Thursday, April 29, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Ivanka Trump Bashes Barack Obama
Maybe she is upset and tired of being lectured to by someone who has never held a real job or had to balance a budget and make a payroll, hhhmmm, maybe, or she could just be like the rest of us and wish her dad would get a new haircut.
gm
Sarah Palin Eugene, Oregon Visit, Leftist Behind Protest Revealed
Sarah Palin Eugene, Oregon Visit, Leftist Behind Protest Revealed
Facebook pages for a rally against Sarah Palin visit to Eugene Oregon, and calls for her “deportation”.
A protest sign that say “Hope she chokes” right next to another sign “Eugene: A Hate Free Zone” (ironic and amusing because of the shape of the sign).
My favorite: A sign touting parenting suggestions with poor spelling (classy)
gm
Facebook pages for a rally against Sarah Palin visit to Eugene Oregon, and calls for her “deportation”.
A protest sign that say “Hope she chokes” right next to another sign “Eugene: A Hate Free Zone” (ironic and amusing because of the shape of the sign).
My favorite: A sign touting parenting suggestions with poor spelling (classy)
gm
The Second American Revolution
Aristotle said: “Tolerance is the last virtue of a dying society.”
America is tolerating the behavior that is destroying our country.
gm
Ballad of Timothy Geithner
This woman is awesome! I love the creativity of Americans no matter our situation.
gm
Freedom is the only solution
The only true solution to our current economic and national security situation is true Liberty and Freedom!
gm
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Health Care Is Not A Right (anything worth having is worth paying for)
In today's proposals for sweeping changes in the field of medicine, the term "socialized medicine" is never used. Instead we hear demands for "universal," "mandatory," "single-payer," and/or "comprehensive" systems. These demands aim to force one healthcare plan (sometimes with options) onto all Americans; it is a plan under which all medical services are paid for, and thus controlled, by government agencies. Sometimes, proponents call this "nationalized financing" or "nationalized health insurance." In a more honest day, it was called socialized medicine. -- Lin Zinser
The following was delivered under the auspices of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine at a Town Hall Meeting on Health Care in Costa Mesa, California, on December 11, 1993.
Most people who oppose socialized medicine do so on the grounds that it is moral and well-intentioned, but impractical; i.e., it is a noble idea--which just somehow does not work. I do not agree that socialized medicine is moral and well-intentioned, but impractical. Of course, it is impractical--it does not work--but I hold that it is impractical because it is immoral. This is not a case of noble in theory but a failure in practice; it is a case of vicious in theory and therefore a disaster in practice. I want to focus on the moral issue at stake. So long as people believe that socialized medicine is a noble plan, there is no way to fight it. You cannot stop a noble plan--not if it really is noble. The only way you can defeat it is to unmask it--to show that it is the very opposite of noble. Then at least you have a fighting chance.
What is morality in this context? The American concept of it is officially stated in the Declaration of Independence. It upholds man's unalienable, individual rights. The term "rights," note, is a moral (not just a political) term; it tells us that a certain course of behavior is right, sanctioned, proper, a prerogative to be respected by others, not interfered with--and that anyone who violates a man's rights is: wrong, morally wrong, unsanctioned, evil.
Now our only rights, the American viewpoint continues, are the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. That's all. According to the Founding Fathers, we are not born with a right to a trip to Disneyland, or a meal at McDonald's, or a kidney dialysis (nor with the 18th-century equivalent of these things). We have certain specific rights--and only these.
Why only these? Observe that all legitimate rights have one thing in common: they are rights to action, not to rewards from other people. The American rights impose no obligations on other people, merely the negative obligation to leave you alone. The system guarantees you the chance to work for what you want--not to be given it without effort by somebody else.
The right to life, e.g., does not mean that your neighbors have to feed and clothe you; it means you have the right to earn your food and clothes yourself, if necessary by a hard struggle, and that no one can forcibly stop your struggle for these things or steal them from you if and when you have achieved them. In other words: you have the right to act, and to keep the results of your actions, the products you make, to keep them or to trade them with others, if you wish. But you have no right to the actions or products of others, except on terms to which they voluntarily agree.
To take one more example: the right to the pursuit of happiness is precisely that: the right to the pursuit--to a certain type of action on your part and its result--not to any guarantee that other people will make you happy or even try to do so. Otherwise, there would be no liberty in the country: if your mere desire for something, anything, imposes a duty on other people to satisfy you, then they have no choice in their lives, no say in what they do, they have no liberty, they cannot pursue their happiness. Your "right" to happiness at their expense means that they become rightless serfs, i.e., your slaves. Your right to anything at others' expense means that they become rightless.
That is why the U.S. system defines rights as it does, strictly as the rights to action. This was the approach that made the U.S. the first truly free country in all world history--and, soon afterwards, as a result, the greatest country in history, the richest and the most powerful. It became the most powerful because its view of rights made it the most moral. It was the country of individualism and personal independence.
Today, however, we are seeing the rise of principled immorality in this country. We are seeing a total abandonment by the intellectuals and the politicians of the moral principles on which the U.S. was founded. We are seeing the complete destruction of the concept of rights. The original American idea has been virtually wiped out, ignored as if it had never existed. The rule now is for politicians to ignore and violate men's actual rights, while arguing about a whole list of rights never dreamed of in this country's founding documents--rights which require no earning, no effort, no action at all on the part of the recipient.
You are entitled to something, the politicians say, simply because it exists and you want or need it--period. You are entitled to be given it by the government. Where does the government get it from? What does the government have to do to private citizens--to their individual rights--to their real rights--in order to carry out the promise of showering free services on the people?
The answers are obvious. The newfangled rights wipe out real rights--and turn the people who actually create the goods and services involved into servants of the state. The Russians tried this exact system for many decades. Unfortunately, we have not learned from their experience. Yet the meaning of socialism is clearly evident in any field at all--you don't need to think of health care as a special case; it is just as apparent if the government were to proclaim a universal right to food, or to a vacation, or to a haircut. I mean: a right in the new sense: not that you are free to earn these things by your own effort and trade, but that you have a moral claim to be given these things free of charge, with no action on your part, simply as handouts from a benevolent government.
How would these alleged new rights be fulfilled? Take the simplest case: you are born with a moral right to hair care, let us say, provided by a loving government free of charge to all who want or need it. What would happen under such a moral theory?
Haircuts are free, like the air we breathe, so some people show up every day for an expensive new styling, the government pays out more and more, barbers revel in their huge new incomes, and the profession starts to grow ravenously, bald men start to come in droves for free hair implantations, a school of fancy, specialized eyebrow pluckers develops--it's all free, the government pays. The dishonest barbers are having a field day, of course--but so are the honest ones; they are working and spending like mad, trying to give every customer his heart's desire, which is a millionaire's worth of special hair care and services--the government starts to scream, the budget is out of control. Suddenly directives erupt: we must limit the number of barbers, we must limit the time spent on haircuts, we must limit the permissible type of hair styles; bureaucrats begin to split hairs about how many hairs a barber should be allowed to split. A new computerized office of records filled with inspectors and red tape shoots up; some barbers, it seems, are still getting too rich, they must be getting more than their fair share of the national hair, so barbers have to start applying for Certificates of Need in order to buy razors, while peer review boards are established to assess every stylist's work, both the dishonest and the overly honest alike, to make sure that no one is too bad or too good or too busy or too unbusy. Etc. In the end, there are lines of wretched customers waiting for their chance to be routinely scalped by bored, hog-tied haircutters, some of whom remember dreamily the old days when somehow everything was so much better.
Do you think the situation would be improved by having hair-care cooperatives organized by the government?--having them engage in managed competition, managed by the government, in order to buy haircut insurance from companies controlled by the government?
