Free Market Medical Care Causes Cancer

Cato is mocking a pro-Obamacare ad campaign that is touting government run health care as a cure for cancer.

Cato seems to misunderstand that one can trace a great deal of the skyrocketing number of cancer deaths directly to health care in the free market.

Prior to the prosperity of the free market, few people lived long enough die of cancer.

The free market gave individuals and families the freedom to invest their health care resources as they saw fit. The result is that people tended to invest their resources in things that prolonged their lives. Go figure?

Greedy doctors, seeking to cash in on the market, pursued research that cured disease after disease until we got to the place where a very large number of people finally succumb to the cellular degeration of their own bodies.

Greedy doctors greed didn't stop with researching parasitic diseases. They've made massive investments in researching cancer itself. They've made massive investments in genetic research seem to be finding cures for many of the once seemingly incurable cancer.

It is now not unusually to nurse people beyond one or two formerly incurable cancers. People will go through a couple cancers until they finally succumb to one too many cancers.

When government and partisan groups are in charge of resources, they inveset the resources of the community in ways that entrench or magnify the powers of the elite. After we pass Obamacare and destroy the free market in medicine, then we are likely to see the fate of our children return to the medical paradigm of the age of serfdom when most people just kind of died and nobody really cared.

With the earth in the balance as it is. I doubt a truly globally centric medical bureaucracy would want to waste valuable community resource on baubles of the bourgeoisie like the artificial heart or advanced cancer treatments. I imagine a science czar who openly discusses the need for forced sterilization would realize that such niceties do not benefit the commune in relation to the resource cost.

High Desert Rock Gardens

Last week I penned a post on water conservation. I had been digging up the dry spots in the lawn and removign clay layers and stumps that impede the growth of roots.

Bradley Ross made the astute observation that underground rocks are also a big problem.

An extension of that observation is that rocks on top the ground can help conserve water.

In the desert, one battles the forces of evaporation. Rocks atop the soil can help hold in moisture while reducing the number of plants (weeds) competing for water.

When placing rocks, the goal is to creat a design with places that concentrates and holds water from the wet season into the dry season.

The rock garden is the preferred landscape design in the dry mountain west for more than just aesthetic reasons.

The Burden of Health Care

One of the themes pounded by the proponents of government control health care is the bizarre notion that health care is some sort of burden. Statists put a great deal

Progressives know that if they can frame an issue as a burden, then they can frame their power grab as an altruistic act.

"That bar of gold you are carrying sure looks heavy. Here, let me take that for you. There. Now isn't that better."

Considering the state of man, one realizes that health numbers among the most valuable thing a person has; therefore health care is the most valuable investment that a person can make.

When you look at health from an individual perspective, you find that it is a great asset. When you look at health care from an individual perspective, you find that it is not only an investment, good health care numbers among the best investments that a person can make.

It is only when health care is thrust into the hands of a third party that it becomes a burden.

If we had a system based on lifecycle analysis, in which people were charged with caring for the bulk of their health care, then health care would behave as an investment.

The phenomenon is clear in athletics where athletes invest a great deal of their resources in tweaking their health for maximum performance.

My niece went into the field of athletic training. Her degree involved intensive training in state of the art sports medicine. The teams that hire folks trained in sports medicine don't see sports medicine as a burden; they see it as the asset that keeps their team competitive.

Many of the greatest innovations in medicine actually come from sports medicine where people are making tremendous investments to get an extra edge. One need simply look at the sudden explosion in marathons around the country. When I was a kid, many saw the completion of a marathon as an exceptional feat. Today's events have people by the thousands applying the discoveries of sports medicine to complete the events.

Healthcare only starts behaving like a burden when it is placed in the hands of third parties.

The third party health schemes favored by progressives (first employer based health care and now socialized health care) create the situation where health care becomes a burden. The reason that filing a health claim is such a hassle is because the investment you want to make in your health shows up as an expense (a burden) to the third party funding it.

