Besides being Labor Day in the U.S., today is the 75th Anniversary of the start of World War II. Six years later, in 1945, over 60 million men, women and children had been horrifically killed by world powers, partisans, and their own governments. That works out to 27,400 people killed every day for six years. In a “civilized” world, and in the living memory of many today. The trigger for the start was Germany’s invasion of Poland on a trumped up border dispute. The seeds of the war were...
How Government Policy Impacts Our Lives
The Laws of Economics Still Work in California
This short post is a thanks to KMPH-CA for its video report about "ObamaCare Having A Destructive Effect On ERs". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3mU7eRPYSE Where was this kind of common sense reporting when the "Health Law-That-Can-Be-Anything" was first concocted? If you increase Demand for anything, like healthcare, the price will rise. But if the price is artificially capped, then Supply will not follow, and there will be shortages (the doctors), rationing (the ER’s) and a black market...
Why Don’t Progressives Recognize Their Policies’ Failures and Change? Part 2 of 2
Continuing from my previous post: Why don't progressives/statists/elitists see these enormous problems and costs which damage most of us and say, “You know, we’ve tried this for fifty years and it hasn’t worked. Let’s at least consider something else.”? The Answer A decade ago I had a running dialog with a secular progressive teacher at one of our children’s high schools. After several conversations, she told me that she wished the Government would tax away more of her income and give it to...
Why Don’t Progressives Recognize Their Policies’ Failures and Change? Part 1 of 2
Background Let’s start with two irrefutable laws that always govern no matter how much wishful thinking is thrown at them: 1. Resources—labor, capital, natural resources, time--are always limited and must always be allocated in some way. Allocation by price is usually best because it maximizes the flow of optimum resources to the most valuable uses. Resources can also be allocated by law, tax, gifts, rationing, or theft; but there will never be enough resources for everyone to accomplish...
When the Facts Don’t Add Up, Make Up Stories and Call Them Facts
Timothy Egan’s Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, of March 15, 2014, entitled “Paul Ryan’s Irish Amnesia”, tries to link 19th century English complicity in the Irish potato famine to Paul Ryan’s concerns about creating multi-generational government dependency in America. It is so full of salacious inferences and strident ideology masquerading as facts that I don’t know where to begin. But I’ll try. And please recall that I am much more a Libertarian than a Conservative, but Egan’s...
Truth Has Consequences: Women and Men are Different
I’m beginning a series on common sense truths which are real, and which therefore have negative consequences when we ignore them or try to pretend that they don’t exist. The following is written with two assumptions in mind: The vast majority of women and men in the military do their jobs extremely well. Individual tours of duty can be very positive. In any large population of people, there are the ten percent at each end of the bell curve who significantly over- or under- perform everyone...
An Alternate “State of the Union” Preamble
In recognition of President Obama's State of the Union address, I'd like to share with you the very different approach of President William Harrison in my novel, The President, written almost twenty years ago. Enjoy. State of the Union Preamble
Thugs
This post originally appeared as a guest post by Parker Hudson at MichaelYoussef.com on December 16, 2013. It is particularly relevant to the fictional story told in Enemy In The Room. Since I am occasionally critical of our President’s foreign policies, I have recently been asked whether I think that the world was somehow more pristine before 2008. Wasn’t the U.S. actually a worse actor in previous years, caroming around the globe and interfering in other nations’ internal affairs? My answer...
Vote For Me and You Can Stay On Your Parents’ Health Plan
It’s a benefit I’m giving to you. And I’m doing good stuff for millions of other folks, too. It’s all free, paid for by your parents and the huge insurance companies. Feels great, doesn’t it! Well, yes, we actually did have to cancel your parents’ plan. It wasn’t good enough for them, or for you, so we cancelled it. And I guess that means neither you nor your parents have any health insurance, but that's one of the small costs of being progressive. I’ve discovered that buying health...
Things We Like #5: Today’s Challenge
I knew that getting older there would be challenges, but I had not anticipated this one. Today I had to estimate how many incandescent light bulbs to buy so that we can read in bed and light our den until we croak. The NannyState has outlawed them. So, being optimistic about life on this side, we now have quite a horde of bulbs. We’ve decided that for as long as we can manage it, we’re too old for cheap wine or non-incandescent reading lights. But the way things are going, once we’ve departed...
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