For anyone brave enough to read her vicious tripe, do so with this thought in mind:
Every dollar spent by government equals more than a dollar stolen from productive citizens. Every job “created” by government spending is more than a job destroyed in the private sector. Every supposed benefit from government spending comes with an even greater offsetting detriment to taxpayers. Apart from the protection of individual rights accomplished by police, military, and courts, government spending equals destruction of wealth and productivity - every time, in every place, in any context, for any purpose.
Prosperity can only arise as the summation of voluntary individual achievement, a tenet which Pelosi and her ilk stand in diametric opposition to. Don’t trust a single word uttered by this Marxist hag.
Most of the irrationality spewed in congress is standard vote-buying rhetoric lacking of intellectual substance, and unworthy of mention; but occasionally there are statements which justice demands we challenge.
I have a friend of a friend (also an opponent of socialized medicine), whose four siblings were cooked to death in the Holocaust, who could offer a slightly different perspective for Mr. Alan Grayson.
There is only one aspect where his obscene analogy holds any hint of merit - the current state of American medicine is indeed a state-sponsored effort destroying life and prosperity.
But, we all know that’s not what he’s referring to.
His implication is that not having someone else pay for your healthcare is the moral equivalent of being persecuted, enslaved and murdered, and that anyone who opposes socialized medicine is guilty of such. This classless bureaucrat equates the burden of self-reliance with facing genocide. This incredible statement, intended as an argument from intimidation, is a complete moral inversion and a slap in the face of any human being who values life.
Even in the political cesspool resulting from today’s cultural rot, for a political figure expected to convey character, integrity, honesty, and intelligence, to so carelessly diminish the most unspeakable evil in modern history is an embarrassingly juvenile feat of malicious ignorance.
This man should offend all Americans and has no business posing as a supposed leader of this country.
A recent story from Michigan depicts an egregious attempt by the state to regulate babysitting which leads to an unavoidable question: To what extent will America condone state involvement in parenting?
The victims in this particular scenario seem only to be concerned with the specific limitations of how the state can regulate child care, but the far more important question is, should the state have any say in the matter of private child-care arrangements?
When you fail to argue on principles, in favor of quibbling over superficial details of implementation, then the possibility of any objective determination of where to draw the line is discarded. Once you throw out the map, there’s no telling where you’ll end up – especially when all passengers compete for their turn to steer the car.
This is yet another symptom of America’s suicidal march into the bowels of socialized education. Once the principle (that the state has a right to our children) is conceded, there is no way to decide the proper extent. If it’s proper for Government to establish compulsory education according to their standards, why start at age 5? Why not pre-school? Why not daycare?
If parents are incapable of adequately providing intellectual guidance according to the state, why not regulate all supervision? Why allow any parental involvement? Why not seize the child just after weaning and just have the parents send in a monthly check?
Better yet, socialize it by calling it free and make it a mandatory element of payroll tax for everyone.
This Orwellian nightmare shouldn’t sound far-fetched considering it’s based on the exact premises of public education - only applied consistently. If America continues to tolerate Public Schools in principle, we should expect more and more of the above.
Children are not property of the state. In a free society, individuals properly have the right to enter into voluntary contractual agreements for child care according to their own wishes, and according to their own financial capabilities. Child care providers, like all other market entities, stand to erect or erode a positive reputation for quality care based on objective standards – those of the parent (the customer). That reputation vouches for their service record objectively.
Conversely, when the state oversees and regulates child care, that objective reputation is replaced with the subjective approval of the state, an artificial facade of quality based on subjective standards that are potentially incompatible with those of the parent.
Many parents unwittingly assume that “state approval must vouch for something!” Yes, parents should consider the conditions for childcare diligently regardless of the state, but phony state approval urges them to shortcut the process under the premise that government is looking out for them.
I’m aware of countless horrifying examples of Daycare establishments, which bear the state approved mark of acceptability, where the conditions are such that I wouldn’t leave my dog in their care. Children wander around in waste-soiled clothing, snot running from their nose, essentially unsupervised by mindless sloths chatting on their iPhone is a common sight in supposedly state-regulated facilities. Very few offer security measures which could prevent any motivated scoundrel from walking off with a child. Just like in other markets, the state regulation has destroyed the notion of an objective reputation that only a free-market can provide, and should be considered irrelevant as metrics of quality or value.
This type of intrusion should be opposed on the basis of individual rights - specifically, a parent’s right to control the education, care and upbringing of their children.
