While I don't agree with Bruce Gabrielle's claim that the Romney campaign is "on the ropes" I like his advice.
http://speakingppt.com/2012/07/14/the-only-way-to-beat-a-story-is-with-a-better-story/
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Monday, July 2, 2012
Obamacare: Crony Corporatism At Its Worst
I wondered why it would take such a 2000+-page monstrosity
of a bill to "cure" the ills of our healthcare system. Wouldn't it be
easier to come up with something that does not disrupt what 90% of the
Americans have for health insurance and deal directly with those people who do
not have it? I'm thinking of something similar to what used to be called food
stamps. Maybe they would be called med stamps! Or do what they do in
Switzerland: provide a direct subsidy to people who cannot afford health
insurance or if the cost of the insurance exceeds a certain percent of their
income. One possible explanation is that Obamacare gives our wise government
bureaucrats complete control over a large sector of our economy. I'm sure
there's some of that motivating the drive to develop such a complicated mess of
legislation.
I also figured it had to be the result of the unholy
alliance we have between government and big business. (This relationship is
often referred to as crony capitalism, however I prefer the term crony
corporatism.) The post below by Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute confirms
this suspicion by providing some background on the birth (or should we say
failed abortion?) of Obama care. Be sure to check out the link that Mitchell
provides in his post to an article that appeared in the Washington Examiner.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Comments on Supreme Court ruling on healthcare bill
I do not plan to provide lengthy
commentary on last week’s Supreme ruling on the constitutionality of the
healthcare act. Many other folks with whom I agree have spoken on the subject.
However I will make a prediction: five years from now our situation with
healthcare will be no better, if not worse, than it is today. And that will
spur further calls for even more government intervention into the healthcare
sector to "fix" the problems. This despite the fact that government
has been involved in healthcare for at least 100 years in a series of actions,
each of which has caused even further disruptions.
The first link from the Ludwig von
Mises Institute provides an extensive list of links to various articles and
studies on the effect of government's role on healthcare and how will we have
now is not anywhere close to a free market in healthcare.
The first link in the list is an
article by Murray Rothbard summarizes the history of the government’s
intervention in healthcare since around 1910. http://mises.org/daily/6099/Government-Medical-Insurance
The Heritage Foundation collection
of pictures and charts captures the key features of Obamacare. Http://www.heritage.org/research/projects/obamacare/obamacare-in-pictures
Robert Bidinotto identifies the
collectivist premises that support the Supreme Court ruling and provides a link
to his analysis of why conservatives continually lose the moral battle in these
battles against the left. I strongly recommend reading both the article on his
blog as well as the link to his article on “Up From Conservatism. http://bidinotto.blogspot.com/2012/06/us-constitution-rip.html
Meanwhile neo-neocon provides some
interesting thoughts.
She also links to this analysis by
Andrew C. McCarthy. http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/06/28/obamacare-ruling-pure-fraud-and-no-due-process/?singlepage=true
And finally for a counter to the
moral argument Obamacare proponents unleash on anyone who dares to oppose their
“noble” cause check out Dr. Paul Hsieh’s article. http://pjmedia.com/blog/can-the-moral-narrative-of-obamacare-be-defeated/
The only way Americans can protect their long-term access
to quality medical care is by demanding that the government respect their
freedom and individual rights. Any system of “universal” health care
necessarily requires a bureaucracy to control who can receive what services and
when — if only to control costs. The medical rationing in Canada and the UK are
typical results. In these countries, far from being a “right,” health care becomes just another
privilege to be dispensed at the discretion of the bureaucrats.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Socialist or Fascist - Thomas Sowell - Townhall Conservative Columnists
Thomas Sowell makes a distinction that many conservative commentators miss when they accuse Obama of being a socialist or a communist.
It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a "socialist." He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.
What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.
…
One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.
I agree with him on this. He also correctly identifies fascism to the political left, not the right as most people do. However he doesn’t specifically mention how some folks like libertarians lay out the axis of the political spectrum with collectivism on the left and individualism on the right. A fascistic dictatorship, even if it favors business, still is a form of collectivism. The following definition provided in Wikipedia clearly shows the collectivist nature of fascism in which the individual is subjugated to the needs of the nation.
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek rejuvenation of their nation based on commitment to an organic national community where its individuals are united together as one people in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood through a totalitarian single-party state that seeks the mass mobilization of a nation through discipline, indoctrination, physical training, and eugenics.
Getting back to Sowell’s piece he makes a couple of key points.
Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama's point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.
Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous -- something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.
Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the "greed" of the insurance companies.
