Gore Vidal Interview

There's an interview with Gore Vidal on "Time Online" - it's not a great read, just an interesting ring.  I thought it worth commenting on something he said, however.  

Vidal, being an obvious modern liberal, comments many times about Obama's ineptitude - and he voted for Obama.  At one point he says this: 

Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn't realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is.

What I find interesting is this: Modern liberals demand that we need the government to help take care of people, because they aren't smart enough to do so on their own.  Yet, right here, it is plainly obvious, that the anointed class, also thinks you need to have intelligence to want the government to assume that role ... it's a dichotomous and conflicting view of the world.  

So on one hand, government's job is to help the uneducated class - on the other hand, American's are too stupid to ever understand the value of having the anointed take care of them.   Great world view ....

- Allen

A Reminder of What "Capitalism" is

Very well written - very much worth the three minutes it takes to read this.  Thank you Walter Williams,

- allen

 

Michael Moore's New Film "Capitalism: A Love Story"
by Walter Williams (September 23, 2009)

Article address: http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID=5652

Summary: Aware of Michael Moore's previous films, I know that it will be at best a misleading story about capitalism. So let's do some defensive mental preparation, not about the film but what is and what is not capitalism.

[CapMag.com]

Michael Moore's new film, "Capitalism: A Love Story" will be released next month. I've neither seen nor read reviews of the film, except for a short piece in the London Telegraph (9/6/09) titled "Michael Moore film calls capitalism evil." Aware of Michael Moore's previous films, I know that it will be at best a misleading story about capitalism. So let's do some defensive mental preparation, not about the film but what is and what is not capitalism.

Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private ownership and control over the means of production. The distribution of goods and services and their prices are mainly determined by competition in a free market. Under such a system the primary job of government is to protect private property, enforce contracts and ensure rule of law.

There has never been a pure free market capitalistic system just as there has never been a pure communist or socialist system, where there is government ownership of the means of production and each individual has equal access to society's resources. However, we can rank economies as to whether they are closer to capitalism or closer to communism or socialism.

If one ranked countries according to whether they were closer to the capitalistic end of the spectrum or the socialistic or communistic end, then ranked countries according to per capita GDP and finally rank countries according to Freedom House's "Map of Freedom in the World," he would find a pattern that is by no means a coincidence. The people in those countries closer to the capitalist end of the economic spectrum have far greater income and enjoy greater human rights protections than those toward the socialist and communist end.

According to the London Telegraph article, Moore's film features priests who say capitalism is anti-Christian by failing to protect the poor.
This is pure nonsense and revealed as such by asking, "If you're an unborn spirit, condemned by God to a life of poverty but allowed to choose the country in which to be poor, would you choose a country near the communist end of the economic spectrum or the capitalist end?" If you chose the United States, you'd find that according to the government surveys, the typical "poor" American has cable or satellite TV, two color TVs, and a DVD player or VCR. He has air conditioning, a car, a microwave, a refrigerator, a stove, and a clothes washer and dryer, and whether he has health insurance or not, he is able to obtain medical care when needed. Try to find that in Cuba, Russia, China or North Korea. If we buy into the nonsense of Moore's priests, the world's poor people are incredibly stupid. Whether fleeing legally or illegally, their destination country is likely to be closer to capitalism than their departure country.

Most of our country's serious problems can be laid at the feet of Congress and the White House and not at capitalism. Take the financial crisis. One-third of the $15 trillion of mortgages in existence in 2008 are owned, or securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the Federal Housing and the Veterans Administration. Banks didn't mind making risky loans and Wall Street buyers didn't mind buying these repackaged loans because they assumed that they would be guaranteed by the federal
government: read bailout by taxpayers. Under a capitalist system, financial institutions would not have been intimidated or encouraged into making risky loans and neither would they have been bailed out if they did so.

Social Security, Medicare and its coverage of prescription drugs have an unfunded liability that exceeds $100 trillion. When those roosters come home to roost, they will make the financial meltdown we've been though look like child's play.

Not withstanding all of the demagoguery, it is capitalism not socialism is that made us a great country and its socialism that will be our undoing.

