Health Care or Freedom??

A really good post at Reason's hit and run blog, on the freedoms we will not enjoy with healthcare reform. ( I bold-ed my favorite paragraph)

Kiss Your Freedoms Goodbye If Health Care Passes
Why we cannot afford to sit out this fight
Andrew Napolitano November 16, 2009


Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights. If this health care bill becomes law, America, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, and privacy as you have enjoyed it will cease to be.
Last week the House of Representatives voted on a 2,000 page bill to give the federal government the power to micromanage the health care of every single American. The bill will raise your taxes, steal your freedom, invade your privacy, and ration your health care. Even the Republicans have introduced their version of Obamacare Lite. It, too, if passed, will compel employers to provide coverage, bribe the states to change their court rules, and tell insurance companies whom to insure.
We do not have two political parties in this country, America. We have one party; called the Big Government Party. The Republican wing likes deficits, war, and assaults on civil liberties. The Democratic wing likes wealth transfer, taxes, and assaults on commercial liberties. Both parties like power; and neither is interested in your freedoms.
Think about it. Government is the negation of freedom. Freedom is your power and ability to follow your own free will and your own conscience. The government wants you to follow the will of some faceless bureaucrat.
When I recently asked Congressman James Clyburn, the third ranking Democrat in the House, to tell me "Where in the Constitution the federal government is authorized to regulate everyone's healthcare," he replied that most of what Congress does is not authorized by the Constitution, but they do it anyway. There you have it. Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights, it doesn't care about the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, it doesn't even read the laws it writes.
America, this is not an academic issue. If this health care bill becomes law, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, privacy as you have enjoyed it, will cease to be.
When Congress takes away our freedoms, they will be gone forever. What will you do to prevent this from happening?
We Can't Sit Back and Allow the Loss of Our Freedoms
We elect the government. It works for us. As we watch the Democrats' plans for health care take shape, we can only ask how did our government get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives?
On Saturday November 7, at 11 o’clock in the evening, the House of Representatives voted by a five vote margin to have the federal government manage the health care of every American at a cost of $1 trillion dollars over the next ten years.
For the first time in American history, if this bill becomes law, the Feds will force you to buy insurance you might not want, or may not need, or cannot afford. If you don’t purchase what the government tells you to buy, if you don’t do so when they tell you to do it, and if you don’t buy just what they say is right for you, the government may fine you, prosecute you, and even put you in jail. Freedom of choice and control over your own body will be lost. The privacy of your communications and medical decision making with your physician will be gone. More of your hard earned dollars will be at the disposal of federal bureaucrats.
It was not supposed to be this way. We elect the government. It works for us. How did it get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives? Evil rarely comes upon us all at once, and liberty is rarely lost in one stroke. It happens gradually, over the years and decades and even centuries. A little stretch here, a cave in there, powers are slowly taken from the states and the people and before you know it, we have one big monster government that recognizes no restraint on its ability to tell us how to live. It claims the power to regulate any activity, tax any behavior, and demand conformity to any standard it chooses.
The Founders did not give us a government like the one we have today. The government they gave us was strictly limited in its scope, guaranteed individual liberty, preserved the free market, and on matters that pertain to our private behavior was supposed to leave us alone.
In the Constitution, the Founders built in checks and balances. If the Congress got out of hand, the states would restrain it. If the states stole liberty or property, the Congress would cure it. If the president tried to become a king, the courts would prevent it.
In the next few weeks, I will be giving a public class on Constitutional Law here on the Fox News Channel, on the Fox Business Network, on Foxnews.com, and on Fox Nation. In anticipation of that, many of you have asked: What can we do now about the loss of freedom? For starters, we can vote the bums out of their cushy federal offices! We can persuade our state governments to defy the Feds in areas like health care—where the Constitution gives the Feds zero authority. We can petition our state legislatures to threaten to amend the Constitution to abolish the income tax, return the selection of U.S. senators to state legislatures, and nullify all the laws the Congress has written that are not based in the Constitution.
One thing we can’t do is just sit back and take it.
Judge Andrew Napolitano is Fox News' senior judicial analyst. This article originally appeared in two parts on FoxNews.com.

Crunchberry Fields Forever

It has been a long time since my last post. Partly it has been because I have been pretty busy at work, but also I kind of lost interest in blogging (not as though the audience on this blog ever execeeded 3-4 people).

However I did find a good blog post on another site that I had to pass on.

