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...
Liberal Progressive Policies
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...
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...
What We Don’t See is Killing Us
Henry Hazlitt was a great Economist. As I first mentioned nine months ago, Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson in 1946, then updated in 1978. It reads like today’s news, because it is filled with economic truth, not political or editorial wishful thinking. Members of Congress, the President, and practicing journalists should all be required to memorize the following excerpt from Chapter 15: “In studying the effects of any given economic proposal we must trace not merely the immediate...
Who or What Will Fill the Leadership Void in Our Nation?
As we approach the 237th anniversary of July 4, 1776, I have several disparate but related thoughts. We are a young nation. It seems impossible to me, but in just my sixty-six years I have lived through over one quarter of our nation’s history. If you trace back only four generations past my grandfather, those men actually fought in the American Revolution. Our nation is young, and as others have said, it is as much a unique combination of ideas as it is a place. It was founded on personal...
President Obama on the Most Vulnerable: Guns and Roe
[Thanks to Rowland Cocks at Men’s Fraternity for pointing me in this direction.] This Tuesday will be the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade ruling, and I very much appreciate President Obama’s words in preparation for the anniversary, mourning that tragic ruling. “I think about … the life that lay ahead of her. And most of all, I think about how when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable among us, we must act now. “So what we should be thinking about is our...
Guns and Doses
This week the Vice President rounded up the usual suspects and held Gun Control Task Force meetings with gun control advocates, opponents, and the entertainment industry. I wish that he had also asked for input from Gil Kerlikowske, the White House’s Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, known as the Drug Czar, but I doubt it. Where did all the guns come from that we now want to try to control? Why are our towns and cities awash in guns? Why are gangs advancing into what...
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