As I write this, it is the afternoon before special Election Day. Californians will vote tomorrow on six proposals relating to the current budget mess.
Proposition 1A will make permanent the tax increases (income, sales, and car registration) the Legislature gave us recently. 1B will, if 1A passes, "pay back" education spending for any past "cuts". 1C-1E, best I can tell, allows "borrowing" from mandated spending to be used, temporarily, in the General Fund. 1F will prohibit any pay increases for Legislaters during a year in which there is an inbalanced budget.
1F may be a good thing, but it certainly won't help much. 1C-E are essentially meaningless. They give the Legislature a temporary pass to spend less than the normally mandated amount on certain popular spending categories, "Children's Services" and "Mental Health", in order to spend more on other things. I think I will vote Yes on 1F and No in 1C-E.
Prop 1B is based on a fraud. When the education bureaucracy got less funding than they wanted, their political wing called it a "cut" (or "billions of dollars of cutbacks"). Prop 1B would turn that into a debt, requiring the taxpayers to "pay back" the difference between what this particular set of tax consumers wanted and what they got. Imagine your son asked you for $1,000, you gave him $100, and he therefore believed you owed him $900.
Prop 1A, and the advertising to promote it, are two of the worst things in current electoral politics. California has the highest income tax, sales tax, and car registration tax in the country (I haven't confirmed this myself, but the anti-1A advertisements say it, and I haven't heard it being disputed). Property taxes in California are not the highest, which undoubtedly stirs the competitive fire of many of our leaders ("We're California. We should be best at everything!").
The proponents of Prop 1A, as far as I can tell they are all tax consumers, describe it as "budget reform", a solution to a "broken process", a "spending limit", everything but a tax increase, which is the only thing it really is. The advertising distances itself from the Legislature, as if our elected officials have nothing to do with spending the extra money that will come in if 1A passes. Most hilariously, and with the help of the Governor, they are threatening to close firehouses and let out prisoners if 1A is not passed. In the entire budget, the largest state budget in the country, larger than almost all nations on Earth, they can't find anything to cut except fire protection and prisons.
We should certainly replace our elected officials, either because they would do such things, or because they would falsely threaten to. But in the meantime, don't give them more money.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Saturday, May 9, 2009
McCain Song
You may recall a fellow named John McCain. He ran for President not too long ago. Here is a song about him. If the composer of the melody objects to my using it, tell him, "The song is your song, the song is my song..."
Muh-Cain is bound for glory, Muh-Cain...
Muh-Cain is bound for glory, Muh-Cai-ai-ain...
Muh-Cain is bound for glory,
But listen to the rest o' the story,
Muh-Cain is bound for glory, Muh-Cain...
Muh-Cain says he's no liberal, Muh-Cain...
Muh-Cain says he's no liberal, Muh-Cai-ai-ain...
Muh-Cain says he's no liberal,
Lookin' like a great big fib, well,
Muh-Cain says he's no liberal, Muh-Cain...
Muh-Cain don't like right wingers, Muh-Cain...
Muh-Cain don't like right wingers, Muh-Cai-ai-ain...
Muh-Cain don't like right wingers,
Just Democrat Kum-BAY-ya singers,
Muh-Cain don't like right wingers, Muh-Cain...
Vote for him, then take a shower, Muh-Cain...
Vote for him, then take a shower, Muh-Cai-ai-ain...
Vote for him, then take a shower,
Wash up for at least an hour,
Vote for him, then take a shower, Muh-Cain...
Will he win, I hope that he will, Muh-Cain...
Will he win, I hope that he will, Muh-Cai-ai-ain...
Will he win, I hope that he will,
No doubt he's the lesser evil,
Muh-Cain is bound for glory, Muh-Cain...
Muh-Cain is bound for glory, Muh-Cai-ai-ain...
Muh-Cain is bound for glory,
But listen to the rest o' the story,
Muh-Cain is bound for glory, Muh-Cain...
Muh-Cain says he's no liberal, Muh-Cain...
Muh-Cain says he's no liberal, Muh-Cai-ai-ain...