In several speeches, Obama has positioned expanding government control of health care as necessary to maintaining a competitive economy.

It is only when the funding for health care is thrust on a third party that it behaves like a burden on the economy. Because the employer is not the beneficiary of the care, employer based insurance transforms from an investment in one's health to an expense that companies need to control and reduce.

When government takes over healthcare, it transforms what would be an investment on an individual scale to a burden on a national scale.

Government care is a burden that must be paid for from higher taxes. As the taxes are a serious burden, the government inevitably begins a system of aggressive rationing of care. Already we hear Pelosi and Obama talking in terms of squeezing dollars out of the health care system when faced with questions about the burdens created to our society by their schemes.

Much of the modern progressive movement is based on Hegel's dictum that freedom is slavery and slavery freedom. The traditional claims that the path to serfdom is a path to a greater freedom. However, one finds that healthcare was really lousy back in the glory days of serfdom.

Although the king's court was full of great talk about all the hard, altruistic work done by the lords for their serfs, the serfs were seen as a burden and were usually left to die in destitution.

The great advances in health care occurred precisely because people in a free market valued their health and figured out ways to improve it.

If, instead of finding ways to increase the third party stranglehold on healthcare, we were talking about ways to help individuals finance their care (the Medical Savings and Loan); we would continue the process of innovation and move the medical industry from being perceived as a burden to being perceived as a benefit.

Label Dodging

I only watched portions of the Sotomayor confirmation. I was disappointed with what I saw. Al Franken praised Sotomayor as the most experienced candidate for the supreme court for the last century.

If she really was one of the greatest jurists in history; I would have expected both the hearings and the news stories about the hearings to be flush with conversations on legal theory.

I switched through various chanels. The commentators I saw on CNBC, MSNBC and CNN were talking about strategy of the getting their candidate past those horrible racist Republicans.

The strategy focus was odd as the Democrats have a super majority. The racist Republicans, who hadn't posted a Latino to a position higher than Attorney General, were pretty much vanquished from the political scene in 2008. The nomination process would have been an ideal time to talk up judicial philosophy.

Instead, the hearing seemed more about Democrats distancing themselves from judicial activism and distancing Sotomayor from Obama's comments about "empathy." I watched one Senator (perhaps it was Schummer) waste a great deal of time showing that Obama's statement on empathy did not play a major role in Sotomayor's career.

I would have been surprised if empathy was a primary theme of Sotomayor's career.

My guess is that the "empathy judge" comment didn't poll well.

Franken's performance was really bizarre. He opened with self-agrandisement about his oath to uphold the Constitution. He ended his speech with talk about rights that weren't in the Constitution. (Neither Reproductive Rights nor open acesss to the Internet are Constitutional rights.)

Franken doesn't seem to have a firm grasp on what the Supreme Court does.

Franken took a stab at rebranding the word "Activist Judge." His snide definition is an activist judge is one who "votes" differently than a politician wants. Franken enumerates activism by the number of times a judge overrules the legislature.

In the case of the Supreme Court, a judge is an activist based on his relation to the Constitution and existing precedence. A judge is not being an activist when it strikes down an unconstitutional law. For that matter a judge would be an activist if, for partisan ends, he failed to rule against an unconstitutional law.

The worst part of the hearing that I saw had Sotomayor pitted against a Republican senator. The Republican Senator was trying asking Sotomayor to give her opinion on a few terms like "constructivist" and "originalist."

I thought it was a great opening for the candidate to talk about different approaches to Constitutional law. Instead Sotomayor spoke about how she tried to avoid labels.

Sotomayor's answer really irked me as I believe a master of any given profession should have a good grasp of different approaches to the profession. The game of classifying and giving names to different approaches to a profession is quality reasoning.

The single minded focus on strategy in the confirmation hearing has me worried that Obama is simply dropping a partisan player in the court.

The Democrats have a supermajority. Obama ran on the promise to raise America to a new level of enlightened discourse. Yet watching a shoe-in nomination I simply felt that partisan players were trying to pull the wool over the collective eyes of the American people.