If this is what would happen under government-managed hair care, what else can possibly happen--it is already starting to happen--under the idea of health care as a right? Health care in the modern world is a complex, scientific, technological service. How can anybody be born with a right to such a thing?
Under the American system you have a right to health care if you can pay for it, i.e., if you can earn it by your own action and effort. But nobody has the right to the services of any professional individual or group simply because he wants them and desperately needs them. The very fact that he needs these services so desperately is the proof that he had better respect the freedom, the integrity, and the rights of the people who provide them.
You have a right to work, not to rob others of the fruits of their work, not to turn others into sacrificial, rightless animals laboring to fulfill your needs.
Some of you may ask here: But can people afford health care on their own? Even leaving aside the present government-inflated medical prices, the answer is: Certainly people can afford it. Where do you think the money is coming from right now to pay for it all--where does the government get its fabled unlimited money? Government is not a productive organization; it has no source of wealth other than confiscation of the citizens' wealth, through taxation, deficit financing or the like.
But, you may say, isn't it the "rich" who are really paying the costs of medical care now--the rich, not the broad bulk of the people? As has been proved time and again, there are not enough rich anywhere to make a dent in the government's costs; it is the vast middle class in the U.S. that is the only source of the kind of money that national programs like government health care require. A simple example of this is the fact that all of these new programs rest squarely on the backs not of Big Business, but of small businessmen who are struggling in today's economy merely to stay alive and in existence. Under any socialized regime, it is the "little people" who do most of the paying for it--under the senseless pretext that "the people" can't afford such and such, so the government must take over. If the people of a country truly couldn't afford a certain service--as e.g. in Somalia--neither, for that very reason, could any government in that country afford it, either.
Some people can't afford medical care in the U.S. But they are necessarily a small minority in a free or even semi-free country. If they were the majority, the country would be an utter bankrupt and could not even think of a national medical program. As to this small minority, in a free country they have to rely solely on private, voluntary charity. Yes, charity, the kindness of the doctors or of the better off--charity, not right, i.e. not their right to the lives or work of others. And such charity, I may say, was always forthcoming in the past in America. The advocates of Medicaid and Medicare under LBJ did not claim that the poor or old in the '60's got bad care; they claimed that it was an affront for anyone to have to depend on charity.
But the fact is: You don't abolish charity by calling it something else. If a person is getting health care for nothing, simply because he is breathing, he is still getting charity, whether or not any politician, lobbyist or activist calls it a "right." To call it a Right when the recipient did not earn it is merely to compound the evil. It is charity still--though now extorted by criminal tactics of force, while hiding under a dishonest name.
As with any good or service that is provided by some specific group of men, if you try to make its possession by all a right, you thereby enslave the providers of the service, wreck the service, and end up depriving the very consumers you are supposed to be helping. To call "medical care" a right will merely enslave the doctors and thus destroy the quality of medical care in this country, as socialized medicine has done around the world, wherever it has been tried, including Canada (I was born in Canada and I know a bit about that system first hand).
I would like to clarify the point about socialized medicine enslaving the doctors. Let me quote here from an article I wrote a few years ago: "Medicine: The Death of a Profession."
"In medicine, above all, the mind must be left free. Medical treatment involves countless variables and options that must be taken into account, weighed, and summed up by the doctor's mind and subconscious. Your life depends on the private, inner essence of the doctor's function: it depends on the input that enters his brain, and on the processing such input receives from him. What is being thrust now into the equation? It is not only objective medical facts any longer. Today, in one form or another, the following also has to enter that brain: 'The DRG administrator [in effect, the hospital or HMO man trying to control costs] will raise hell if I operate, but the malpractice attorney will have a field day if I don't--and my rival down the street, who heads the local PRO [Peer Review Organization], favors a CAT scan in these cases, I can't afford to antagonize him, but the CON boys disagree and they won't authorize a CAT scanner for our hospital--and besides the FDA prohibits the drug I should be prescribing, even though it is widely used in Europe, and the IRS might not allow the patient a tax deduction for it, anyhow, and I can't get a specialist's advice because the latest Medicare rules prohibit a consultation with this diagnosis, and maybe I shouldn't even take this patient, he's so sick--after all, some doctors are manipulating their slate of patients, they accept only the healthiest ones, so their average costs are coming in lower than mine, and it looks bad for my staff privileges.' Would you like your case to be treated this way--by a doctor who takes into account your objective medical needs and the contradictory, unintelligible demands of some ninety different state and Federal government agencies? If you were a doctor could you comply with all of it? Could you plan or work around or deal with the unknowable? But how could you not? Those agencies are real and they are rapidly gaining total power over you and your mind and your patients.
In this kind of nightmare world, if and when it takes hold fully, thought is helpless; no one can decide by rational means what to do. A doctor either obeys the loudest authority--or he tries to sneak by unnoticed, bootlegging some good health care occasionally or, as so many are doing now, he simply gives up and quits the field." (The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, NAL Books, 1988, pp. 306-307)
Any mandatory and comprehensive plan will finish off quality medicine in this country--because it will finish off the medical profession. It will deliver doctors bound hands and feet to the mercies of the bureaucracy.
The only hope--for the doctors, for their patients, for all of us--is for the doctors to assert a moral principle. I mean: to assert their own personal individual rights--their real rights in this issue--their right to their lives, their liberty, their property, their pursuit of happiness. The Declaration of Independence applies to the medical profession too. We must reject the idea that doctors are slaves destined to serve others at the behest of the state.
Doctors, Ayn Rand wrote, are not servants of their patients. They are "traders, like everyone else in a free society, and they should bear that title proudly, considering the crucial importance of the services they offer."
The battle against socialized medicine depends on the doctors speaking out against it--not only on practical grounds, but, first of all, on moral grounds. The doctors must defend themselves and their own interests as a matter of solemn justice, upholding a moral principle, the first moral principle: self-preservation.
14 August 2009 Leonard Peikoff in Capitalism Magazine
Leonard Peikoff Dr. Peikoff was associate editor, with Ayn Rand, of The Objectivist and The Ayn Rand Letter (1971-76). He is author of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. He is founder of the Ayn Rand Institute.
The following was delivered under the auspices of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine at a Town Hall Meeting on Health Care in Costa Mesa, California, on December 11, 1993.
Most people who oppose socialized medicine do so on the grounds that it is moral and well-intentioned, but impractical; i.e., it is a noble idea--which just somehow does not work. I do not agree that socialized medicine is moral and well-intentioned, but impractical. Of course, it is impractical--it does not work--but I hold that it is impractical because it is immoral. This is not a case of noble in theory but a failure in practice; it is a case of vicious in theory and therefore a disaster in practice. I want to focus on the moral issue at stake. So long as people believe that socialized medicine is a noble plan, there is no way to fight it. You cannot stop a noble plan--not if it really is noble. The only way you can defeat it is to unmask it--to show that it is the very opposite of noble. Then at least you have a fighting chance.
What is morality in this context? The American concept of it is officially stated in the Declaration of Independence. It upholds man's unalienable, individual rights. The term "rights," note, is a moral (not just a political) term; it tells us that a certain course of behavior is right, sanctioned, proper, a prerogative to be respected by others, not interfered with--and that anyone who violates a man's rights is: wrong, morally wrong, unsanctioned, evil.
Now our only rights, the American viewpoint continues, are the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. That's all. According to the Founding Fathers, we are not born with a right to a trip to Disneyland, or a meal at McDonald's, or a kidney dialysis (nor with the 18th-century equivalent of these things). We have certain specific rights--and only these.
Why only these? Observe that all legitimate rights have one thing in common: they are rights to action, not to rewards from other people. The American rights impose no obligations on other people, merely the negative obligation to leave you alone. The system guarantees you the chance to work for what you want--not to be given it without effort by somebody else.