By what right can the state tell a parent or caregiver how many children they can manage effectively? Such terms are properly agreed upon by parents and the caregiver. So long as the terms of service are properly disclosed and adhered to, that agreement is sovereign.
An individual has the right to choose who, where, and on what terms their child can be cared for. The state has no moral, logical, or economical base for involvement the matter.
The role of government is to protect individual rights through the enforcement of objectively defined criminal law. In For the state to be involved with any other aspect of childcare, commercial or private, is beyond the proper scope of government.
“The DRG administrator will raise hell if I operate, but the malpractice attorney will have a field day if I don’t—and my rival down the street, who heads the local PRO, favors a CAT scan in these cases, I can’t afford to antagonize him, but the CON boys disagree and they won’t authorize a CAT scanner for our hospital—and besides the FDA prohibits the drug I should be prescribing, even though it is widely used in Europe, and the IRS might not allow the patient a tax deduction for it, anyhow, and I can’t get a specialist’s advice because the latest Medicare rules prohibit a consultation with this diagnosis, and maybe I shouldn’t even take this patient, he’s so sick—after all, some doctors are manipulating their slate of patients, they accept only the healthiest ones, so their average costs are coming in lower than mine, and it looks bad for my staff privileges…”
Meanwhile, the patient (maybe you or your loved one) dies…
This hypothetical, but factually warranted, scenario was from a lecture given back in 1985, so imagine if we adjust the cognitive and ethical nightmare presented above to accommodate an additional 25 years of cancerous government involvement. Consider how much worse it will be when the few remaining slivers of freedom are completely ground into the muck of full government control.
Keep in mind the scenario portrayed above, along with the highlighted acronyms, when you next hear some righteous idiot condemn the “free” health care market.
In a free market of healthcare, the only relevant decisions are amongst the physician and the patient to determine the most appropriate course of action available in accordance with the rational judgment and financial means of both parties. Freedom, efficiency, objectivity and justice are the guiding principles one needs when his life is on the line, not subjective deliberation, bureaucratic pandering, systemic injustice and economic dysfunction.
Barack Hussein Obama
He said that all must lend a hand [?]
To make this country strong again
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein Obama
He said we must be clear today
Equal work means equal pay
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein Obama
He said that we must take a stand
To make sure everyone gets a chance
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein Obama
He said Red, Yellow, Black or White
All are equal in his sight
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein Obama
Yes
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein Obama
Just a harmless class jingle respecting the office of the president? Not if considered in full context.
This type of occurrence is not exclusive to this president, this political party, this country, or even this century. The historical record of every socialized nation reveals that government seizure of the educational apparatus is inevitable. However, America wasn’t founded as a Socialist, Fascist, or Communist nation, it was founded as a Constitutional Republic based on the principles of individual rights - on such principles no justification for socialization of any market can be logically based. There certainly is no justification either morally or practically for Government to involve itself in the field of ideas.
When Government assumes control over a country’s education, it must assume the management of the funding for such a system. If it controls the funding, it must also control the subject matter being taught. When a government controls the subject matter being taught, they are, in effect, dictating ideology by force - a student cannot pass without compliance with the established curriculum. Wrangling the ideological essence of a population by force is a crucial component to directing the herd. This power was precisely why the 10th condition for transition in the Communist Manifesto was “free public education”.
We must take this very seriously.
Progressive, socialized education is not only systematically destroying our youth’s ability to think conceptually across all subject matter, it also effectively facilitates the level of indoctrination necessary to destroy America.
For America to survive, public education should be adamantly opposed on moral and (obvious) practical grounds. So long as the system remains, we don’t have a chance. Public schools will be the death knell of this country. This is not about optimism vs. pessimism - this is a logical fact drawn from just the numbers.
Rational, self-reliant, individualist minded people, the type of individuals who founded America, i.e., Capitalists, will simply be outnumbered by the irrational, collectivist sheep-like types that socialized education breeds. The ideas and cognitive guidance that a child is exposed to in its formative years ingrain ideals that after years of reinforcement are very hard to think out of. Our government has hijacked our children, by force, throughout those crucial years. The ideas being cast on our youth today bear faint resemblance to any of the founding principles of this country. The work and thought of the patriots of the American Revolution, as well as all the scientific, and creative ingenuity of the 19th century is being tactfully undermined by modern (anti) philosophy and by the dysfunction and incompetence of our socialized system of education.
Before any might take offense, let me clarify one notion; there are good people in our schools - I know because I am married to (a former) one and I know many others - but in a bureaucratic system essentially immune to fundamental economic laws (their customers can’t say no), the most competent and passionate educator doesn’t stand a chance in a non-objective system ruled by the whim of political engineering.