I learned very little about Sotomayor, beyond the facts that she loves Nancy Drew, loves Perry Mason and hates being labeled. The part of the nomination process I watched actually lowered my estimation of the Senate and Supreme Court.

Water Saving Effort

People tend to use the brown spots and dry areas on the lawn to indicate when to water. I used to believe that the way to reduce water consumption was to design the sprinker systems so that it hit the dry spots with extra water.

Last year I took a new approach. I decided to go to each of the terminally dry spots and find out what is underneath them.

I took a pick and dug and dug into each of the dry spots. I've found and removed old root systems. In another area I found a really hard clay a few inches from the ground. In this case, i broke up the clay, mixed in mulch and closed the wounds.

The places I treated last year are nice and green this year. I tackled several other dry yesterday.

I think the secret to a healthy lawn in dry country is to concern oneself with the quality of the soil six inches down. IF the soil can hold water several inches down, then you can reduce water consumption by watering longer for fewer times.

A Sequence of Stimuli

The official word this week from Vice President Biden is that the Bush Recession Depression was far worse than the doomsday rhetoric of the campaign and that the economy is likely to need a new stimulus to jolt it out of all the horrific mismanagement of the Bush Dark Ages.

I scratched my head. According to the structure of our Constitution, the Legislature holds the purse strings and consequently has a bigger impact on the economy than the presidency. So, I wonder why they don't call this the Pelosi/Reid Recession as it happened after their ascension into power.

Despite the sizeable effort on the part of the partisan press to associate the economic downturn on Bush, it is possible for a neutral third party to see the recession as a result of the transition of power.

Investors, after all, look ahead and not backward.

The 2004, 2006 and 2008 elections saw a massive leap to the left. Businesses and investors matched their strategy to the new economic landscape which means lower profits, higher taxes. Workers will become huge liabilities. So it is best to dump 'em.

I guess the thing that infuriates me most about a very calculated and concerted effort to blame Bush for all the world ills is that the speeches generally stop with the re-enforcement of a partisan theme without getting into details of why Bush, the father of all failures, failed.

At most we get vague platitudes about the failure of deregulation, or the failure of the free market. Democrats seethe with wealth envy and drizzle with accusations of greed.

We interrupt this post on the evils of greed for adulation of Michael Jackson. Now back to the partisan theme of deriding businesses for greed.

These moral platitudes kind of sit in the same bucket with all of the other such platitudes made throughout history.

The political blame game does not help us uncover causes.

I will outline a possible cause. The cause will even include an attack Bush to help make it palatable to the left.

Bush became the president in the midst of the dotcom bust.

Bush came up with a clever plan. He stimulated the economy with a tax cut.

The tax cut did not have a corresponding spending cut. That meant it was financed with deficit spending.

The wars were also stimuluses to the economy.

The same problem happens with spending based stimulus. When the government borrows and spends, then they must tax that money back at a later date. Failure to do so creates a recessive economic force. The out of control earmarks during the Bush Dark Ages were pretty justified as regional stimuli.

It is entirely possible that our primary economic problem is that government keeps trying to inject artificial stimuli into an economy that has become desensitized to economic stimulus but has developed a serious reaction to debt.

If this is the case, then doing another stimulus package is likely to do more harm to the economy than good.

But, Biden might be right. We are a poorly educated country and people might be fooled into responding possitively to another stimulus if the adminstration continues to frame economic issues as the fault of Bush.

The Drug Trade, for example

Continued from last post.

I fear that many approach the world of ideas as if allegiance to an ideology dictates one's positions on all issues. A well formed system of thought will have some core principles and a logical framework for discussing ideas. However, one will find that, in any well formed systems of ideas, there are different ways to argue both sides of most major issues.

I present two examples: Libertarians tend to favor legalization of drugs. Conservatives tend to oppose it. So, I will present a Libertarian argument against legalizing drugs and a Conservative argument for it.

