This is off the theme of this Blog. But, thought it well worth the time to read.
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson082909.html
While I agree with VDH point, I think it goes farther. The spending frenzy has another purpose. If the US is broke, it’s bonds rated with Mexico’s, then the liberals/statists know the US will no longer be a world power. Game and Match.
Mr Wattson had no choice in health care.
After weeks of excruciating pain, Mark Wattson was understandably relieved to have his appendix taken out.
Doctors told him the operation was a success and he was sent home.
But only a month later the 35-year-old collapsed in agony and had to be taken back to Great Western Hospital in Swindon by ambulance.
Mark Wattson, 35, from Swindon may have been the victim of botched surgery after he had to have his appendix removed twice
To his shock, surgeons from the same team told him that not only was his appendix still inside him, but it had ruptured - a potentially fatal complication.
In a second operation it was finally removed, leaving Mr Wattson fearing another organ might have been taken out during the first procedure.
The blunder has left Mr Wattson jobless, as bosses at the shop where he worked did not believe his story and sacked him.
Mr Wattson told of the moment he realised there had been a serious mistake.
'I was lying on a stretcher in terrible pain and a doctor came up to me and said that my appendix had burst,' he said.
'I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I told these people I had my appendix out just four weeks earlier but there it was on the scanner screen for all to see.
'I thought, "What the hell did they slice me open for in the first place?"
'I feel that if the surgery had been done correctly in the first place I wouldn't be in the mess I am today. I'm disgusted by the whole experience.'
Mr Wattson first went under the knife on July 7 after experiencing severe abdominal pain for several weeks. He was discharged but exactly a month later he had to dial 999 after collapsing in agony.
Mr Wattson was readmitted to the Great Western Hospital in Swindon after his appendix ruptured
Following the second operation his incision became infected and he was admitted to hospital for a third time for treatment.
He said: 'I had a temporary job at a sports shop but when I took in two medical certificates saying I had my appendix out twice they didn't believe me.
'Now I'm helpless. I can't go out and find a job, I can't go to interviews, I can barely walk and am in constant pain. Before the first operation they told me I had to have my appendix removed and when I woke up afterwards they said it had been a complete success.
'But then I keeled over in agony one month later and when they did some tests at the hospital we could see the appendix was still there on the scans.
'As far as I was aware they took my appendix out and no one told me any different.
'I have no idea what they did take out, but I want to find out what went wrong.'
A spokesman for Great Western Hospital confirmed that a representative had met Mr Wattson and that an investigation had been started.
He was unable to confirm what, if anything, was removed in the first operation.
Paul Gearing, deputy general manager for general surgery at Great Western Hospital NHS Trust, said: 'We are unable to comment on individual cases.
'However, we would like to apologise if Mr Wattson felt dissatisfied with the care he received at Great Western Hospital.'
A year or so back, we were having a conversation with another couple. I don’t recall what the innocuous remark was, but it infuriated the other woman, who called us names and stormed off. I was going to say something to her, but her partner said it would be a waste of time. I reflected on it and decided they must be like James Carville and Mary Matlin.
I guess I need to re-read Ann Coulter’s “How to Talk to a Liberal”.
Liberals have always had a problem debating with conservatives. They don’t really understand conservatives’ attraction to individualism and honor and responsibility enough to be able to come up with coherent responses when people say they want low taxes and a small government. All liberals know is that they are very smart, and everyone else is very dumb for not seeing how smart they are and that they should run everything. So they come up with childish name-calling, such as “conservatives are greedy” and “conservatives are evil” to try and shut up what they don’t understand. And they find there is nothing better than the cry of “racism.”
Rose Friedman, who passed away this week, writing with her husband Milton in their 1980 book "Free to Choose":
Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised. In addition, by dispersing power, the free market provides an offset to whatever concentration of political power may arise. The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
I read to learn and I have learned a lot from an author I discovered a few years back, Victor Davis Hanson. We have read all of his books. I have even read Thucydides, because he wrote an introduction to the translation. Since he is eminently knowledgeable in Greek history, he readily sees the contrasts and comparisons with modern governments and culture. I seldom read one of his articles without learning a new word.