The right to life, e.g., does not mean that your neighbors have to feed and clothe you; it means you have the right to earn your food and clothes yourself, if necessary by a hard struggle, and that no one can forcibly stop your struggle for these things or steal them from you if and when you have achieved them. In other words: you have the right to act, and to keep the results of your actions, the products you make, to keep them or to trade them with others, if you wish. But you have no right to the actions or products of others, except on terms to which they voluntarily agree.
To take one more example: the right to the pursuit of happiness is precisely that: the right to the pursuit--to a certain type of action on your part and its result--not to any guarantee that other people will make you happy or even try to do so. Otherwise, there would be no liberty in the country: if your mere desire for something, anything, imposes a duty on other people to satisfy you, then they have no choice in their lives, no say in what they do, they have no liberty, they cannot pursue their happiness. Your "right" to happiness at their expense means that they become rightless serfs, i.e., your slaves. Your right to anything at others' expense means that they become rightless.
That is why the U.S. system defines rights as it does, strictly as the rights to action. This was the approach that made the U.S. the first truly free country in all world history--and, soon afterwards, as a result, the greatest country in history, the richest and the most powerful. It became the most powerful because its view of rights made it the most moral. It was the country of individualism and personal independence.
Today, however, we are seeing the rise of principled immorality in this country. We are seeing a total abandonment by the intellectuals and the politicians of the moral principles on which the U.S. was founded. We are seeing the complete destruction of the concept of rights. The original American idea has been virtually wiped out, ignored as if it had never existed. The rule now is for politicians to ignore and violate men's actual rights, while arguing about a whole list of rights never dreamed of in this country's founding documents--rights which require no earning, no effort, no action at all on the part of the recipient.
You are entitled to something, the politicians say, simply because it exists and you want or need it--period. You are entitled to be given it by the government. Where does the government get it from? What does the government have to do to private citizens--to their individual rights--to their real rights--in order to carry out the promise of showering free services on the people?
The answers are obvious. The newfangled rights wipe out real rights--and turn the people who actually create the goods and services involved into servants of the state. The Russians tried this exact system for many decades. Unfortunately, we have not learned from their experience. Yet the meaning of socialism is clearly evident in any field at all--you don't need to think of health care as a special case; it is just as apparent if the government were to proclaim a universal right to food, or to a vacation, or to a haircut. I mean: a right in the new sense: not that you are free to earn these things by your own effort and trade, but that you have a moral claim to be given these things free of charge, with no action on your part, simply as handouts from a benevolent government.
How would these alleged new rights be fulfilled? Take the simplest case: you are born with a moral right to hair care, let us say, provided by a loving government free of charge to all who want or need it. What would happen under such a moral theory?
Haircuts are free, like the air we breathe, so some people show up every day for an expensive new styling, the government pays out more and more, barbers revel in their huge new incomes, and the profession starts to grow ravenously, bald men start to come in droves for free hair implantations, a school of fancy, specialized eyebrow pluckers develops--it's all free, the government pays. The dishonest barbers are having a field day, of course--but so are the honest ones; they are working and spending like mad, trying to give every customer his heart's desire, which is a millionaire's worth of special hair care and services--the government starts to scream, the budget is out of control. Suddenly directives erupt: we must limit the number of barbers, we must limit the time spent on haircuts, we must limit the permissible type of hair styles; bureaucrats begin to split hairs about how many hairs a barber should be allowed to split. A new computerized office of records filled with inspectors and red tape shoots up; some barbers, it seems, are still getting too rich, they must be getting more than their fair share of the national hair, so barbers have to start applying for Certificates of Need in order to buy razors, while peer review boards are established to assess every stylist's work, both the dishonest and the overly honest alike, to make sure that no one is too bad or too good or too busy or too unbusy. Etc. In the end, there are lines of wretched customers waiting for their chance to be routinely scalped by bored, hog-tied haircutters, some of whom remember dreamily the old days when somehow everything was so much better.
Do you think the situation would be improved by having hair-care cooperatives organized by the government?--having them engage in managed competition, managed by the government, in order to buy haircut insurance from companies controlled by the government?
If this is what would happen under government-managed hair care, what else can possibly happen--it is already starting to happen--under the idea of health care as a right? Health care in the modern world is a complex, scientific, technological service. How can anybody be born with a right to such a thing?
Under the American system you have a right to health care if you can pay for it, i.e., if you can earn it by your own action and effort. But nobody has the right to the services of any professional individual or group simply because he wants them and desperately needs them. The very fact that he needs these services so desperately is the proof that he had better respect the freedom, the integrity, and the rights of the people who provide them.
You have a right to work, not to rob others of the fruits of their work, not to turn others into sacrificial, rightless animals laboring to fulfill your needs.
Some of you may ask here: But can people afford health care on their own? Even leaving aside the present government-inflated medical prices, the answer is: Certainly people can afford it. Where do you think the money is coming from right now to pay for it all--where does the government get its fabled unlimited money? Government is not a productive organization; it has no source of wealth other than confiscation of the citizens' wealth, through taxation, deficit financing or the like.
But, you may say, isn't it the "rich" who are really paying the costs of medical care now--the rich, not the broad bulk of the people? As has been proved time and again, there are not enough rich anywhere to make a dent in the government's costs; it is the vast middle class in the U.S. that is the only source of the kind of money that national programs like government health care require. A simple example of this is the fact that all of these new programs rest squarely on the backs not of Big Business, but of small businessmen who are struggling in today's economy merely to stay alive and in existence. Under any socialized regime, it is the "little people" who do most of the paying for it--under the senseless pretext that "the people" can't afford such and such, so the government must take over. If the people of a country truly couldn't afford a certain service--as e.g. in Somalia--neither, for that very reason, could any government in that country afford it, either.
Some people can't afford medical care in the U.S. But they are necessarily a small minority in a free or even semi-free country. If they were the majority, the country would be an utter bankrupt and could not even think of a national medical program. As to this small minority, in a free country they have to rely solely on private, voluntary charity. Yes, charity, the kindness of the doctors or of the better off--charity, not right, i.e. not their right to the lives or work of others. And such charity, I may say, was always forthcoming in the past in America. The advocates of Medicaid and Medicare under LBJ did not claim that the poor or old in the '60's got bad care; they claimed that it was an affront for anyone to have to depend on charity.
But the fact is: You don't abolish charity by calling it something else. If a person is getting health care for nothing, simply because he is breathing, he is still getting charity, whether or not any politician, lobbyist or activist calls it a "right." To call it a Right when the recipient did not earn it is merely to compound the evil. It is charity still--though now extorted by criminal tactics of force, while hiding under a dishonest name.
As with any good or service that is provided by some specific group of men, if you try to make its possession by all a right, you thereby enslave the providers of the service, wreck the service, and end up depriving the very consumers you are supposed to be helping. To call "medical care" a right will merely enslave the doctors and thus destroy the quality of medical care in this country, as socialized medicine has done around the world, wherever it has been tried, including Canada (I was born in Canada and I know a bit about that system first hand).
I would like to clarify the point about socialized medicine enslaving the doctors. Let me quote here from an article I wrote a few years ago: "Medicine: The Death of a Profession."
