be happy to concentrate on raising the living standard of their peoples if only wicked Uncle Sam and his gang of reactionary allies would permit them to do so.
Thursday, June 25. 2009
Mrs. Barrister has given up her interest in politics. She says the Repubs blew their chance when they had Bush, the Senate and the House, and will get no more chances for the forseeable future. When the Repubs stand for freedom, it comes out sounding like a mean parent saying "No" - unless you have a talented communicator who believes in what he is saying.
Here's a summary of her gloomy thoughts:
- The Dems gave $4-8 billion of tax dollars to ACORN two months ago as part of the "stimulus." How can Repubs compete with that kind of money?
- The Dems will make 6-10 million illegal immigrants citizens. How are you going to compete with those numbers?
- Immigration at the turn of the century brought in millions lacking in the individualistic traditions and in the Protestant ethic that founded the country (including some of her relatives). They never really "got it." Since then, it's been about money and security - not freedom - and FDR made that idea permanent.
- As Newt warned years ago, once you have government medicine it's all over. It will all be arguments about "gimme more," and your very life will be in the hands of the State.
- The family was the foundational cultural institution of America and the foundational transmitter of culture. It's dying rapidly now, statistically. 70% of black kids born outside marriage, 23% of white kids. TV shows make jokes about how only gays and Republicans get married any more. This leaves women hoping that the State will be their reliable husband to protect them and to help raise their kids.
Related at Time: Does The Ice Age Cometh for Repubs and Conservatives?
From my perspective, the Dem national agenda is as follows:
1. Pay off supporters (done, in part, via the "Stimulus")
2. Raise middle-class taxes big-time via "Climate" excuse for tax on energy
3. Socialize medicine
4. Amnesty for all illegals
5. Tax the "rich" so they stop feeling so independent
6. Nationalize K-12 education
And then what?
It is what is called overreach, and it is nuts.
Friday, June 19. 2009
Stolen from Moonbattery. (Hope he doesn't mind all of the recent thefts):
My grandmother, advocate of the turn of the century (that’s early 1900’s) democratic socialism based in defense of the little guy from rampant big business, taught me that the biggest myth in America is the efficiency of big business. So, government grew in regulations and programs, and so did unions, to counter big business and favor the little guy. ‘Till now it’s a truism that big government is inefficient and too little the friend of the little guy, and big unions are money founts for their leaders at the expense of labor having jobs. Meanwhile, big business has more and more become an ally of big government and unions to divide the spoils, and stifle competition and innovation. All that leaves to maneuver for the little guy against the increasing encroachments of the biggies is small business and individuals.
It’s time for more small businesspeople and individuals to defy the biggies with a chant of I am Spartacus, or I am an American.
(No, I didn’t purposely ignore big academia. It has made itself largely irrelevant via meaningless coursework enriching self-serving pedants.)
Consider a few datapoints:
Investigative journalist Tim Carney reminds us that in 1993 the biggest insurers supported Hillarycare, to shift liability risk onto taxpayers and profit from claims-processing contracts. Small insurers, brokers who work with small companies, and individuals revolted. Today, the big insurers are again cooperating with the government-dictated health care advocates, as long as the big insurers can profit from more premium payers steered their way.
The Canadian medical societies remind us not to go north for a model of government-dictated health care, as the waits are excessive by even long-wait standards approved by the government.
The former Chief Economist of the US Chamber of Commerce reminds us (sorry, a subscription only column) that when government as umpire controls a team, bad and self-serving calls are to be expected.
Michelle Malkin reminds us that Mrs. Obama and President Obama’s chief political operative worked to reduce care for the poor, to enrich her employer (and her compensation).
Mickey Kaus reminds us that unions are to be exempted from Obamacare, and further benefit from attracting members through higher benefits than the rest of us.
The CEO of the consumer highest-rated insurer in the US reminds us that he doesn’t so much fear government-plan competition but, “more about the federal government’s ability to do this at all, much less do it well. Merely coordinating basic demographic information between Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - three big federal programs that millions of Americans belong to - can be a chore for beneficiaries, their children, and their health plans.”
Be Spartacus. Say "I am American. I refuse to be pushed around by the biggies, or under their thumb."
Write or call your congressional representatives to represent your views.