Muh-Cain says he's no liberal,
Lookin' like a great big fib, well,
Muh-Cain says he's no liberal, Muh-Cain...
Muh-Cain don't like right wingers, Muh-Cain...
Muh-Cain don't like right wingers, Muh-Cai-ai-ain...
Muh-Cain don't like right wingers,
Just Democrat Kum-BAY-ya singers,
Muh-Cain don't like right wingers, Muh-Cain...
Vote for him, then take a shower, Muh-Cain...
Vote for him, then take a shower, Muh-Cai-ai-ain...
Vote for him, then take a shower,
Wash up for at least an hour,
Vote for him, then take a shower, Muh-Cain...
Will he win, I hope that he will, Muh-Cain...
Will he win, I hope that he will, Muh-Cai-ai-ain...
Will he win, I hope that he will,
No doubt he's the lesser evil,
A Few Pages of Random Thoughts
The World is full of disappointments,
We all get our share.
Get out of the mud,
Get over it, Bud,
Who said life was fair?
If you want to discourage teenage cigarette smoking, just tell the girls how bad they smell and tell the boys how gay they look.
If you can’t afford to pay for your own health care, you can’t afford to pay a share of everyone else’s.
Please be kind to your future self.
A dollar spent by government costs society more than a dollar and (in many cases) buys less than a dollar’s worth.
People are (more or less) wise in the decisions they make for themselves. We benefit from good decisions, suffer from bad decisions, and (slowly) learn the difference. But when we make decisions for other people (like when we vote, for instance) the consequences (good or bad) of our decisions are so far removed from us, we decide more poorly. And it probably gets a lot worse for most people when they get on a jury.
Unfortunately, we can’t do any better than representative democracy or jury trials, because the autocrats or judges, perhaps initially blessed with a little more wisdom than the rest of us, will be made stupid by power.
Power corrupts. Another way of saying that is “The fellow with the hammer thinks the whole world is a nail.” That’s why, for instance, no matter how much money gets spent on public schools (or medical research, drug abuse prevention, take your pick), the people who make their living at those things say it isn’t enough.
Every time you hear an advocate or a newscaster start a sentence with “Experts say” or “Studies show”, you should hear in your mind “I’m just about to lie to you”. The “studies” were commissioned and conducted to reach a particular conclusion the studiers and the newscaster already believed before the studies were begun. One becomes and “Expert” by agreeing with the advocate; one becomes a non-expert by disagreeing. That’s why you will almost never hear a sentence start “Most experts say”, “Some experts say”, or “Every expert but one says”. The one who disagrees has just ceased to be an “Expert”.
If something is paid for by the Government, or a new Government expenditure is proposed, ask yourself “Could the money for this be raised from people choosing to pay, as contributors, investors, or a combination?” If the answer is no, then it is wrong to force taxpayers to fund something they wouldn’t fund voluntarily. If the answer is yes, then it is unnecessary to have the taxpayers fund it.
There are exceptions to the above paragraph. Certain things do need to be done by government for specific reasons. That something is so costly that “only the Government can afford it” is not a legitimate argument (the proof of this is left as an exercise for the Reader). But we can’t have the police force or courts run on voluntary contributions, because they would be influenced too much by the contributors and too little by everyone else. We can’t have the fire department funded that way because non-contributors know they would get fire protection to keep a fire from their property from igniting that of a contributing neighbor. We could not have a privately financed road system because the only practical way to get users to pay for it is the gasoline tax.
Yes, the things that only Government can do add up to a lot, but not to half the economy, which is about what Government is now.
Let’s suppose you earn a thousand dollars. It means someone thinks that your work or a product you produce is worth at least a thousand dollars to him. Maybe that “someone” is a consumer but more likely it is a company that produces products or work for “someone” else, maybe another company. The payer of your thousand is willing to do that because she/he/it will get at least a thousand in income because of your work. There is a chain of money passing from consumers to you and a chain of value passing from you to consumers. At each transaction, payer and payee (work consumer and worker) agree on the price/wage paid for the good/service. Now you would probably like more money and your employers would like to pay you less, but the actual amount (the grand we mentioned way back at the start of the paragraph) is close enough to “fair” (the value of your work to your employer and the whole economy) that you both agree to the transaction. You pay some taxes, and you get to keep the rest of the thousand.
