Determinism, Government, and Social Justice

"Dictatorship and determinism," wrote Ayn Rand, "are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries: if one seeks to enslave men, one has to destroy their reliance on the validity of their own judgments and choices—if one believes that reason and volition are impotent, one has to accept the rule of force.
“Representation Without Authorization,” The Ayn Rand Letter, I, 21, 1

Today, we see the spectacle of a federal government nearing totalitarian power over society. It seeks to re-create the nation in its own image--green, "socially just", ignoring the power of the individual and his right, both Constitutional and natural, to empower his own will; and it is doing so by giving us cause to relinquish our reliance on the validity of our own judgments and choices.

It is telling us that General Motors and Chrysler no longer know how to manage their own companies, because in a world where they naturally lost their share of the market to competition, they also lost money when a disaster struck the economy after government interference in that economy.

Of course, the government has interfered in the capitalist economy almost from the beginning of our nation's founding. But once it became large enough to be a real force, then the concept of capitalism was replaced by the concept of the "mixed" economy. But no one calls it that.

They still call it capitalism, and so when this mixed economy fails because the capitalists have lost control over their own capital, lost it to bureaucrats who were not seeking to protect capital but rather to protect special interests from the capitalists, then the bureaucrats could claim the capitalists were incompetent of maintaining a healthy economy. It isn't "socially just" to allow a few incompetent money mongers to destroy everything for everyone.

The real capitalists knew better, but the majority of people alive today believe that the government has proved "capitalism" is the special interest who must be shackled and told how to manage its own affairs; when the fact is, it has been shackled for so long it no longer knows how to do what it is supposed to do.

It is supposed to say no to government interference, relying on the validity of its own choices based on objective market values. No such values can exist when a mixed economy by definition is subjective.

And since the government can now make the claim that "health care" is inefficient and have that backed up by the health care industry climbing naked into bed with it, "the people" are beginning to believe that reason is impotent---when it is not governed.

When a new piece of electronics hits the market, it is always expensive at first. Look at the price of the IPhone, which now has dropped by more than 60%. The first real laptop computer for under $200 is being advertised heavily on TV by a major wireless internet carrier who sells that laptop.

So when a new piece of medical equipment, or new medicines, hit the market, they are always expensive. The difference is, there are not hundreds of thousands of hospitals rushing out to buy the new equipment, and the meds are not immediately prescribed to millions of people, so there is no reason for the price to come down.

Yet, everyone who gets sick and can be helped by the new equipment want it used on them, and they then complain about the cost of health care, and they equate it with health care itself. There is nothing wrong with health care. There is something wrong with everyone wanting the best and the most expensive procedures used on them, while complaining about the costs.

"Social justice" is a form of alleviating the effects of determinism, but it's all smoke and mirrors. Determinism doesn't exist, but if the philosophers can get you to believe it does, then they have power over everything and everyone, including government policy, because it is they who taught the policy wonks everything they know.

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Obama to Compromise Health Industry Principles

President Obama will soon remove job protections for people who disagree with him. The plan is already in motion

The Obama administration, in its effort to reform health care, is bringing to the table the health care workers who, fifteen years ago during the Clinton administration, were opposed to universal health care.

Accordin to the words of a TV reporter, the current administration believes no one can "own the table," as Obama seems to think the opposition did fifteen years ago. They want to bring the opposition to the table to "play nicely this time," said the reporter.

Bringing them to the table to "play nicely" is something I covered in a question I answered in Yahoo Answers. I used the example of "getting along" with people of other ideas, specifically Islamofascists. There are, in fact, Westerners who wonder why we can't get along with them.

I said that if we "played nice" with Islamofascists, it would be compromising our principles, not just things here and there that could be otherwise in order to get along. Islamofascists are taking over the United Kingdom, preventing elected officials from other nations from entering England to talk to the very Parliament who invited that official, who was sent home from the London airport.

Fortunately, Congress has seen fit to invite this same person, to watch his movie "Fitna." Islamofascism on the Rise and New World Order May Be Islamicist

I made the point that Islamofascists don't play nice. They cut off the heads of people who disagree with them. I don't want you or anyone "playing nice" with Islamofascists in the United States if it means my mother's head could be cut off because you misjudged the manner in which they "play."

Now it seems the Obama administration is going to do some very heavy arm twisting. They are going to force health care workers opposed to abortion, contraception, and univeral health care to "play nice" and forget what they are opposed to. Obama removes job protections for pro-life doctors and nurses

Did you read that correctly? President Obama will soon remove job protections for people who disagree with him. The plan is already in motion. Already, some doctors and nurses are vowing to go to jail rather than compromise on their principles.

And I have no doubt that under Obama, the Attorney General will go after any health care worker who lives by his own principles. The President is already reported playing dirty with Republicans, trying to split them from their base; it is being reported that the attacks on Rush Limbaugh that call him the "leader of the Republican party" come straight from Chief of Staff Rob Emmanuel, or at least have his blessing.

If the Democrats can push the liberal or centrist conservatives away from the outspoken Limbaugh and his listeners, then they have a better chance of getting those conservatives on their side. This is the way politics is played, but Obama has ulterior motives, namely to move those centrists further left, away from the Limbaughs, Shawn Hannities, Ann Coulters, and Glen Becks for the purpose of twisting their arms.

During the next four years we are going to discover how Mr. Obama does not "play nice." The misnamed " Employee Free Choice Act", or "check card," which Obama not only supports but who was taught his political tactics by ACORN who is now actively working with the unions for this legislation, is not "free choice" for two important reasons:

• It is a "majority by one" democracy, which our Founders clearly had no intention of the U.S. becoming. The minority was to be protected from pure majority rule, which is why the Founders created this nation as a "republican" form of democracy. That means we elect people who then decide for us; we don't democratically vote on everything ourselves.
• There is no "free choice" when everyone you work with and any union representative can see the ballot you have cast.