Ask your employer and your doctors to do so too.
Tuesday, June 16. 2009
Kimball discusses a topic on which I am often hammering here: the topic of wealth creation. Liberals and Lefties often talk about money as if it grew on trees, and talk about themselves as if they were being generous by taking it and spending it.
The Boris Johnson piece which prompted Kimball's post is here. One quote from it:
I want to hear politicians talk less about themselves and their priorities and more about the entrepreneurs, the people who get up at 5am to organise their business or cut deals with the other side of the world. Every time you hear politicians swanking about what they are going to do with public funds, remember that wealth was ultimately created by private enterprise; and, if they don't help the wealth creators, they won't have any money to spend.
And from Kimball's piece:
Mr. Johnson has tailored his comments to the situation in London. But they apply equally to the United States. One of the many blighting effects of socialism is the distorted view of economics it disseminates. Economics is not primarily about the distribution of wealth. Rather, it is about the creation of wealth. That is the conditio sine qua non of the whole game. That is why capitalism is superior to every other economic arrangement yet contrived: given its head, it is a far more efficient engine for the creation of wealth than all its competitors. Remember this the next time you hear "politicians swanking about what they are going to do with public funds": the money they are planning to distribute "was ultimately created by private enterprise; and, if they don't help the wealth creators, they won't have any money to spend."
I have never understood why Lefties and Liberals disparage business. Without business, they would be nowhere. Business is the engine that makes everything work, and entrepreneurs, inventors, businessmen, financiers and investors run the engine for us. We should be grateful to them because, without those guys, we'd all be out of work.
h/t, Blue Crab
Sunday, June 14. 2009
 Another quote from the Steyn piece we posted and commented on yesterday:
"Health" is potentially a big-ticket item, but so's a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System – or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.
And another:
In Britain, once the crucible of freedom, civic life is all but dead: In Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, some three-quarters of the economy is government spending; a malign alliance between state bureaucrats and state dependents has corroded democracy, perhaps irreparably. In England, the ground ceded to the worst sociopathic pathologies advances every day – and the latest report on "the seven evils" afflicting an ever more unlovely land blames "poverty" and "individualism," failing to understand that if you remove the burdens of individual responsibility while loosening all restraint on individual hedonism the vaporization of the public space is all but inevitable.
By way of contrast with the excellent Steyn essay, economist Robert Frank thinks we'll all be happier if we're taxed more and controlled more, presumably because we are incompetent, dysfunctional morons. A quote from a comment on his book:
Behaviorist economics has become the latest fad among liberals. Classic free-market economists hold that individuals are rational, or at least act rationally: thus free decisions in a free market deliver optimal economic results. The behaviorists, among whom Frank is a pioneer, propose by contrast that government should protect us against the consequences of our passions. Behaviorist economics has supplied a scientific rationale for increasing taxes, imposing additional regulations, and limiting individual choice. It’s all for our own good.
One wonders to what extent the current success of behaviorism on the liberal left might implicitly draw on the American Puritanical tradition. In the name of science (global warming, healthy living, and so on), the liberal academic community seeks to impose limitations on individual free choice, the same way the old-time Puritan pastors did. (When I raised this historical precedent in a conversation with Frank, who sees himself as a God-free libertarian, he was speechless.)
Frank's vision is of citizens as a herd of happy, peaceful, benighted sheep, grazing, screwing and reading comics in a meadow while producing wool for the State's mills - and ruled by wise, altruistic men like him (who of course lack the passions of us peons - other than the passion to run the world their way. And who wants their life to be fully rational anyway? Not me.).
Problem is, as our post on technocrats and policy wonks yesterday discussed, the People have far more accumulated wisdom and life experience than any group of scheming technocrats or condescending academics who wish to create a world in their own image.
I would much prefer Sippican, Vanderleun, Glenn Reynolds, or my neighbor as President than the smartest guy in the Harvard School of Government. They understand why the energetic people of the world want to come to America.
Furthermore, we have seen all over the world in the 20th Century 1. how dispiriting powerful States are to the inventiveness and productivity of the aspiring, imaginative, creative and energetic individual (and how, if you dispirit the producers, there's no money to fund anything), 2. how entire sociopathic populations and cultures can be created (as in the Soviet Union) by energetic and resourceful people working the system and sneaking around it, and 3. how States politicize everything, and how power corrupts.
