Last week, I brought you a video from the National Prayer Breakfast speech of Dr. Benjamin Carson. His words were heartening in many respects, and many in conservative media leaped at the notion of his political potential as a candidate. I thought at the time that it was a bit of a fad, and I was therefore surprised to see Hannity run a full hour-long show on FoxNews devoted to talking with Dr. Carson. (You can see the full video, here in parts 1 and 2.) I am glad Hannity had him on because my own caution seemed justified by something Dr. Carson said. As I listened to him address the question of health insurance, it struck me as odd that he sees an inherent conflict of interests between an insurance company seeking to make a profit and its customers seeking health coverage. When I hear such things said, I often dismiss them as the vapid utterances of mindless politicians, but since Dr. Carson has been receiving so much press, including on this site, it’s time to address the matter. What Dr. Carson the practitioner of health-care seems to think about insurance is a common misconception, and it offers one more reason why conservatives must be cautious in their choices of leaders.
Dr. Carson said on Hannity’s show that there exists an inherent conflict of interests between health insurance companies and their insured clients. This is not true. The actual conflict begins a good deal sooner in the process, and as I think you will see, exposes a wider misunderstanding of the problem. Ask yourself this: Who are the majority of purchasers of health insurance? If you said “individuals,” you’re wrong by a mile. The truth is that the largest purchasers of health insurance are institutions, including the Federal and states’ governments, and corporations. The problem here is that the people who consume the service are not the people directly paying for it. Any time you break the connection between the end user and the provider of goods and services, you effectively destroy likewise the natural market signaling that provides feedback in both directions.
As an example, imagine you are a smoker looking for health insurance. If you were approaching insurance companies directly, they would undoubtedly quote you a price many times higher than the one they propose to a non-smoker. Obese? Same thing. This would mean that as a matter of natural market forces, you would either amend your behaviors and condition, or you would bear the burden of higher prices. Insurers would naturally consider everything about you in determining what they would charge for a policy, but perhaps more importantly, you would be free to shop for insurance among many providers. This would act as a restraint upon overcharging, and would also cause them to offer special discounts if you lived an exceedingly healthy lifestyle. In short, personal responsibility would have a good deal to do with how much you pay for health insurance, as it should in a free market. At the same time, a particular company’s profitability would hinge on making consumers happy with their coverages.
What many people ignore is that if one had to pay cash for the whole bill each time one became ill, or injured, most of us would go untreated indefinitely, because few of us have the resources to pay cash for extensive or invasive health-care procedures. Dr. Carson talks a good deal about Health Savings Accounts, but such plans are more useful for mundane purposes of a less critical nature than their utility in life-threatening circumstances. While I support Health Savings Accounts, I believe insurance is a necessary hedge against calamities. If we change our focus from health-care insurance for ongoing maintenance, to a paradigm in which what we insure against are catastrophic circumstances, while letting things like HSAs pick up the slack for ordinary health maintenance, in a market environment, one would see the market begin to perform in a natural fashion. Unfortunately, this means that people would need to shop for insurance like they do any other commodity, and seek out the best deals on their ordinary health maintenance and preventative care, and most Americans have become far too complacent about such matters, expecting it all to be automatic.
The truth of the matter is that if Americans want health-care to improve markedly in the United States, while restraining the growth in costs, without resorting to some sort of death-panel or other government-mandated rationing mechanism, there is a mechanism, however imperfect: The free market. Unfortunately, since the advent of Medicaid and Medicare, and even widespread employer-purchased health benefits(prompted by government wage and price controls,) we haven’t had a free market for health-care in the United States, never mind health insurance. The government is now the largest consumer of health-care services in the country as a direct payer, by many times over, and yet there is still an illusion held by many who receive health-care services paid for or otherwise subsidized through government payments that they are in control of their health-care. They’re not.
If Dr. Carson’s criticism of corporate health insurance providers were true, then it must be even more thoroughly the case that no institution more than government would wish to avoid costs by denying care. Do you need evidence? Consider Paul Krugman, longtime leftist economic propagandist and one-note statist, quoted as follows in a piece at Western Journalism:
“We’re going to need more revenue…it will require some sort of middle class taxes as well…And we’re also going to…have to make decisions about health care, not pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits…death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.” -Paul Krugman
What Krugman is saying is entirely true, but only ifgovernment becomes the source and payer for health-care, because otherwise, the free market would regulate prices in the same manner it does for virtually everything else. Some will object, insisting that “health-care is different,” just as they have insisted that every other human need is different, from food to housing to education to Internet service to cellular phones. All of these claims are equally wrong, and equally immoral. These claims all begin by demanding that some basic human needs be met, and all of them end with a gun to tax-payers’ heads. Allof them.
I admire a number of positions taken by Dr. Carson, and I have no objections whatever about his participation in the public policy debate, but at some point, if he wishes to keep my attention, he will be required to offer more than platitudes and generalities about Health Savings Accounts. He devoted several lines of rhetoric to the attack of ideologues, but I am always cautious when people attack broad sets of philosophically bound principles in vague terms. I am curious to hear more from Dr. Carson, but I hope there will be a good deal more specificity. Talk of presidential runs and other such notions are fanciful and premature at best, and while I’ve heard a number of truncated statements about various topics from Dr. Carson, what I’ve not heard is a guiding philosophy that informs his opinions. Absent that, I have no grounds upon which to base any opinion of his suitability to any office, much less his qualifications to be President of the United States, and I find it unseemly that Hannity and others would talk of Dr. Carson in presidential terms given that we know so little about his positions. It may turn out that Dr. Carson is wonderful in all respects, but we already have a President who sailed into office through the propagation of vague, nice-sounding generalities, and I do not believe we can afford another.
Each year, my wife and I celebrate Thanksgiving, and depending on where our daughter is, and where her soldier may be, the two generally join us for a modest but plentiful meal of turkey and other typical dishes. This year will be like most, as my daughter joined us while her husband serves a tour in Afghanistan. We talk about him, wishing he’d been here, and gave thanks for all we have, but this year is a little different than most. Life on a farm can be hard, but when you deal with livestock, there are certain hazards you accept, and while you seek to mitigate and minimize them through thinking about safety first, on some occasions, due to bad luck, absent-mindedness, or simple miscalculation, when things go wrong, they can go wrong all at once, leaving a disaster in the wake. This week has been such a time on our farm, when the mundane and simple task of feeding our horses turned into a nightmare. As it has happened, we wound up quite lucky, but it could have gone differently for this will go down in the family book of lore as the Thanksgiving that almost wasn’t.
Working the hours we do, plus tending to all the chores of the farm, one of the seasonal adjustments that happens each year is that due to shortening days as we near the Winter solstice, the evening feeding time moves up a bit to permit all chores to be completed before the sun goes down. No group of people is more tuned to the changing of the seasons than those who labor in agricultural endeavors, because that floating orb of superheated plasma that lights our days and warms our Earth is really the dominant force governing life on this planet. When I depart work this time of year, the sun is already low on the horizon, and the daylight is nearly gone. For this reason, my better half sets out to feed the herd and to dispense with the evening chores because by the time I arrive home, the last embers of burning daylight are slipping from the sky.
So it was this week that as my wife came to the last pasture that as she began to dispense the feed, the band of mares was typically unruly as any zoo at feeding time. Determined to be done with the days chores, as she began to distribute the feed, there arose a bit of euphoria among the mares: “Hurrah, it’s supper time.” One of the mares, in uncharacteristic exuberance, launched into a flurry of bucking and kicking, as a young colt might do under the watchful gaze of his dam. Unfortunately for my wife, she didn’t see it coming, looking up just in time to catch a flying hoof about her brow. An inch closer to the mare, and she’d have never placed the phone-call, but as the blood streamed from the crater, she called me at work. “I just got kicked in the head by one of the mares.”
I rushed home and kept her on the line, knowing head trauma victims are best kept calm and conscious. She refused to let me call an ambulance, insisting I would be faster anyway, without the cost. There is some reason to think she’s right, but as I told her, the EMTs in the ambulance can do things I can’t. She insisted. I continued to roll, with all apologies to any relevant authorities. I pulled into the yard, and she was standing there waiting for me, so I pulled alongside her and threw open the door. As she climbed in, I looked at the wound, and I had to look away because I didn’t wish to upset her more than necessary, as I sped down the road to the hospital ER just ten minutes away, as the Mustang flies. Arriving at the Emergency Room as she walked through the door, the nurses at the front desk couldn’t conceal their shock and they ushered her immediately back.
After a CT scan mercifully revealed no brain hemorrhaging, but also no fractures, the team in the trauma center began the process of flushing the wound and then stitching her brow and forehead back together. Multiple layers of stitches later, her face swelling as her left eye became a slit, our daughter present, we talked about happier times while we all contemplated how close this ugly accident had come to outright disaster. Life is so fragile, and our time here so short, in the hustle and bustle of the everyday grind, it is well that Americans have a day set aside to count their many blessings and remember to say thanks to the Almighty.
This evening, as we clean up the kitchen, and put up the left-overs, we’ll be thankful to remember this as the Thanksgiving that almost wasn’t. I will keep it as a reminder of how temporary life is, and how suddenly it can be lost, and how dear to me are all whom I love. For all of the ugliness of the last few days, I am still surrounded by the people I love, so that through all the travails and tribulations our nation may yet endure, we can still count ourselves among the very lucky. I hope on this day of turkey, and shared celebration, each of you find yourselves in similar company, knowing full and well the blessings of the day. Say “Thanks.” Say them often. Hug those around you a little tighter, since we never know the day or the manner in which it can all end.
Note: I wish a very Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers! May you have so many reasons to be thankful as I.
Every doctor in America who is worth his or her salt should quit. Apparently, given the impending implementation of Obama-care, they’ve been contemplating it. How many? Eighty-three percent! Unfortunately, most of them will not quit, and more is the shame because if we want to defeat Obama-care, that’s the way it could be done. That, or the statists would need to unmask completely and simply enact in law what they intend: Health-care professionals, from doctors to nurses to orderlies must now be the slaves of the state. If you think this is an overstatement, consider the facts. When you are forbidden from negotiating your wages, and must accept whatever some bureaucrat tells dictates, you are a slave. You can pretty it up any way you like, but that’s where all of this will lead. Eventually, those skilled enough, smart enough, and diligent enough to be doctors will realize they would be better off doing something else. Instead, the ranks of doctors and nurses will begin to be filled with the incompetent, the slothful, and the under-qualified. This is what always happens under socialized medicine, and every one of these would-be slaves has the same moral right to refuse this servitude, and the sooner they do, the better the chance that they will spawn a movement in opposition.
If you’re not a doctor or nurse, and you’re not a skilled radiologist, and you haven’t the foggiest about how to operate an MRI machine, you might want to hold on a moment before joyfully proclaiming your new “right to medical care” under the Affordable Care Act(a.k.a “Obama-care.”) Those who foolishly believe they will maintain some form of private health insurance over the longer haul ought to pay attention too. Let us imagine everybody has insurance, as the Utopian masterminds behind Obama-care promise. Then what? It is not only money that can be inflated out of all value. An insurance to purchase a service that is in shortage isn’t much of an insurance, is it? Imagine having auto insurance of this sort. You have your fender-bender, and your insurance company estimates the damages, sending you out in search of a shop to perform the repairs. What if you can’t find one? What if you sit there with the check from your insurer, satisfying your claim in full, but there exists no shop to perform the work, or so few, that you will be without your vehicle for weeks or months, or perhaps longer. How will you maintain your job? How will you get to the grocery store?