"In medicine, above all, the mind must be left free. Medical treatment involves countless variables and options that must be taken into account, weighed, and summed up by the doctor's mind and subconscious. Your life depends on the private, inner essence of the doctor's function: it depends on the input that enters his brain, and on the processing such input receives from him. What is being thrust now into the equation? It is not only objective medical facts any longer. Today, in one form or another, the following also has to enter that brain: 'The DRG administrator [in effect, the hospital or HMO man trying to control costs] will raise hell if I operate, but the malpractice attorney will have a field day if I don't--and my rival down the street, who heads the local PRO [Peer Review Organization], favors a CAT scan in these cases, I can't afford to antagonize him, but the CON boys disagree and they won't authorize a CAT scanner for our hospital--and besides the FDA prohibits the drug I should be prescribing, even though it is widely used in Europe, and the IRS might not allow the patient a tax deduction for it, anyhow, and I can't get a specialist's advice because the latest Medicare rules prohibit a consultation with this diagnosis, and maybe I shouldn't even take this patient, he's so sick--after all, some doctors are manipulating their slate of patients, they accept only the healthiest ones, so their average costs are coming in lower than mine, and it looks bad for my staff privileges.' Would you like your case to be treated this way--by a doctor who takes into account your objective medical needs and the contradictory, unintelligible demands of some ninety different state and Federal government agencies? If you were a doctor could you comply with all of it? Could you plan or work around or deal with the unknowable? But how could you not? Those agencies are real and they are rapidly gaining total power over you and your mind and your patients.
In this kind of nightmare world, if and when it takes hold fully, thought is helpless; no one can decide by rational means what to do. A doctor either obeys the loudest authority--or he tries to sneak by unnoticed, bootlegging some good health care occasionally or, as so many are doing now, he simply gives up and quits the field." (The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, NAL Books, 1988, pp. 306-307)
Any mandatory and comprehensive plan will finish off quality medicine in this country--because it will finish off the medical profession. It will deliver doctors bound hands and feet to the mercies of the bureaucracy.
The only hope--for the doctors, for their patients, for all of us--is for the doctors to assert a moral principle. I mean: to assert their own personal individual rights--their real rights in this issue--their right to their lives, their liberty, their property, their pursuit of happiness. The Declaration of Independence applies to the medical profession too. We must reject the idea that doctors are slaves destined to serve others at the behest of the state.
Doctors, Ayn Rand wrote, are not servants of their patients. They are "traders, like everyone else in a free society, and they should bear that title proudly, considering the crucial importance of the services they offer."
The battle against socialized medicine depends on the doctors speaking out against it--not only on practical grounds, but, first of all, on moral grounds. The doctors must defend themselves and their own interests as a matter of solemn justice, upholding a moral principle, the first moral principle: self-preservation.
14 August 2009 Leonard Peikoff in Capitalism Magazine
Leonard Peikoff Dr. Peikoff was associate editor, with Ayn Rand, of The Objectivist and The Ayn Rand Letter (1971-76). He is author of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. He is founder of the Ayn Rand Institute.
Obama Admin Buried Report on Cost of ObamaCare Until After Vote
Whoa! That report from the Medicare actuaries released last week that concluded ObamaCare would raise premiums? The Obama Administration had it a week before the final vote...and sat on it:
The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama's health care "reform" law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius's staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.
"The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote," says an HHS source. "Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think."
Apparently, copies of the report were sent to Sebelius and to the White House.
So in addition to midnight votes and bribes to reluctant Congressmen, the Obama folks sat on government reports, reports that the taxpayers paid for, which would have shined a light on the President's healthcare reform lies. And that's what they were. He can't plead ignorance. His own actuaries were telling him it would raise premiums while he was going on TV and saying the opposite.
Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 12:22 AM on Ace of Spades
The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama's health care "reform" law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius's staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.
"The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote," says an HHS source. "Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think."
Apparently, copies of the report were sent to Sebelius and to the White House.
So in addition to midnight votes and bribes to reluctant Congressmen, the Obama folks sat on government reports, reports that the taxpayers paid for, which would have shined a light on the President's healthcare reform lies. And that's what they were. He can't plead ignorance. His own actuaries were telling him it would raise premiums while he was going on TV and saying the opposite.
Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 12:22 AM on Ace of Spades
My Name Is...
Everything you need to know about perseverance (minus a little alcoholism) you can learn from Inigo Montoya.
gm
Whose country is this?
Posted: April 26, 2010
8:51 pm Eastern
By Patrick J. Buchanan
With the support of 70 percent of its citizens, Arizona has ordered sheriffs and police to secure the border and remove illegal aliens, half a million of whom now reside there.
Arizona acted because the U.S. government has abdicated its constitutional duty to protect the states from invasion and refuses to enforce America's immigration laws.
"We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Washington to act," said Gov. Jan Brewer. "But decades of inaction and misguided policy have created an unacceptable situation."
We have a crisis in Arizona because we have a failed state in Washington.
What is the response of Barack Obama, who took an oath to see to it that federal laws are faithfully executed?
He is siding with the law-breakers. He is pandering to the ethnic lobbies. He is not berating a Mexican regime that aids and abets this invasion of the country of which he is commander in chief. Instead, he attacks the government of Arizona for trying to fill a gaping hole in law enforcement left by his own dereliction of duty.
He has denounced Arizona as "misguided." He has called on the Justice Department to ensure that Arizona's sheriffs and police do not violate anyone's civil rights. But he has said nothing about the rights of the people of Arizona who must deal with the costs of having hundreds of thousands of lawbreakers in their midst.
How's that for Andrew Jackson-style leadership?
Obama has done everything but his duty to enforce the law.
Undeniably, making it a state as well as a federal crime to be in this country illegally, and requiring police to check the immigration status of anyone they have a "reasonable suspicion" is here illegally, is tough and burdensome. But what choice did Arizona have?
The state has a fiscal crisis caused in part by the burden of providing schooling and social welfare for illegals and their families, who consume far more in services than they pay in taxes and who continue to pour in. Even John McCain is now calling for 3,000 troops on the border.
Police officers and a prominent rancher have been murdered. There have been kidnappings believed to be tied to the Mexican drug cartels. There are nightly high-speed chases through the barrios where innocent people are constantly at risk.
If Arizona does not get control of the border and stop the invasion, U.S. citizens will stop coming to Arizona and will begin to depart, as they are already fleeing California.
What we are talking about here is the Balkanization and breakup of a nation into ethnic enclaves. A country that cannot control its borders isn't really a country anymore, Ronald Reagan reminded us.
The tasks that Arizonans are themselves undertaking are ones that belong by right, the Constitution and federal law to the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Homeland Security.
Arizona has been compelled to assume the feds' role because the feds won't do their job. And for that dereliction of duty the buck stops on the desk of the president of the United States.
Why is Obama paralyzed? Why does he not enforce the law, even if he dislikes it, by punishing the businessmen who hire illegals and by sending the 12 million to 20 million illegals back home? President Eisenhower did it. Why won't he?
Because he is politically correct. Because he owes a big debt to the Hispanic lobby that helped deliver two-thirds of that vote in 2008. Though most citizens of Hispanic descent in Arizona want the border protected and the laws enforced, the Hispanic lobby demands that the law be changed.
Fair enough. But the nation rose up as one to reject the "path-to-citizenship" – i.e., amnesty – that the 2007 plan of George W. Bush, McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama envisioned.
Al Sharpton threatens to go to Phoenix and march in the streets against the new Arizona law. Let him go.
Let us see how many African-Americans, who are today frozen out of the 8 million jobs held by illegal aliens that might otherwise go to them or their children, will march to defend an invasion for which they are themselves paying the heaviest price.
Last year, while Americans were losing a net of 5 million jobs, the U.S. government – Bush and Obama both – issued 1,131,000 green cards to legal immigrants to come and take the jobs that did open up, a flood of immigrants equaled in only four other years in our history.
What are we doing to our own people?
Whose country is this, anyway?
America today has an establishment that, because it does not like the immigration laws, countenances and condones wholesale violation of those laws.
Nevertheless, under those laws, the U.S. government is obligated to deport illegal aliens and punish businesses that knowingly hire them.
This is not an option. It is an obligation.
Can anyone say Barack Obama is meeting that obligation?