In the article below, my new word was ochlocracy. Which is government by mob.
[Did you know you can obtain the definition of any word through Google. Try it. Type Define:ochlocracy in the address bar of your browser. One of the selections should be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy]
Now armed with this new knowledge, you are prepared to read Our Ongoing Catharsis. Which gives some hope that that is a way out of the current crisis.
Ronald Regan called the Soviet’s an Evil Empire and was lambasted for it. George W. Bush termed North Korea, Iraq and Iran an “Axis of Evil” and was denounced and parodied for doing so. Harry Reid calls Americans "evil mongers" and gets no rebuke.
I have been a reader of the Wall Street Journal since I was 25. The title of this Blog comes directly from the base philosophy of the Journal for over 100 years - "free people and free markets." More than anything else I have read, it has molded my views. Through it’s pages I have been exposed to many opinions and always facts.
That’s all I wanted to say. I leave you with two quotes that are meaningful to me.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. - Daniel P. Moynihan
"Don't believe the man who tells you there are two sides to every question. There is only one side to the truth."
William Peter Hamilton, one of the first men to hold the job of editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal.
This is John Mackey’s, the CEO of Whole Foods model for healthcare. It makes sense to me.
* Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs).
* Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits.
* Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines.
* Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover.
* Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
* Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost.
* Enact Medicare reform.
* Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Here’s the bottom line, as stated by Mackey:
Rather than increase government spending and control, we need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health.
The solution is to make them responsible by giving them that responsibility, not having government further usurp it and make decisions for them. The most fundamental aspect of freedom and liberty is individual responsibility. The system we have now, as well as the one that is being proposed, works against that fundamental requirement and thereby lessens both our freedom and our liberty.
This isn’t just about health care – its about our freedom.
I stole this from The QandQ Online Magazine
Michael Moore has a post on his blog from someone named John Gray entitled, “A Day In The Life Of Joe Middle-Class Republican” in which Gray attempts to make the point that all good things we enjoy in life flow from government and liberals. It begins like this:
Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards. He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure their safety and work as advertised.
All but $10.00 of his medications are paid for by his employers medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance, now Joe gets it too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs this day. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.
And so on. Gil Guillory answers Gray’s assertions in a comment at the Mises blog:
Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He makes it with a machine he could not possibly have made himself. He does not know where it was made, or how it works, and may not care. He does not know the people that planted, cultivated, harvested, dried, roasted, packaged, freighted, warehoused, distributed, marketed, or retailed his coffee, and may not care. The company that insures the manufacturer of the coffee machine required that it meet certain safety guidelines, as established by the private insurance-company-funded Underwriters Laboratory. Joe has seen the UL mark, but is not really sure what it’s for or how it protects him. He doesn’t clearly understand why greedy businessmen might be interested in a safe product. All of this was made possible by libertarians who fought for and won the legal right to free trade.
He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water which he bought from Ozarka, because the local government monopoly of water supply bears the comforting designation of “accepted” and also tastes funny.
Sam Bostap also answers the post:
Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with bottled water because he knows that the municipal water system supplies water that occasionally has e coli and other natural organisms that will make him ill–after all his mother died from drinking water that was polluted by sewage after a heavy rain. Joe tried to sue, but was told that the city had sovereign immunity from such suits as a result of state law. If the water he pours from the bottle he bought at Safeway is polluted, he knows he can sue the manufacturer and collect big, so he feels pretty sure that it’s clean.
Joe grinds his coffee beans carefully because they’re very expensive as a result of the U.S. government-enforced international coffee cartel that exists to protect the jobs of coffee importers–heavy campaign contributers to Congress. He’s also careful about how much sugar he puts in his coffee because it costs seven times the world price of sugar as a result of the U.S. government imposed import restrictions on sugar to protect the domestic sugar beet and sugar cane industry.
I