Naturally, if you’re a welfare leech, you’re not much worried about that, but if you’re a working American with bills to pay, you’d better begin to think about it now. Under Obama-care, slowly, but surely, this will become the inevitable conclusion: Care will be of poorer quality, more scarce, and since everybody will have their coverage, there will be no advantage by offering more in payment. How long before a black-market medical system develops? Do you deny the possibility of all of this? Are you stuck on the notions of what you have known, rather than what can(and likely will) now come to pass? What happens when it’s your six-year-old daughter down at the emergency room with a fractured wrist, in a line that stretches up and down the hallways and side corridors, because there exists a severe shortage of medical professionals? Will your wishes mute your daughter’s agony?
You think doctors and nurses are endless, bottomless pits of human compassion, but they’re not, and no person is, because it’s simply not possible. More, if you want their compassion, shouldn’t you offer them yours? Why do you wish to have them work as slaves to your needs? Isn’t that what this whole corrupt system has become? Tax-payers must be slaves. Doctors and nurses and orderlies must be slaves. Everybody must be slaves but he who has nothing to offer, and no intention of offering it, since he has no intention of obtaining it by his own efforts.
Am I being too crass, and too obnoxiously terse in my appraisal? Brother, you haven’t seen the half of it yet. Wait until doctors are unionized, since it will be the only way to protect their diminishing wages, and they look at you and your suffering child, parent, or spouse and say simply: “I’m on break.” At the ends of their shifts, they will walk away, as carelessly as the country has walked away from them. What do you think is the meaning about the endless delays in Medicare payments, and the inaction of Congress year after year in adjusting reimbursements to doctors? Were I a physician, I wouldn’t have a single patient who is in a government system of any sort. Why would one wish to accept patients whose payment will always be less than it ought to be, while robbing from paying patients in order to subsidize the government-paid accounts?
Imagine running any other enterprise like this for long. All of your paying customers would abandon you. You wouldn’t be able to carry off this sort of con-game, because they’d price-shop the matter and move briskly to another provider, whether the product is a widget or the service is the measurement of blood-pressure. What Obama-care offers, and indeed what all forms of socialized medicine promise is to deliver something many people desperately want without regard to their ability to pay. That’s it, in a nutshell, and if I were a physician, I’d be looking to set up a clinic somewhere off-shore where I could live out my life unmolested by big government mandates. Nobody should be compelled to labor. Neither you, nor I, and certainly not doctors. We’d better begin to consider if we wish to coerce the people who we expect to save our lives.
Back in 1978, Dr. Milton Friedman discussed all of this at length. I’ve provided his talk on the matter, in six pieces, here:
There, I’ve said it, though I will be damned for it. The problem we have had in the Republican party comes to surface at times like this, and I’m not going to participate in the reckless concealment. There are those of political motives, who care not for the disaster that is the Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act(a.k.a “Obama-care”) because it serves their political ends. Within some circles of the elite Republican establishment – that thing George Will assures us does not exist while telling us this ruling is really a ‘victory’ – there are those who are absolutely giddy with anticipation in the wake of this ruling, though they must presently conceal it. It comes down to two things: Some of them are purely fifth-column statists, who actually want this law, and others are motivated solely by the opportunity they see in the political sphere. After all, what better way to unite wayward Republicans and conservatives then to hit them with a true disaster? If you’re a Republican party hack driven by purely political considerations and motives, this ruling is a gift from on high that will help drive the vote.
Sure, it does horrendous damage to the body of case-law. Yes, it does gut the constitutional limits on Congressional power. Absolutely, it permits Congress to tax in any way it likes so long as some moron in a black robe can dismiss its unconstitutional aspects as irrelevant or insignificant. True, it really has no manner of a silver lining if you’re an actual conservative, but so what? At least it will help Mitt Romney get elected by driving the herd! It will permit the Republican establishment to foist their own version of it upon us, tinkered-with and massaged as it will be, but still the heart of the bill will remain intact, and the Beltway crowd can be ecstatic that they will have finally killed the meaning of the constitution, the rule of law, and the entire notion of American self-reliance and self-determination. Nevertheless, it also offers the chance to the GOP establishment to round up the herd, and get them all running in the same direction. That it had been an establishment Republican who sabotaged this ruling should be the dead giveaway.
I would ask my conservative brethren to consider the evidence. Even a flimsy, often obtuse Anthony Kennedy ruled our way, so absurd is this law. A man who is able to imagine that Arizona has not the authority to protect its own citizens from foreign invaders, as in Arizona v. United States was not able to imagine the Affordable Care Act as constitutionally permissible. Think of that! This law is so preposterous, and the arguments of the administration so bizarre and absurd that Anthony Kennedy could not sustain them, but John Roberts, Bush appointee, did. Do we think John Roberts is truly the idiot that his ruling implies? Do we believe John Roberts is so intellectually vacuous that he could not see the absurdity of his ruling? If we believe this, why are we not demanding Boehner and the beltway boys impeach this man as an incompetent? Why? I’ll tell you why: Because Boehner and his toadies would never do it anyway.
We are being herded. We are being driven. We are being run through the political squeeze-chutes of the GOP establishment. These people are worse than our open enemy, the leftists. They are using subterfuge and stealth to reorganize our society into their global vision of statism, a nanny-state version in which you have little freedom to choose, and even less money or property with which to exercise that choice. We are descending into a death of one-thousand cuts, and we have Republican party bosses who are gleeful that we are angry, because they intend to use that as the fuel to recapture power, not for conservatism or freedom, but for the aggrandizement of their own statist vision, complete with open borders and vast social programs to which we are all enslaved, but as a bonus, with our votes, too!
How else does one explain the servile pronouncements by some conservative commentators that the ACA ruling had been a victory? How else does one discount the accurate assessments of stalwarts like Mark Levin, who sees this monstrosity clearly? How in the name of most unholy Hell does one derive the notion that this is anything but a national tragedy? In some respects, I place this ruling above Pearl Harbor Day. In terms of the long-term damage it will do to America, I place it above 9/11. I place it as the greatest attack on the United States and her people since before its current constitution had been adopted. It will certainly lead to the death of more Americans. It was certainly a plot hatched against us. The delivery of the fatal blow was no less a shock. I must go all the way back to General Benedict Arnold to find an apt analog for the sort of sabotage this infamy represents, and all brought to you by a bi-partisan Washington DC establishment that seeks to rule over you.
Remember, when some conservatives reflexively screamed at the notion of the appointment of Harriet Miers, many felt relief when George Bush put up John Roberts, who was seen as more reliably conservative and eminently more qualified, as was my pet goat. That was the sham in all of this. Roberts is no conservative, and his ruling in this case makes that plain, lest there be any confusion. Harriet Miers was a throw-away nomination, and Roberts was the goal all along. This is how politics is done. I was astonished at the speed at which the reaction to the Miers controversy was brought to a head, and more astonished still at how quickly they dropped the ostensibly reliable Roberts on us. Do you remember who screamed first and loudest at the Miers nomination? I do. Odd how that critic is now a rabid Romney-bot these days, isn’t it? I hate conspiracy theories, but I always thought it odd how that whole situation turned out, with Rehnquist retiring just in time to re-nominate Roberts for the Chief Justice position.
Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that the GOP establishment exists to keep us in check, to keep us to a dull roar as the statists reorganize our nation into their vision of global, social, welfare-statism. The GOP establishment advances the ball(never spiking it, of course,) and we permit them to manage us like puppets. If you accept their talking points these last three days, you’re playing directly into their hands, and you had better believe that they see this as a victory, because for their agenda, it is. They will be immune to Obama-care. They won’t worry about death panels. They won’t worry about government-enforced rationing. They won’t be waiting in the endless lines. They won’t have any need to concern themselves with the entirety of the system they’re building, because they are above it, after all.
The same people who tried at every turn(and often succeeded) to blunt the conservative Reagan revolution are once again making political hay over this decision, as they now know you have no alternative. They engineered it that way. Feel free to believe what you want, of course, but for me, the matter is clear. I have seen suppositions that somehow, Obama bullied Roberts into this decision, but I find that unlikely. Roberts was placed in this position to uphold Obama-care. There are those who will become apoplectic at the mere suggestion, but for me, the matter is now painfully obvious: If we do anything short of replacing the Republican Party, this nation will be damned. I’ll not be kept in line any longer. The Republican Party must rip this law out from the roots, or we must make a new party.
Some are still convinced that there exists a win in all of this. They offer as evidence that we are still free, this moment, and that this affords to us a chance, somehow. This is akin to saying that as the last breath escapes your lips, the hooligans choking the last of your life from you, there is still some chance. Technically? Sure. Practically? No. Violence is being done to us, and the best we get from most Republicans indicate that many of them don’t mind, in fact, although there are a few notable exceptions. On the 11th of July, we will have a pointless exercise of repeal in the House of Representatives, a tale told and believed only by idiots, that for all its sound and fury, will signify nothing. The GOP establishment loves a charade, and too many of us likewise adore one.
I wish to thank Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. He has made plain what I have been arguing for some time: This nation is dead. Everything that had made it a nation, indivisible, has been wiped away, and in its place is a stinking, festering carcass of past glory. What remains is the fetid, reeking, scorched remains of a free people, now subjugated into tyranny by a United States Supreme Court dominated by a cabal of leftists and pragmatists, the former seeking to overturn our constitution, and the latter willing to join them in order to remain popular. There is no political liberty anywhere on Earth any longer.
There will be some number of conservative talking heads who will urge calm, and if you feel inclined to listen to that hogwash, you should follow your leanings, but I will have none of it. There is nothing in this but pure, unmitigated evil. This law has converted us to the Soviet Union. The walls are not [yet] built, and the barb-wired fences to restrain us are not [yet] erected, but all the necessary elements of a slave state are now in place.
Freedom of choice? Gone.
Freedom to be unmolested by outrageous governmental persecution? Gone.
Freedom to worship(or not) as one sees fit? Gone.
Freedom to live one’s life according to such beliefs? Gone.
Freedom to be secure in your person and your effects? Gone.
Freedom to decide what is in one’s own best interest? Stripped, wrecked, tormented, and tossed aside by John Roberts and the rest of the Statist Judicial activists on the Supreme Court.
Do you realize that to decide as he did, John Roberts had to ignore the plain language of the law, and imagine what is a penalty provision into a tax?
We have here a case of judicial activism writ large across our constitution, and it is a red-letter stamp: Null and Void.
Do you expect Mitt Romney to save you from this? Do you expect him to step up and do so?
Ladies and gentlemen, this has been rigged. The least-qualified Republican to campaign against Obamacare is our presumptive nominee. The least-qualified to criticize it will now be our candidate?
Shall I play the funeral dirge now, or wait until November 7th?
While the media has immediately leaped into the considerations of the horse-race aspects of this Supreme Court ruling, nobody is addressing the fact that our liberties have been stripped from us. Nobody but a few lonely conservative bloggers, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh. I expect other talk-show hosts will address this matter, but what we have in this case is a complete dissolution of the United States as we have known it.
I will not pay for Obama-care. I am looking into pulling my own health insurance, and making them force me to pay. SCREW THEM! This is my life, my money, my health, my choice.