Now suppose I earn a grand. Suppose your young son earns a grand. Suppose your favorite entertainer and my least favorite (I hope they are not the same person) do the same. Let’s add one more person, an anonymous scientist who helped develop the drug that kept your Mother alive. Let’s assume we all get our money from the free economy; none of us is a burglar, a tax consumer, or a professional plaintiff. We all earned a grand. Maybe you’re underpaid and I’m overpaid (or vice versa); maybe one or both of the entertainers is useless to society; the scientist and your son probably both deserve much more than they get. But the best guess we really have is that we six “deserve” the thousand bucks that we receive freely for work we freely do. And we all pay taxes, and get to keep the rest. This is fair, right?
Now suppose you get to keep 600 dollars. Suppose I keep 700, your son keeps 850, the scientist keeps 500, and the entertainers 350 and 400, respectively. That’s fair, isn’t it? We all did a thousand dollars worth of work (in the opinions of the receivers of that work), and we all get to keep different amounts. You make a grand in less than a week, I in a little longer time, your son in a month (he’s just starting out now; he’ll get skills and do much better in a few years), the scientist in a couple of days, and the entertainers in a couple of hours.
The medieval global warming, and the global cooling that followed, ought to be enough to dismiss the notion of human-caused global warming in our time. Yes, there were humans in the Dark Ages, and they exhaled carbon dioxide, and lit fires. But they didn’t stop doing these things to cause the world to cool between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. Okay, when the climate warmed they started lighting fewer fires than before, but that trend certainly reversed once the cooling was noticed and it took a few more hundred years to restart warming. And the medieval carbon footprints were miniscule compared to nowadays, when global warming is slowing and will almost certainly leave us with a cooler world than that of Eric the Red, William the Conqueror, and Ethelred the Unready.
The best argument in favor of human-caused global warming is this: “Either agree with us or we’ll call you names and try to get you fired from your job.”
Senator Clinton and others accused General Petraeus of giving false testimony to aid the political aims of the Bush administration. Without any basis for an independent military assessment (are there any of them with military accomplishments other than John Kerry having used a hand grenade to insert rice into his own buttocks and turning that incident into a purple heart), they assume that anyone in the Administration is first and foremost a political operative.
This is not a characteristic of the Bush Administration. But it was, and will be, the defining characteristic of the Clinton Administration. Government functions that the rest of us would never think of as political were drafted into the struggle against the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy”. The purpose of the FBI was to supply files on prominent Republicans to the Democratic Party. The purpose of missile technology was to sell to the Communist Chinese for campaign contributions. The purpose of the military was to stage raids to draw public attention away from Willie Whopper’s sexual exploits. The purpose of the Oval Office … I’ll leave this one out. The purpose of the Internal Revenue Service was to punish prominent critics of the Administration. The purpose of the Immigration and Naturalization Service was to abbreviate the background check process to qualify a million new voters in time to vote for Clinton in the 1996 election (turns out this was unnecessary because the opposing candidate was Bob Dole).
To be a functionary in the Clinton Administration meant (and will mean) to be a Clinton Stooge. The remarkable thing is how true almost all of these people have been to their Stoogeness. In whatever colleges, news networks, or publishers they have gone to work for, their primary identity is still Clinton Stooge (although the networks try to hide that). Wesley Clark, Richard Clark, Jamie Gorelik, George Steffy, Sandy Sox, Madeline Albright, the list goes on. Seems like I haven’t heard anything lately from Janet Reno, and I don’t know why, but I’m confident it’s not because she has become de-Stooged. The only exceptions I can think of are Al Gore and Dick Morris, the former because of his own megalomania, the latter (I think) because the Clintons treated him poorly.
Polls occasionally show that most Americans would like to see tax increases for people richer than themselves. And that’s supposed to be news. If you asked the question “Would you favor a tax increase on everyone except yourself?” what do you think the majority would say?
