Keynesian Economics and Government Math

If you are suspicious of the numbers Democrats throw around when promising us heaven on earth, you are not alone. Some patriotic citizen out there, equally suspicious, put pencil to paper on the Cash for Clunkers program hailed by all and sundry as such a rousing example of the beneficence of Keynesian pump-priming, to see just how marvelous a thing it was.

Cash for Clunkers is a tiny program by this administration's standards, so the following analysis, suitably scaled up for the other government spending horror shows coming this season, should serve to clarify our situation, vis-a-vis our government masters.

The two main rationales for the program were 1) replacing gas guzzlers with more efficient cars, while 2) goosing sales and thereby providing stimulus to the economy. My, how they must imagine old John Maynard beaming down from heaven at his acolytes' clever combination of his economic theory with the tenets of the Church of Green. Let's take a look:
A vehicle at 15 mpg and 12,000 miles per year uses 800 gallons a year of gasoline.
A vehicle at 25 mpg and 12,000 miles per year uses 480 gallons a year.

So, the average "Cash for Clunkers" transaction will reduce US gasoline consumption by 320 gallons per year.

They claim 700,000 vehicles – so that's 224 million gallons / year.

That equates to a bit over 5 million barrels of oil.

5 million barrels of oil is about ¼ of one day's US consumption.

And, 5 million barrels of oil costs about $350 million dollars at $70/bbl.

So, in brilliant Keynesian fashion, the government (that is, you and I) spent $3 billion to save $350 million.

Hey, if you're going to save the earth, you have to spend some money. The extra $2.65 billion is what the carbon dioxide not spewed into the atmosphere by those clunkers cost us.

Now let's see what they can do with regulating and taxing the entire carbon-based energy sector. Should be a bargain along the lines shown above.

Revenge of the Left

The left is the left. I mean the baby-boomer, University of Woodstock left. They can't help it. They are creatures of their emotions--their Western, Christian civilization hating emotions. As such, they are all to predictable to those who know them.

Western Christian civilization culminates in American civilization which, for that reason, they hate. Accordingly, they hate American world power and every arm of it. Think of the discomfort the Clinton people felt at having uniformed military officers in the White House when they moved in back in 1993. Now in 2009, the Obama people go one better: they're making open war on the CIA.

In "Punishing Patriots," Ralph Peters is blunt: "in this administration's hard-left cosmos, the CIA is evil. For that matter, America is evil. Americans need to be punished and forced to face the evil our country has done." Hence, our President travels in foreign lands apologizing for his country the way German Chancellor Angela Merkel apologized for her country's behavior in Poland. This attitude is perfectly consistent with his twenty year discipleship under the pastoral care of Jeremiah Wright.

Fouad Ajami has compared Barack Obama's political style to that of a Third World dictator ("Obama and the Politics of Crowds" and "Obama's Summer of Discontent"). Peters draws his own parallels.

This is the sort of politicized retribution that prevails in backwater countries when regimes change. Our wise tradition has been for new administrations to accept that their predecessors did their best, however disagreeably, and move on. Gerald Ford sacrificed himself to that end, and even Jimmy Carter understood that presidencies are not for domestic revenge.

As ObamaCare, cap and trade, and union "card check" voting will destroy the American economy, this hunt for public enemies in the CIA will throw the door open for al Qaeda to destroy whatever is left of us. "You can't do useful intelligence work on a choke-chain. Yes, the intel community needs oversight and guidance." An editorial in last week's Wall Street Journal sounded a similar alarm over this castration of the faithful dog who patrols our perimeter. "The message that Mr. Holder's criminal probe will send to thousands of men and women is that they had better not do anything remotely controversial on behalf of American safety, even with a lawyer's permission" ("Prosecuting the CIA," August 29, 2009)

The genius of our republic is that its design soberly recognizes the complexity of human nature, and makes prudent account for its moral highs and lows. A wise national security policy does the same, a acknowledges that, "For the rest of us to live in peace, patriots must stand at the edge of darkness where our enemies dwell." For President Obama and the flower child fogies with whose resentments his heart resonates, the darkness is largely within our borders and national security is largely a matter of domestic reform.

By the way, Obama's emotional union with old leftists like Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank helps to explain why he will not tack to the right, as David Brooks and Ed Gillespie have advised him, in response to public opposition and plummeting approval ratings. The other reason is that he wants to be a transformational President. So he will ram through whatever legislation it takes to change the American economy and way of thinking fundamentally, no matter what the political cost.

The Democrat's Cassandra

I suspect Camille Paglia, a teacher of classics at U Penn, is not long for the Democratic party, at least if it continues down its road to Stalinism. She said she proudly voted for Obama and is a proud Democrat; the only alternative is unpalatable because she probably cannot imagine getting on board with Chamber of Commerce types or fundamentalist Christians (she is a notorious pagan atheist) . She is however one of the few intellectually honest people on the left, so her reflections on her own party ought to be taken by them as a distant early warning. Actually, its pretty late, but this is still pretty cutting.

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web -- both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy -- I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

How has "liberty" become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals? (A prominent example is radio host Mark Levin's book "Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto," which was No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three months without receiving major reviews, including in the Times.) I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party -- but I must be living in the nostalgic past. Remember Bob Dylan's 1964 song "Chimes of Freedom," made famous by the Byrds? And here's Richie Havens electrifying the audience at Woodstock with "Freedom! Freedom!" Even Linda Ronstadt, in the 1967 song "A Different Drum," with the Stone Ponys, provided a soaring motto for that decade: "All I'm saying is I'm not ready/ For any person, place or thing/ To try and pull the reins in on me."