The Republic that is our constitutional, representative form of government stands upon a precipice. We have a President who has undertaken to set aside the constitution at every turn. We have a Congress divided, split between a Senate controlled by a maniacal shill for the President, and a House of Representatives led(and I use that verb very loosely) by a Speaker who is unwilling to do battle with the President, unwilling to attempt even the most basic defense of our Constitution, and incapable even of holding an outrageous Attorney General to account without much hand-wringing and waffling. We have a United State Supreme Court that has most recently ruled that States have no sovereignty to speak of, and not even the authority to protect its own citizenry. We are told by the presumptive Republican nominee that he will repeal Obamacare, despite implementing a similar program in the state he governed, while his various mouthpieces talk about “replacement.”
Do you think we face long odds? Do you believe our Republic can survive or recover? The decision expected from the Supreme Court on Thursday will either re-shape our country forevermore, or allow us one more opportunity to restore it. Make no mistake about it: If the court upholds the Affordable Car Act, the Republic is dead.
I have given this a good deal of thought, busy as I have been these last two months, and as we’ve all waited to see what tomorrow will bring, I’ve decided that if the Supreme Court of the United States upholds this legislative abomination, a de facto state of war exists between the United States Federal Government and the people whose rights it had been constituted to defend. Those who will perceive this as true will be branded enemies of the state, in one fashion or another, and the decline of this Republic will accelerate at a breathtaking pace. There can be no recovery of the Republic if this law is allowed to stand, and the urgings to repeal it from we citizens, with platforms large and small, will fall on the same deaf ears that have ignored our pleas for more than two years. If this law stands, there is no constitutional, representative republic.
If the law is overturned, even then, our jeopardy will only have begun, because this President will ignore the ruling of the court, as he has done repeatedly, and as he has done remorselessly. He will attempt to impose his program anyway, and even should our milquetoast House of Representatives act to impede him, he will turn to incitement, outright. He will attempt to raise a mob, and force his will by virtue of threats and violence. He will do everything in his power, and many, many things beyond their legitimate exercise in order to create chaos. Barack Obama will not rest, and none of the looters or moochers who ride upon his coattails will allow this to be overturned. We may see what can only be termed a civil war, and it will be bloody.
This is the direction in which this nation has been lurching for generations, since the so-called “progressives” took over both parties. We have been led into a box canyon, from which none may escape unscathed. Today, idiotic former Democrat Congressman from Rhode Island, and latest family ne’er-do-well, Patrick Kennedy warned:
“If the Court upholds the law, dangerous Tea Party extremists will go on a rampage.”
We should be so lucky. The truth is that if the court upholds this law, Tea Party types will not go on a rampage, because they are not dangerous, although they probably should have been.
Rampage or not, civil war or not, this piece of legislation and all that has followed in its wake serve to demonstrate how fragile our Republic has become after a century of unceasing statist agitation. In the 1930s, we could have sustained this condition had our court exhibited such staying power as to have overturned all of the New Deal legislation, because the American people were still a moral people by a vastly overwhelming majority. By “moral,” I mean specifically in the sense that they respected the notion of property rights, the idea of self-sufficiency, and the concepts that once buttressed our constitutional foundation. Who now can claim this description would apply?
I spent most of the first decade of my adult life serving under an oath by which I swore to uphold and defend the United States Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I have never yielded on my oath, neither for comfort nor for ease; neither for the sake of a false unity nor for the sake of familial peace. Sadly, many of my countrymen no longer even understand what principles that oath had been constructed to honor, and to protect, but still, I observe it, while our Supreme Court ignores it, our President demolishes it, and our Congress abandons its defense. No branch of government seems interested in upholding it any longer, and by this procedure, they have slowly stolen our Constitution from us. Thursday, we will learn if we shall have even one more chance to resurrect our Republic, but if we are given that chance, we must neither squander it nor revel too long in our temporary reprieve. “Rampage?” Indeed, we of Tea Party orientation must rampage at the polls, where we must not permit even the most thuggish brigands of the President to deter us from our electoral duties. We must now walk back the entire statist menu, or watch our Republic perish. If the Supreme Court does not present a sentence of death, we must make the most of any temporary stay. We must undo it all, or be undone by it.
The question has been asked here on this site, and on others what will become of the state of health-care if Obama-care falls. I’ve heard the gnashing of teeth among those who think we need some kind of health-care reform, and while I agree, I doubt most would agree with my own prescription. Cold-hearted. Selfish. Greedy. These are all the terms that would be used by statists to describe my own visions of health-care reform. Even a few alleged conservatives can’t quite bring themselves to endorse my view because at heart, they’re not free market capitalists. You shouldn’t be surprised, as there are many self-proclaimed “conservatives” who are really nothing of the sort, and who would just as readily inflict and impose their vision of “fairness” as any left-wing socialist radical. The difference is that they claim to be motivated by other ideas, or beliefs, but what remains universally true is that to impose them, they too must destroy liberty. I oppose any such plan, plot, or program, irrespective of the source, and I think it’s time we had this little talk lest there be some confusion: I don’t support government involvement in any aspect of healthcare. None.
The first thing one must know about the free market is that it is destroyed the moment government becomes involved. If you want to destroy innovation, efficiency, and industry within any segment of any market, introduce government as a buyer. This is because government is a terrible consumer because it is not spending its own money, but instead yours. It’s also because the government has undue leverage in a market where it is not the ultimate consumer. Of course, there will be those of you who will demand to know the fate of the poor, with the stabbing of a pointed finger against my chest, since the poor, by definition, don’t have a good deal of money with which to purchase health services. As ever, those who wish to control others rely upon the poor to furnish the excuse for their power. The question is not “what should we do about the poor,” as Ayn Rand famously observed, but “should we do anything about the poor?” This is where the compassion-fascists show up to berate free-marketeers, claiming that the advocates of this viewpoint are heartless and mean-spirited and greedy. Balderdash!
In order to have any sort of system in which various “necessities” are provided, it is first necessary to obtain them. Once government is placed in this role, it is inevitable, and in fact a prerequisite that the government employ cruelty against others, from whom the necessities (or the money to purchase them) will be taken. Ladies and gentlemen, there is no escape from this, and when I observe statists of either left or right political persuasion making this argument, I remind them first of the inescapable, inexorable moral breech: Government has only force and on that basis, government becomes a murderous villain in the hands of a statist. Pay, or die. There are those who enjoy shading the black and white behind a curtain of gray fog, but the simple, undisguised fact is that for any such program to exist, government must become evil. That’s right, I wrote it: Evil. I take it as an act of evil whenever one initiates force against another, or threatens force, in order to make material (or other) gain. If one is an advocate of a government-funded, implemented, or regulated healthcare system by any name, one must admit from the outset that one is in favor of robbery through an agent.
Call it third-party theft. Call it whatever you will, but when government, on the behalf of some citizens, extorts money from the pockets of other citizens, government has assumed the role of a mafia protection racket. One can dress it up in all the Sunday’s finest of “compassion,” or “brother-love,” but what one is doing is to attack one person for his wealth on the basis that it should be provided to others on the basis of their needs. That’s Marxism, and if one supports this in any measure, he or she is not a conservative. One can claim it. One can prefix it with words like “compassionate” all one pleases, but the simple fact is that to threaten one’s fellow man with injury and death; violence and expropriation; robbery and slavery is as abominable and un-Christian as one can be. There is no mitigation. There is no excuse. There will be a long line of those accustomed to robbing their neighbors who will come forth to claim that they possess some right – yes, they’ll actually claim a right – to do through government what they would never consider doing themselves for fear of eating a shotgun: Robbing their neighbors willy-nilly, and with abandon.
Yes, this is the ugly nature of statism, and it’s why I cannot support any health reform that doesn’t get government out of the health-care business altogether. It is at this point that some will ask me: “But what of veterans?” To the degree veterans have been injured in the performance of their duties, just as with any worker injured or maimed on the job, the employer must carry that cost, and since we are the employers of soldiers, yes, it is proper for us to pay for that healthcare necessary to make them well, to rehabilitate them, and to compensate them for permanent loss/injury. That does not mean we need a vast and inefficient system of providing care to veterans. While it is true that certain afflictions and injuries are not common in the civilian sector, nevertheless, to the degree we can, we should job this out through private providers. Speaking as a veteran myself, and having seen what have been deplorable conditions at VA hospitals when I’ve volunteered my time there, I cannot but think that most of the veterans I saw would have been better served in the private sector.
Everybody else? You’d better figure it out. One has no entitlement, natural or otherwise, to the contents of his neighbors’ wallets. Since the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, too many Americans have adopted the notion that it is okay to steal from one’s neighbors, or to steal from one’s grand-children so long as government acts as the agent and instrument of that theft. To steal remotely, through a third party is no less a theft, but it is at once doubly cowardly. Imagine walking next door to one’s neighbor, and demanding a meal, or an aspirin, or a dollar, or to move in. In any civilized society, one making such demands would be laughed at, and if he tried to obtain his demands by force, he would be short-lived indeed. For many millions of Americans, this has become the all-too-common procedure, except that they have the middle-man of government doing their dirty work, never casting the first thought in the direction of the absolute tyranny they’re inflicting on their neighbors, or dismissively concluding that “everyone does it,” which is not only a falsehood, but also a psychological confession of one’s ill intent.
As Rand explained more eloquently, and succinctly, one can do anything one pleases for the poor, out of one’s own pocket, and out of one’s own sense of charity or compassion, and there is naught but good to be born of that approach, be it food, clothing, healthcare, housing, or education. What one must not do is force others to do one’s will in terms of charity or compassion, because it becomes neither, it breeds contempt, and it is a grave evil of its own in the first instance, for which there can be no ethical justification, despite endless rationalizations born of statist delusion.
I’ve been asked what we should replace Obama-care with, if it’s overturned. My answer is simply: A system in which government has no say, and no money in the distribution or provision of health-care, of any sort, as an entitlement for citizens who have done nothing more than breathed. It is only because of governmental involvement that such shameless thugs as the current dictator of New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, can claim to be acting in the public interest when he bans soft-drinks larger than 16 ounces, or table salt in restaurants, or any of the myriad other tyrannical dicta he puts forth, all “for your own good.” That sort of monstrous conduct by a public official is just the beginning, and it’s also why I wait along with millions of other Americans to see whether the United States Supreme Court will do its duty, or whether it will enable the advance of tyranny.
There are those who argue that Obama-care must be replaced by something, and my answer is that it should be: The US Constitution. There exists no entitlement to the wealth of others, whether that wealth is to be taken in order to finance beans and rice or blood transfusions and open heart surgery. Some will ask where is my compassion, but I maintain that my compassion is with those whose property and wealth is expropriated in the name of the compassion of others. Unless and until the United States returns to the rule of Constitutional law, the country will continue inexorably downward. There is no compromise between good and evil, yet what all of this redistributionism endorses is plainly evil. None of my readers would walk next door and demand from their neighbors such provisions as they might from time to time need, but too many Americans are all too comfortable sending a government agent in their stead. That’s not liberty. That’s not freedom. That’s not right.
As the nation awaits the US Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a “Obamacare,” Speaker of the House John Boehner, (R-Ohio) has issued some advice and counsel to Republicans if the Obamacare law should be struck down. In typical surrender-monkey fashion, Boehner has said that Republican shouldn’t gloat, and shouldn’t “spike the football.” This is typical of Boehner’s temperament: Don’t make waves, don’t stir up trouble, and don’t celebrate victory. During his speech as the health-care bill passed the House, Boehner said, choking back tears, that the law wouldn’t stand. To date, he’s done remarkably little to assist in seeing that promise through. One would think that with so passionate a statement at the time of the law’s passage under the dictatorial control of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat majority in the House, even the tepid John Boehner would be moved to celebrate a bit if the law is struck down by the court.