About the Author: Born in Philadelphia in 1936, Walter E. Williams holds a bachelor's degree in economics from California State University (1965) and a master's degree (1967) and doctorate (1972) in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles. Please contact your local newspaper editor if you want to read the WALTER WILLIAMS column in your hometown paper.

End Of Life Issues

I have attached the cover of this week's Newsweek. It reads: "Curbing excessive End of Life Care is GOOD for America" A friend of mine commented that this is a sign of our government moving backwards on healthcare, not forward.

These end of life issues currently in the national spotlight are literally at two extremes (and I'm not one to bemoan extremes), both consequent of the same ailment: the government. Truly, the reason for being stuck with both extremes is because the government has meddled with healthcare in the first place - this is not a spontaneous phenomenon.

Case in point - I was consulted for a patient a couple of weeks ago that was literally at the end of the road. Stage 4 cancer, really with very little time left ... details aside, he coded and ended up in the ICU dependent on a respirator. This patient was at the point of no return. They asked my team to place a tracheostomy for his breathing. When I asked the primary team if end of life issues had been discussed with the family - get this, they said the faimly had said that they wanted 30 days of procedures performed before they would discuss any end of life issues. What procedures? Blank out. For what purpose? Blank out. To what end? Blank out. 30 days, as if that were some magic number. Before that, they wouldn't discuss any end of life issues. He passed a week later on his own accord - but this story highlites something.

The family did not even think once about the cost of his care. 30 days was a completely arbitraty number. And the reason is - third party payer medical care, which is essentially a government mandate. So, we are at one extreme, at the moment, where people do not care AT ALL about the cost of care when in many ways, care should be probably stopped. The question of cost does not come up AT ALL. We're not allowed to mention it, lest we may get sued. It is truly a non-issue.

So, what's the government's brilliant response? To do the exact opposite - and take the choice away from people completely.

Never is a liberal's response, make a difficult choice yourself. It's either a productive member of society's choice for you or the all knowing government's choice.

There is definitely a disconnect at the moment, but the answer is not the other extreme. Rather, it's making people make the hard decision of how much care is worthwhile, and how much care is futile. At the moment, the only decision is based on one of two approaches with no other factors:

(1) Throw everything including the kitchen sink at this person with no other considerations, or

(2) They decided before they never wanted a ventilator, so please stop care

That my friends, is the current decision tree - kind of sad. (And it's the government's fault). And I'm not against extremes, as long as it's rooted in a well founded and logical premise.

Good Cartoon

By Michael Ramirez

Sowell Quote

A notable Sowell Quote: 

The most childish of all the things being said in the august setting of a joint session of Congress last week was that millions of people can be added to the government's health insurance plan without increasing the federal deficit at all.
If the President of the United States could do that, it is hard to imagine what he would do as an encore. Walking on water would be an anticlimax

Great Professor (if only true)

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan". 

All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. 

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. 
The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.  

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.  
The second test average was a D! 
No one was happy. 

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. 

The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.  

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. 

Could not be any simpler than that.

Protest Pics

CIA Prosecutions

This is an important issue - just wanted to discuss briefly.

For the liberals who wish to prosecute CIA agents for torture ex-post facto, it is important to remind them of some important things, if you ever have the opportunity -

(1) the prosecution of Nazi's after the war is neither analogous or equivalent - For starters, other countries tried Nazis, which is a completely different thing than your own country changing its own rules.  Israel and America's rules were always the same, they never changed - don't commit genocide. So nothing has changed ex-post facto, its essentially a continuation of the war, however microscopic.  

(2) Torture - at its most basic form, imprisonment is indeed torture.  Dismemberment/beating is the most extreme form on the other side of the spectrum.  Everything else between is just that, a mix of the two extremes.  But the point is this - regardless, you cannot make torture illegal as an absolute, because imprisonment, regardless of how acceptable, is still torture. So to say, "they committed torture, and that is wrong," is just short-sited.  