There is a serious problem in a democracy when a large percentage of voters pay little or no taxes. When a ballot proposition involves spending or not, or an election is between a candidate who wants to increase spending and one who doesn’t, the non-taxpayer voter isn’t thinking “Should we spend more money?” but “Do I want more of other people’s money to be spent, some of it for me?” What is the “large percentage”? Maybe 10%, maybe 30%, but when it gets close to a majority, when almost half of the voters think of themselves only as consumers of taxes and not taxpayers, a handful of limousine liberals will determine the outcome of every election.
The most formidable candidate for President? The one who will say: “I opposed the attack on Iraq. Not because [fill in your favorite dopey ‘60s slogan] but because this was the wrong place and time to engage the enemy in the War on Terror. But now that gains have been made (at too high a cost), it would be foolish to leave Iraq before the country is stabilized. And it is helpful to the enemy, and discouraging to our allies, every time a potential President makes noises about a withdrawal. But a candidate like me will have better judgment about when and whether to engage the enemy again.”
I probably wouldn’t vote for such a candidate, but he or she almost certainly would win. And I would have the confidence that the new President would make decisions for the sake of the country and not for her or his political ambitions.
The Worldwide War on Islam? Right. That explains the airliners that crashed into the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Jewish suicide bombers in pizza parlors in Damascus and Mecca, the Fatwas issued by the Pope against Cat Stevens and Cassius Clay, the U. S. laws against Islamic proselytizing and Koran ownership, and the disappearance of Mosques, Islamic schools, and Burkas from the Bay Area. No wonder Muslims are desperately trying to leave the United States; I understand we are down to about eight million.
Is there a Worldwide War on Islam? Only if you change the preposition.
Polls show that more than half of Americans favor “free” health care for all. Since we are in the Bay Area, add 10%; since these words are in the Argus, add another 10. So, about 70% of you looking at this page favor free health care. I’m going to tell you why I disagree.
First of all, most of you don’t really mean free. If your plan is to stop paying doctors, nurses, medical device companies, and hospital janitors, and expect them to keep on working, I’ll let some other writer explain why this might not work.
So, “free” means “paid for by other people”, and from now on I will make the substitution but will abbreviate. So if a large percentage of the population can’t afford to pay for their own health care (the justification for PFBOP health care), can they pay for everyone else’s instead?
You want “free” health care? “Free” does not really mean free, unless you plan to stop paying doctors, nurses, medical device companies, and hospital janitors (and expect them all to keep working). Thus “free” means “paid for by other people”. This may be disappointing, but it shows how you can get “free” health care without having to wait for it from the Federal Government. Make a deal with your neighbor: he pays for your health care and you pay for his. That way, each of you gets health care “free” (as free as under any possible Federal program), and each of you can get the highest quality health care without any concern about cost.
It used to be that the Left had the reputation of being more devoted to the Bill of Rights and civil liberties than did the Right. But look what’s happening now. At a time when most of the influencers of public opinion (public schools, colleges, newspapers, National Public Radio, television news and entertainment programs, and Hollywood movies) are dominated by kooky Left bias, Members of Congress are plotting action against private sector conservative talk radio. If you believe in freedom of expression as a principle (and not just as a rhetorical trick to keep tax funded subsidies going to Leftists) then you ought to worry about a Democrat Administration combined with a Democrat Congress.
How about a ticket of Ann Coulter for President and Walter Williams for Vice President? Then we can find out whether America is “ready” to elect a woman and an African American.
“Single Payer Health Care” is to Socialized Medicine what a “Gentlemen’s Club” is to a titty bar. The phrases mean the same thing but the former language is chosen because it sounds more respectable. The only real surprise is that folks choosing to utter the “honorable” phrase think that nobody notices.
We all get our share.
Get out of the mud,
Get over it, Bud,
Who said life was fair?
If you want to discourage teenage cigarette smoking, just tell the girls how bad they smell and tell the boys how gay they look.
If you can’t afford to pay for your own health care, you can’t afford to pay a share of everyone else’s.
Please be kind to your future self.
A dollar spent by government costs society more than a dollar and (in many cases) buys less than a dollar’s worth.