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled.

Things to Keep in Mind

John Stossel, long employed in yeoman's work on behalf of the republic, brings his acute eye to the government-run health care about to be pressed down on us by our betters. You and everyone you know should hear this piece in order to accurately assess the President's last ditch attempt to keep the wheels on his rolling disaster. Only a massive push back is going to prevent the Canada-ization of our medical industry.




And just for fun, here Stossel confronts the useless idiot Michael Moore on his claims of Cuban superiority in health care. What a crock.

"To the Struggle Against World Terrorism"

Kicking around low budget things to do this weekend, my wife, the lovely and gracious Pamela, suggested we drive over to Bayonne. "Why Pamela", I said, "whatever for? Can anything good come out of Bayonne?"

She then proceeded to tell me what was good in Bayonne. Bayonne is directly across the harbor from Ground Zero, and in fact the piers and jetties there were used for receiving evacuees and as staging areas for rescuers after the attack. 13 of its citizens have been claimed by Islamist terrorism. One of Russia's premier artists, Zurab Tsereteli, on the day the Twin Towers fell, noted the outpouring of grief in Moscow as he walked the streets. A project formed in his mind: a monument featuring the common motif he was seeing among the crowd gathered in front of the American embassy--tears. He booked a flight to New York to visit ground zero and to search for a suitable place on the Jersey side for a memorial.

The "arts community" in Jersey City, where it was to be sited at first, raised a ruckus and made locating it there impossible. It would block views of the Hudson and the New York skyline they sniffed; its kitschiness was not just unpleasant but offensive; the artist was one of the world's most self-aggrandizing and pompous self-promoters; and so on.

Bayonne-- gritty, working class Bayonne, stepped up. They wanted a monument to the sorrow and loss that beautiful day in September. And so the deal was quickly struck. Out at the end of a man-made peninsula jutting into the harbor, right next to the Bayonne Dry Docks and site of the departure point for war materiel for every US military operation from WWII to Desert Storm known as the Military Ocean Terminal, is situated the only memorial the victims of 9/11 are likely to have. The entire area is being redeveloped into high end residential and commercial properties, and the memorial out at the end will act as an aesthetic and historical anchor for the place.

The drive out past the huge complex of largely abandoned warehouses and industrial buildings, looking like places Mafia hits are carried off, is a bit disconcerting. But the two acre park and memorial is well conceived and rendered, in bronze and flamed granite.
When we were there, only about 10 or 12 people were there with us. As I was gazing at the inscribed cobble stones donors are able to place to commemorate loved ones, a man asked if I were looking for any one in particular. Shifting out of my teary-eyed reverie, I said no. It turned out he was the caretaker, and surprised me with saying the plastic receptacle at the entrance gate for donation forms for those cobble stones, empty when we arrived, has to be refilled every day. It looked to me like the place was little known, and did not have that many visitors. But a recent email campaign has its profile being raised all over the country. In fact, that email campaign accounted for my presence and my wife's there today.


For reasons known only to them, the boys and girls of the press and their editors virtually ignored the ceremony opening the monument on September 11 2006, despite the presence of Bill Clinton, George Bush, Vladimir Putin, and an audience of two thousand. Do you know about this monument? Didn't think so. Neither does the vast majority of the country, thanks to the news blackout on things related to the terrorist bombing and murder of thousands of Americans on that day.


One thing that stands out when looking at the names of the fallen on the black granite base is the widely dispersed patrimony they represent--every European type of name, German, Irish, Italian, Polish, etc, but also Indian, Arabic, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, and many others not discernible by me. Of course this is due to the cosmopolitan nature of New York City, but also, importantly, the openness of America which is also affirmed by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty hard by. The marking of those people's deaths, gathered together in that one sacred place, is silent but eloquent witness to the goodness of America.


And, surprisingly to me, the empathy of the Russian people, as well as the energy and heart of one artistic soul determined not to let the event pass unmemorialized. Zurab Tsereteli, after being rebuffed by Jersey City, payed for the monument himself, since Bayonne had only 40 thousand dollars to spend. The 12 million dollar monument is a gift from the artist and the people of Russia, much in the tradition of France's gift of Lady Liberty, just across the harbor.

"To The Struggle Against World Terrorism"

Humbling the One

Fouad Ajami has an eloquent and insightful account of Barack Obama's presidency so far. It builds on what he wrote last October in "Obama and the Politics of Crowds."

Here, in "Obama's Summer of Discontent," he repeats his point that, "His politics of charisma was reminiscent of of the Third World." The people invest all their hopes and all their authority in a charismatic leader who embodies them and who thus speaks and acts in their name without serious legal restraint. In fact it is just the sort of tyranny that grew out of the ancient democracies, and which the Founders of our republic resolved to avoid by means of the unique features of our liberal republic (federalism, representation, checks and balances, separation of powers).

But Obama and his most religiously devoted supporters have been disappointed with how difficult it has been for the President to realize all his beautiful hopes. Ajami explains that it because we are not a Third World "democracy."