Unfortunately, Boehner is made of tears but no anger. Americans are rightly angry over the enactment of Obama-care, but for some reason, the GOP insiders in Washington don’t quite grasp it. This is emblematic of the entire GOP establishment, some number of whom want the law to remain in place so they can benefit from crony-capitalism with the state exchanges created under the law. They simply don’t share our passion for liberty, and when it comes right down to it, they don’t really represent we conservatives. I’ve got some bad news for Speaker Boehner, and it’s not recklessly intended, but instead purposeful: If Obama-care is struck down by the courts, I am going to spike the ball. I’m going to carry on an extended celebration in the endzone, and if the referees say anything about it, they might get the ball spiked in their faces too.
“No one knows what the court will decide,” Boehner said in a memo to fellow Republicans. “But if the court strikes down all or part of the president’s healthcare reform law, there will be no spiking of the ball.”
He underlined the last eight words to emphasize his reference to the NFL football end-zone celebration.
Boehner fears Republican gloating over a court victory could detract from the party’s emphasis on the struggling economy and the need for job growth, two campaign issues that consistently trump healthcare as voter priorities in national opinion polls.
“We will not celebrate,” Boehner said, during a time of unemployment and rising government debt and healthcare costs.
If you’re a conservative, you probably wonder why it is that an allegedly conservative Speaker of the House might take such a stance, and why there’s anything wrong with a little celebratory “ball-spiking” should the law be overturned. The answer is simple: For those who rule over us in Washington, DC, even the leadership of the party that claims to represent us, liberty is not important. What upset John Boehner to the point of tears over the passage of the Affordable Care Act wasn’t the content of the bill, so much as the way in which it was passed. While it’s true that Pelosi, Reid, and Obama used every device of the villain in order to pass the law, and suspended rules, and played fast-and-loose with House and Senate rules in order to shove this law down our throats, that’s still not the most important part of the matter. At the heart of the matter is the question of liberty, and for that, John Boehner had few tears, and those in the GOP establishment didn’t shed any, either. For Boehner, it was about the process, and how he had been closed out of it, and how then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi(D-CA) shoved a bill through that really had no business coming for a vote. You will doubtless recall the whole “deemed passed” business, and the entire fiasco of passing a bill originating in the Senate as though it had been the House bill all along, in order to sidestep the ordinary legislative process. This is what wrinkled Boehner’s shorts.
The fact that the government was taking over one-sixth of the US economy was not the salient issue in his view. The fact that the American people would now see the intentional destruction of private health insurance and markets was not the cause of his tears. The idea that the government could claim to be regulating non-existent commerce, precisely because it did not exist had not been the source of his discomfort. No, none of these bother John Boehner so much as the way in which the bill was passed. Boehner had been concerned about process. With his focus on the employment situation, one would think Boehner could see that Obama-care is itself a job-killer, and for that reason alone, there would be good cause for celebration if the law is overturned by the court, but as usual, Boehner is worried about process and politics.
If you want to know why it is that John Boehner is urging restraint should Obama-care be struck down, it’s simply because he’s trying to look at the political ramifications. In general, it’s true that nobody likes a sore loser, and few more like an obnoxious winner, but in this case, I believe Boehner and the rest of the political calculators are missing the point. Nearly three-fourths of the American people believe this law is unconstitutional. Three-fourths! If this is even close to accurate, then ball-spiking may not present any particular political dangers, but it also may actually assist Republicans in the Fall. After all, conservatives can now point to the fact that we do have a limited government, despite the usurping proclivities of Barack Obama and the Democrats, and they can further point to all the reasons why any Republican president who would presumably appoint conservative Supreme Court justices must be preferable to the current president who will continue the trend of appointing justices obnoxious to the US Constitution.
The simple fact is that when a people overcomes governmental treachery, and what this author views as treasonous legislation, there is every good justification to celebrate, or “spike the ball.” If John Boehner wasn’t such a predictable, unfailing beltway insider, he too would understand that if this law is turned back by the courts, it will be every reason for the celebration of those who have fought tirelessly against this law, from it’s introduction to its passage, and even beforehand. While John Boehner has whined about being “one-half of one-third of the government,” he has failed to make a stand on behaf of liberty. Instead, he’s been a plodding, tepid Speaker of the House, and he’s done nothing to risk his position, and I believe that’s the trouble: Boehner is risk-averse to a pathological extent. He’s been more apt to stick it to his own party than he has been willing to do battle with the Democrats in the House, or face off against Majority leader Harry Reid(D-NV) in the Senate or the resident at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
All of this talk assumes that the bill will be struck down in part, or in whole, but we won’t know that until the decision finally comes out, sometime later this month. What we must learn from this is that should a Republican majority re-convene next January, we conservatives must exert maximum pressure on our respective House members to ensure that John Boehner is not retained as the Speaker of the House. We simply cannot tolerate this brand of hand-wringing leadership, devoid of the passion for liberty we conservatives share, and to have a Speaker telling his members that they should not celebrate when victorious is abominable. Of course, maybe that’s the problem Boehner has with all of this: If the Supreme Court strikes down Obama-care, Boehner has a whole new problem: How does he manage to re-write the law, if it’s to be written at all? Billions upon billions of dollars have already been spent in terms of the implementation of the law. That money cannot be un-spent. Many things will be left in limbo as a result, and you can bet that left in place, Boehner will fail to pursue the righting of things, particularly if Obama manages to beat the presumptive Republican nominee this Fall.
We need leadership, and that leadership must press advantages, politically as well as legislatively, but to do so requires a principled view of the issues at hand. Boehner’s unwillingness to do a victory dance in the end-zone signifies that he doesn’t understand what moves the grass roots, and average, ordinary Americans, who will be thrilled to hear of it should the court strike down Obama-care. It will be the first sign in more than four years that government is finally being brought under control, and that is most definitely something to be celebrated, but if John Boehner can’t understand that, and thinks it improper, I suggest he do what he does best.
There’s a good deal of talk about how the oral arguments before the Supreme Court seemed to have gone badly for the government, particularly Solicitor General Verrilli, with a good deal of talk about how unprepared he seemed to make the arguments before him, but let’s be careful about two things: I’m sure Verrilli is an able attorney, but there’s no way to plaster enough lipstick on this pig to disguise its true nature, but more importantly, I don’t think we should take for granted anything about how this or any other court will rule based on their questions alone. If all the people who’ve spent the week trying to read the tea-leaves are wrong, we may be in for a serious disappointment come the end of June. For my part, while the questioning offered some measure of hope, I won’t count my chickens before they’ve hatched, or even count Obama’s before they have gone home to roost.
Listening to the media, you would think Verrilli had been the constant butt of jokes, and while it’s clear that there were a few laughs at his expense, I think this says more about the impertinent character of the Obama-care legislation than it says about Verrilli’s legal scholarship. He was placed in this position by a Congress now long gone, defeated and sent home by voters in 2010, and a President who was willing to sign this tract of tyranny into law despite a 2 to 1 disapproval by the American people at the time, that has only managed to worsen, now just shy of three-fourths of Americans considering the law unconstitutional. As any litigator will tell you, if you have his client with a smoking gun in hand over the dead body with a signed confession, and thirty eyewitnesses, you’re not going to make it far on the defendant’s claims of innocence, but as an attorney, if your client says he will plead not guilty, you must still stand in and defend him. That he’s left you with no conceivable method for doing so isn’t your fault, so I’d prefer we not tread too heavily on Verrilli. He may be a left-wing goon for all I know, but he was doing his job.
The question of severability on Wednesday seemed to cause the greatest stir from the leftist members of the court, because they wanted to find some way, any way at all, to salvage some part of the “Affordable Care Act.” One after the next, they tried to set up questions designed to muddy the water, but fundamentally, the problem is this: If the individual mandate is struck down as unconstitutional, the rest of the bill is eligible because it would be difficult to imagine how the exchanges and the rest of the complex structure of the law operates without the mandate provision. Some have assumed that the court may bounce the remainder of the bill, because Justice Scalia pointed out the impossibility of going through the law and figuring out what stays and what goes without risking larger damage. In other words, keeping some of the Act might well wind up causing more trouble than it fixes.
I think that’s the proper way to view it, and you might wonder in light of this why the liberals on the court are so intent on keeping such parts of it as they are able. The answer is simple enough once you understand their highly political motive: The mandate, if carved out, would merely affect the funding mechanism, but it would not do anything to the spending side. The spending would go on, and the Congress would face deficits even greater than those already envisioned with this irresponsible law, and the entitlement would become firmly rooted in the American culture. Once that happens, repeal becomes almost impossible. For the liberals, therefore, preserving as much as the bill by severing only the mandate becomes the object of the ruling.
The conservatives may not be inclined to tamper with any of it. They may not wish to toss out the entire bill for what will to some be an appearance of a political ruling, but the truth is that no matter what the court rules, it will certainly have political ramifications. The question is whether that matters to all of the justices. We know it drives the liberals on the court, but the problem is the conservatives are generally disinclined to weigh politics in their considerations on rulings. If that is the case, you could well see a bifurcated ruling in which they throw out the mandate but leave the entirety of the remainder in place. This too would constitute a disaster because the spending would commence in full as the law comes into force, with the revenue then [more] uncertain.
It could also happen that the court rules 5-4 that the mandate is constitutional, and if that happens, the country is thoroughly screwed. At that point, the whole severability question is moot, and the law is implemented on schedule. Of course, there are many theories about how this may play out, but the fact remains that we won’t know until late June. Liberals are preparing for the scenario in which some or all of the law is tossed by preemptive strikes in media against various justices, particularly Justice Scalia. I expect those attacks to ratchet up, even though the voting is already complete, and all that remains is to write the ruling and publish.
This process is important to the function of our republic, and yet there are those who disparage it as anachronistic, but I believe that if we are to remain a nation of laws, we must give the process its due. Leftists want to know the ruling now, and you can bet every court clerk is being prodded for answers by media who want to know in advance. I would urge conservatives not to become to happy over what they have heard and read from the oral arguments. Politically, you should remain engaged as though the law is going to be upheld. You won’t be surprised if it is, and you won’t wonder about what to do next.
We already knew that Mitt Romney would never stand up for capitalism, but on Jay Leno’s show on Tuesday night, Romney said that he would seek to repeal Obama-care and replace it. We don’t need to replace it with a different big government plan like Romney-care, which is almost the same thing. We need to get the government OUT of health care to the degree we can. That’s going to be impossible with Mitt Romney who intends to extend the welfare state just the same. It isn’t a question of repealing Obama-care only to replace it with another big-government program, but instead getting government out of all such programs. Mitt Romney would tinker around the edges, only, as I’ve been reporting here for months, and this clip is effectively his confession.
Here’s the video, with the relevant portion at roughly half-way through:
The other problem with Romney’s claim is that he will issue waivers for Obamacare, but the truth is that no waivers are permissible under the statute, and the left will immediately take a Romney administration to court. There will be no waivers. This man is lying to the American people when he hangs all of this on a supposed waiver. Sure, Obama is issuing waivers, but there’s nothing in the law that suggests this is permissible.