People are (more or less) wise in the decisions they make for themselves. We benefit from good decisions, suffer from bad decisions, and (slowly) learn the difference. But when we make decisions for other people (like when we vote, for instance) the consequences (good or bad) of our decisions are so far removed from us, we decide more poorly. And it probably gets a lot worse for most people when they get on a jury.
Unfortunately, we can’t do any better than representative democracy or jury trials, because the autocrats or judges, perhaps initially blessed with a little more wisdom than the rest of us, will be made stupid by power.
Power corrupts. Another way of saying that is “The fellow with the hammer thinks the whole world is a nail.” That’s why, for instance, no matter how much money gets spent on public schools (or medical research, drug abuse prevention, take your pick), the people who make their living at those things say it isn’t enough.
Every time you hear an advocate or a newscaster start a sentence with “Experts say” or “Studies show”, you should hear in your mind “I’m just about to lie to you”. The “studies” were commissioned and conducted to reach a particular conclusion the studiers and the newscaster already believed before the studies were begun. One becomes and “Expert” by agreeing with the advocate; one becomes a non-expert by disagreeing. That’s why you will almost never hear a sentence start “Most experts say”, “Some experts say”, or “Every expert but one says”. The one who disagrees has just ceased to be an “Expert”.
If something is paid for by the Government, or a new Government expenditure is proposed, ask yourself “Could the money for this be raised from people choosing to pay, as contributors, investors, or a combination?” If the answer is no, then it is wrong to force taxpayers to fund something they wouldn’t fund voluntarily. If the answer is yes, then it is unnecessary to have the taxpayers fund it.
There are exceptions to the above paragraph. Certain things do need to be done by government for specific reasons. That something is so costly that “only the Government can afford it” is not a legitimate argument (the proof of this is left as an exercise for the Reader). But we can’t have the police force or courts run on voluntary contributions, because they would be influenced too much by the contributors and too little by everyone else. We can’t have the fire department funded that way because non-contributors know they would get fire protection to keep a fire from their property from igniting that of a contributing neighbor. We could not have a privately financed road system because the only practical way to get users to pay for it is the gasoline tax.
Yes, the things that only Government can do add up to a lot, but not to half the economy, which is about what Government is now.
Let’s suppose you earn a thousand dollars. It means someone thinks that your work or a product you produce is worth at least a thousand dollars to him. Maybe that “someone” is a consumer but more likely it is a company that produces products or work for “someone” else, maybe another company. The payer of your thousand is willing to do that because she/he/it will get at least a thousand in income because of your work. There is a chain of money passing from consumers to you and a chain of value passing from you to consumers. At each transaction, payer and payee (work consumer and worker) agree on the price/wage paid for the good/service. Now you would probably like more money and your employers would like to pay you less, but the actual amount (the grand we mentioned way back at the start of the paragraph) is close enough to “fair” (the value of your work to your employer and the whole economy) that you both agree to the transaction. You pay some taxes, and you get to keep the rest of the thousand.
Now suppose I earn a grand. Suppose your young son earns a grand. Suppose your favorite entertainer and my least favorite (I hope they are not the same person) do the same. Let’s add one more person, an anonymous scientist who helped develop the drug that kept your Mother alive. Let’s assume we all get our money from the free economy; none of us is a burglar, a tax consumer, or a professional plaintiff. We all earned a grand. Maybe you’re underpaid and I’m overpaid (or vice versa); maybe one or both of the entertainers is useless to society; the scientist and your son probably both deserve much more than they get. But the best guess we really have is that we six “deserve” the thousand bucks that we receive freely for work we freely do. And we all pay taxes, and get to keep the rest. This is fair, right?
Now suppose you get to keep 600 dollars. Suppose I keep 700, your son keeps 850, the scientist keeps 500, and the entertainers 350 and 400, respectively. That’s fair, isn’t it? We all did a thousand dollars worth of work (in the opinions of the receivers of that work), and we all get to keep different amounts. You make a grand in less than a week, I in a little longer time, your son in a month (he’s just starting out now; he’ll get skills and do much better in a few years), the scientist in a couple of days, and the entertainers in a couple of hours.