Get the definitive account describing the rebirth of appreciation for liberty across the nation, Whistleblower magazine's "THE GREAT AWAKENING: How tea partiers are setting a new course for America"
8:51 pm Eastern
By Patrick J. Buchanan
With the support of 70 percent of its citizens, Arizona has ordered sheriffs and police to secure the border and remove illegal aliens, half a million of whom now reside there.
Arizona acted because the U.S. government has abdicated its constitutional duty to protect the states from invasion and refuses to enforce America's immigration laws.
"We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Washington to act," said Gov. Jan Brewer. "But decades of inaction and misguided policy have created an unacceptable situation."
We have a crisis in Arizona because we have a failed state in Washington.
What is the response of Barack Obama, who took an oath to see to it that federal laws are faithfully executed?
He is siding with the law-breakers. He is pandering to the ethnic lobbies. He is not berating a Mexican regime that aids and abets this invasion of the country of which he is commander in chief. Instead, he attacks the government of Arizona for trying to fill a gaping hole in law enforcement left by his own dereliction of duty.
He has denounced Arizona as "misguided." He has called on the Justice Department to ensure that Arizona's sheriffs and police do not violate anyone's civil rights. But he has said nothing about the rights of the people of Arizona who must deal with the costs of having hundreds of thousands of lawbreakers in their midst.
How's that for Andrew Jackson-style leadership?
Obama has done everything but his duty to enforce the law.
Undeniably, making it a state as well as a federal crime to be in this country illegally, and requiring police to check the immigration status of anyone they have a "reasonable suspicion" is here illegally, is tough and burdensome. But what choice did Arizona have?
The state has a fiscal crisis caused in part by the burden of providing schooling and social welfare for illegals and their families, who consume far more in services than they pay in taxes and who continue to pour in. Even John McCain is now calling for 3,000 troops on the border.
Police officers and a prominent rancher have been murdered. There have been kidnappings believed to be tied to the Mexican drug cartels. There are nightly high-speed chases through the barrios where innocent people are constantly at risk.
If Arizona does not get control of the border and stop the invasion, U.S. citizens will stop coming to Arizona and will begin to depart, as they are already fleeing California.
What we are talking about here is the Balkanization and breakup of a nation into ethnic enclaves. A country that cannot control its borders isn't really a country anymore, Ronald Reagan reminded us.
The tasks that Arizonans are themselves undertaking are ones that belong by right, the Constitution and federal law to the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Homeland Security.
Arizona has been compelled to assume the feds' role because the feds won't do their job. And for that dereliction of duty the buck stops on the desk of the president of the United States.
Why is Obama paralyzed? Why does he not enforce the law, even if he dislikes it, by punishing the businessmen who hire illegals and by sending the 12 million to 20 million illegals back home? President Eisenhower did it. Why won't he?
Because he is politically correct. Because he owes a big debt to the Hispanic lobby that helped deliver two-thirds of that vote in 2008. Though most citizens of Hispanic descent in Arizona want the border protected and the laws enforced, the Hispanic lobby demands that the law be changed.
Fair enough. But the nation rose up as one to reject the "path-to-citizenship" – i.e., amnesty – that the 2007 plan of George W. Bush, McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama envisioned.
Al Sharpton threatens to go to Phoenix and march in the streets against the new Arizona law. Let him go.
Let us see how many African-Americans, who are today frozen out of the 8 million jobs held by illegal aliens that might otherwise go to them or their children, will march to defend an invasion for which they are themselves paying the heaviest price.
Last year, while Americans were losing a net of 5 million jobs, the U.S. government – Bush and Obama both – issued 1,131,000 green cards to legal immigrants to come and take the jobs that did open up, a flood of immigrants equaled in only four other years in our history.
What are we doing to our own people?
Whose country is this, anyway?
America today has an establishment that, because it does not like the immigration laws, countenances and condones wholesale violation of those laws.
Nevertheless, under those laws, the U.S. government is obligated to deport illegal aliens and punish businesses that knowingly hire them.
This is not an option. It is an obligation.
Can anyone say Barack Obama is meeting that obligation?
Get the definitive account describing the rebirth of appreciation for liberty across the nation, Whistleblower magazine's "THE GREAT AWAKENING: How tea partiers are setting a new course for America"
Thomas Sowell : Filtering History
Thomas Sowell : Filtering History - Townhall.com
We must learn history or we will repeat it and only the players will change.
gm
We must learn history or we will repeat it and only the players will change.
gm
New "rights" are wrong
Don Richmond / Naples
Originally published 05:01 p.m., April 24, 2010
Updated 11:45 a.m., April 26, 2010
Brent Batten was absolutely correct in his column of March 25 when he stated there is no right to “the fruits of another group’s labor.”
The Declaration of Independence holds that rights are “self-evident.” However, it is the failure to grasp the true nature of rights which has brought this country to its current condition. It remained for the 20th-century philosopher Ayn Rand to explicitly identify rights as “moral principle(s) defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.” Rights pertain only to “freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men. ... Rights impose no obligations on (others) except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating (your) rights.”
The source of all rights is the right to life, and its sole implementation is the right to property, the right to use the products of your efforts to sustain your life. The rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the rights to enjoy your life and use your property. Rights are an objectively necessary requirement of human life, principles which apply equally to all persons and at all times. In sum, rights are freedoms for rational beings to take the actions necessary to fulfill and enjoy their lives. Any alleged “right” which violates these rights is not a right, but an excuse for a crime.
The only way to violate individual rights is through the initiation of force. A person who initiates force against you is attempting to negate your means of survival by forcing you to act against your judgment as to what your life requires. The only moral use of force is in retaliation against those who initiate its use. The sole proper purpose of government is to protect its citizens’ rights by banning the initiation of force and placing its retaliatory use under objective control. The purpose of the U.S. Constitution was, and is, to establish and maintain the supremacy of individual rights over our society and our government.
Consider, by contrast, the congressman quoted by Batten: “We have a moral obligation today, tonight to make health care a right.” That person believes he has a duty to force the providers of health care to work. Only a slave has no choice in the work he does. If health care is considered a right, then someone must provide it, willing or not. If too few people choose the profession of health care to provide for everyone’s “rights,” how will the need be met? Will doctors be jailed for the “crime” of leaving medicine? Will students be drafted into medical schools? If so, what kind of doctors will result? A doctor in Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” says, “A man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards,” let alone in an operating room.
The root of this evil is altruism, the perverse principle that “man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue, and value” (Rand). Thus, altruism negates individual rights. If one has no right to exist for one’s own sake, one has no rights whatsoever. The health-care measures passed may be touted as “good-faith efforts,” as Batten stated, but the “good faith” is solidly rooted in an evil premise.
Altruistic ideologues, such as those running our government, believe that the initiation of force to counteract selfishness is not only permitted, but obligatory. To a committed altruist, anyone who refuses to sacrifice, to serve others at his own cost, is harming those others by denying them their right to the product of his efforts.
It was altruism, not selfishness, that gave rise to the horrors of communism and fascism. Both systems, variants of collectivism, deny that individuals have any reason for existence other than to serve others and advocate stamping out self-interest as a moral imperative. By contrast, this country was founded by men who did not consider themselves sacrificial animals, servants or slaves to the state. By claiming that rights are unalienable, they held that rights exist whether or not anyone chooses to recognize them.
There is no more time to evade this choice. Will we recognize the existence of individual rights and the full meaning of what they are and what they require, or will we accept the institutionalized slavery of enforced service of all to all, where ability is penalized and need is encouraged?
Richmond has a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in operations research. He was a software systems developer on Wall Street. He is now a residential real-estate appraiser. He is a founding member of the Ayn Rand Society for Individual Rights of Naples, an organization formed to bring Rand’s philosophy of objectivism to greater public notice.