The beating heart of Libertarianism is the freedom of the individual. Libertarians aspire to a society where people are making rational decisions for themselves which cumulatively improve the quality of the society itself.

A great deal of Libertarian thought centers on resolving the paradox that society cannot give an individual the right to take liberty from others.

Psychoactive and addictive substances diminish the ability of a person to engage in rational decision making. Even worse, the drug culture often has people selling or giving away drugs in hopes of manipulating others.

A staunch Libertarian might argue that society must have a way of restricting any substance which diminishes the capacity of a person to reason based on the observation that the capacity of reason is the essence of the individual.

Conservatives are dedicated to preserving and strengthening the moral fabric of a nation. As such, Conservatives tend to be strident supporter of strong anti-drug laws.

A conservative however, might notice that the strong drug laws are not stopping the drug trade, but appear to be providing a mechanism that is funding the moral break down of society. Such a conservative would argue for legalization with the hope that legalization might create a mechanism wherein one controls the harms of the drug trade. A law and order conservative might recognize that a law not well enforced can do more harm to society than the activity outlawed.

Conversely, I should note, an anarchist hates all laws. An anarchist might like the strong drug laws as the laws makes smuggling operations lucrative and have the potential to create an underclass that could be radicalized in revolution.

Anyway, rational systems (with a set of defined principles and solid reasoning process) are not as dictatorial as people make out. Having principles affects one's approach to the challenges of the day, but it does not dictate one's actions.

Ideologies and Political Issues

One of the really odd things about the nature of ideas is that, within any well developed system of thought, there are arguments for and against any given political issues.

This observation is not really a paradox. A paradox is a conflict in base principles. My observation is simply a recognition of the multidimensional nature of logic and the universe itself.

On pretty much all major issues, you will find Conservative arguments for and against the issue, progressive arguments for and against the issue, Christian arguments for and against the issue, Libertarian Arguments for and against the issue and so on.

Societies tend to have a few foundational principles. The real divisiveness happens when intellectuals inject paradox or conflict into these foundational principles.

Anyway, I wrote up an example, but realized that our public schools and universities simply do not give people the training to appreciate or understand subtleties in arguments.

The post started with a foundational principle. It then showed how one could argue both side of an issue from the principle.

I despaired. Our modern education system has created an image driven culture that would simply cue off the examples and fail to notice that I am actually trying to discuss the way that different ideas lead.

The Colorado Right to Life Blog!: Personhood Update: Colorado & Montana

According to The Colorado Right to Life Blog there is a new Personhood movement (SoW) afoot that seeks to extend the right to life, liberty and happiness to the tiny people who are temporarily biologically dependent on a host.

I suspect this means the pro-lifers will be loudly pounding drums in upcoming elections.

This single issue movement appears to be a bit hostile to anyone claiming to be Conservative who is not 100% on board with the most aggressive stand on the wedge issue.

The timing of this movement is unfortunate. The American system has been burdened with back-to-back progressive administrations. As mainstream Conservatives are trying to fight back against unprecedented expansion of the state, the loudest group within the Conservative movement is gearing up for a very loud campaign on a wedge issue that will drive away allies seeking the limited government outlined in the Constitution.

Please don't get this post wrong. My sympathies lie with the pro-lifers.

It simply strikes me that they are fighting on the wrong battlefront.

The battle for hearts and minds is far more important than one's posturing on the political stage.

The story of Jesus Christ is that the Son of God did not take the first boat to Rome to establish a perfect and just law. Jesus went out into the community where he engaged people in moral debate and education. Above all, Jesus provided people with alternatives.

As I watch the abortion issue, I notice that Christians win hearts and minds when they follow Christ and go out in the community to provide education and alternatives to abortion. They lose hearts and minds when they engage in political activities aimed at solving the issue through the law.

The real battle isn't at the ballot box. The real battle is happening in churches, schools and the street.