(3) Taking number 2 above in account, when half your own country regards water-boarding ok by surveys, you can't then all of a sudden treat it as if it's a well accepted and undisputed fact that it is torture

(4) Terrorists are not bound by the rules of the Geneva Convention

(5) This is the most important - Remind them of the precedent they are setting - An equivalent (I stress, equivalent) situation would be if Roe v. Wade ever gets overturned and abortion becomes illegal (which I hope does not happen) - using this precedent, right wing fanatics can say the precedent exists to prosecute physicians who in the past provided abortive services.  Would you really want a situation like that in our country? 

Regardless of how bad Bush was, he was only able to do the things he did because of prior precedent from liberal Presidents.  Precedent goes a long way - for both are safety from terrorists, the stability of justice and the preservation of job security in the future, these prosecutions should be dropped.  

Washington Lies

Another great article, this one by Walter Williams - some stuff in here I think most would find interesting - I past an exceprt below:

By Walter Williams:

At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee, along with President Johnson, estimated that Medicare would cost an inflation-adjusted $12 billion by 1990. In 1990, Medicare topped $107 billion. That's nine times Congress' prediction. Today's Medicare tab comes to $420 billion with no signs of leveling off. How much confidence can we have in any cost estimates by the White House or Congress?

Important Passage by Sowell

This is an excerpt from a larger article - but I though this part is worth knowing:

By Thomas Sowell:

Those who are pushing for legal action against CIA agents may talk about "upholding the law" but they are doing no such thing. Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the Geneva Convention gives rights to terrorists who operate outside the law.

There was a time when everybody understood this. German soldiers who put on American military uniforms, in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge were simply lined up against a wall and shot-- and nobody wrung their hands over it. Nor did the U.S. Army try to conceal what they had done. The executions were filmed and the film has been shown on the History Channel.

So many "rights" have been conjured up out of thin air that many people seem unaware that rights and obligations derive from explicit laws, not from politically correct pieties. If you don't meet the terms of the Geneva Convention, then the Geneva Convention doesn't protect you. If you are not an American citizen, then the rights guaranteed to American citizens do not apply to you.

That should be especially obvious if you are part of an international network bent on killing Americans. But bending over backward to be nice to our enemies is one of the many self-indulgences of those who engage in moral preening.

But getting other people killed so that you can feel puffed up about yourself is profoundly immoral. So is betraying the country you took an oath to protect.

Unfortunately, everyone is pushed these days to think that there are only two possible political ideologies: Red vs Blue. This is not the case ... if people could pull themselves out of this mold, the discussions would go much further. I urge you to research a topic, the difference between classical Liberals vs. modern liberals. One is based on science, the other purely on emotion. Don't make policy on emotion.

Origin of Nazi

Directly from Wikipedia's entry on Nazi: "Nazism, known officially in German as National Socialism (German: NAtionalsoZIalismus), refers to the ideology and practices of the National Socialist German Workers' Party or NSDAP under Adolf Hitler.

Can you say "huh?"

A nice article from Bloomberg online: 

 

Obama Goes Postal, Lands in Dead-Letter Office:

By: Caroline Baum

 

 

Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) -- "UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It's the Post Office that's always having problems." -- Barack Obama, Aug. 11, 2009

No institution has been the butt of more government- inefficiency jokes than the U.S. Postal Service. Maybe the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The only way the post office can stay in business is its government subsidy. The USPS lost $2.4 billion in the quarter ended in June and projects a net loss of $7 billion in fiscal 2009, outstanding debt of more than $10 billion and a cash shortfall of $1 billion. It was moved to intensive care -- the Government Accountability Office's list of "high risk" cases - - last month and told to shape up. (It must be the only entity that hasn't cashed in on TARP!)

That didn't stop President Barack Obama from holding up the post office as an example at a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, last week.

When Obama compared the post office to UPS and FedEx, he was clearly hoping to assuage voter concerns about a public health-care option undercutting and eliminating private insurance.

What he did instead was conjure up visions of long lines and interminable waits. Why do we need or want a health-care system that works like the post office?

What's more, if the USPS is struggling to compete with private companies, as Obama implied, why introduce a government health-care option that would operate at the same disadvantage?

Obama Unscripted

These are just two of the questions someone listening to the president's health-insurance reform roadshow might want to ask.