In Tuesday’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said something in response to a question from Justice Antonin Scalia that I believe was intended to mislead. Scalia was much too clever for Verrilli, and why he didn’t call Verrilli on it, he made it clear that he understood full well what Verrilli was doing with his wording. It might not have been a “lie” in the strictest sense of the word, but it was intended to obfuscate the issue, and to do so in such a way as to shield the government from the very basis on which I have been criticizing the “individual mandate” since its proposal. To understand this “lie,” “misleading statement,” or “obfuscation,” whichever you will prefer to call it, you must understand the basic issues in context. In my view, Verrilli tried to hide something crucial, and you should know it.
What General Verrilli tried to conceal is the fact that this “cost-shifting” that Obama-care’s mandate is intended to address was created by government statute. Let us start with the transcript, available in full here:
GENERAL VERRILLI: That — that absolutely is a justification for Congress’s action here. That is existing economic activity that Congress is regulating by means of this rule.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Mr. Verrilli, you could say that about buying a car. If people don’t buy cars, the price that those who do buy cars pay will have to behigher. So, you could say in order to bring the price down, you’re hurting these other people by not buying a car.
GENERAL VERRILLI: That is not what we’re saying, Justice Scalia.
JUSTICE SCALIA: That’s not — that’s not what you’re saying.
GENERAL VERRILLI: That’s not — not -
JUSTICE SCALIA: I thought it was. I thought you’re saying other people are going to have to pay more for insurance because you’re not buying it.
Now for the key exchange:
GENERAL VERRILLI: No. It’s because you’re going — in the health care market, you’re going into the market without the ability to pay for what you get, getting the health care service anyway as a result of the social normsthat allow — that — to which we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care.
Here, Scalia absolutely demonstrates he understands the issue:
JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, don’t obligate yourself to that. Why — you know?
And now, for the slam dunk:
GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, I can’t imagine that that — that the Commerce Clause would — would forbid Congress from taking into account this deeply embedded social norm.
JUSTICE SCALIA: You could do it. But does that expand your ability to issue mandates to — to the people?
Let me explain why I’ve italicized the portions above. When Verrilli argues that the receipt of healthcare by the so-called free-riders is the result of “the social norms that allow,” he stammered through a self-correction, “to which we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care.”
What Verrilli is here talking about is that Congress has enacted laws prohibiting an emergency room from turning away patients on the basis that they cannot show an ability or willingness to pay. Verrilli tried to hide this behind a “social norm,” and later a “deeply embedded social norm,” but in fact, Scalia understood with acute perception why it is that Verrilli would do this, and he spat it back in Verrilli’s face, as was right and proper: “Well, don’t obligate yourself to that.” In other words, if you don’t want people to receive treatment without having paid, repeal the law that provides that treatment must be provided.
Verrilli wasn’t satisfied with this, and he claimed that “[he] can’t imagine that the commerce clause would forbid Congress from taking into account this deeply embedded social norm.”
Here, Scalia might have asked him: “How deeply embedded a social norm is it that has been enacted within my lifetime,” but he did not, preferring to underscore the larger point:
“You could do it. But does that expand your ability to issue mandates to — to the people?“
What Scalia is asking here is plain enough: The government may claim an interest in taking this “deeply embedded social norm” into account in creating its policy, but a desire to support a “social norm” (deeply embedded or otherwise) confer upon the government the authority to stand in demand of participation in the social norm?
What Scalia here recognized is that which I’ve been telling you all along: The government may enact a law forcing somebody to provide a good or a service(I reject that too, by the way) but the fact that the government creates a legal obligation for itself does not give them an additional claim of authority over you.
A good example is this: You let one of your adult children move their entire family into your home with you, despite the fact that they can or should afford their own domicile on their own, but when you perceive it is too burdensome, you then go to your other adult children and demand they help you support them, since it’s now bankrupting you. Your other adult children would rightly say to you: “Don’t let them live their any longer.”
What kind of mind would actually propose this to their other adult children? The other adult children would be best to remove themselves from the conversation and ignore the demanding parent. The problem is that in this case, it’s the government that’s making the demand, and we(the other adult children) are prohibited from ignoring it.
What Scalia recognized, and every one of you must know, is that there is a cost to the choices one makes, but having made them, there is no authority to shift the costs of those choices onto unwilling others who would have chosen differently. This is at the heart of the entire Obama-care insurance mandate argument: The government voluntarily decides to fund or subsidize something for somebody, and then mandates that you participate in the payment. There is no right to health-care, or any other material commodity or service, and nobody is obligated to pay for it. This should be the basis upon which the entirety of the New Deal and the Great Society are tossed out to the curb, but what’s particularly objectionable about Obama-care’s mandate is that it compels you to purchase an insurance against such costs that you may well never incur.
Understanding this, you should see why it is that what Solicitor General Verrilli attempted to conceal, but Scalia didn’t permit, is that more than “deeply embedded social norms,” these are laws inflicted and imposed upon us by Congress, and that Congress is free to repeal them, but the creation of these obligations does not disparage our liberties. I hope Antonin Scalia lives to be one-hundred-twenty years old, or longer, and delivers us from as much evil as he is able. His agile legal mind, and his clear understanding of the issues at stake is among the best hopes we have for maintaining our liberties, or reclaiming those we have forfeited already. Our lives quite literally depend on it.
Appearing on Fox News with Megyn Kelly, former Massachusetts Governor and putative GOP nomination “front-runner” Mitt Romney was caught a bit flat-footed when Megyn Kelly asked him about his support of a Federal insurance mandate. As Kelly pointed out, it’s going to be difficult for Romney to run away from this, although he’s been trying for months. The truth, no matter how you slice it, is that Romney has previously stated that he thought the model he used in his home state for so-called “Romney-care” would be good for the entire nation. Kelly played a clip for Romney to attempt to refute, but the problem is that it’s basically irrefutable. This isn’t simply about insurance mandates, bad as they may be, but instead goes to the veracity of anything this candidate says or promises.
One cannot argue in support of a Federal insurance mandate in the first instance, only to disclaim it in the second instance, but claim never to have said what one has clearly said. It would be a different matter if Mitt Romney said that he had changed his mind on this issue, and no longer supported the idea, but what he is trying to do is say that he never supported the idea at all. Clearly, that’s simply not so.
Rather than confront the issue head-on, he tries to weasel away from what he said in the 2008 primary season, and that simply won’t do. Some in the media wonder why Mitt Romney isn’t catching fire with conservatives, and I strongly believe you need look no further than this exchange between he and Megyn Kelly. He could have straightened it out, and he could have admitted he removed a line from his book about taking Romneycare nationwide, but instead, he’s trying to trick conservatives into thinking he didn’t say what he said and wrote.
This is a problem, because one must ask what his motive might be. After all, under the pressure of public opinion, most candidates will back-pedal at least a little when presented the opportunity, but Mitt’s not doing that. The problem is, he can’t claim it’s because he’s taking a “principled stand” on the issue, otherwise he would be more forthright about it. He’d say he’s changed his view, suck it up, and move on. He’s not doing that either, leading one to wonder why.
I have my own thought, and it goes back a few weeks to when Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi was interviewed on the matter, and she as much as admitted she would be part of Romney’s program to take Romneycare nationwide as a replacement for Obamacare. At present, he can still claim he never changed his mind, despite implying otherwise, but never really reversing himself. He wants to be able to go into the Fall election and promise only to replace Obamacare. He won’t care about conservative opinion at all, at that point, because he will figure that he has them anyway. If he gets the nomination, he may have a point, because what will conservatives do? Will they stay home and permit Obama’s re-election, or as a matter of personal and familial self-defense, and in the defense of the nation, simply go pull the lever, or punch out the chad for Mitt Romney?
Romney is willing to bet it’s the latter, and his whole campaign is predicated on winning the nomination predominately in liberal locales and doing what he can in the South, but knowing that once he has the nomination, he can ignore the South almost entirely and focus on those swing states. If this is his strategy, and it surely seems to be, then once he has the nomination in hand, what’s to prevent him from flipping back a bit on the issue of a national mandate for health insurance? It will satisfy many Democrats after all, particularly those fatigued with Obama’s disastrous economic policies, and his gamble will be that he may pick up more around the middle than he will lose from the conservative base of the party.
I believe this may well be the reason he’s still hedging his bets on this issue. It’s either that, or his ego won’t permit him to say he’s changed his mind, or some political strategist is telling him to capitulate on the issue will do him more damage than good. Whatever is going on here, Romney isn’t credible simply because the facts and his own historical statements refute his current ones, but his current statements seem to contend his historical statements don’t exist. If you can follow this, then you must see as I do that Mitt Romney is plainly lying. I know not how others may choose to vote, but we already have one liar in the White House, and I’m not inclined to replace him with another.
Remember when Congress was running the numbers through the Congressional Budget Office to get a scoring of the costs of Obama-care? Not surprisingly, these estimates fell well short of the real numbers under the arm-twisting and politicking of the Democrat leadership of Nancy Pelosi(D-CA,) then Speaker of the House. In short, they engineered a lie, and that lie was that over ten years, the costs of Obama-care would be “just” $900 Billion, but now the CBO has revised its estimates, and that number has sky-rocketed to nearly $1.8 Trillion. You might wonder how badly you’re about to be hammered, but you can expect that by the time Obamacare is fully implemented, most working Americans will see their premiums sky-rocket(and in truth, many already have in just the last two years since the bill’s passage.) Expect to pay more in taxes, and if you’re an employer, you may want to consider what they intend for you with all the new penalties.
Back in 2009-10, when the bill was being debated, they kept going back to browbeat CBO as repeated modifications of the bill continued to exceed one-trillion dollars. They finally came out with a cost estimate of $940 billion, and this was sufficient to get the support of some wavering Democrats who didn’t want to be tagged with a $1 Trillion expenditure. At the time, many Congressional critics said that it would come in far higher since the CBO was using a static scoring that didn’t account for economic conditions at large. Much of the near doubling of the costs are accounted for by a weaker economy than they had estimated at the time. This is typical CBO estimating: Look at the sky today, see it is blue, and estimate the cost for umbrellas over the next ten years will be zero. As you’re drenched for lack of an umbrella, they will explain that their estimates didn’t account for the dynamics of weather.
The entire Obama-care scam is just now kicking into high gear. Over the next eighteen months, as new features and taxes kick in, along with the mandates and penalties, I don’t think most small or even medium businesses quite grasp how badly this is going to affect their bottom lines. This is because much of it has been hidden, and many large corporations have managed to obtain exemptions from the Obama administration. It’s not clear that those exemptions are even legal, and it’s fairly certain they will end early in a second Obama term. Our best hope is that the Supreme Court overturns the whole law, since there is no severability clause in this law, meaning that to throw out one portion, for instance the individual mandate, all portions of the law must go. If that happens, we’ll be extraordinarily fortunate, but we must plan on the fact that this is going to go forward irrespective of the desires of more than 65% of the American people, who oppose it.
When you see Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, or Barack Obama, or any other Democrat who supported and voted for this law, you can assume they are liars, one and all, and that they knew full well that this program was going to cost significantly more than advertised. They lied, because it was the only way to get even their own members to vote for it, not because those members believed the lies, but because it gave them plausible political cover. Know this: If your member of Congress or your Senators voted for this bill, despite what they may say now, they knew it was an underestimate based on willful ignorance. You should cast your votes accordingly at the next opportunity.