Originally published 05:01 p.m., April 24, 2010
Updated 11:45 a.m., April 26, 2010
Brent Batten was absolutely correct in his column of March 25 when he stated there is no right to “the fruits of another group’s labor.”
The Declaration of Independence holds that rights are “self-evident.” However, it is the failure to grasp the true nature of rights which has brought this country to its current condition. It remained for the 20th-century philosopher Ayn Rand to explicitly identify rights as “moral principle(s) defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.” Rights pertain only to “freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men. ... Rights impose no obligations on (others) except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating (your) rights.”
The source of all rights is the right to life, and its sole implementation is the right to property, the right to use the products of your efforts to sustain your life. The rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the rights to enjoy your life and use your property. Rights are an objectively necessary requirement of human life, principles which apply equally to all persons and at all times. In sum, rights are freedoms for rational beings to take the actions necessary to fulfill and enjoy their lives. Any alleged “right” which violates these rights is not a right, but an excuse for a crime.
The only way to violate individual rights is through the initiation of force. A person who initiates force against you is attempting to negate your means of survival by forcing you to act against your judgment as to what your life requires. The only moral use of force is in retaliation against those who initiate its use. The sole proper purpose of government is to protect its citizens’ rights by banning the initiation of force and placing its retaliatory use under objective control. The purpose of the U.S. Constitution was, and is, to establish and maintain the supremacy of individual rights over our society and our government.
Consider, by contrast, the congressman quoted by Batten: “We have a moral obligation today, tonight to make health care a right.” That person believes he has a duty to force the providers of health care to work. Only a slave has no choice in the work he does. If health care is considered a right, then someone must provide it, willing or not. If too few people choose the profession of health care to provide for everyone’s “rights,” how will the need be met? Will doctors be jailed for the “crime” of leaving medicine? Will students be drafted into medical schools? If so, what kind of doctors will result? A doctor in Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” says, “A man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards,” let alone in an operating room.
The root of this evil is altruism, the perverse principle that “man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue, and value” (Rand). Thus, altruism negates individual rights. If one has no right to exist for one’s own sake, one has no rights whatsoever. The health-care measures passed may be touted as “good-faith efforts,” as Batten stated, but the “good faith” is solidly rooted in an evil premise.
Altruistic ideologues, such as those running our government, believe that the initiation of force to counteract selfishness is not only permitted, but obligatory. To a committed altruist, anyone who refuses to sacrifice, to serve others at his own cost, is harming those others by denying them their right to the product of his efforts.
It was altruism, not selfishness, that gave rise to the horrors of communism and fascism. Both systems, variants of collectivism, deny that individuals have any reason for existence other than to serve others and advocate stamping out self-interest as a moral imperative. By contrast, this country was founded by men who did not consider themselves sacrificial animals, servants or slaves to the state. By claiming that rights are unalienable, they held that rights exist whether or not anyone chooses to recognize them.
There is no more time to evade this choice. Will we recognize the existence of individual rights and the full meaning of what they are and what they require, or will we accept the institutionalized slavery of enforced service of all to all, where ability is penalized and need is encouraged?
Richmond has a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in operations research. He was a software systems developer on Wall Street. He is now a residential real-estate appraiser. He is a founding member of the Ayn Rand Society for Individual Rights of Naples, an organization formed to bring Rand’s philosophy of objectivism to greater public notice.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Heritage responds to President Obama
Mr. President, Heritage does not support Obamacare
March 30, 2010 | By Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D.
President Obama this morning cited The Heritage Foundation's research in an attempt to sell his health care package as a "middle of the road, centrist approach." We take great exception to this misuse of our work and abuse of our name. This is but the latest act in a campaign to sell this big-government program as a moderate law that incorporates conservative ideas. Americans should not be fooled.
Let's be very clear: We oppose this new law because it is a radical new intrusion into the daily lives of all Americans and a massive takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy. We view the President's health care law as inimical to our national interests and offensive to the historic American dedication to the principle of self-government.
Our research has shown that President Obama's health approach is financially unsustainable and will ultimately lead to health care rationing, a lower quality of care and a greater degree of dependence on government. We deplore those outcomes and are committed to making the intellectual case for this law's repeal.
What part of that does President Obama not understand?
Specifically, President Obama told NBC's Today Show host Matt Lauer that a centerpiece of his health care package, "in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market—that originated from The Heritage Foundation."
But the President knows full well—or he ought to learn before he speaks—that the exchanges we and most others support are very different from those in his package. True exchanges are simply a market mechanism to enable families to choose their health insurance. President Obama's exchanges, by contrast, are a vehicle to introduce sweeping regulation and federal standardization on health insurance.
Moreover, we completely disagree that President Obama's law improves the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market. On the contrary, it will create a staggeringly complex and costly insurance system that will drive up premiums for Americans.
The President's health care law is only eight days old, and already it has cost our economy billions of dollars. Late last week, AT&T alone took a $1 billion charge because of the impact of the bill, and the consulting firm Towers Watson told the Wall Street Journal that the total hit this year will reach nearly $14 billion. It is sad, given the present state of our economy, that the President's party in Congress has reacted not by trying to find ways to spare the jobs that will be lost because of this law. Instead, they are trying to intimidate companies that take such charges with threats that they will be hauled in before the Energy and Commerce Committee.
It is also revealing that President Obama is still struggling to sell the American people on a bill that he and his party rammed through passage by a narrow margin in the face of bipartisan opposition. It is a sign of desperation that he, his handlers and the media echo chamber are reverting to the campaign practice of selling the President and his policies as centrist, middle of the road and aisle-crossing. As the country has found out the hard way in the past 15 months, they are none of those things.
The President has made a habit of using conservative talking points when trying to sell a liberal ideology because he knows that this is a center-right country that rejects his agenda when articulated honestly. His supporters have even tried to pin the blame of the potentially unconstitutional individual mandate on us. This approach brushes over the details of our research and ignores our ability to evolve past further developed research.
Over 16,000 new IRS agents will be hired by the government to enforce the President's mandate on the American people. The President's health care plan also raises premiums, taxes, and costs while lowering quality, and expanding Medicaid. These are not conservative ideas.
And let's be clear, these are not ideas Heritage has ever, or would ever, support.
We made every effort over the past year to share our ideas for better health care reform with the President and members of both parties in Congress, but were not invited behind the closed doors. Now, after the bill is signed, it seems the President wishes we were along for the ride. We were not. We remain fervently opposed to the President's partisan plan, and urge its immediate repeal. This is not common politics, it's common sense.
Had President Obama limited his bill to centrist elements, he would have won wide bipartisan support for effective reform both within Congress and among the American people. He would have won it, too, at a fraction of the cost of this intolerable, huge and intrusive legislation. He would not now be facing popular rejection by the American people. And he would not need to misrepresent Heritage policies and positions in an attempt to give his radical health plan the patina of respectability.
Chapter 3 - GOD DOES NOT DISAPPOINT, NO MATTER WHAT WE MAY THINK
I am truly loving the book "No Doubt about It" by Dr. Dewey Bertolini!
He writes: "Every disappointment that you or I will ever experience is the direct result of unmet expectations." Chew on that a minute.
"God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent. Has He said, and will He not do? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?"
Numbers 23:19
"Why do we insist on holding God hostage to words He never spoke, to promises He never made?" No doubt about it: God is no mere human! He doesn't tell lies or change his mind. God always keeps his promises. As long as His words and His promises, and only His words and His promises, determine our expectations, God cannot and will not ever disappoint."