From Coyote blog:

A portion of my novel BMOC was satire of oddball lawsuits. In that book, for example, I had a woman suing Disney because she found that the characters at Disney World were people in costumes rather than the actual animated characters she had expected. I thought that was enough beyond reason and reality to constitute satire, but I guess I was wrong:

On May 21, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of
California dismissed a complaint filed by a woman who said she had purchased
“Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries” because she believed “crunchberries” were real
fruit. The plaintiff, Janine Sugawara, alleged that she had only recently
learned to her dismay that said “berries” were in fact simply brightly-colored
cereal balls, and that although the product did contain some strawberry fruit
concentrate, it was not otherwise redeemed by fruit. She sued, on behalf of
herself and all similarly situated consumers who also apparently believed that
there are fields somewhere in our land thronged by crunchberry bushes.

Doesn't XANGO contain a certain amount of cruchberries? I mean it can't be pure mangostean can it?

I'll Take The Chance If You Take The Blame

From Coyote's Blog how we are being robbed.

Privitizing Gains, Socializing Losses
April 2, 2009, 8:59 am
Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz has a great deconstruction of the Geithner toxic asset plan in the NY Times. If you want to see how the new corporate state works, where the government works with a small group of powerful insiders to the benefit of those insiders and the detriment of everyone else, this is a great example.
Stiglitz walks through how the Geithner plan will operate, and I want to do so as well. I have added a few tables to help illustrate his example a bit better.
Let’s begin with a financial asset that was originally worth $200. To make things simpler, we’ll assume that with the current economy there are now two outcomes for this asset — a 50% chance it recovers and eventually pays off its full value of $200, and a 50% chance it becomes effectively worthless (more realistically, there is a range of outcomes, but this does not really effect the following analysis).
The average “value” of the asset is $100. Ignoring interest, this is what the asset would sell for in a competitive market. It is what the asset is “worth.”
This is a classic expected value analysis. At business school, you spend a lot of your time doing these (trust me). Expected value is just the percentage chance of each outcome times the value of the outcome, on in this case 50% x $0 + 50% x $200 = $100.
So Stiglitz hypothesizes a situation under the new Geithner plan where a private entity might be willing to pay $150 for this $100 asset. That’s certainly a windfall for the financial institution that owns the asset currently, since the asset is only worth $100 on the open market. But why would someone pay $150? Well, it starts with this:
Under the plan by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the government would provide about 92 percent of the money to buy the asset but would stand to receive only 50 percent of any gains, and would absorb almost all of the losses
The actual percentages are 8% from the private purchasers, 8% “equity” from the government, and 84% in a government-guaranteed loan (Equity is in scare quotes because most investors learned long ago that if you provide 80%+ of the capital in a risky venture, you can call the investment “debt” all day long but what you have really done is made an equity investment).

But we have already posited how this will come out: a 50/50 chance of $0 and $200 for the final asset value. So we can compute the outcomes.
50% Chance Investment = $0
50% Chance Investment = $200
Expected Value
Taxpayer
-138
+25
-56.5
Investor
-12
+25
+6.5
Bank
+150
-50
+50
So there is a huge built-in subsidy here. Now, I don’t personally think the government needs to be injecting equity in banks. But I understand there are a lot of people who support it. So perhaps the $50 subsidy of the banks in the above example is warranted. But why the $6.5 subsidy of Geithner’s old pals in the investment world? This is a pure windfall for them, like finding money laying on the street. Even Vegas does not tip the odds so far in favor of the house.
I agree with Stiglitz’s analysis:
What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a “partnership” in which one partner robs the other. And such partnerships — with the private sector in control — have perverse incentives, worse even than the ones that got us into the mess.
So what is the appeal of a proposal like this? Perhaps it’s the kind of Rube Goldberg device that Wall Street loves — clever, complex and nontransparent, allowing huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets. It has allowed the administration to avoid going back to Congress to ask for the money needed to fix our banks, and it provided a way to avoid nationalization.

Bush to Obama = More Of The Same

Here is a good article on how Obama is continuing on with what Bush II did. I really believe that GWB did more for the Democrats cause that for the Republicans. His so called "Compassionate Conservatism" is code for social programing and government growing. That is where many Republicans became disenfranchised with their party, myself included. I for one would like to see a new Libertarian-Republican hybrid party emerge and take over.

from the National Post, by Chris Edwards:

The point here is not to condemn president Bush, but to illustrate that
party labels have meant very little in recent federal expansions. Each recent
president has added new subsidy programs, expanded existing ones and imposed new
mandates on the states. Those changes have been usually retained by later
presidents, resulting in outlays growing ever larger. Recently, Republicans have
opposed some “pork” spending, but unless they challenge programs in a more
fundamental way, spending will be a runaway freight train under President Obama.