It has been my contention throughout this primary season that Mitt Romney will not be able to defeat Barack Obama because he will be unable to differentiate between himself and Barack Obama on the matter of Obamacare. It is nearly impossible to believe Mitt Romney on this issue, because when he claims that on the basis of federalism and the Tenth Amendment, he would never prescribe for the nation the same sort of mandate he imposed on the people of his own state of Massachusetts, the evidence contradicts his own words on the matter. I have shown you videos that demonstrate the point, but here is one more from none other than leftist Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC, who was offering a ‘warning’ to Romney. Before the election is over, if Mitt Romney is the nominee of the Republican party, the left and their lap-dog media intend to make we conservatives rue the day, and it will be with Mitt Romney’s assistance.
I think it’s going to be worse than O’Donnell admits. I doubt whether the Obama campaign or Barack Obama himself will wait for Romney to make this into an issue. It’s my bet that he’ll do his best to avoid the issue altogether, because the left-wing media will not permit him to get away with the lies in the general that they have forgiven in the primary season. When Romney lies to other Republicans, the mainstream media won’t object, but you can bet that if Romney tries to pass off this same lie in the general campaign against Obama, he will never be permitted to get away with it.
Romney is vulnerable to defeat for this reason, and because his pronouncements on the campaign trail have to date promised repealing Obamacare, it’s going to be raised whether he likes it or not. The way it will be raised is by labeling Romney both as a liar and a hypocrite, two charges he surely seems to deserve in the matter. It will be done in the weeks leading up to the election, probably after the middle of October, and it will be used to massacre the Republicans.
More, I suspect that if he secures the nomination, Romney will try to walk back all of this “repeal Obamacare” talk almost immediately. He’ll talk about fixing it instead, and as I reported some time ago, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi has let that cat out of the bag. What this means for Republicans is that once the party nominates Mitt Romney, they’re going to find themselves stuck with a clunker who probably will go down to defeat in November, not merely because of Romneycare, but because of Mitt Romney’s ongoing attempt to conceal it.
Mitt Romney has repeatedly insisted that the Tenth Amendment and the principles of federalism forgive Romneycare. Many question this assertion, but to date, Romney has dodged and evaded it. While the media continues to talk about contraception, Rush Limbaugh, and every evasion they can imagine, but none have asked Romney any question in opposition to this premise. I want to know when the media will finally get around to vetting this, but it seems they have bought the lie that since Romneycare happened at the state level, it’s somehow different. That’s not the case, and it never will be, but for the willing media that simply refuses to address this issue. In order to make this plain, I am going to explain once more why Romneycare is not excused and may not be forgiven on the basis of federalism.
The principle of federalism exists because of the way in which our nation was formed. Our constitution is best compared to a contract in partnership among the several states. In this sense, the states are superior to the Federal government they created, in precisely the same way that the individual retains sovereignty even after entering into a partnership. A contract of marriage is another similar concept. On the grounds of the marriage compact, one spouse does not gain the authority to coerce the other to an action. When such things occur, there’s generally a dissolution of a partnership or a divorce in marriage. Of course, the Civil War set a precedent in this regard with respect to the states, but the principle is sound even if our observance of it has not always been the most faithful.
What Mitt Romney argues with respect to his health insurance reform plan in Massachusetts(hereafter: Romneycare) is that the state of Massachusetts is eligible to do to individuals that which the Federal government may not. The problems with this argument are many, but let us focus on just a few. First, the Tenth Amendment doesn’t offer protections solely to the states, but also to the people. In fact, one could also argue that the Ninth Amendment, also applies. Here are the Ninth and Tenth Amendments:
Ninth Amendment – Protection of rights not specifically enumerated in the Constitution.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
These are important parts of our Constitution, and while many of our children will study the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth, sadly, the others are frequently neglected. The Ninth simply states that just because a right wasn’t specifically addressed in the Constitution does not mean it does not exist. In effect, citizens could rightly claim all manner of other rights under the auspices of the Ninth, and they have. The Tenth is considered to be a strong pro-federalism Amendment, reserving power over all matters not specifically mentioned to the States, or to the people. What this means is that the Federal Government cannot come along and create whatever laws it wants, without respect to the sovereignty of the individual states, or to the individual people residing in them.
To be perfectly frank about this, if we applied the Tenth amendment more strictly, as should have been the case, many Federal laws now in existence would be tossed out as violations. That said, what Romney claims is that the State can do to individuals that which is forbidden to the Federal Government. Again we return to the Civil War as a precedent, but we needn’t go that far. We need only go back to the 1960s, when Kennedy sent the Feds to enforce the rights of individual citizens against the State government in Alabama, led by Governor George Wallace. Notice that the Tenth Amendment had no application there, since the rights being protected were recognized by the Federal Government, and disparaged by the State.
Here starts the trouble. Romney argues that unlike the Federal Government, that must abide by a commerce clause that forbids the Federal Government from interfering in intrastate commerce, by enumerating interstate commerce alone, the state of Massachusetts is under no such restriction, and in fact is merely exercising its authority over intrastate commerce. Romney, his shills and his supporters all claim that this is just like automobile insurance. Most states in the United States mandate some form of auto insurance, but this is a deception too. The states may not compel anything beyond liability insurance. They cannot force drivers to purchase collision insurance, comprehensive insurance, road hazard insurance, or anything of the sort. They may only compel the purchase of liability insurance(and most states permit a liability bond of self-insurance,) and only because the vehicles to be operated are to be operated on the public roadways. On your private property, the state has no such authority. Therefore, the authority of the state to compel the purchase of insurance(or posting of bond) is contingent upon your use of the public roadways, but their ability to compel is limited to liability insurance.
Once you understand this, the argument of Mitt Romney evaporates. The mandate in Romneycare compels the individual to purchase insurance that he may never use, but most importantly, insurance to cover his own injury or loss. This is the equivalent of forcing you to insure your lawn-mower against losses that only you might incur(damage, theft, etc,) or insuring your car against yourself with a sledgehammer in your driveway. The State cannot compel the purchase of such insurance, and the reason is simple: The government has no interest in it, and thus no standing. The claim of Romney and other statists is that the state does have an interest, by virtue of the fact that you might show up and demand healthcare irrespective of your ability to pay.
This is a result of the legal requirement by the Federal Government that an emergency room cannot turn persons away for lack of ability to pay. Effectively, what Romney and those like him argue is that because the hospitals may be coerced to take non-paying patients, that this then gives the state the authority to compel all to insurance. This is like arguing that because some people commit robberies, we ought to be compelled to purchase pre-paid legal services, one and all, or that because some people may be bitten by rattlesnakes, we all ought to carry around a snake-bit kit, and redistribute the costs on a uniform basis.
This is absurd, and in fact, this is the root of the Romneycare scam, and what you have is really the result of an unjust law that requires some people to provide services to others irrespective of their ability to pay. Imagine somebody walking into the grocery store and filling their cart or basket and then walking out without paying on the basis that everybody needs to eat. Of course, we’ve short-circuited this too through the foodstamps program. In truth, with medical care, we’ve short-circuited this with Medicaid and Medicare, and much of the unpaid medical bills are generated by people who find themselves uncovered by situation. All of it is really socialism, writ large, and Mitt Romney’s attempt to pretend otherwise is a shame, but the fact that the mainstream media permits him to evade the subject with talk of federalism and “states’ rights” is a damnable scandal.
When you invite the world into your bedroom, don’t expect the world to withhold comments. When you invite government to fund healthcare, there will be no holding back the ultimate encroachment into personal privacy. There’s no ambiguity here. When Sandra Fluke testified before Congress, she invited this, but more importantly, when leftists shoved government healthcare down our throats, beginning in the 1960s, and culminating finally in “Obamacare,” the whole question of privacy was suppressed with a finality that most people simply won’t like: The government is involved in your healthcare. By definition, it is no longer private information. You cannot bring government into the matter of contraception without inviting it ultimately into your doctor’s office, your bathroom, and your bedroom.
People who are defending Fluke are ignoring the simple fact that when you make your sexuality and things related to it a matter of public record and government interest, you’re holding the door open for public judgments. Your reproductive health, but also the health of your kidneys is subject to governmental review. Do not offer that you haven’t understood where this would lead. Fluke wants others to be compelled to cover her contraception. What did she expect would happen? If you come to me and say “hey, pal, I need you to pay for…my kids to eat,” you can expect that I will soon ask you why you have so many children. As long as people are going to try to redistribute their private burdens onto the public account, there should be no claim whatsoever that the demand-makers can avoid public judgment. They’re inviting them.
What do you think is the meaning of the implementation of the various state EBT cards, so that at the grocery check-out, those living off of the rest of us can avoid any alleged stigma previously associated with food-stamps? They want the dignity associated with the appearance of paying their own way without the necessity of actually doing so. Such people are frauds, but their first victim is always themselves. Before they can fool the rest of us, they must first pretend to themselves that this procedure is fine, and that there is no shame in any of it. I won’t permit it. I’m not going to let charlatans parade around as though they are anything other than what the facts reveal.
If you’re a college student, or anybody else for that matter, and you wish to avoid pregnancy, but cannot afford your own contraceptives, there’s a simple answer, and as Foster Freiss might offer, it may involve an aspirin. As a member of the paying public, my first response when you demand free contraception is:
“Nothing is free. Why do you think I should pay for it?”
What can you answer? What is your moral premise? What is the basis for your claim against my wallet? There are two important principles here, and the first is that to Ms. Fluke and any like her who demand contraception funded by others, the only rational answer must be “No.” It’s an important word, and just as it applies in this context, where I do not give my consent, Ms. Fluke and all those like her should consider adding the word to their own vocabularies, in which case contraception might no longer be such a pressing necessity.
I don’t know anything about Fluke’s sexual habits, and I don’t really care. I simply don’t wish to pay for them, and I don’t want government compelling coverages on faith-based institutions, including the university at which she is a student. Her sexual life became a matter of public concern when she made it one. She is not a victim of Rush Limbaugh, or anybody else. She’s a victim of her own desire to put a gun to the heads of people of faith who will be coerced under the auspices of Obamacare to cover her contraceptive needs.
This is the truth of this issue, and when you consider what Obamacare will actually impose, from death-panels to medical records databases, and access to your financial records, it’s clear that there will be no effective protection of privacy. I don’t know how any rational person can believe that they can get somebody else to pay for something on their behalf, and still maintain privacy. You have a heart condition? The government will know. Diabetes? The government will know. Herpes? The government will know. They will know everything about you including the weight you register when you step on the scale in your doctor’s office.
What do you think has been the meaning of the “war on obesity,” the “war on bad eating habits,” the “war on smoking” or the “war on salt?” Wait until this system begets a “war on sexuality” or some such thing. It’s only a matter of time, because in the hands of politicians, it will be unavoidable. There will be no privacy. You will face inevitable judgments if you rely upon government directly or indirectly to meet or mandate the fulfillment of your needs. Sandra Fluke complains that she’s going broke paying for contraception, and that may be the case, but life is full of choices, and it’s time for her to grow up and make them, or sustain the judgments heaped upon her for demanding others carry the burdens those choices impose.
Sandra Fluke is a law student at Georgetown University. Fluke believes it is the duty of insurers to pay for her contraception. Of course, what she really means is that she’s another disgusting little socialist who wants others to carry her burdens. She says she testified in order to shine light on the plight of women who aren’t getting contraceptive coverage through the university. I have a problem with the mandates under Obamacare, and the one that will require religious institutions to provide contraceptive coverage through health-care insurance policies they provide to employees is at the center of this issue. On Wednesday, Rush Limbaugh commented on Fluke’s testimony, asking what kind of woman demands payment for her to have sex.