The medieval global warming, and the global cooling that followed, ought to be enough to dismiss the notion of human-caused global warming in our time. Yes, there were humans in the Dark Ages, and they exhaled carbon dioxide, and lit fires. But they didn’t stop doing these things to cause the world to cool between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. Okay, when the climate warmed they started lighting fewer fires than before, but that trend certainly reversed once the cooling was noticed and it took a few more hundred years to restart warming. And the medieval carbon footprints were miniscule compared to nowadays, when global warming is slowing and will almost certainly leave us with a cooler world than that of Eric the Red, William the Conqueror, and Ethelred the Unready.
The best argument in favor of human-caused global warming is this: “Either agree with us or we’ll call you names and try to get you fired from your job.”
Senator Clinton and others accused General Petraeus of giving false testimony to aid the political aims of the Bush administration. Without any basis for an independent military assessment (are there any of them with military accomplishments other than John Kerry having used a hand grenade to insert rice into his own buttocks and turning that incident into a purple heart), they assume that anyone in the Administration is first and foremost a political operative.
This is not a characteristic of the Bush Administration. But it was, and will be, the defining characteristic of the Clinton Administration. Government functions that the rest of us would never think of as political were drafted into the struggle against the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy”. The purpose of the FBI was to supply files on prominent Republicans to the Democratic Party. The purpose of missile technology was to sell to the Communist Chinese for campaign contributions. The purpose of the military was to stage raids to draw public attention away from Willie Whopper’s sexual exploits. The purpose of the Oval Office … I’ll leave this one out. The purpose of the Internal Revenue Service was to punish prominent critics of the Administration. The purpose of the Immigration and Naturalization Service was to abbreviate the background check process to qualify a million new voters in time to vote for Clinton in the 1996 election (turns out this was unnecessary because the opposing candidate was Bob Dole).
To be a functionary in the Clinton Administration meant (and will mean) to be a Clinton Stooge. The remarkable thing is how true almost all of these people have been to their Stoogeness. In whatever colleges, news networks, or publishers they have gone to work for, their primary identity is still Clinton Stooge (although the networks try to hide that). Wesley Clark, Richard Clark, Jamie Gorelik, George Steffy, Sandy Sox, Madeline Albright, the list goes on. Seems like I haven’t heard anything lately from Janet Reno, and I don’t know why, but I’m confident it’s not because she has become de-Stooged. The only exceptions I can think of are Al Gore and Dick Morris, the former because of his own megalomania, the latter (I think) because the Clintons treated him poorly.
Polls occasionally show that most Americans would like to see tax increases for people richer than themselves. And that’s supposed to be news. If you asked the question “Would you favor a tax increase on everyone except yourself?” what do you think the majority would say?
There is a serious problem in a democracy when a large percentage of voters pay little or no taxes. When a ballot proposition involves spending or not, or an election is between a candidate who wants to increase spending and one who doesn’t, the non-taxpayer voter isn’t thinking “Should we spend more money?” but “Do I want more of other people’s money to be spent, some of it for me?” What is the “large percentage”? Maybe 10%, maybe 30%, but when it gets close to a majority, when almost half of the voters think of themselves only as consumers of taxes and not taxpayers, a handful of limousine liberals will determine the outcome of every election.
The most formidable candidate for President? The one who will say: “I opposed the attack on Iraq. Not because [fill in your favorite dopey ‘60s slogan] but because this was the wrong place and time to engage the enemy in the War on Terror. But now that gains have been made (at too high a cost), it would be foolish to leave Iraq before the country is stabilized. And it is helpful to the enemy, and discouraging to our allies, every time a potential President makes noises about a withdrawal. But a candidate like me will have better judgment about when and whether to engage the enemy again.”
I probably wouldn’t vote for such a candidate, but he or she almost certainly would win. And I would have the confidence that the new President would make decisions for the sake of the country and not for her or his political ambitions.