President Obama thinks that he can improve federal efficiency, and perhaps
he can somewhat. But he cannot change the fundamental factors that make the
government such a poor allocator of resources. If Mr. Obama succeeds in
expanding the government, it will probably function worse than under president
Bush because it will be even harder for administrators to keep track of all the
spending. Sadly, President Obama’s first budget sets a course for more
government bloat, more economic distortions and ultimately lower standards of
living for everyone who is not living off of federal handouts.

That's the problem with politicians; they all think they can do it better. The only importance to them is staying in office/power.

Green Jobs

This may not be perfect for full time work, with all the bed sores and the what nots, but part time on the weekends, sign me up.

Chinese Exports (other than Yao)

An interesting post from Coyote Blog regarding trade with China and an historical comparison with Japan.

China bashing during the past decade is reminiscent of the Japan bashing that
occurred during the 1980s. It turned out that Japan’s substantial export surplus
with the US, its extensive accumulation of US Treasury bonds, and its purchases
of assets in the US did not hurt the United States, but were for the most part
foolish actions on the part of the Japanese government and businesses. I believe
that similar conclusions will be reached about the parallel Chinese practices.

He posted a hypothetical from a Chinese citizen:

It is important to note that each and every one of these government
interventions subsidizes US citizens and consumers at the expense of Chinese
citizens and consumers. A low yuan makes Chinese products cheap for
Americans but makes imports relatively dear for Chinese. So-called
“dumping” represents an even clearer direct subsidy of American consumers over
their Chinese counterparts. And limiting foreign exchange re-investments
to low-yield government bonds has acted as a direct subsidy of American
taxpayers and the American government, saddling China with extraordinarily low
yields on our nearly $1 trillion in foreign exchange. Every single
step China takes to promote exports is in effect a subsidy of American consumers
by Chinese citizens.

It is an interesting thought. Certainly we know what happened to Japan. Could China really be in store for an economic downfall? It stands to reason that if/when china's economy gets to that point where the wealth in country exceeds that of export productivity the US will find another developing country to feed our insatiable desires for cheap goods. Hencho En Guatemala???

Weapon Ban

At the Cato Institute Blog David Rittgers talks over a renewed assault weapon ban. In the name of Mexico's war on the drug cartells, the Obama administration wants to ban similar assault weapons banned during the Clinton era.

The ban would be a revival of a law passed in the early years of the
Clinton administration that expired in 2004. The law prohibited the sale
of newly-manufactured magazines holding more than ten rounds of ammunition and
having two of five cosmetic features on semi-automatic rifles. If you had
a pistol grip and a detachable magazine, you couldn’t have a bayonet lug. More recent proposals have attempted
to ban “barrel shrouds,” which the rest of the world calls “handguards” - the
place you put your hand (instead of on a hot barrel) to prevent burning it while
firing.
The emphasis here is on the cosmetic - any rational discussion of the
issue ought to note that an “assault weapon” is any object you use to assault
someone with - and banning the presence of a bayonet lug on the barrel of a
rifle is senseless. Knives, tire irons, and bricks can all serve as
“assault weapons.” This is an instance where quotation marks are not just
appropriate, they are required.

Predictably, both Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have temporarily quashed the issue. Let’s hope
they keep it out of the halls of Congress, and focus instead on a sensible drug policy that impacts the demand created by an illicit drug market.
Pelosi and Reid realize
that this proposal will do is come back to haunt Democrats in the 2010 mid-term
elections, which historically trend against the president’s party anyway.
Many Democrats attributed the flip of the House of Representatives
to Republican hands in 1994 to the first “assault weapons” ban. Numerous
experts believe that the reason Al Gore could not carry his home state of
Tennessee in the 2000 election was his push for broader gun control.
Blue Dog Democrats that ran on pro-gun platforms in conservative districts must
be rolling their eyes. The rest of the country should do so as well, and
send this proposal to the dustbin

.

It seems Ironic that the gun lobby's faith lies in Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid. Apparently staying in power is more important that acting on your beliefs.