American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the "mandate of heaven" is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.

Barack Obama needs humbling, and the American people are just the ones to give it to him.

Obama, the Czars of Czars

I have recycled this PJTV video from Harold's addition below for a different application. (Good find, Harold. There is wisdom in many web surfers.)

The persistence of the "O," even in semi-official representations of the man by his party, is quite telling. I see no trace of the "O" on the White House website, but the those folks at Organize for America are clearly following the man, not the President.

It is not a substitute symbol, but a parallel one. What I find particularly troubling is the parallel structures that he is establishing. In addition to the seal, he has the "O." Through Organizing for America, he is mobilizing citizens not as President, but as Barack Obama, not under the flag but under the rising "O."

In addition to his cabinet, he has fifteen cabinet members and six appointees of cabinet rank, people like the director of OMB, the UN ambassador, and the EPA administrator. Alongside these are possibly thirty-one "czars" (Politico), depending on how you count, and soon perhaps as many as thirty-nine according to the PJTV video below. As these do not require Senate confirmation, they form a kind of parallel government--or the seeds of one--that is unaccountable within our system of checks and balances. Use of the word czar goes back as far as 1973. The name suggests extraordinary powers not subject to conventional democratic accountability. The fact that this President has multiplied them far beyond what anyone before him has ever contemplated is alarming in itself. Bruce Walker at American Thinker sums it up: "He is not appointing dozens of "czars." He is creating a party-state system of political commissars."



The Czar (or Tsar) was the Russian monarch, the title deriving from Caesar, of the Romans, as did the German "Kaiser." Thus, it means essentially "emperor." Since reigning over these many czars is the "O" himself, what dos that make Barack Obama?

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" - Wendell Phillips, speech in Boston, Massachusetts, January 28, 1852.

***********
Update:

Since I posted this on Friday evening, President Obama's "Green Jobs Czar," Comrade Van Jones, resigned amidst controversy over his connection with Marxism and a few other embarrassments. Just when Obama wants to focus our attention on his Plan for Utopian Socialist Healthcare (PUSH), all eyes are turning toward the emerging Czarst American government, this communist that Obama recruited for his administration, and any other far-left ideological termites who are quietly eating away at our political and economic liberty from within Obama's commissariat.

Harold has drawn my attention to a Powerline post on this crack in the Obama castle wall. "Jones...signifies the soul of Obama's domestic policy as well as anyone in the administration."

Made in Obama's Image

In my previous posts on Obama art, I have drawn attention to the blend of religion and politics that the artists express, the religion centering on the political figure himself.

Michael J. Lewis makes the same connection in his essay, "The Art of Obama Worship" in Commentary (September 2009).

What is striking about these paintings is not their quality, about which the less said the better, but their consistent tone. They belong to that class of objects known as “devotional art.” Such objects are not only intended as votive offerings, to serve as the focus of veneration; the actual process of making them is itself an act of piety, a consideration that all but places them outside the realm of aesthetic judgment.

Lewis takes us through a recent history of the intersection of art with politics, from the Vietnam War through the art wars of the 1980s to Bush Baiting most recently. He then discusses Shepard Fairey, Ron English, and Shawn Barber, but dwells at length on the Fairey's career and the powerful effect of his Hope poster, recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.

He concludes, saying, "...there is something unsettling about images that offer little more political commentary than an uncomplicated adulation that borders on power worship. By showing the subjects removed from all political context, and in a beatific reverie, such art produces images that are aesthetically indistinguishable from the “dear leader” effigies that delighted the dictators of the 1930s or of our own day."

Harold adds:

Great posts David; this is a hugely important and amazing development to watch unfold, with its undeniable connection with fascist and totalitarian propoganda techinques. The hard left has always leaned that way--they admire everything they know about Lenin, Stalin, Che, Castro, Chavez...all of whom knew (know) and exploit(ed) the power of iconic images in their propoganda.

Bill Whittle at PJTV has this video piece suggesting conservatives had better get with the program in understanding the importance of images...recall that Socrates said political philosophy has need of images, and in fact that he himself was "greedy" for images.

Government "Care"

A headline up on the UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper marks yet another reason not to trust government health care. "Sentenced to death on the National Health Service" is a line that doesn't mince any words. Seems those programs put in place by state run health care systems, which commence with such concern for patients, health, and care, come soon to be seen as cost centers by administrators desperate to cut costs regardless of patients, health, or care. This is yet more evidence, if any were needed, that the end of life provisions the Democrats were attempting to include in their bills are indeed dangerous, no matter how neutral or anodyne the language. The trajectory is dark but predictable. The power over people's literal lives seems to be of a more intoxicating kind than just the power to make us recycle or pay huge portions of our earnings to the Treasury. The Dutch and the Swedes have also found that sending the old, the weak, and the terminal into that goodnight is a power doctors get a taste for, and one they soon begin using early and often, sometimes without even notifying the families. Especially when beds are scarce, budgets are strained, and the overwhelming directive from above is to cut costs.

"In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.

"Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away. But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

"The scheme, called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), was designed to reduce patient suffering in their final hours. Developed by Marie Curie, the cancer charity, in a Liverpool hospice it was initially developed for cancer patients but now includes other life threatening conditions.


"It was recommended as a model by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), the Government’s health scrutiny body, in 2004.