The Worldwide War on Islam? Right. That explains the airliners that crashed into the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Jewish suicide bombers in pizza parlors in Damascus and Mecca, the Fatwas issued by the Pope against Cat Stevens and Cassius Clay, the U. S. laws against Islamic proselytizing and Koran ownership, and the disappearance of Mosques, Islamic schools, and Burkas from the Bay Area. No wonder Muslims are desperately trying to leave the United States; I understand we are down to about eight million.
Is there a Worldwide War on Islam? Only if you change the preposition.
Polls show that more than half of Americans favor “free” health care for all. Since we are in the Bay Area, add 10%; since these words are in the Argus, add another 10. So, about 70% of you looking at this page favor free health care. I’m going to tell you why I disagree.
First of all, most of you don’t really mean free. If your plan is to stop paying doctors, nurses, medical device companies, and hospital janitors, and expect them to keep on working, I’ll let some other writer explain why this might not work.
So, “free” means “paid for by other people”, and from now on I will make the substitution but will abbreviate. So if a large percentage of the population can’t afford to pay for their own health care (the justification for PFBOP health care), can they pay for everyone else’s instead?
You want “free” health care? “Free” does not really mean free, unless you plan to stop paying doctors, nurses, medical device companies, and hospital janitors (and expect them all to keep working). Thus “free” means “paid for by other people”. This may be disappointing, but it shows how you can get “free” health care without having to wait for it from the Federal Government. Make a deal with your neighbor: he pays for your health care and you pay for his. That way, each of you gets health care “free” (as free as under any possible Federal program), and each of you can get the highest quality health care without any concern about cost.
It used to be that the Left had the reputation of being more devoted to the Bill of Rights and civil liberties than did the Right. But look what’s happening now. At a time when most of the influencers of public opinion (public schools, colleges, newspapers, National Public Radio, television news and entertainment programs, and Hollywood movies) are dominated by kooky Left bias, Members of Congress are plotting action against private sector conservative talk radio. If you believe in freedom of expression as a principle (and not just as a rhetorical trick to keep tax funded subsidies going to Leftists) then you ought to worry about a Democrat Administration combined with a Democrat Congress.
How about a ticket of Ann Coulter for President and Walter Williams for Vice President? Then we can find out whether America is “ready” to elect a woman and an African American.
“Single Payer Health Care” is to Socialized Medicine what a “Gentlemen’s Club” is to a titty bar. The phrases mean the same thing but the former language is chosen because it sounds more respectable. The only real surprise is that folks choosing to utter the “honorable” phrase think that nobody notices.
Prayer for a Stranger
One thing life in the Bay Area gives us in abundance is the opportunity to encounter strangers. Without knowing the particulars of a stranger’s life, there are a few things that I think we can pray for everyone we meet.
“Lord, I pray for this stranger’s prosperity,
that he has useful, honest work to do,
that he does it well
that he is fairly compensated,
that he is wise with his money,
and that he will be secure in his future.
“But more than this, I pray for his health,
that his body and brain will be free of disease, pain, and excessive limitations,
that he will live as long as You intended for us,
and will enjoy those many years.
“But more than this, I pray for his virtue,
that he will be honorable in his dealings with strangers,
loving to friends and family members,
fair to work associates,
generous to the unfortunate,
and kind to his future self.
“But much more than all this,
I pray for this stranger’s salvation,
because I believe that no matter how prosperous, healthy, and virtuous he is,
his body will one day die
and his soul will live on,
and that the eternal life of that soul depends—entirely—on his need for a Savior.”
“Lord, I pray for this stranger’s prosperity,
that he has useful, honest work to do,
that he does it well
that he is fairly compensated,
that he is wise with his money,
and that he will be secure in his future.
“But more than this, I pray for his health,
that his body and brain will be free of disease, pain, and excessive limitations,
that he will live as long as You intended for us,
and will enjoy those many years.
“But more than this, I pray for his virtue,
that he will be honorable in his dealings with strangers,
loving to friends and family members,
fair to work associates,
generous to the unfortunate,
and kind to his future self.
“But much more than all this,
I pray for this stranger’s salvation,
because I believe that no matter how prosperous, healthy, and virtuous he is,
his body will one day die
and his soul will live on,
and that the eternal life of that soul depends—entirely—on his need for a Savior.”
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