"Last year, the House voted for card check legislation, while the Senate defeated it. Price says members knew then that they could claim credit for voting for the bill without having it pass, since President Bush had vowed to veto it. With Barack Obama in the White House, the equation has changed. Obama was a co-sponsor of the bill last year and has said he would sign the law if enacted. In her first public appearance after being confirmed as labor secretary, Hilda Solis told 700 union members and community activists in Miami this week that she plans to work to help pass and then enforce card check legislation." Newsmax.com

As for Obama's end to doctors', nurses', and other health care professionals' right to conscience, "An unnamed official told the Washington Post that the HHS [Health and Human Services] is concerned the rule is written 'so vaguely that some have argued it could limit family planning counseling and even potentially blood transfusions and end-of-life care.'" [emphasis added Catholic News Agency]

As testament to the idea that Obama supports "pure democracy" rather than a "democratic republic," Obama took a cyber-step towards greater transparency and interactive government with a new feature called "Seat at the Table" on his official website.

"We look forward to benefiting from the many more voices that will now be a part of the decision-making process," said John Podesta, who was co-chairman of Mr. Obama’s transition team.

Approximately three-fifths of Americans are Democrats or left-leaning independents. In a pure Obamian democracy, I have no doubt the minority will be given little or not protection from the majority. Writing of an Obama presidency before the election, Free Republic wrote, "it is a prudent thing to expect and plan for the worst, and hope for otherwise."

After all, free Americans can either sit back and watch our newly minted "redistibution-of-wealth" President redistribute not only wealth but political power to the "majority-plus-one" constituancy; it Americans can do the only thing left to them and that is to take it to the streets.

Expect a European "Summer of Discontent" here in the States, even it if doesn't happen in the summer.

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Universal Health Care in U.S. Gets "No Pass"

Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and a Democrat-majority legislature passed “universal” health insurance, gaining budget-busting cost overruns and a state begging breathlessly for $21 billion more federal transfer payments to fund it for three more years.

This is a reprint from Pacific Research Center Vol. 14 No. 3: January 21, 2009
Lessons from States with “Universal” Health Care
By John R. Graham, Director, Health Care Studies

Last January, governor Schwarzenegger’s expensive and unwieldy proposal for so-called “universal” health care finally gasped its last breath, after a long year of lobbying and coalition-building by the governor’s team. A year later, in 2009, legislators should attempt to learn from two states that have legislated “universal” care.

Hawaii imposed universal health care in 1974 by passing a law compelling employers to provide health insurance and forcing them to pay half the cost of a plan directly. Facing resistance from small businesses, the state has never been able to “close the deal.” As late as 1993, a supportive scholar described Hawaii’s efforts at “universal” coverage as “lodged somewhere in midstream.”

On the other hand, also in 1993, managers in the state’s health department managed to convince themselves that Hawaii had covered 95 percent of its population. As it turns out, in 1974, one in 50 Hawaii residents was uninsured. Today, after more than three decades of mandatory insurance, that number stands at one in 10. Of course, Hawaii is not immune to national trends, but scholars have concluded that the state’s pay-or-play mandate might have reduced the ranks of the uninsured by 5 to 8 percent at best. The plan fails to deliver, but Hawaiian advocates of government-dictated health care just won’t quit.

Last year they rolled out yet another program – “Keiki Care,” compulsory “free” health insurance for children without coverage, who are in families with incomes too high for Medicaid or other state programs. Republican governor Linda Lingle shuttered it in October, barely seven months after its launch, after learning that 85 percent of the kids enrolled had previously been covered by a private, non-profit plan for only $55 per month.

Republican governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts collaborated with a Democrat-majority legislature to pass “universal” health insurance in April 2006. Although he tried to backpedal during the presidential primaries, he cannot avoid the plan’s legacy: budget-busting cost overruns and a state begging breathlessly for $21 billion more federal transfer payments to fund it for three more years.

Notwithstanding a bailout from the federal government, the state has had to raise taxes on businesses – a task the legislature delegated to the bureaucrats who run the program. While hospitals' uncompensated care dropped from $166 million in the first quarter of 2007 down to $98 million in the first quarter of 2008, or $272 million annually, the budget for “universal” health care in Massachusetts is running at $869 million: $3.19 of taxpayers' dollars spent for every dollar of uncompensated care avoided.

Californians can be grateful that governor Schwarzenegger failed to impose a similar regime but those who proposed it are more active than ever. David Zingale, who spearheaded the governor’s initiative, has joined the California Endowment, a foundation with $3 billion in assets, to lobby for health reform in Sacramento. These folks mean business.

The California Endowment spent $10 million in advertising for health “reform” in 2007. But the Endowment is not a charity that has succeeded in raising money through voluntary philanthropic donations. Rather, it is sitting on a pot of gold that the state taxed from Blue Cross of California’s surplus back in 1996, as a cost of getting the state’s permission to convert to a for-profit health plan. And to what end?

Such conversions were necessary because non-profit health plans were increasingly poorly capitalized as health costs rose, and threatened with insolvency. For-profit conversions simply allow beneficiaries to transfer some of the risk of rising health costs to shareholders.

The California Endowment does conduct some valuable research. Nevertheless, by imposing a special tax on Blue Cross to found this unaccountable organization, California has actually reduced the amount of money available for private health care, and increased the amount of money “invested” in advertising campaigns supporting government-run health care.

That kind of government plan, the evidence from Hawaii and Massachusetts suggests, tends to promise more than it can deliver and introduce more problems than it solves. In 2009, California taxpayers should demand more freedom to purchase the health care that best meets their needs. Making Health Savings Accounts tax deductible would be a good place for legislators to start.

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