Frank is thus dangerously naive to idealize the State as some benevolent, altruistic, all-wise entity - almost like a god - and he is ignorant to view his fellow Americans as needing control and direction at gunpoint. It is an infantile and grandiose vision, and one which every proud red-blooded American should find demeaning and insulting. Un-American. Steyn's point about civic life is very well-taken by us Yankees: civic life isn't the Federal Government - it's your neighborhood and town.
I thought this debate was over when the Berlin Wall fell. Who imagined that the fall of Communism across the world would just provide a fresh opportunity for these soul-destroying weeds to sprout up again?
Count me as a Jeffersonian in this respect: "The government which governs least, governs best." We are not idiots, Prof. Frank.
Saturday, June 13. 2009
When professionals unionize, they are no longer professionals. I think we posted this last year, but Gates reminded us of this important piece:
Steyn on medical care and the nanny state. Great piece. One quote:
...there is a cost to governmentalizing every responsibility of adulthood – and it is, in Lord Whitelaw's phrase, the stirring up of apathy. If you wander 'round Liverpool or Antwerp, Hamburg or Lyons, the fatalism is palpable. In Britain, once the crucible of freedom, civic life is all but dead: In Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, some three-quarters of the economy is government spending; a malign alliance between state bureaucrats and state dependents has corroded democracy, perhaps irreparably. In England, the ground ceded to the worst sociopathic pathologies advances every day – and the latest report on "the seven evils" afflicting an ever more unlovely land blames "poverty" and "individualism," failing to understand that if you remove the burdens of individual responsibility while loosening all restraint on individual hedonism the vaporization of the public space is all but inevitable. In Ontario, Christine Elliott, a candidate for the leadership of the so-called "Conservative" party, is praised by the media for offering a more emollient conservatism predicated on "the need to take care of vulnerable people."
Look, by historical standards, we're loaded: We have TVs and iPods and machines to wash our clothes and our dishes. We're the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: Every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we're "vulnerable": By definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively "taking care" of potential "vulnerabilities" is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.
What's my view? I am in favor of providing help with medical costs for the poorest and most helpless, but we already have that. It's called Medicaid. Furthermore, the charity clinic I work in one day a week will see anyone who makes under $50,000/yr and who lacks insurance, on a sliding fee scale. We will see nobody for nothing, though: that would be degrading both to patient and to the docs. (Such clinics are a good example of "civic life.")
I know there seem to be more people around today who long for a parental State than there were 20 or 30 years ago. I worry that they do not know that they are selling their freedom, dignity, and can-do spirit - literally their American birthright - for a bowl of lentils.
Friday, June 12. 2009
From The Committee of Public Sensitivity, at Pajamas:
Ezra Levant: I think most debates are won or lost before they’ve even begun. That’s because one side manages to define the terms of the debate and even the vocabulary. Take the very name “human rights commission.” How could you possibly argue against something so saintly? And me? I was accused of “hate speech.” Who could possibly support me?
Time to turn that around. I was actually the defender of human rights — freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, property rights. The HRCs were violating my rights. I wasn’t a hater; I was merely publishing the news. But, as it turns out, many staffers of HRCs are so radical, their own politics can reasonably be called hate. Etc. My point is: I decided not to let the other side have all the good words. That’s a story about political correctness. But it’s about something much deeper than that; it goes back to George Orwell’s Newspeak and 1984. I wasn’t about to let some petty fascists tell me I was abnormal. They were. And it was my goal to prove it.
From Coyote:
Bill Whittle makes a great point in this video which is at the heart of the problems with this administration: While Obama and his young policy wonks may be smarter (or at least think they are smarter) than other folks individually, they cannot possibly be smarter than the sum of 300 million well educated, relatively affluent Americans making decisions for themselves. Every technocrat founders on these rocks, when they substitute their decision as command and control planners for individual decision making (example). Everyone talks about a revival of interest in Ayn Rand, and that is great, but it is Hayek who has never been more relevent.
More on the failures of technocrats here.
His final link includes the key phrase "You don't have the right to make decisions for other people." Smart or not, most technocrats and policy wonks have never had a job outside of government, academia, or think tanks - and thus tend to be disconnected from how reality works. Their insulation protects them, and reinforces their rationalizations for their power-seeking.