Impromptu Obamanomics is getting scarier by the day. For all the president's touted intelligence, his un-teleprompted comments reveal a basic misunderstanding of capitalist principles.

For example, asked at the Portsmouth town hall how private insurance companies can compete with the government, the president said the following:

"If the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining -- meaning taxpayers aren't subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services and a good network of doctors, just like any other private insurer would do -- then I think private insurers should be able to compete."

Self-sustaining? The public option? What has Obama been doing during those daily 40-minute economic briefings coordinated by uber-economic-adviser, Larry Summers?

Capitalism Explained

Government programs aren't self-sustaining by definition. They're subsidized by the taxpayer. If they were self-financed, we'd be off the hook.

Llewellyn Rockwell Jr., chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of LewRockwell.com, put it this way in an Aug. 13 commentary on Mises.org:

"The only reason for a government service is precisely to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, or else there would be no point in the government's involvement at all."

Rockwell sees no "economic reason for a government postal system" and would abolish it.

Of course, there's the small matter of the U.S. Constitution. Article 1, Section 8, grants Congress the power "to establish Post Offices and Post Roads." A series of subsequent statutes gave the USPS a monopoly in the delivery of first-class mail. Congress thought that without such protection, private carriers would cherry-pick the high-profit routes and leave money-losing deliveries in remote areas to the post office. (In those days, the USPS covered most of its expenses with revenue.)

Less Bad Option

It was only through exemptions in the law that private carriers, such as UPS and FedEx, were allowed to compete in the delivery of overnight mail.

Short of a constitutional amendment or a waiver from Congress, we are stuck with the USPS.

But back to our storyline. Everyone makes a mistake or flubs a line when asked questions on the spot, including the president of the United States. We can overlook run-on sentences, subject and verb tense disagreement, even a memory lapse when it comes to facts and figures.

The proliferation of Obama's gaffes and non sequiturs on health care has exceeded the allowable limit. He has failed repeatedly to explain how the government will provide more (health care) for less (money). He has failed to explain why increased demand for medical services without a concomitant increase in supply won't lead to rationing by government bureaucrats as opposed to the market. And he has failed to explain why a Medicare-like model is desirable when Medicare itself is going broke.

The public is left with one of two unsettling conclusions: Either the president doesn't understand the health-insurance reform plans working their way through Congress, or he understands both the plans and the implications and is being untruthful about the impact.

Neither option is good; ignorance is clearly preferable to the alternative.

(Caroline Baum, author of "Just What I Said," is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Caroline Baum in New York at cabaum@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 17, 2009 21:00 EDT

More on this wonderful article

Ralston describes in a short article some of the MAJOR problems with our system. Neither the Republicans NOR the Democrats seem to get any of this. This is truly a masterful piece. Unfortunately, utopia is a dream. Free hand outs, UNFORTUNATELY, do not work. We all wish they would, but it does not work. It is a well known statistic that 80% of healthcare costs go to 20% of the population: the elderly. That means that the overwhelming majority of costs is paid by medicare. That means, that by and large, our medical system is more government, than not. Do you get that? Our current woes are not because a lack of government involvement - they are more involved than not. This is a simple fact. And that's just by thinking on a cost basis - not even considering the thousand upon thousands of regulations and rules that are imposed upon the system. 

Our current system is a failure of government regulation - too much of it. By no means should we be reforming the system by asking for more regulation, we need to decrease government involvement. Please people - wake up before it's too late. These economic plans are impossible to turn around, even when they are COMPLETE failures - look at social security. It's bankrupt and we can't do anything about it. Don't support something because a politician, of all people, promises it'll give some impossible utopian ideal.

Think - are you more surprised when which of each of the following counterparts fails at doing what it was supposed to do:
(1) Public school vs private school - properly educate a child
(2) US postal service vs. Fed Ex - properly deliver something
(3) Public Defender vs. Private Lawyer - properly defend a client
(4) Social Security vs. Private Retirement Plan - give a good return on investment
(5) Public Works project vs. Private building contractor - build under budget

Really - in each of the above, would you be more surprised when which one fails to accomplish the task at hand? Let's just be honest here. Read this article and think about what is going on.