While Rush was making a play on words, it’s still the fact that at the root of this, there is an undeniable truth. First, let’s hear from Rush Limbaugh on Thursday:
Yes, Rush is his usual, combative self, but let’s examine the thought behind the sentiment: Rush is saying that Ms. Fluke ought to pay for her own contraception, because otherwise, what she is doing is to make her sex life, and the sex lives of her fellow students a matter for public review. You can’t demand the public subsidize your “reproductive health” and not expect some sort of public denunciations or judgments. You simply can’t. The complaint that Fluke expresses is that this isn’t fair, because male students don’t face a similar burden. Don’t they? If they don’t, whose fault is that? I do not understand the illogical claim of some, and Fluke is one of them, that they simultaneously don’t want government in their bedrooms, but do want them to fully furnish it for them. I don’t want to hear about the relatively small number of women who actually need contraceptive pills for some therapeutic purpose, because just like in the abortion argument, and the questions regarding exceptions for rape and incest, the exception must not be the aim of the rule.
The answer here is clear: Keep your contraception private, and it will remain private. Contraception for that purpose is not healthcare. It’s contraception. I don’t care about Fluke’s sexual habits or those of other Georgetown students, but when you sign up to attend a religiously-founded institution, you shouldn’t expect coverage that conflicts with that institution’s firmly-held beliefs. Instead, Fluke is demanding that Obamacare be enforced on Catholic universities. I come back to the warning of Cardinal George, of which I wrote yesterday: If I were the Catholic church, and this law isn’t overturned, I would shut down every hospital, school, and university under that umbrella and take a bulldozer to them, or I would continue as before and refuse to pay the fines. Either way, I would not surrender or wilt before the government on this issue.
In short, if it were up to me, Fluke would be looking for a new venue to finish her studies. The moment people believe that they possess a right to impose costs on others, or force them to suspend their adherence to their own beliefs, a line has been crossed. Fluke has no right to an education, and no right to contraception at the expense of others, either in cash, or in terms of quashing their beliefs. This is one more reason why the law known as Obamacare must be overturned. Limbaugh offered to buy her all the aspirin she needs, but I think we should let nature run its course. She has no right to expect nature to be suspended on her behalf, and yet that is the actual aim of her testimony. In the end, what Fluke demands is a government gun aimed at religious institutions to compel them to provide the coverage she wants. That’s socialism, and in the end, this is really the heart of the matter.
I have long held the position that statists wish to supplant the church and its influence in the lives of people with its own authority, and to do so, the institutional left seeks to displace religion from the lives of Americans because this will enable them to pour government into the vacuum. The latest controversy over the Obamacare mandates on religious institutions to provide contraception coverage in their health care insurance policies was thought to be just another ill-considered political decision from which the Obama administration would ultimately retreat. That retreat has been only rhetorical as Obama’s dictatorial policy remains in place. This isn’t political ineptitude, but statists’ calculations: The Obama administration knows that this attack on the Catholic church and Christianity generally will result in the wholesale elimination of religiously-oriented institutions. That’s what they’re after, and that’s what they’ll get, as the seek to push people even further from religion in order to make more room for the growth of an aggressive and overpowering state.
Hot Air posted an article on this, and I think it should give us pause, because it speaks to the motivations of those who are forcing these policies upon religious institutions, and what their real goal might be. They aren’t worried that the Catholic charities, hospitals, and schools(including universities) will perhaps cease to operate, due to matters of conscience because they fully expect them to do so. Francis Cardinal George of the archdiocese of Chicago sent a message to parishioners and its contents demonstrate the point:
“Two Lents from now,” Cardinal George warned, “unless something changes, the page [listing Catholic organizations] will be blank.”
The Cardinal didn’t stop there. He went on to describe the choices with which the church will be confronted:
Secularize itself, breaking its connection to the church, her moral and social teachings and the oversight of its ministry by the local bishop. This is a form of theft. It means the church will not be permitted to have an institutional voice in public life.
Pay exorbitant annual fines to avoid paying for insurance policies that cover abortifacient drugs, artificial contraception and sterilization. This is not economically sustainable.
Sell the institution to a non-Catholic group or to a local government.
Close down.
This is telling, and you can already see the hand-writing on the wall. The Catholic church will not be able to take steps 1 or 2, so they will instead be compelled to follow steps 3 or 4. What will that accomplish? Simply put, it will demolish their employees, their institutions, and will further serve to separate Catholics from their church. This is not accidental, but instead a long-sought goal of the institutional left that has been seeking to drive all religion out of our society. This move will force a retreat of the church into the physical buildings that bear the same description.
The truth is that the church, any church, is not a matter of buildings. It is as large and widespread as its adherents, and this is the secret to what the Obama administration and his thugs of the left are really after: They will confine the church to church grounds, but force the church out of the public sphere altogether. Whether you’re a Catholic, or a member of any other faith, you’ve just been served notice that your church is no longer welcome in the public square except on conditions to be established, enforced, and dictated by government.
Of course, Cardinal George is well aware of this fact, and it’s with sadness I report to you his conclusion from his letter to his parishioners, and if you are a person of faith, you had better pay attention, because whether you are a Catholic or not, he’s speaking to you. All of you:
“The provision of health care should not demand “giving up” religious liberty. Liberty of religion is more than freedom of worship. Freedom of worship was guaranteed in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union. You could go to church, if you could find one. The church, however, could do nothing except conduct religious rites in places of worship-no schools, religious publications, health care institutions, organized charity, ministry for justice and the works of mercy that flow naturally from a living faith. All of these were co-opted by the government. We fought a long cold war to defeat that vision of society.”
“The strangest accusation in this manipulated public discussion has the bishops not respecting the separation between church and state. The bishops would love to have the separation between church and state we thought we enjoyed just a few months ago, when we were free to run Catholic institutions in conformity with the demands of the Catholic faith, when the government couldn’t tell us which of our ministries are Catholic and which not, when the law protected rather than crushed conscience. The state is making itself into a church. The bishops didn’t begin this dismaying conflict nor choose its timing. We would love to have it ended as quickly as possible. It’s up to the government to stop the attack.”(emphasis added)
When you consider what the Cardinal is saying, its importance must not be ignored. He’s issuing you a warning, but he’s also telling you the resolution. The government is doing this. Who runs the government? You do. You have it in your power to stop this. You can stop this in November. You can stop this by refusing. You can. You can stop this with a vote. If you’re not Catholic, you’re not exempt from any of this, or the effect it will have on your church, mosque, synagogue or temple. There are no exemptions, because if the Obama administration can successfully drive the Catholic church out, by the far the single largest religious institution in the country, with as many as one in six hospital beds in the country under its umbrella, what will your relatively less influential institution of faith do in response? How will you hold back the government?
Here in the Bible belt of Texas, there are relatively fewer Catholics, but there is a vast diversity of small churches with tiny congregations that are all under threat by this move against religion. As people of faith, you had better understand that this isn’t a war on the Catholic church isn’t due to an anti-Catholic bias, but instead a war on all religion as an obstacle to the supremacy of the state. The institutional left isn’t out to slap the Catholic church in a political move for the sake of some radical, loud-mouthed supporters as has been supposed. They are taking steps to chase churches out of the public square, the private sphere, and eventually out of existence. This is the purpose, and if you blind yourself with the faulty notion that this is about Catholics, or about contraception, you’re setting yourself up for slavery, because whereas churches must solicit donations from you to support their various social causes, the government will instead only demand payment at gunpoint. There will be no choice, and there will be no conscience but that which they dictate it to be.
We’ve heard a good bit about what the 2,700 pages of Obamacare holds in store for the American people, but I’m not sure you will have known all of these details. This video is astonishingly detailed, and if you haven’t seen it before, taking the ten minutes necessary to view it will certainly be an eye-opening affair for those of you who’ve not seen this. Suffice it to say that if this isn’t repealed, we’re going to lose all of our liberties, and with it, the entire country. Take the time to watch this. If you weren’t worried about healthcare before, you will be afterwards:
I don’t know you well enough to give you even the most vaguely intimate details of my life. Why do you want them? I don’t love you, and you don’t love me, so why can’t you let me be? Why is my contract in employment any of your business? If my employer is happy, and I’m happy, apart from the fact that you’re already taxing both to death, why do you need to know how much I earn per hour, or anything of the sort? Why are you involved in the question of my health insurance? Not only do you wish to decide whether I will buy health insurance, but also what it will cover. Note to jack-boots: I’m a forty-something man married to a forty-something woman and we’re not interested in contraceptive coverage.
Why will my health-insurer be forced to cover it? Florescent lighting gives me a headache. CFL’s particularly are the bane of my existence. Why may I not choose what kind of light-bulb I will purchase? I don’t mind paying extra for the slight difference in efficiency. Why must I be condemned to a life of headaches triggered by these lights, just to suit you?
Of course, you’re not satisfied with this, are you? Hardly. You don’t want me to buy weapons, but to the degree you permit it, you don’t want me to buy too many at once, and you want gun stores to report me if I buy more than one at a time. Why? Are you afraid I’ll arm a gang of Narco-terrorists with them? Like you did? Of course, since we’re speaking of terrorism, let’s cover your general ineptitude. You want to scan Granny’s wheelchair, but you refuse to “profile.” Why? Profiling has been a crime-fighting technique for generations because it works. Why is it that you’re willing to subject women to body-scanning abuse by some of your pervert agents? Will you treat my wife that way? My adult daughter? What makes you think we’re chattel for your amusement?
Speaking of our children, you now seem to believe it’s your business what we pack in our kids’ school lunches. Why is it that elected officials believe that their busy-body spouses should have any say-so in what we eat or drink, or don’t? We didn’t elect them, but even if we had, why do you believe it’s any of your business? You don’t buy my food. You don’t prepare it. You don’t feed my children, so when you explain to me how you’re seizing my kid’s lunch to be replaced by such meals as you deem suitable, are you confused as to why I might be upset?
As all of this grows and grows, I have begun to wonder if you’re even aware of how sick of you I have become. If you were a person, I would charge you with theft, stalking, harassment, and torture. Since you do all of this under color of your official authority, you also do it at the point of a gun. I wanted you to know this, and to know that I no longer consent. You are in violation of the constitution that acts as the social contract between and among us. You have taken on the role of dictator, and frankly, I’m not interested in being your servant since our compact declares that you will be mine. I don’t want anything from you. I don’t want a single commodity. My state and local governments are going to receive the same talking-to, but since I know you are arrogant and no longer believe you need listen, I’m going to make this explicit: Leave me alone. I don’t want your hand-outs. I don’t want your iron fist. I don’t want anything but those limited purposes for which you were created: Defend the country against foreign enemies and domestic criminals, and act as an objective arbiters in our own domestic squabbles. You have no other legitimate purpose.
Here we go. I published an article earlier this morning, and here’s a piece of video that perfectly demonstrates my point. This sort of nonsense must be stopped, and we must be the generation who stops it, or our country is finished. It starts with defining the concept of “rights,” and this ACLU basket-case is a perfect case study in how the left discards actual liberties in the name of concocted ones. Listen to what this twit says, and recognize, given what I posted earlier, what she is really doing here. It’s vile and disgusting, and the ACLU is moving from merely Anti-American to criminally complicit in the overthrow of our constitution.