Thursday, June 11. 2009
Via a colleague from a patient in his 40s this afternoon: "With my unemployment now with 23 weeks, plus the State's 12 weeks, and the federal 18-week extension, I figure I can begin looking for a job in November. Since my wife got laid off later, she can wait until December or January. We're both burned out and need a break from work. She's been getting job offers, but there's no way she would take one now. And keeping our income down will help my youngest get a scholarship."
I didn't know this new world was offering Sabbaticals For All. How do I get mine?
 Insty notes that one would think that California legislators would have more to worry about than day care center diets. Maybe not.
They want 2 year-olds to eat vegetables and skim milk to deal with the "obesity crisis." What they apparently forgot is that the natural diet of 2 year-olds is sweet, fatty Mother's Milk.
And what they probably never bothered to learn is that normal brain development depends on getting the right fats. Myelenization of the brain continues through adolescence. Whole milk is the right thing for kids, whether it's Mom Juice or Cow Juice.
Wednesday, June 10. 2009
Hugh Hewitt has been calling on the nation’s doctors to take their customary leading role of trust by Americans to oppose Obamacare, especially the so-called “public” (read, government) health insurance that would displace private insurance at astronomical costs, bureaucracy, and interference in medical advancements and treatment decisions. Hewitt has been pessimistic they would, feeling the American Medical Association is “cowed…by the Obama/Pelosi/Reid hard-left edge of the Democratic Party.”
Hewitt should have had more faith in the AMA’s 250,000 doctors. The New York Times reports:
But in comments submitted to the Senate Finance Committee, the American Medical Association said: “The A.M.A. does not believe that creating a public health insurance option for non-disabled individuals under age 65 is the best way to expand health insurance coverage and lower costs. The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans.”
If private insurers are pushed out of the market, the group said, “the corresponding surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers.”
The New York Times tries to cushion the blow to Obamacare advocates by saying:
The A.M.A., an umbrella group for 180 medical societies, does not speak for all doctors. One group, Physicians for a National Health Program, supports a single-payer system of insurance, in which a single public agency would pay for health services, but most care would still be delivered by private doctors and hospitals.
However, the New York Times fails to mention that the Physicians for a National Health Program claims just “more than 16,000 members,” and that one does not have to be a physician to join, its joining page requiring just “$40 / Year -- Health reform advocates (Non Physicians)” to be a member.
I suppose that the NYTs’ coverage of Obama’s speech to the AMA’s convention next Monday will laud Obama for his great courage in telling the overwhelming majority of the nation’s doctors they don’t know medicine.
We posted Klavan's Why are Conservatives so Mean? video last week, which was very much based on de Tocqueville.
Samuel Gregg in the Phila Bulletin notes that this is the 150th anniversary of de T's death. A quote from his piece Despotism - The Soft Way:
For all their love of liberty, de Tocqueville stated, “Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”
Democracy, de Tocqueville argued, encouraged this fixation with equality because it requires people to relate to each other through the medium of democratic equality. This encourages us first to ignore, then to dislike, and finally to seek to reduce all differences that contradict this equality — particularly wealth disparities.
This is key to what de Tocqueville considered democracy’s tendency to “soft despotism.” Democratic despotism, de Tocqueville thought, would rarely be violent. Instead, it would amount to a Faustian bargain between the political class and the citizens. He predicted that “an immense protective power” might assume all responsibility for everyone’s happiness — provided this power remained “sole agent and judge of it.” This power would “resemble parental authority” and attempt to keep people “in perpetual childhood” by relieving them “from all the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living.”
Is America on the road to comfortable servility? “The American Republic,” de Tocqueville wrote, “will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, America has slowly drifted toward a political economy of soft despotism. Despite the Reagan Revolution, the trend-lines of government-spending and intervention have been in the anti-liberty direction. Entire constituencies of people now exist who regularly support politicians who promise that, in return for their votes, their entitlements (corporate-welfare, bailouts for those “too big to fail,” the old-fashioned welfare state, etc.) will be maintained and increased.
The problem is that governments can only tax-and-spend so much before incentives to wealth-creation (as opposed to wealth-transfers) begin disappearing.
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