The best thing we as parents can do for our children, and the only chance for America is throw aside the yolk of public education to the extent that we can. The very nature of the system is intended (on egalitarian grounds) to prevent citizens from any other options, and for many that is the unfortunate reality. If a man is taxed for education funding beyond his choice, he very well may not be able to afford to fork out even more of his hard-earned money for opting out of the system. This is the hidden sinister nature of public education - it all but eliminates feasible competition for the vast majority of citizens.
Once the moral sanction is granted, they’ve got us. They can take our children, by force… they can bus them across the county for racist social engineering… by force, and they can then proceed to teach (indoctrinate) them any ideals (regardless of how offensive or irrational those ideals may be) by force.
Take a moment to consider the reality of that last paragraph. For those who can, get your children out of public schools and into private (rationally guided) or home based schooling - schooling that enforces the principles and ideals that you hold sacred. Do whatever you can within your means, adjust your finances, move to a different area, consider home-schooling, but don’t sanction the hideous violation of your rights by doing (or saying) nothing.
If nothing else, and more importantly, understand the principles at hand and vocally oppose socialized education at every opportunity. This is a critical time.
When children are exposed to irrational, collectivist ideals from age five to twenty-five, they’re much easier to rouse by any leftist leader to support any collectivist cause. Socialized medicine, environmentalism, progressive taxation, “net-neutrality”, and the perpetuation of all other anti-capitalist, anti-man, anti-life bad ideas, past and present, are now fueled by voters thoroughly brainwashed in public schools. As the indoctrination continues to intensify, the scope of power afforded to our collectivist rulers will approach free-reign - we’re almost already there.
The best thing we can do for ourselves, our children, our country and the entire world is to fight public education in America as passionately, articulately and as loudly as we can, by every means available, on the basis that man has the right to exist for his own sake, and the the proper role of government is to protect individual rights - not violate them by forcing men to pay, neither for himself nor others, into an inherently corrupt system that spreads ideas contrary to his convictions as well as the founding principles of America.
I won’t grant it the benefit of linking to it, but I must comment that the mock “PSA” recently produced by moveon.org, featuring a gaggle of hollywood drones, is one of the most superficial, outrageously fallacious, and economically ignorant displays of human stupidity that I’ve seen in some time - a message which accurately reflects the de facto ideological debris surfacing from the bowels of American pop culture.
It’s chock-full of mostly shopworn rhetoric, but there are a few exceptionally erroneous humdingers - the most stunning of which is this sarcastic mind-bender:
“…what’s so American about competition?”
He’s partially correct, there is nothingAmerican about what he refers to as “competition”, i.e., nationalizing an industry, but referring to such as competition is an (intentionally) obscene misuse of the word.
His incredibly distorted implication is that competition is American, and the healthcare market is lacking competition (which it is only to the extent that government intervention has facilitated). His sarcastic portrayal of a stereotypically “greedy” insurance exec (a supposed free-market advocate) dismissing the need for increased competition is intended to A) condemn businessmen as exploitative predators, B) highlight the supposedly un-American essence of the “free-market” as represented by the greedy exec, and C) suggest that anyone who doesn’t advocate “reform” is un-American.
These conniving insinuations are united by condescending sarcasm in order to justify the need of (even more) Government intervention. Let’s unpack this irrational nonsense.
Competition is a vital economic aspect that can exist only to the extent that a market is free of coercion. Government intervention, i.e, reduction of freedom, can only decrease competition. There is no way to legislate competition. Competition is a dynamic which reflects a sum of individual choices. Those choices present an unyielding potential for the loss or gain of market share, if the market is free, i.e., void of unnatural barriers to entry for new competition. If an insurance company had rates that were unnecessarily high, or coverage that customers deemed inadequate, then another firm could seize the opportunity to earn the business of any customers who unsatisfied with their insurance coverage. The only way that a company can escape acknowledging that constant threat of competition is through some barrier to market entry. The only entity that can legally pose such a barrier is Government - the only entity which can regulate and tax businesses by force.
The greedy insurance executive portrayed has no control over competition short of leveraging government force in some manner. So, if there is any lack of legitimate competition, it can only be as a result of government acting beyond its proper scope - protecting individual rights.
In fact, the market is not free, and that is the exact cause for its dysfunctional state today.