Amen to that Dr. Bertolini, Amen! Thanks for a great book!
gm
Dr. Williams and Dr. Sowell discuss government run healthcare
Once you have opened the floodgate you CANNOT tell the water where to go.
gm
Health care Tyranny
The states formed the federal government not the other way around. The federal government cannot tell the states how to spend state generated tax dollars.
gm
Judge Napolitano - Health Care Bill unconstitutional
Jail for failure to purchase a product a good? How do you feel about government intrusion into your privacy?
gm
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Healthcare is a Good, Not a Right!
A right stems from our humanity, a good is something you buy or someone else buys for you. Those who claim that healthcare is a right simply want to extend a form or government welfare. It is impossible to be charitable with someone else’s money. Charity comes from your own heart not from the government spending your money.
*When we pay our taxes to the government and it gives that money away, that is NOT charity, it is WELFARE.
*When the government takes more from us than it needs to secure our freedoms so it can give some of that money away, that is NOT charity, it is THEFT.
*When the government forces hospitals and doctors offices to provide free healthcare to those who can’t or won’t care for themselves, that is NOT charity, it is SLAVERY.
What we have now is Constitutional Chaos because the government steals and enslaves We the People.
gm
Health care bill will destroy American Liberty
Government is the negation of our Freedom because congress recognizes NO LIMITS on its power.
gm
Friday, April 23, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Blacks, the Media & the Tea Parties by Lloyd Marcus
April 22, 2010
Blacks, the Media, & the Tea Parties
By Lloyd Marcus
I am exhausted. I returned home after performing at tea parties in 42 cities, from Searchlight, NV to Washington, D.C., in nineteen days while on the Tea Party Express III tour. I'm black conservative singer/songwriter, entertainer, author, and spokesperson Lloyd Marcus.
I wish to share with you how the liberal mainstream media has dealt with my participation on the Tea Party Express III tour.
Liberal mainstream media all but call me an Uncle Tom. Their reports imply that I am a token black too stupid to realize that I am being used by the tea party movement. In typical liberal mainstream media arrogance, they are totally blind to the blatant racism of their reporting.
Because I do not fit the liberal mainstream media's "all blacks must vote Democrat and believe that America is racist and unjust" template, I must be an idiot. As a matter of fact, because I am a black man who loves his country and proclaims that America is the greatest land of opportunity on the planet for all who choose to go for it, much of the liberal media consider me dangerous and even wish me harm.
The liberal mainstream media are relentless in their quest to portray the tea party patriots as racist. And yet, I have performed my song, "American Tea Party Anthem," at over 150 tea parties, been treated like a rock star, and have even seen signs which read, "Lloyd Marcus for President!" Not one tea party attendee has ever called me the N-word.
Meanwhile, a Google search will reveal numerous liberal websites and blogs which freely and excessively call me an f-ing stupid N-word. The reason for their over-the-top anger and outrage against me: I express love for my country and refuse to be a hyphenated American.
The same liberals who accuse white conservative Republicans of being mean-spirited, racist, and intolerant are the hate-filled black and white Democrats who use the N-word every other word when writing about me and have even threatened me with physical harm.
After my performance at a tea party in Traverse City, Michigan, a white reporter approached me for an interview. The upbeat, mostly white audience loved me and my patriotic performance. Smiles were everywhere. With a stony face, the snooty female reporter asked me a series of annoying questions straight out of the liberal playbook.
But what really got my blood boiling was when she asked me the following question with the trademark liberal condescending edge: "Mr. Marcus, don't you think by calling yourself an unhyphenated American, you are encouraging white people to feel comfortable with their racism?"
I wanted to say, "Lady, what the heck are you talking about? You are obviously one miserable, bitter, and unhappy human being. Get away from me." Instead, I replied, "With all due respect, I strongly disagree." I turned and walked away from her, abruptly ending the interview.
Perhaps I should have stayed and argued my point of view. But I have lost patience with arrogant liberal reporters who think that they are so much smarter than us. This negative-spirited reporter had decided the spin of her story before interviewing me. My answers to her questions would not have made a difference.
At our Tea Party Express III tour rally in Buffalo, NY, four TV channels covering the rally had cameras in front of the stage. In the finale of each rally, we sing "God Bless The USA." Emotions were high in Buffalo as the audience waved U.S. flags, sang along, and many wept. All four camera techs had looks on their faces as if they were vampires who had just been shown a cross. They were not happy campers. What is with these folks in the media? Why such disdain for their country?
At the April 15th Tea Party in Washington, D.C., a reporter for Ebony (a prominent national black magazine) approached me for an interview after my performance. The reporter asked me the same two questions every other reporter has asked: Are the tea parties racist? Why are blacks not attending?
Without going into great detail in this article, I explained to the reporter the tea party movement is not about race, but about stopping an out-of-control administration from pushing our country towards socialism.
Frustratingly, the Ebony magazine reporter replied, "So why do you hate Barack Obama?" Then, outrageously, he asked me again, "Are these rallies racist?" It was as if he did not hear a word I said.
The liberal mainstream media obviously have an agenda and a paradigm to maintain. They say that the tea party movement is racist, and the facts will not change their reporting.
At the Traverse City, Michigan rally on the Tea Party Express III tour, a white woman approached me in a wheelchair. Extremely excited, she said, "Oh my gosh, it's Lloyd Marcus. May I have a picture with you? Thank you so much for all you are doing for our country. I love you!"
After a picture and hugs, I chatted with other fans.
Later, with tears in his eyes, Don, a Tea Party Express staff member, told me more about the woman in the wheelchair. The woman's daughter told Don that her mom was dying. The daughter said that her mom told her that all she wanted to do before dying was "to meet Lloyd Marcus."
Wow! I was blown away and humbled. Then I became extremely angry at the liberal mainstream media's and Democrats' vicious, shameful attempts to portray the tea party patriots as racist.
Just the other day, after my performance at a tea party in St Augustine, FL, an elderly white veteran thanked me and broke down in tears for our country. We embraced for several moments.
The liberal mainstream media and Democrats are attempting to racially divide and conquer our country. They are evil. As long as God gives me strength, I will continue to defend my fellow patriots who are white and fight to take back America.
- Lloyd Marcus, (black) Unhyphenated American
lloydmarcus.com
I had the chance to see Mr. Marcus last year in D.C. he was very inspirational and had the crowd singing along with him, it was awesome!
gm
Is this the kind of change we really want for our country?
One amazing detail about this video is that Dr. Friedman was speaking at The Mayo Clinic in 1978. He discusses Dr. Max Gammon’s Theory of Bureaucratic Displacement which simply states that when you have an organization taken over by a government bureaucracy input goes up while output goes down, useless work tends to displace useful work (think DMV, Dept. of Education, Dept. of Human services, CDC and the H1N1 immunization fiasco). He gave the example of Britain 1965-1973, in those 8 years hospital staff increased 28% and administrative and clerical help increased by 41% (input went up) Dr. Gammon measured output by the average number of beds occupied daily, that amount decreased 11% (output went down) BUT this was NOT for want of patients, at any one time there was a waiting list of 600,000 people (not a typo, he said six hundred thousand). Things have not improved over time and now we are heading in that direction.
He also quoted from Dr. Gunner Biorek of Sweden (his resume includes, Professor of Medicine at Karolinska Institute, Head of Dept. of Medicine at a major hospital in Stockholm and the personal physician to the King of Sweden). Dr. Biorek gave a speech at the University of Chicago in 1976 titled “How to be a clinician in a socialist country”.
“It is obvious that the existence of a competing free market constitutes a continuous threat to the operation of a socialist public service however heavily subsidized by taxpayer money. The element of quality that derives from patient’s personal preference for and confidence in certain doctors cannot easily be done away with so long as people are willing to pay for a free choice of physicians. To do away with such opportunities therefore has become a new goal of Swedish health care politicians. The introduction of these various regulatory processes has resulted in a cancerous growth in the number of medical administrators at all levels of incomes.”