"It has been gradually adopted nationwide and more than 300 hospitals, 130 hospices and 560 care homes in England currently use the system.


Notice, to begin with, the Orwellian language tricks--euthanasia is the "pathway;" the government board--or death panel, in Palin's parlance--is NICE. Nice. These soft despots and coercive Utopians always set out with the thought that they are doing good, and doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Of course, a big part of the plan is to steadily increase that which we cannot do for ourselves, leaving more and more for the government experts to shoulder in their valiant lives of selfless public service.

The surface appearance of a tender hearted and sensitive government panel concerned to improve the public weal is soon belied by the reality under that appearance. People are not equal; there are less desirables among us, and it is government's duty to be hard nosed enough to recognize the fact, and act upon it in a way that maximizes utility for the rest of us. We are all "the rest of us" until we are the one on the gurney--but you know, everyone's number comes up eventually, and who better at discerning it than the government's expert numerologists?

The doctors blowing the whistle on this understand that palliative care is perhaps the portion that most needs to be individualized; that patients near the end or in desperate straits need closer attention from attending physicians, not another set of bureaucratic guidelines that allow thoughtless box checking by doctors who then agglomerate patients under preset parameters based on general symptoms or indicators.

[Dr Hargreaves] said: “I have been practising palliative medicine for more than 20 years and I am getting more concerned about this “death pathway” that is coming in. “It is supposed to let people die with dignity but it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Patients who are allowed to become dehydrated and then become confused can be wrongly put on this pathway.” He added: “What they are trying to do is stop people being overtreated as they are dying.

“It is a very laudable idea. But the concern is that it is tick box medicine that stops people thinking.” He said that he had personally taken patients off the pathway who went on to live for “significant” amounts of time and warned that many doctors were not checking the progress of patients enough to notice improvement in their condition.

Prof Millard said that it was “worrying” that patients were being “terminally” sedated, using syringe drivers, which continually empty their contents into a patient over the course of 24 hours.

In 2007-08 16.5 per cent of deaths in Britain came about after continuous deep sedation, according to researchers at the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, twice as many as in Belgium and the Netherlands.

“If they are sedated it is much harder to see that a patient is getting better,” Prof Millard said.

But hey--aren't we all better off with that bed freed up for the next--probably more deserving--patient?

Bringing Down the Political Class

Thomas Jefferson warned us that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure." (Letter to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787). We are far from the point where the political process is so exhausted and corrupted that love of liberty requires political bloodshed, but it is often healthy in a free republic to bring down, and even humiliate, those who have come to see themselves as the naturally ruling element.

Here is a U.S. Marine laying into a Congressman.



This Congressman is clearly a dweeb. The Marine kicks him in the groin repeatedly, then turns his back on him, leaving the Congressman standing there looking anything but a leader. Sadly, it is the people who epitomize the self-imagined naturally ruling element that deserve this treatment--people like Congressmen Barney Frank and Charles Rangel--but neither of those men would ever stand for this treatment. They are reprehensible in many ways, but they are not dweebs. Of course that is what makes it so difficult to dislodge the purported naturally ruling element.

It is encouraging news that Harry Reid is trailing in the polls behind his likely Republican challenger, former UNLV basketball player Danny Tarkanian.

The Other Shark in the Water

Perhaps you have forgotten about that other ominous monster from the deep out there, but it has not forgotten you. I refer to the Cap and Trade bill lurking off to port, forced to wait its turn for a bite of taxpayer shank as its larger cousin, the Jaws-like health care killer, makes its repeated passes past all that taxpayer flesh, sizing up just the right moment to carry off its pound(s) of flesh.

It's hard for me to imagine how the economy survives the bite from just one of these, let alone both; but some form of both have some non-zero probability of getting through. So, maybe it'll just cost an arm and a leg; we'll be economic paraplegics instead of quadraplegics--a nation of "bobs", as it were.

This video trailer from the Cascade Policy Institute will help you stay focused on the other predator out there. Perhaps a sharp rap on the snout by alert citizens will send it back into the deep.

ObamaCare Means Lay Down Your Life

In the competing views of health care reform, we see the fruit of different political philosophies and different moral universes. When considering the public good, Democrats think more socially whereas Republicans are more individualistic in their approach to the question. In modern times, the social trump leads in the direction of totalitarianism, an all powerful state overseeing and directing all things for what it judges to be the good of the people (or so they say). Individual sovereignty leads increasingly to a destruction of moral community. In other words, they lead to Castro's Cuba and Capra's Potterville, respectively. The Founders of our republic envisioned neither one.

Betsy McCaughey, in "Obama's Health Rationer-in-Chief," shows how the social trump that neglects the importance of individual self-government and the inherent worth of every human being works its way out in the Obama administration's approach to managing scarce health care dollars from Washington instead of at the point of consumption.

It is horrifying, but at the same time revealing, that a man with this moral orientation would have such a prominent role in the formulation of our government's health care policy.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for the greater good of society instead of focusing only on a patient’s needs. Many physicians find that view dangerous, and most Americans are likely to agree.

The health bills being pushed through Congress put important decisions in the hands of presidential appointees like Dr. Emanuel. They will decide what insurance plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have, and what seniors get under Medicare. Dr. Emanuel, brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. He clearly will play a role guiding the White House's health initiative.

