no third solution

Blogging about liberty, anarchy, economics and politics

Is it “Un-American” to Disagree with Nancy Pelosi?

August 11th, 2009

I read Doug Mataconis’ post at the Liberty Papers the other day, discussing a USAToday Op-Ed in which Pelosi and Hoyer accuse basically any opponent of national socialism government-mandated health care of trying to silence the “facts”. Ironically, Pelosi and Hoyer craft a lengthy fairy-tale about what Obamacare will actually be, which is almost entirely devoid of anything even remotely resembling a “fact”.

The first fact is that health insurance reform will mean more patient choice. It will allow every American who likes his or her current plan to keep it. And it will free doctors and patients to make the health decisions that make the most sense, not the most profits for insurance companies.

Except that the 1,000+ page bill:

Doesn’t allow any person the choice of not buying a policy. Ergo, less choice, not more.
And that the government decides what level of care is acceptable, and fines you (they call it a “tax”) if you don’t comply. Ergo, less choice, not more.
And that the government will effectively set the prices for all private health plans, effectively mandating that you buy certain plans or else. Ergo, less choice, not more
And that there will be a government committee in charge of deciding what treatments and benefits you get. Ergo, the choice is not left to doctor and patient.

(Do you notice a pattern here?)

To be fair, there are over 1,000 pages in the bill (PDF), so I don’t blame you for not wanting to read it. In fact I would be surprised of Pelosi and Hoyer have read it themselves, and I would be downright flabbergasted if someone like Nancy Pelosi, who has all the moral and intellectual capacity of a Geranium, actually comprehended what she had read. Fortunately someone else did read it, and summarized the healthcare monstrosity. But I digress.

Doug seemed to take issue with the fact that the health care nazis are calling people “un-American”.

Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Hoyer should be ashamed of themselves for calling the exercise of a precious Constitutional right “Un-American.”

No. They should be sentenced to nothing less than permanent exile. Further, he comments:

So, a town hall filled with disruptive Code Pink demonstrators is “democracy in action,” but a town hall filled with opponents of ObamaCare is Un-American. Or at least that’s how the calculus works in Nancy Pelosi’s universe.

I’m surprised that he’s surprised by this; it’s nothing new in the game of politics. Recall a few years back, when the Bush administration played the same game? Sure, the circumstances were a little bit different, but it boiled down to the same argument, crystallized in the famous Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists speech, which would become a staple of the latter Bush Regime.

Stirring up fear, creating enemies where there are none, and then accusing anyone who’s not on the bandwagon of being “un-patriotic” has been the modus operandus of politics (electoral and otherwise) for hundreds of years. Politicians have to pit brother-against-brother, because that’s how they lever their control. They create, instigate, or imagine a “problem”, and then propose that they alone are uniquely qualified to handle the problem. Or they make fantastic promises to Paul, which can only be “kept” as long as the politics can keep Peter in a condition of servitude, in order to provide for those promises.

Thus the despot subdues his subjects, some of them by means of others, and thus is he protected by those from whom, if they were decent men, he would have to guard himself;The true rewards of tyrants. just as, in order to split wood, one has to use a wedge of the wood itself.

— The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, E. La Boettie

This behavior, these false accusations and empty promises, the rhetoric of “I know what’s best for you” or “You have to do this for me” or “for the poor” or “for the children” — always conditioned upon the unspoken: “or else!” — is the behavior of a sociopath. It is the behavior of someone who cares not for your needs, wants, desires, freedoms or objections (moral, religious, or otherwise). These are the behaviors of people who wish to keep you in chains.

Is it “un-American” to reject these crimes for what they are? Doug says maybe it is, and if so, “Make the most of it.”

Is it “un-American” to disagree with someone? Is it “un-American” to want to put an end to other people telling you what to do, where to go, how much to pay, how to live, how to die? If it is so, I want absolutely nothing to do with being “American”.

If this is truly “un-American” then we’ve got a hell of a lot more allies out there.

National Healthcare: Because It Can’t Get Any Worse

July 20th, 2009

If the industry supports national health care, “for the good of the consumers”, first follow the money, because politicians are great at colluding with big business in order to steal from the rest of us.

There was a fluff piece in InsuranceNewsNet this week, written by an insurance company executive (but no by-line) that attempts to alleviate people’s fear of government health care, and casting arguments like those I’ve put forth in the past as “scare tactics”.

[People] still fall prey to the scare tactic that nothing — but nothing — could be worse than a government takeover of the system. How things could be worse than they are now, I cannot imagine.

The industry is in love with the idea of nationalized health care, and Cohen is a shill.

Take a look at the real-world examples of national healthcare, and point to one which is not an epic fail. Look at the data for the cancer survival rates in Britain and Canada as compared to the cancer survival rates in the U.S. Or the months of waiting for routine medical procedures! Sure, some of these procedures might be “more expensive” on paper in the U.S. than they are elsewhere, but if you’ve only got 6 months to live, and the (free) life-saving procedure has an 18-month waiting list, it might as well cost a trillion dollars, because in either case, you’re not going to get it.

Most—if not all—of the problems with the current “system” (and I use the term loosely) in the U.S. stem directly from government interference. The health-care family of industries, including primary care provision, pharmaceuticals, insurance, etc., is more heavily regulated than any other industry in the world, with the possible exception of Finance, which has ironically been imploding for the better part of 18 months.

