Protect science - from the government

It's not hard to find people who want the climate controversy to disappear. To these people, a challenge to their beliefs is the same as an attack on science itself. (A question they should answer: does science require conformity?)

From the New York Times:

...forces are continuing their campaign to undermine the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chief scientists...

It's true that science needs to be protected, but not from energy and automobile companies who spend comparatively little, but from political agendas, through which billions of dollars are spent pushing particular points of view and rewarding cronies.

Private citizens have their own long-term happiness to gain through scientific discovery of the truth, and will always be willing to pursue that discovery - on their own dime.

Today's bureaucrats aren't interested in securing the long-term happiness of their citizens. They are driven by a short-term lust for power, influence, and money - on other peoples' dimes.

Truth and reality are the enemy of such bureaucrats, and science needs protection from them

The Road to Sucky Insurance

Why is nobody emphasizing that the reason we have an employer-based, non-portable, comprehensive insurance system is because of 50 years of government "reforms"?

Insurance is an inefficient way to handle common medical occurrences. You've probably thought about how health insurance works completely differently than most insurance - in that normal insurance only deals with rare events, and is usually affordable and self-purchased.

One reason for this difference is that regulation has pushed us into employer-based systems through tax incentives and (historical) wage freezes - creating an artificial (i.e. non-voluntary) incentive for businesses to provide insurance as a benefit.

Yet further regulation stipulates what these plans must cover.

Thus we have the spectacle of employer-based, non-portable, comprehensive plans - foisted on us by lawmakers.

This scheme, together with Medicare, separates the costs of care from the people who have to pay for it. In which case, why wouldn't someone seek an MRI for a headache?

We need to get insurance out of our day-to-day medical needs by eliminating the regulatory carrots and sticks that have pushed us into this crazy scheme, and allow innovative businessmen to find ways to offer customers the health care they want, and let consumers voluntarily decide what is in their own best interest, without bureaucrats commanding them from on high.

The Pledge of Subservience

I pledge subservience
To the poor
Of the United States with ObamaCare
And to the collective
For which it stands
No patient
Has to pay
Unless you count taxes
With suffering and sacrifice for all

The Moral Shadow of Glenn Beck

Sometimes the most innocuous of remarks can tell you volumes about what a person thinks.

In this case, it was Glenn Beck, on his show with a panel of doctors. While discussing the cost of health care, Mr. Beck asks what incentive a drug company would have to pour money into research if they were not allowed to profit from their discoveries.

Glenn is absolutely right to ask this question, but in the very next breath, with his usual fervent flair, Mr. Beck tries to fend off criticism of profit:

"What? Do we have Mother Teresa in the drug companies now? ... it [would be] great if we could all be like that..."

Um, what?

With this fleeting utterance, Glenn Beck briefly swings a spotlight past a moral contradiction.

He is trying to support profit-seeking while advocating a non-profit morality.

This is the moral premise that leads, inexorably, to a simple equation: Republicans = Democrats.

If drug companies were, in fact, Mother Teresas as Glenn Beck advocates, they would simply go out of business. No business can operate by giving everything away for free. Apparently, for Glenn Beck, the only way you can make drugs is by cheating on morality.

"it [would be] great if we could all be like that..."

If you really believe that Glenn, do it now. Be like that. Stop the pretense of upholding Mother Teresa as an ideal, and then failing to live up to it. What's that you say - you have a family to provide for? But Glenn! Don't you want your family to be moral too?

The truth is, a world of Mother Teresas would be a horrible world. A world of forsaking pleasure, denying self, and servitude to all.

The purpose of morality should be for making our lives on Earth as good as possible. As long as Republicans accept Mr. Beck's morality of altruism, they will be unable to stop the diminishing of freedom, and the decline of prosperity.

Who can defend capitalism with a morality that damns it?

Arnold Schwarzenegger's plans to socialize health care.

Just how does one distinguish between a California Republican and Democrat, anywhow?

What Would Romney Do?

As the government works to impose socialized medicine on an unwitting public, the Republican front runner in the 2012 election is himself guilty of perpetrating his own failed-version of socialized medicine - in his home state of Massachusetts.

Romney represents Republican confusion at its worst: pretend to diametrically oppose Liberal policies, while taking away freedom from individuals and doctors by forcing them into a state-controlled health care system.

It's time to get rid of these "say one thing and do another" Republicans.