ObamaCare gives new meaning to the call to lay down your life for your country. It gives a perverse twist to Kennedy's noble call at the end of his 1961 inaugural address: "ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

Of course, I would like to re-produce the entire article, but I can only encourage you to read the whole thing in the Wall Street Journal.

Like Lunch, There is No Free Health Care

The Democrats are puzzled as to why Americans aren’t flocking to grab a piece of the “free health care” that their generous and compassionate party is trying to arrange for us. Paul Krugman attributes this insanity to the “zombie” ideas of the Reagan years which, though dead, continue to live among us ("All the President's Zombies" NYT, Aug. 23, 2009).

But Guy Sorman explains in this short City Journal essay ("Paying for Le Treatment," Aug. 24, 2009) that, as it is with lunch, there is NO FREE HEALTH CARE. He uses the recently celebrated French system as an example.

In a New York Times Magazine essay ("Le Treatment"), Sara Paretsky, a novelist travelling in France with her husband (ah, the privileges of wealth) explained how impressed she was by the quality and speed of the care that her husband received when he went to the hospital with chest pains. This care would have been free if they had been French citizens. Instead, the system billed them, but for only $220. She recommends this paradise which can be ours if we would just follow the President into the happyland of hope and change that he promised us and is now trying to deliver.

Wealthy liberals believe this sort of fantasy because they are used to having things just handed to them. They turn on the tap of life, and out flows whatever abundance they desire. They put bad things at the foot of their driveway, and the next day it has magically disappeared. Surely the government--especially the Obama government--can institute a national health care system than mandates low prices from wicked price gougers and top quality care from health care professionals who, as government employees, will become public spirited instead of narrowly selfish in their service to patients.

What a wonderful world. But it exists only in the dreams and delusions of political liberals. The rest of us look at the post office and the IRS, and dread the thought of our health care in the hands of the similarly callous and inefficient.

Sorman ends his brief lesson in the economics of "free" government goodies with this warning:

"In the end, who paid for Paretsky’s husband’s nearly free ride in a French hospital? French workers and taxpayers; American patients; and the young, unqualified, and out-of-work French unable to find jobs because of the unemployment that national health insurance engenders. There is no such thing, anywhere, as a perfect health-insurance system. It’s always a trade-off among competing goods, and the choices to be made are ultimately political ones. Americans commenting on health-care reform should try to make the costs and consequences of these choices transparent, rather than resorting to misleading morality plays."

We Have Seen the Future--and it's Oregon

Sarah Palin coined the phrase "death panels" that is sticking like death to the ObamaCare health care debate. We note that it is Sarah Palin, mindless gun toting hillbilly, ONE, Barack Obama, brilliant constitutional lawyer and auto and health care industry expert, ZIP. Due to the whistle blowing by the ex-governor, the Senate was shamed into removing the provision they said did not exist. They lost this round to Palin because there were just too many eyes on the thing for their denials to hold up--even the Washington Post's Charles Lane admits the slippery-slopiness of the provision requiring end of life counseling. Eugene Robinson, one of the president's staunchest supporters, agrees that the import of the provision is to shorten lives, and thus curtail the medical spending that supports the waning years of people's lives.

Nat Hentoff, an Old Left colleague of Christopher Hitchens at the Nation magazine two decades ago, weighs in with his characteristic bluntness in his piece "I'm Finally Scared of a White House Administration" . As a constitutional scholar and ardent critic of government power (mostly Republican government power), he validates and then some Palin's concerns over where this is going.

Despite media reports, Palin's Facebook post responding to Obama is a model of successful refutation--clear, concise, and heavily footnoted. I don't know if she wrote it--she may still have staff working for her--but no fair minded person would associate such successful argumentation with the cartoon character the media has invented to represent her.

But it is not just the logical points that immediately follow from the language in the bill that show the likelihood of the death panel charges. The actual implementation of the laws Congress writes falls to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats whose only means of administering such massive programs is to shuffle individual cases into the nearest category and get on to the next case. Or go to lunch, Whatever. It is they who decide what the categories are, and what the criteria for judging which cases fit which category. And they will never see a single patient whose life outcome they are deciding. There is also the inconvenient fact that in several government-run health care systems the advice given to old patients turns out to be euthanasia (Sweden and Holland both give a lot of weight to government doctors to make the decision to pull the plug, even against the patient or the family's wishes, often outside official guidelines).

And now this story from Oregon's experiment in socialist living surfaces just at the wrong time for the deceiving sponsors of government control of everything. This is exhibit A in what government run health care portends for a large swath of its victims, in its all-caring, all knowing benevolence. I meant to say bureaucratic callousness.

This lady has a form of cancer treatable with a drug deemed too expensive for her case. The letter she received from the Oregon state authority suggested her best option under their wise and noble program is "aid in dying". So thoughtful of them. Listen to the director of the state commission--Oregon's death panel-- skate around the obvious cost basis analysis for the twice-appealed decision.

Funny Foreign Song

I've been busy these days with a grant application and children's swimming lessons, so I'm just going to post this video that my wife and I think is both hilarious and infectious. Five and half million YouTube viewers think so too (of course, there are repeat views; we have seen it many times).

There's nothing to be learned in this (is that ever true?). It's just fun.



The song itself has become surprisingly popular. Since when did Americans listen to foreign songs? These guys must be the richest guys in Moldova.