“The setting in which medicine has been practiced during thousands of years has been one in which the patient has been the client and employer of the physician. Today, the state, in one manifestation or the other, claims to be the employer thus the one to prescribe the conditions under which the physician has to carry out his work. These conditions may not and will eventually not be restricted to working hours, salaries and certified drugs. They may invade the whole territory of the patient/physician relationship.”
If we value freedom we have no other choice but to fight to repeal this bill!
gm
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
You don't see this on the "mainstream" media
By PoliJAM.
In response to being asked why it will take until 2014 for the recently enacted health care reform bill to take full effect, Congressman John Dingell (D-Michigan) said that such time is needed for the government bureaucracy to take the necessary steps to “control the people.”
“The harsh fact of the mater is, when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways, it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”
This shocking admission by a leading Democrat that the health bill is meant to “control the people” is exactly what has been long feared by the many Americans opposed to the Democrats’ long partisan pursuit of a government takeover of the U.S. health care system.
Don’t tell me this isn’t about power and control. If it was truly about taking care of those in need then they would have addressed tort reform and allowed insurance companies to sell across state lines.
gm
The Limits of Power by Dr. Thomas Sowell
The Limits of Power
Even in times of slavery, mere power was not always enough.
When, many years ago, I first began to study the history of slavery around the world, one of the oddities that puzzled me was the practice of paying certain slaves, which existed in ancient Rome and in America’s antebellum South, among other places.
In both places, slave owners or their overseers whipped slaves to force them to work, and in neither place was whipping a slave literally to death likely to bring any serious consequences.
There could hardly be a greater power of one human being over another than the arbitrary power of life and death. Why then was it necessary to pay certain slaves? At the very least, it suggested that there were limits to what could be accomplished by power.
Most slaves performing most tasks were of course not paid, but were simply forced to work by the threat of punishment. That was sufficient for galley slaves or plantation slaves. But there were various kinds of work where that was not sufficient.
Tasks involving judgment or talents were different, because no one can know in advance how much judgment or talent someone else has. In short, knowledge is an inherent constraint on power. Payment can bring forth the knowledge or talent by giving those who have it an incentive to reveal it and to develop it.
Payment can vary in amount and in kind. Some slaves, especially eunuchs in the days of the Ottoman Empire, could amass both wealth and power. One reason they could be trusted in positions of power was that they had no incentive to betray the existing rulers and try to establish their own dynasties, which would obviously have been physically impossible for them.
At more mundane levels, such tasks as diving operations in the Carolina swamps required a level of discretion and skill far in excess of that required to pick cotton in the South or cut sugar cane in the tropics. Slaves doing this kind of work had financial incentives and were treated far better. So were slaves working in Virginia’s tobacco factories.
The point of all this is that when even slaves had to be paid to get certain kinds of work done, this shows the limits of what can be accomplished by power alone. Yet so much of what is said and done by those who rely on the power of government to direct ever more sweeping areas of our life seems to have no sense of the limits of what can be accomplished that way.
Even the totalitarian governments of the 20th century eventually learned the hard way the limits of what could be accomplished by power alone. China still has a totalitarian government today, but, after the death of Mao, the Chinese government began to loosen its controls on some parts of the economy, in order to reap the economic benefits of freer markets.
As those benefits became clear in higher rates of economic growth and rising standards of living, more government controls were loosened. But, just as market principles were applied to only certain kinds of slavery, so freedom in China has been allowed in economic activities to a far greater extent than in other realms of the country’s life, where tight control from the top down remains the norm.
Ironically, the United States is moving in the direction of the kind of economy that China has been forced to move away from. China once had complete government control of medical care, but eventually gave it up as the disaster that it was.
Our current leaders in Washington operate as if they can just set arbitrary goals, whether “affordable housing” or “universal health care” or anything else — and not concern themselves with the repercussions — since they have the power to simply force individuals, businesses, doctors, or anyone else to knuckle under and follow their dictates.
Friedrich Hayek called this mindset “the road to serfdom.” But, even under serfdom and slavery, experience forced those with power to recognize the limits of their power. What this administration — and especially the president — does not have is experience.
Barack Obama has had no experience running even the most modest business, and personally paying the consequences of his mistakes, before becoming president of the United States. He can believe that his heady new power is the answer to all things.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
I have learned so much by reading Dr. Sowell's books and articles, he is a national treasure!
gm
Even in times of slavery, mere power was not always enough.
When, many years ago, I first began to study the history of slavery around the world, one of the oddities that puzzled me was the practice of paying certain slaves, which existed in ancient Rome and in America’s antebellum South, among other places.
In both places, slave owners or their overseers whipped slaves to force them to work, and in neither place was whipping a slave literally to death likely to bring any serious consequences.
There could hardly be a greater power of one human being over another than the arbitrary power of life and death. Why then was it necessary to pay certain slaves? At the very least, it suggested that there were limits to what could be accomplished by power.
Most slaves performing most tasks were of course not paid, but were simply forced to work by the threat of punishment. That was sufficient for galley slaves or plantation slaves. But there were various kinds of work where that was not sufficient.
Tasks involving judgment or talents were different, because no one can know in advance how much judgment or talent someone else has. In short, knowledge is an inherent constraint on power. Payment can bring forth the knowledge or talent by giving those who have it an incentive to reveal it and to develop it.
Payment can vary in amount and in kind. Some slaves, especially eunuchs in the days of the Ottoman Empire, could amass both wealth and power. One reason they could be trusted in positions of power was that they had no incentive to betray the existing rulers and try to establish their own dynasties, which would obviously have been physically impossible for them.
At more mundane levels, such tasks as diving operations in the Carolina swamps required a level of discretion and skill far in excess of that required to pick cotton in the South or cut sugar cane in the tropics. Slaves doing this kind of work had financial incentives and were treated far better. So were slaves working in Virginia’s tobacco factories.
The point of all this is that when even slaves had to be paid to get certain kinds of work done, this shows the limits of what can be accomplished by power alone. Yet so much of what is said and done by those who rely on the power of government to direct ever more sweeping areas of our life seems to have no sense of the limits of what can be accomplished that way.
Even the totalitarian governments of the 20th century eventually learned the hard way the limits of what could be accomplished by power alone. China still has a totalitarian government today, but, after the death of Mao, the Chinese government began to loosen its controls on some parts of the economy, in order to reap the economic benefits of freer markets.
As those benefits became clear in higher rates of economic growth and rising standards of living, more government controls were loosened. But, just as market principles were applied to only certain kinds of slavery, so freedom in China has been allowed in economic activities to a far greater extent than in other realms of the country’s life, where tight control from the top down remains the norm.
Ironically, the United States is moving in the direction of the kind of economy that China has been forced to move away from. China once had complete government control of medical care, but eventually gave it up as the disaster that it was.
Our current leaders in Washington operate as if they can just set arbitrary goals, whether “affordable housing” or “universal health care” or anything else — and not concern themselves with the repercussions — since they have the power to simply force individuals, businesses, doctors, or anyone else to knuckle under and follow their dictates.
Friedrich Hayek called this mindset “the road to serfdom.” But, even under serfdom and slavery, experience forced those with power to recognize the limits of their power. What this administration — and especially the president — does not have is experience.
Barack Obama has had no experience running even the most modest business, and personally paying the consequences of his mistakes, before becoming president of the United States. He can believe that his heady new power is the answer to all things.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
I have learned so much by reading Dr. Sowell's books and articles, he is a national treasure!
gm
Bumper sticker police
I put a bumper sticker on my car for the first time EVER, I am doing a lot of things for the first time. Do you have any bumper stickers? I would love to hear what other people have been motivated to do (maybe for the first time).
gm
Monday, April 19, 2010
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