This might seem like an issue of semantics but I don’t believe it is. I hold that incorrectly identifying Obama’s political position harms the credibility of the person making this claim. A knowledgeable opponent would have cause to ignore the comment because it shows ignorance at worst or sloppy thinking at best. It also incorrectly pits the right as being purely pro-business regardless of its relationship to government (i.e., the right supports big business cronyism while the left is protecting us little folk who need the help of our enlightened politicians to fight for our rights against the juggernaut of big business and the rich.)
Over time the left has done a good job of usurping certain terms in our language. An example is their term “right wing dictatorship” which can be safely uttered and no one challenges it. If we accept this designation we’re faced with the choice of a dictatorship of the proletariat on the left fighting the dictatorship of the bourgeois on the right. The individual is conveniently ignored in this spectrum.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
How I Learned Not to Deny Climate Change by By Robert Tracinski
This article gives a somewhat different perspective on global warming, I mean climate change. How I Learned Not to Deny Climate Change
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
The News Media as Instructors not Reporters
This post from Ace of Spades HQ starts out with how the Washington Post buried a story about how Obamacare actually is going to increase the deficit, not lower it as was originally claimed. Further down Ace makes an interesting distinction about the role that the news media establishment believes they are fulfilling. His observations mesh with comments I’ve posted earlier about the Ruling Class. Ace’s analysis implicitly touches on the abandonment of any pretense of being objective. In our post-modern world these folks believe the truth is what they want it to be, especially if they believe it serves an end they feel is moral and justified. Just don’t ask them to objectively defend this position because, you know, objectivity is such a 20th century, out-of-fashion notion!
This story sums up everything that is wrong with the media, and why it is dying -- and why it should die.
The media is no longer in the information business.
They are in the instruction business.
This is an important distinction.
If you're in the information business, your stock in trade is information. You have no particular concern about how that information will be received, or interpreted, or used for making political arguments. That's not your business-- you are in the business of data, not Narrative and not the internal contents of your readers' minds.
You are not your readers' minders, nor their tutors: You stand equal to them. They are citizens are you are citizens; you have no special insight into The Truth, and they no special disadvantage in discovering The Truth.
Now, if you're in the Instruction business, things are quite different. You stand not as an equal with your readers, but as a Teacher. And, worse yet, they are Children in need of your guidance.
You cannot just offer information willy-nilly to children. …
You must be protective of Children, who are, in final analysis, incompetent (legally as well as actually) individual who need to be told what to think and how to think. You cannot give them license to think whatever they like, for they are not mature enough for that.
They haven't yet learned the skill of thinking.
Thus, everything you tell a child must be with rounded corner and soft padding. Children are dangerous, after all, to themselves and others, if not properly minded at every moment.
Why do people -- and not just strong partisans, but most anyone who isn't a diehard liberal partisan -- hate the media?
Because of this, this belief of the media that we wish or need their Instruction in ordering our lives and ordering our thoughts.
But they are determined to do just that.
…
This isn't even restricted to news -- the media's strong belief that it is the Thin Black and White Line between semi-retarded barbarians from Idiocracy and civilization is present in films and fictions, too.
Every goddamned movie is a children's movie, with a soporofic, corporate-approved Moral (don't hate strangers; be yourself!).
Even movies for adults. Especially movies for adults.
This is called "being responsible." It's also called "being condescending" and "making infantile, bad art," but they prefer "being responsible."
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Reflections on Inequality
This short essay by Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, nicely captures in a very few words key libertarian counter-points to the Occupy Wall Street stance on inequality.
Israeli president Shimon Peres reminds us: "By and large, those in the world who placed freedom above equality have done better by equality than those who placed equality above freedom have done by freedom." That observation, apparently lost on the Occupy Wall Street crowd, has a moral component as well: It is more just to reward effort, even if it cannot be proven to benefit the least affluent, than it is to reward the least affluent, even if they exert little effort to improve their status. Moral superiority does not entail punishing the industrious wealthy to sustain the indolent poor.
Further, the top 1 percent of income earners — persons earning more than $343,000 in 2009 — paid 38 percent of income taxes. And that doesn't reflect the nondeductibility of capital losses, the tax on illusory gains due to inflation, and the double tax paid indirectly by shareholders on corporate profits before they're distributed or impounded in stock prices. By contrast, according to the Committee on Joint Taxation, more than half of American households paid zero income taxes. Those numbers are astonishing. Even persons who embrace progressive taxation are hard-pressed to argue that the tax code is insufficiently discriminatory. How far must progressivity extend to satisfy the left's notion of fairness?Read the whole thing. It’s only seven paragraphs long!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