It was first released in 2004 and became a hit all over Europe. Its foothold in America apparently started with this utterly pointless waste of time on YouTube, although 31 million viewers disagree with me. Truly, man knows not his time, whether for raving popularity or for death.

Reagan Weighs In On ObamaCare

If only Ronald Reagan were alive to speak into the debate about government takeover of the health care system.

But take heart! Though he is gone, he speaks nonetheless!

Here is the Gipper himself in 1961 explaining at that time why citizens should actively oppose "socialized medicine." This is a 10 minute recording on a record album produced by the American Medical Association. But it's all Reagan: his thoughts on the subject; his eloquence.



Notice how he speaks directly to the ordinary American as an ordinary American himself without talking down or pretending to be something he was not. Notice also his appeal to political theory and the Founding. Notice lastly, that his appeal is not to prosperity nor to fiscal sanity, as good and legitimate as those are. His appeal is to the noble concern for liberty.

He closes with this warning:

If you don't do this [call your Congressman] and if I don't do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

Yes--he saw socialized medicine itself as being decisive in the fight for liberty against socialism, which he viewed as antithetical to the American spirit and the American system of government, and which he identified with tyranny.

Guns and Public Safety

New York City is a little safer today because an armed citizen with a steady hand blew away four armed men who were robbing his store. This account in the New York Times is moving.

They strode into the restaurant supply store in Harlem shortly after 3 p.m. on Thursday, four young men intent on robbery, one with a Glock 9-millimeter pistol, the police said. The place may have looked like an easy mark, a high-cash business with an owner in his 70s, known as a gentle, soft-spoken man.

But Charles Augusto Jr., the 72-year-old proprietor of the Kaplan Brothers Blue Flame Corporation, at 523 West 125th Street, near Amsterdam Avenue, had been robbed several times before, despite the fact that his shop is around the corner from the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street.

There were no customers in the store, only Mr. Augusto and two employees, a man and a woman. The police said the invaders announced a holdup, approached the two employees and tried to place plastic handcuffs on them. The male employee, a 35-year-old known in the community as J. B., struggled with the gunman, who then hit him on the head with the pistol.

Watching it happen, Mr. Augusto, whom neighborhood friends call Gus, rose from a chair 20 to 30 feet away and took out a loaded Winchester 12-gauge pump-action shotgun with a pistol-grip handle. The police said he bought it after a robbery 30 years ago.

Mr. Augusto, who has never been in trouble with the law, fired three blasts in rapid succession, the police said.

The first shot took down the gunman at the front. He died almost immediately, according to the police, who said he was 29 and had been arrested for gun possession in Queens last year.... Mr. Augusto’s other two blasts hit all three accomplices, who stumbled out the door, bleeding. One of them, a 21-year-old, staggered across 125th Street and collapsed in front of...one of the city’s biggest housing projects. ...[A]n ambulance rushed him to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where he was dead on arrival. The police said he had a record of arrests for weapons possession and robbery. Another wounded man left a blood trail that the police followed to 125th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The fourth wounded man was picked up, on the basis of witness descriptions, at 128th Street and St. Nicholas Terrace. Both were taken to St. Luke’s.

This is a television report on the incident.



As the WPIX video above reports, Mr. Augusto's shotgun is unregistered, so he faces prosecution for violation of New York gun laws. The laws covering shotguns are more permissive than those pertaining to handguns, however. They require merely a permit, not a license. Furthermore, the New York Times reports, "Under long-established New York law, a person is allowed to use deadly physical force when he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to meet the imminent use of deadly physical force and there is no reasonable chance of retreating from the danger."

All the same, if more people were legally armed--at the very least in their homes and businesses--there would be less need for being armed. It's paradoxical, but true. The same logic applied to the Cold War standoff between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. The existence of nuclear weapons and the credible threat of their use in response to aggression preserved peace between the two alliances. As Robert Heinlein is reported to have said, "An armed society is a politie society."

John Locke, the chief theorist of our liberal democratic system of government and way of life, would view Mr. Augusto's actions as perfectly reasonable and defensible. In the Second Treatise of Government, he argues,

...it being reasonable and just, I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because such men are not under the ties of the commonlaw of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures, that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power.

And hence it is, that he who attempts to get another man into his absolute power, does thereby put himself into a state of war with him; it being to be understood as a declaration of a design upon his life: for I have reason to conclude, that he who would get me into his power without my consent, would use me as he pleased when he had got me there, and destroy me too when he had a fancy to it; for no body can desire to have me in his absolute power, unless it be to compel me by force to that which is against the right of my freedom, i.e. make me a slave. To be free from such force is the only security of my preservation; and reason bids me look on him, as an enemy to my preservation, who would take away that freedom which is the fence to it;...

This makes it lawful for a man to kill a thief, who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life, any farther than, by the use of force, so to get him in his power, as to take away his money, or what he pleases, from him; because using force, where he has no right, to get me into his power, let his pretence be what it will, I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me in his power, take away every thing else. And therefore it is lawful for me to treat him as one who has put himself into a state of war with me, i.e. kill him if I can; for to that hazard does he justly expose himself, whoever introduces a state of war, and is aggressor in it (sections 16-18).