The second, more ridiculous fallacy presented is the implication that further government intervention can remedy the claimed lack of competition. This absurd contradiction suggests using illogical means to achieve fallacious ends. There is no conceivable scenario where socializing a market could possibly incite more competition than completely de-regulating the same market. Competition is driven by the sum of consumer choices. Socializing, by definition, spends consumers money apart from their discretion. Socializing a market is the antithetical destroyer of competition - just as we see in the stagnant debacle known as our “public” schools - which can hardly be described as a competitive market. How could there be any substantive competition when “customers” (as the IRS likes to refer to taxpayers) are forced to pay into the government system. In order for would-be competitors to even exist, much less compete, they’d have to stay afloat considering both a forced, artificial decrease in demand since the “customer” has already been persuaded at gunpoint to choose another vendor, as well as the main “competitor” they’re up against (government) is effectively immune to market influence, i.e., can operate at a loss, since his customers are guaranteed and his funding is the unlimited virtual piggy-bank known as the treasury. How can one compete with an entity which holds the power to legally force customers to unconditionally pay for services and can arbitrarily charge as little or as much as they want?
Forcing consumers to pay for services from a “producer” immune to customer satisfaction - this is what Turk, as a perfect caricature of pragmatic, collectivist ignorance, means by competition.
Suppose one could demonstrably claim increased innovation, lowered costs, and a dramatic universal increase in both quantity (life expectancy) and quality of life – the fact remains that socialized medicine is a system rooted in the wholesale encroachment of individual rights. There is no combination of practical angles that outweigh the moral essence. There is no scope of benevolence reaped by one man or one million that can justify forcefully clobbering a single right of another individual.
There was a time when rushing a thousand-page bill through Congress so fast that no one has time to read it would have provoked public outrage. But now, this has been attempted twice in the first 6 months of a new administration.
The fact that they got away with it before, with the “stimulus” bill, may have led them to believe that they could get away with it again. But the first bill simply spent hundreds of billions of dollars.
The current “health care” bill threatens to take life-and-death decisions out of the hands of individuals and their doctors, transferring those decisions to Washington bureaucrats.
People are taking that personally– as they should. Your life and death, and that of your loved ones, is as personal as it gets.
The logic of their collectivist thinking– and the actual practice in some other countries with government-controlled health care– is that you cannot even pay for some medical treatments with your own money, if the powers that be decide that “society” cannot let its resources be used that way, or that it would not be “social justice” for some people to have medical treatments that others cannot get, just because some people “happen to have money.”
Despite incessant repetition of the fact that millions of Americans do not have medical insurance, hardy souls who have actually read the mammoth medical care legislation being rushed through Congress have discovered all sorts of things there that have nothing whatever to do with insuring the uninsured– and everything to do with taking medical decisions out of the hands of doctors and their patients, and transferring those decisions to Washington bureaucrats.
How many racist, marxist/communist policies, comments, advisers, associates and staff members does it take for us to agree we’ve elected an aspiring collectivist dictator?
…The hallmark of such mentalities is the advocacy of some grand scale public goal, without regard to context, costs or means. Out of context, such a goal can usually be shown to be desirable; it has to be public, because the costs are not to be earned, but to be expropriated; and a dense patch of venomous fog has to shroud the issue of means—because the means are to be human lives.
“Medicare” is an example of such a project. [Or socialization of health care to any degree]
“Isn’t it desirable that the aged should have medical care in times of illness?” its advocates clamor.
Considered out of context, the answer would be: yes, it is desirable. Who would have a reason to say no? And it is at this point that the mental processes of a collectivized brain are cut off; the rest is fog. Only the desire remains in his sight—it’s the good, isn’t it?-it’s not for myself, it’s for others, it’s for the public, for a helpless, ailing public… The fog hides such facts as the enslavement and, therefore, the destruction of medical science, the regimentation and disintegration of all medical practice, and the sacrifice of the professional integrity, the freedom, the careers, the ambitions, the achievements, the happiness, the lives of the very men who are to provide that “desirable” goal—the doctors.
After centuries of civilization, most men—with the exception of criminals—have learned that the above mental attitude is neither practical nor moral in their private lives and may not be applied to the achievement of their private goals. There would be no controversy about the moral character of some young hoodlum who declared:
“Isn’t it desirable to have a yacht, to live in a penthouse and to drink champagne?”—and stubbornly refused to consider the fact that he had robbed a bank and killed two guards to achieve that “desirable” goal.
There is no moral difference between these two examples; the number of beneficiaries does not change the nature of the action, it merely increases the number of victims. In fact, the private hoodlum has a slight edge of moral superiority: he has no power to devastate an entire nation and his victims are not legally disarmed.