The writer describes a recent (and from the sounds of it, awful) experience with a local emergency room, and concludes that “The emergency room is the great leveler of American life. Everyone gets miserable treatment.”

Recall the last time you went to the emergency room and ask yourself if the government could possibly do a worse job. If the answer is yes, then you might need medical attention more than you realize.

Recall the last time you went to the DMV to renew your license plate or get a new photo ID or the last time you went in to the Post Office to mail a package. There are a dozen windows, each ostensibly belonging to one clerk but mysteriously, there are only three clerks working.

There are four people in front of you and it takes 40 minutes to complete your 30-second transaction. The only other place this happens to you is at a bank — except there you have the option to use an ATM. Now ask yourself if any business could do a worse job at providing these very basic services, than the government does?

I’m sure I could find dozens stories similar to Cohen’s (I’ve linked to several in the past) from the UK, from Canada, or this pathetic story from Japan about a bicyclist-hit-by-car who was rejected from 14 hospitals before he died, or from anywhere else national health care has been attempted.

Cohen just shrugs and says, “it can’t get any worse.”

I beg to differ. This is the same government that spends billions of dollars a year on roads that are constantly under construction or repair. The same government that, in an effort to forestall a financial shitstorm, took all of your money and gave it (no-strings-attached) to Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. The same government that used to spend $436 on uni-directional impact generators hammers.

The same government that, as primary provider and funder of education in this country, has presided over skyrocketing college and university tuition, increasing per-pupil costs at public schools, and steadily declining standardized test scores. America is spending more on education than she ever has at any time in the past, and kids are coming out of that factory dumber, and dumber each day.

And Cohen thinks that we’d be better off by putting these criminals in charge of our health? He is either a liar, a buffoon, or a thief. (Guess where my money is?)

ObamaCare is National Socialism

June 24th, 2009

For the record: I can’t wait until the lustre of the Obama Miracle Machine begins to fade, when people wake up and realize that he can’t turn water to wine; like every other mortal, he’s only capable of turning water into piss.

Why? Because I’m tired of hearing about single-payer healthcare, national healthcare, Obamacare. It’s failed in Canada. It’s failed in the U.K. It’s failed in Japan. The nearest American control group for this pitiful experiment is Massachussetts where, (you guessed it!) it’s another epic fail.

National Healthcare’s awful track record notwithstanding, “our government” is still attempting to bring Obamacare to fruition.

House Democrats on Friday (June 19, 2009) unveiled draft legislation they said would cover virtually all of the nation’s nearly 50 million uninsured as President Barack Obama has promised. However, they offered few details on how to pay for it.

For starters, claiming that there are 50 million uninsureds is about as dishonest as it gets. Seventy-five percent of those “50 million” are either disproportionately young, disproportionately wealthy, or disproportionately not-even-fucking-citizens. So 50 million people who don’t have insurance because they don’t want it, are too lazy to use the programs already available, or don’t qualify for welfare on account of not being citizens, and this is somehow a national crisis?

No. The only crisis is the looming decision on how to pay for it. Obamacare will almost certainly be financed by a tax increase of some sort.

Higher taxes on upper-income households appear likely, but broad levies — even a federal sales tax — are also under discussion.

One of the reasons given for nationalizing healthcare is that (although this is disputed) the few uninsured folks cost the rest of us a few hundred to perhaps $1,000 each year. Perhaps the few people who are truly uncovered are costing me a few bucks a week in implicit costs. Perhaps. But the solution here given—the best solution that government could come up with is: let’s make the costs explicit.

So much for not raising taxes on the middle class! I’ve even heard that benefits from my employer—several hundred dollars per month—might be taxed to pay for Obamacare.

Ironic. Raise my taxes in order to pay for something that I’m already (allegedly) paying for in the first place. Let’s cut the crap and call a turd a “turd,” OK. This isn’t about healthcare. It’s not about welfare or well-being or compassion or any of that flowery language that politicians use like some fourth-grade Fashionista with a Bedazzler and a few too many sequins.

Pure and simple: this is about control.

It would require all individuals to obtain health insurance and force employers to offer coverage to their workers, with exemptions for small businesses

If you don’t want it, you buy it. If you can’t afford to offer it to your employees, you become a “small business” or you go out of business. Or else you go to jail. Every time you read the words “require” and “force” in this context, understand that there is nothing but violence behind it.

Control over healthcare expenses puts all individuals in a very precarious position with regards to their government, since the government will have a very effective but essentially invisible means of control, of social engineering. Like every other arena in which Federal funds play, there will be “strings attached”; obliged to provide us with healthcare, the government will begin making choices regarding what’s left of our personal liberties.

Given a few hours, I could probably come up with a list a mile long, but try these on for starters.

We don’t provide treatment to the elderly. Budget constraints.
We don’t provide treatment to gays. High-risk lifestyle.
We don’t provide treatment for hairlips. Aesthetic/non-essential.
We don’t provide treatment to fat people. Lifestyle choice.
We don’t cover your broken wrist; snowboarding accidents are excluded.

It might begin quietly, with certain foods or habits (transfats, alcohol, tobacco, etc) but will eventually impact lifestyle choices of all sorts. Your freedoms, my freedoms, pitted against one another in a popular vote, they’ll ask each of us to vote away the others’ liberties. Many will play along, willingly. And no matter who wins, we all lose, as more and more power accrues to the government.

It’s war against community, for the health of the State.