In brief, anyone who would put me in his absolute power, for example at the point of a gun, should be assumed for the sake of one's self-preservation to have murderous intent. And so, being for the moment beyond the protective reach of the civil authorities, anyone in that situation has the moral right to protect himself with deadly force. Even viewing the matter from within a Christian moral framework, I am under no obligation to prefer the life of a murderous aggressor to my own or to that of my family or employees or, for that matter, any innocent person I find being threatened in that way.

This is the thinking of one local observer who was interviewed for the report: “If I were him, I would kill a dozen of them,” he said. “You have to protect your workers and your family. Case closed.”

The good sense of this statement is intuitively obvious. It follows that if people have the right to exercise that freedom, they should have the freedom to obtain the means to it, i.e., to own a gun. It follows in addition that training people in the proper use of fireams, so that in the event they should have to defend themselves they can do it responsibly and safely, is a public good. Instead of teaching children how to use condoms in order to make what some regard as inevitable teenaged sexual activity safer, the public schools (if we are to have public schools) should be training children in the use of firearms the same way they offer driver's education.

A Crash Course in Who We Are

I hope within the next few months (is that asking too much?) to take the civics test for my American citizenship. I will not study for it, of course. If I can't pass this test with a Ph.D. in political science, I don't deserve citizenship or any other kind of honor. But one cannot escape the irony that whereas people from other countries who apply for American citizenship must pass a test on American history and political institutions so that they can participate in our political process more intelligently, people who were born here and have the right to vote simply by virtue of having survived to eighteen years of age can be as abysmally ignorant of these matters as the government school system allows them to be (and that's pretty bad).

Recent developments in Washington--and I'll throw in the last 75 years as well--demonstrate that Americans in general are in need of a remedial course in our political principles. There are many institutions that are working on this national project in adult education. But most recently, David Corbin and Matthew Parks, who teach political science at The King's College and University of New Hampshire respectively, have started an effort in the blogosphere, aptly entitled republican101. Here is one of Prof. Corbin's posts that presents the gist of the blog.

Sarah Palin’s surprise announcement that she was resigning as Governor of Alaska amounted to another bad news day for Republicans. Every news day recently has seemed like a bad news day for Republicans. Which has led some to suggest that the party would do better to resemble its political adversary. This is bad advice. Republicans instead should do the following:

(1) Remember that before there were Republicans, there were republicans.

(2) Consider that the American people are a republican people, not a Republican people.

(3) Understand that this is a good thing.

(4) Begin to transform the Republican party into the republican party.

Well, what is a republican?

John Adams defined a republican as a species of man who ascribes to “an Empire of Laws, and not of men . . .in other words to that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the laws.” Knowing that there was “an inexhaustible variety of Republics because the powers of society are capable of innumerable variations,” Adams endorsed a republican form of government held together by a regime that “introduces knowledge among the People, and inspires them with a conscious dignity, becoming Freemen.” For Adams, the most excellent form of government encourages excellence in both its leaders and its citizens.

How often has government at any level inspired dignity, excellence, and freedom in the past year?

You might be a republican if you’re still racking your brain.

And if you’re a discouraged Republican, you might think encouragingly about the prospect of the Republican party becoming republican again. If the American people are more republican than they are Republican, Republican politicians would do well to take note.

Our Bodies, Ourselves

In that 1970's tract of feminist political thought masquerading as a medical self help book, women were encouraged to regard their bodies as the battleground where the forces of reaction--the Establishment patriarchy grounded in Christianity and capitalism, warred against the progressive, enlightened socialism of the New Left. The same seminal, revolutionary moment brought the slogan that helped collapse the important distinction between what is private and what is public, and what is the legitimate extent of government control and intrusion into private lives: The personal is the political. The Supreme Court almost at the same time famously derived a right to privacy from the "emanations of penumbras" of certain of the articles of the Bill of Rights which finds a right to privacy, and which disallows states from legislating restrictions on abortion, validating in one way the right of a woman to her own body (skipping over of course the baby's right to hers--that, apparently was an emanation not appearing in the particular penumbra examined by Justice Douglas.)

It is interesting then to find that same tender concern for the privacy rights of individual bodies kicked to the curb deep in the legalese of the House bill conjuring universal, affordable, non-budget busting health care for all God's children. The bill contemplates boards of experts to advise--no, rule on--both what treatments are necessary and feasible, and which citizens are worth spending the republic's limited treasury on. (Funny--for other purposes, the Treasury is always unlimited--no end to the Blue Sky projecting for the goodness of what the Congressional shepherds intend for its little flock, or what the Congress spends on itself.)

The Congress' insistence on making government the provider of health services forces the logic of the distortion of the public/private distinction to its ugly end: your body is not your own, if the government is paying for its upkeep. It's hard to think of a deeper intrusion into private right than the loss of control over one's own health and life, because, well, there isn't one.

Our Bodies, Our Selves co-author (there were twelve) Nancy Miriam Hawley said of writing the book that "We weren't encouraged to ask questions, but to depend on the so-called experts. Not having a say in our own health care frustrated and angered us. We didn't have the information we needed, so we decided to find it on our own." This laudable, and I should say, quintessentially American attitude, helped foster a take-it-back kind of can-doism recognizable in many aspects as what makes America great and exceptional. And of course that is exactly what is under attack in so much of the legislation of this radical left Congress, unleashed under the aegis of the age of Obama.