As it now turns out, back in 2005 when Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he forced religious institutions including Catholic hospitals to dispense the so-called “morning after pill.” This is another bit of evidence as to how Mitt really isn’t a conservative, and how he really doesn’t care about religious liberties. I am exhausted with his posturing as a saintly man who abides his faith, but to put his stamp of approval on a law that deprives others of their recourse to conscience is a disgusting breach of the the Constitution. I don’t care to hear his pathetic states’ rights arguments, as they don’t apply in this situation, irrespective of his nonsense to the contrary. There’s something fundamentally wrong with a politician who thinks it’s his role to shove such provisions down our throats, irrespective of our wishes, and irrespective of the matters of conscience that collide in these issues. He’s only too happy to command you.
This bit of information merely confirms the worst of my fears about Romney: He’s not merely Obama-Lite. He’s Obama with an “R” next to his name instead of a “D.” This sort of state interference with the rights of religious practice and conscience is precisely the sort of monstrosity people of faith have suffered endlessly under the Obama regime. We shouldn’t be in the business of nominating a candidate who is substantially more like Obama than unlike him. I hope my fellow conservatives and Tea Party folk will understand that this isn’t merely about abortion, or morning-after pills, or anything else of the sort. This is entirely about the ability of people of faith and the organizations they create around their shared faith to determine for themselves in which activities they will participate.
This is precisely the same thing Obama is now doing with respect to the coercion of religious organizations, including the Catholic church, to provide insurance to employees that includes contraception. Once again, government is interfering in the relationship between employers and employees, and their insurers. This is a scandalously tyrannical abuse of authority, and the fact that Mitt Romney participated in much the same thing disqualify him in my view. Whatever your views on the divisive issues, there can be no ignoring that even if it is not your faith under attack in this case, your turn will come eventually.
I cannot now and will not ever vote for Mitt Romney under any circumstances I can now imagine, and I can imagine plenty. Feel free to make of that what you will. In fact, make the most of it, but I will not be bullied on the matter. That he actually imposed such a thing on the people of Massachusetts is simply unforgivable in my book. I will have no part in merely replacing Barack Obama with another who shares his despotic reflexes.
I’ve been watching the latest uproar over the Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Planned Parenthood flap, and I’ve been wondering how long it would be until the Komen group back-tracked and started to retrace its steps back to the left. You see, I’ve known about this group for many years, and once had some involvement with it when a dear friend of mine, a fellow college student, was stricken with breast cancer and all that comes after. She was the wife of a soldier, and the mother of three children, and in her mid-thirties, she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. She underwent surgery and chemotherapy, and went through all the trauma in her life and with her family associated with the disease, but ultimately, five years after she had first screened clear of cancer following her treatment, the cancer was back with a vengeance and in the space of two years, she was gone.
It was in this context that I first became aware of the Komen foundation, and it was not long after that my friend became aware of their ties to Planned Parenthood. Like many Christians, she was appalled, and she decided to look for other ways to help the cause to which she was now tied. It’s a dilemma many Christians have faced, as they wish to contribute to the search for a cure to breast cancer, but like so many good causes, there are often back-side politics not viewable by the public. This week, when the Komen outfit announced that it would no longer give money to Planned Parenthood, they said they were doing so because that organization is under investigation, but I knew when they said that they would soon backtrack as the abortion profiteers at Planned Parenthood wouldn’t be able to let it go easily.
The problem is this, and I think it’s no more difficult than this: The Komen outfit needs to disentangle itself from Planned Parenthood. There are too many other paths available to mammogram screenings without relying on Planned Parenthood, an organization which now turns out, contrary to what was said in the press earlier Friday, does not provide mammography at any of their facilities, but merely refers women to places that do. Part of the controversy arises because the Susan G Komen folks have not been forthcoming all along. I remember when my friend discovered that Komen was sending some money to Planned Parenthood, and she was disappointed to say the least. Her question to me at the time had been: “Why would they drag this ugly political issue with such profound moral implications into what should be a straight-forward pursuit of a cure for Breast Cancer?”
It’s true, and I think it’s a good question that Komen for the Cure should be asked. After all, Planned Parenthood is not specialist in breast cancer, whatever they may claim, and it’s outlandish and foolish for Komen to maintain this relationship. When they first announced their withdrawal of financial grants to Planned Parenthood, their donations soared. This should give you some idea of how many people have withheld their support due to the politicization of the Foundation by virtue of the inclusion of funds to Planned Parenthood. Too many people have sincere questions of conscience with the divisive issue that is abortion to simply ignore the funding of Planned Parenthood. If Komen was institutionally smart, they’d run from Planned Parenthood, but of course, they will not, and now they are clearly going back on the issue.
They point to three clinics at which mammograms are done, but as the story at BigJournalism.com demonstrates, there are no mammography facilities at those clinics, and they simply refer women on to other facilities. Surely, Komen could do this without the abortion provider as a middle-man. This entire episode will wind up causing more trouble for Komen, and it’s sad, because they do some tremendous work, but they should take greater care not to cause some to abstain from involvement. This entire episode does more to ultimately hurt their cause than to help it, and knowing the suffering so many women face as a result of this horrendous disease, I can’t imagine why they would continue to do anything that would hinder their pursuit of a cure, but now it seems rather than serving the interests of their noble cause, they are instead buckling to the radical Planned Parenthood. People of faith who care deeply about the search for a cure to breast cancer are right to wonder about their organizational priorities.
Just a short while ago, I was retrieving a fresh cup of coffee, and I happened to hear something on the television that caused me to do a double-take. FoxNews was on and America’s New Headquarters had a contributor on to talk about obesity in America, and the fact that obesity and even the classification “overweight” seem to have plateaued in the country. The doctor, from Mt. Sinai in New York, a David Samadi, was discussing the implications of the new study showing this plateau. The thing that caught my attention was not so much the discussion of obesity, but what this idiotic doctor was prescribing: He wants new taxes, for instance, a “soda tax,” and he wants to reduce the number of fast-food outlets in the country. Excuse me? Physician, heal thyself! This is the nature of the stories even allegedly “conservative” news outlets like FoxNews cover when most of us aren’t watching, and it almost always leans in the direction of socialism.
Let me say from the outset that like many Americans, I could stand to eat Five Guys burgers somewhat less frequently, but let me also suggest that it is none of this doctor’s business what I eat or drink, where I eat it or drink it, and most of all whether I am taxed for so doing. Samadi’s view seems to be that he can issue prescriptions for three-hundred-million people, never having examined more than a few hands-full of them. More, since he has no such authority or power or the ability to control, he exhorts government to do so on behalf of his preferred prescription for people the vast majority of whom he has never met, never mind examined or treated. What sort of collectivized thinking permits this arrogant [expletive deleted] to sit there in a television studio and proclaim to all that he has the answers for your life, but that he needs government’s power to coerce and to tax in order to implement them?
There is something wicked about the minds of those who view their fellow men as cattle, to be poked and prodded and driven in a direction that they may not themselves wish to go. It is born of a mindset that does not respect first and foremost the lives and rights of individual people. These people are those who I term “regulators,” who wish to regulate all persons in a given society of which they are members to conform to their view of what is right for all people. Mayor Bloomberg’s various bans on salt or saturated fats in cooking oils are just two examples, but it is the mindset of a tyrant that is troubling in all of this. I don’t need Mayor Bloomberg, Michelle Obama, or Dr. Samadi telling me what to eat, when to eat it, or whether I ought to have access to it at all. It’s simply not their concern. Or is it?
Now we arrive at the meat of this issue, because there is much more than burgers at stake here. What is under examination is not whether they have the authority to control us, but how they derive such authority in the first place. The answer is simple: They rely upon the faulty claims of the notion of “the public health.” You may have noticed that they always portray this as a “public health crisis,” and as an “epidemic,” but this is a lie, and their authority in the matter only arises because of health-care, and the fact that government is the biggest player in that segment of the market. They have routinely positioned the matter in such a way that they can make the claim that by virtue of governmental expenditures in this field, it therefore becomes an issue of public imperative. Worse, by allowing their colossal medical expenditures and controls to grow out of all bounds, you have permitted them to enter this field, and thereby exert control over your breakfast, lunch, dinner, and evening snack besides. More damaging still is the fact that the government is now the largest food provider on the planet. Again, I remind you: We have permitted this.
Here’s a basic rule of nature, and of civilization that the statists know and are now turning in their favor: If you are the provider of a thing, you can decide when to provide it, how to provide, how much of it to provide, and under what conditions you’ll provide it. For instance, if I invite you to my home for a meal, since I am providing it, it is my natural right to determine all the particulars. If you provide me a service without compensation, it is clear that I have no ethical or moral claim with respect to the manner in which you provide it. Only paying customers have any say-so in the matter. The old adage “beggars can’t be choosers” should immediately leap into one’s mind. That simple old adage merely paid homage to that which is self-evident, and yet it is this same concept that has been bent and twisted into the service of the state’s aggressive aggregation of power. The strategy has been to blur the lines. Let’s see if we can reconstruct the approach.
First, we create simultaneously programs to:
Provide food to the poor
Provide health-care to the poor
Provide “health insurance” to the elderly
Do you see how this has mutated? The idle poor are fed, but they are fed rations excessive for a person at hard labor, and we wonder why there is obesity? We then provide these same people health-care, and we wonder why there is a “public health crisis?” Add to this that we simultaneous have a system of health “insurance” for our elderly that further obscures the difference between paying and non-paying, and at the other end of the spectrum, we now have federal food programs in schools, as the manner by which federal funds are dispersed and control exercised.
By exercising control over the disbursement of these commodities and services, the government is essentially putting itself in the position of the provider, and therefore has become the “chooser,” with all the beneficiaries effectively having been rendered “beggars.” Those of us who are paying for this are the real providers, and yet we are now told it is a matter of “human rights” that we do this provisioning. Obamacare is simply the latest in this chain, but it’s hardly the only “improvement” to the system that has been foisted upon us in recent years, with the Bush Medicare Prescription Drugs program added to the mix.
With the government now being the largest payer in the health-care market, you can expect that it will naturally displace market imperatives in the delivery of health-care goods and services, and it will necessarily prioritize that delivery(death panels, for instance,) while reaching into unrelated markets to regulate those things that it will make the case as having some influence over the costs to government.
This then leads to the grotesque spectacle of Dr. Samadi appearing on FoxNews telling us what we can eat, where we can procure it, and what taxes we ought to pay along the way, as the whole miserable assembly comes lurching into plain sight. You can be told what you can eat because you will [eventually] rely upon government to pay for your health-care. The market can be told what it may provide, and how, because the government has an interest in reducing its costs. The tax-payer can be told to shut up about it, since it’s virtually established as some sort of irreducible premise that every person ought to be somehow entitled to that which does not pour from the heavens, but must be obtained by human effort. As you can therefore see, it is inevitable that government has now used this to become a dictator in every important facet of our lives, and all because somewhere along the march from our founding to present, we permitted them to make our needs the means to its ends.
When you consider that this is the sort of thing that is discussed on allegedly conservative media when most of the country isn’t watching, it ought to alert you to the underlying premises of the discussions in media many more of us witness. What we should note is that in most every media outlet, there is a sort of inherent reverence for the state, and for the under-girding foundational constructs of collectivism, and we ought to be very careful not to ignore that these media outlets are fundamentally in favor of it, almost all of them, and widely across the board. It’s easy to dismiss this sort of news story as simple time-fillers on a weekend with no ongoing crisis-bound event on which to report, but I think we should be careful to see that is also a sign of what lies behind the blaring headlines, and it is key to understanding why the country continues to be dragged ceaselessly leftward.