It occurs to me that this is not merely an assault on the Constitution and way of life of these United States, a solemnly constituted people, although that is serious enough. It goes beyond the Constitution and self understanding of the people of the United States as encoded in our official public documents, all the way to the natural rights philosophy that grounds the constitution and that self understanding itself. It undercuts the first principle of freedom, articulated most famously by John Locke in his theory of labor, property, and freedom. A person has a natural right to what will sustain his life because he owns his body, his self. He has absolute dominion (humanly speaking), and property in, his own person and body. All property right, and all right whatever, follows from that fact. Personal freedom, personal property, constitutional government by consent, and the rule of law all begin in this natural right to one's own self. This is the basis for the well known triad of Lockean natural rights in the Declaration, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (or property, as Locke has it).

The intrusion into what one may do with one's body, is, like the intrusion into what one may do with one's property, fraught. There is some State interest in restricting property rights in the interest of the greater public good. Pig farms, abattoirs, and salvage yards are not permitted in residential neighborhoods. Likewise, ingestion of narcotic drugs is restricted because of the danger to the public from people out of their minds on them. To the extent that your personal actions or the property that you control is a threat to the health, safety, or welfare of other equally endowed rights-holders--that is to say, every other person, it falls within the province of the public legislation to limit it. Against such legislation seen to exceed these limits, the Supreme Court has established a benchmark which must be met or overcome--strict scrutiny. The Court will apply strict scrutiny to any law thought to impose an undue burden on any fundamental right, or thought to bring invidious discrimination to groups or individuals based on race, sex, religion, and a growing list of things. The restrictions on abortion that Roe swept away were thought to impinge just such a fundamental right--the right of a woman to choose whether or not to carry a baby to term, not withstanding the state's interest in the protection of life and the interest in the ongoing generation of citizens.

Yet now we begin to see legislation restricting what we consume, starting with trans-fats and tobacco. Sugar, alcohol, and non-organic milk are soon to follow. If Congress is paying for our health care, they will certainly not blanch at serving up as laws and regulations all kinds of good ideas about how we should live. (For a fuller discussion, go here) The property we have in our bodies--literally, what is proper to us, and us alone--is, under the health care monstrosity being considered, about to be taken, in much the same way as real property is taken, via something like eminent domain. The government in such cases abrogates personal property rights in favor of a public good--new highway or sewer line needs to run through your yard, so out you go--thanks for playing.

This seems to be what is in prospect for our most personal property, our bodies. We will have restrictions on choice of procedure and drug regimen based on what an expert panel decides is right (read cheapest) for situations like ours--not even a revue of the actual case at hand, just categories of cases, rated first and foremost by age and ability to contribute. Anyone recall just now the Nazi propaganda initiative against the "useless feeders"--disabled, retarded, insane, aged, etc? Anyone not full of Aryan health and vigor was given the heave-ho. But that's really unfair isn't it, to bring in all those Nazi comparisons. Although they didn't cotton to any natural rights either did they? Everyone created equal? Capable of self government? Government by consent? Freedom for self-actualization? I can hear Hermann Goering cocking his pistol at the very sound of those ideas.

The natural right basis of our Constitution is to be overthrown to accommodate the State's spurious interest in equalizing health outcomes. We will all be made miserable at the same rate by government employees masquerading as health professionals who give a damn. Oh, except for Congress. And their staffs of thousands. And the entire federal workforce. And Hollywood and Silicon Valley elites. And all unionized workers. (want to rethink that offer of union representation at your workplace now?) All the rest of us will queue up and wait for whatever rationed bit of drug therapy or surgical expertise is left over, and our right of personal decision over what is most personally proper to us, our bodies, will have been taken under something very much like the doctrine of eminent domain, where the State's interests supersedes our own.

Makes you wish for the timely publication of a good feminist tract regarding personal body decisions and our right to make them. Oh wait--they've got their abortions paid for in this thing, so we won't be hearing any objections from them this time about "experts" or patriarchal intrusion into personal lives.

If only we had a Court that could look for some more penumbral eminations...

God Is Back In New York

This spring, two editors from The Economist published God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (Penguin 2009). John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge distinguish themselves among their associates in the scribbling class with their appreciation for those who are restrained and directed by religious faith, especially the Christian faith.

Of particular interest to me and many readers of this blog is the special mention they give to The King's College in the conclusion.

The Empire State Building...is an embodiment of technological prowess and an icon of modern pop culture, the building where King Kong met his tragic end. Yet this icon of modernity is also home to one of America's leading seats of Evangelcial learning. King's College, which moved into the building in 1999, now occupies two floors of the skyscraper.

They quote the college President, Stan Oakes, saying,

For all the sophistication and prestige of the secular colleges, almost all of their professors traffic in spent ideas that do not work--bad ideas that have had a myriad of disasterous consequences in our generation. They are wrong about God, human nature, wealth, power, marriage, poverty, family, sex, America, liberty, peace and many other decisive issues.

They point out that The King's College is not just about great ideas, but also about the great city that the college inhabits.

Many Christians deliberately retreat from the temptations ofd the big city, attending Bible schools and Christian universities in small towns....King's College deliberately brings young Christians to the heart of the beast. ... [W]here better to train people to exercise influence on the world than the capital of the media and financial world, not to mention the home of the United Nations?

Here are reviews from The New York Times, FoxNews, The New Statesman, and the Washington Post.