This strange notion that the law is the highest manifestation of the human spirit is something that belongs to the left.

The idea that we will change people by changing the law (or changing an administration) is the progressive position.

In my opinion, the heart of the conservative position is that our acts as free individuals are far more important than the dictates of state. A conservative defends the rule of law as one needs law for a civil society; However, a conservative does not see the law as the end all of existence. Conservatives are often willing to live with bad law as they see the turmoil involved in changing the law as worse than the law itself. After all, the law is not the primary game. The development of the individual is the primary game.

I suspect that many pro-lifers see the goal of overturning Roe-v-Wade as a primary aim of conservatism.

This is actually a paradoxical position.

In the broad sense, the term "conservative" refers to those who don't want a law changed.

In the sphere of abortion law, the ProChoicers hold the conservative ground, and the ProLifers (who want to effect change by passing new laws) are the progressives.

Respect for life should be a constant. But the political configurations mutate on a regular basis and political ideologies are almost always wrought with contradictions.

The contradictions are not unique to Conservatives.

Modern liberals are odd creatures: By advocating single payer health care, they effectively hold that the state should be the primary agent in health care. As the payer is the determining agent in the rationing of care; the modern liberal effectively relinquishes control over the rationing of health care to the state.

The ideal of the modern liberal is that it is for the state to decide who lives or dies.

The beating heart of the progressive position on health care is: As our physical bodies are entities that exist within a political state; then the state should be the primary agent in the care of our physical bodies. As the single payer is charged with rationing of care, then the single payer is charged with determining who lives and dies.

Oddly, while the modern liberal cling with religious fervor to this progressive position, they claim that a woman is the primary agent in deciding what happens to her body. The Pro-Choice movement holds that a woman should have the ability to kill any living being dependent on her for sustenance.

Modern liberals hold that women are the deciders when it comes to the fate of children in the womb, but are not the deciders in the care of her own body. That is the job of the single payer … the state.

Of course, political bedfellows change on a regular basis.

Were Christians to ever win the hearts and minds of the majority on the abortion issue, progressives would drop support for the pro-choice movement and become all self-righteous in overturning Roe-v-Wade.

This happened with Civil Rights. The Jim Crow laws and the concept of separate-but-equal were the products of the Left. When the issue no longer polled well, the left turned on its own and changed from passing intrusive laws that forced segregation to passing intrusive laws to force integration.

In the process of the Civil Rights movement, the left engaged in a massive disinformation campaign to frame the Party of Lincoln as the source of racism.

Racism was a wedge issue nurtured by the left to expand the scope of government.

Wedge issues will always work to the disadvantage of those who support freedom.

The way the game works is that the loud single issue voters in the Pro-Life movement will do everything they can to associate their cause with Conservatism (driving many away from the movement).

If the pro-lifers were ever to win the hearts and minds of the people; the progressives would then run a change campaign that vilified Conservatives as baby-killers and used the common cause of saving babies as a justification for ever more restrictive laws and centralization of the government.

The ways things stand is that Conservatives will be the first to stand against the legalization of abortion, and will be the last to stand against the change campaign to outlaw it. They will be vilified by the intellectual community regardless of their stand.

Conservatives will be the first to stand against the idea that gay marriage be recognized as the legal and moral equivalence to heterosexual marriage. They will be the last to stand with the homosexual population when a progressive inevitable turn on them and run a change campaign that vilifies and seeks to destroy the homosexual community.

I really don't have a conclusion for the post. Perhaps the conclusion is simply that politics is always a mess, as such the best approach to life is to look to ourselves for the improvement of society and not to the government.

Denial of Rationality

Attempts to deny the rationality of one's opponents numbers among the greatest affronts to rationality.

Rationality, after all, is the process of clearly defining and stating reasons for one's actions or beliefs.

By the nature of life, people will often find themselves caught in situations dominated by low quality discourse. Failure to match the style of the day means one's ideas go unheard.

It may not always be possible to engage in high quality reasoning. However, once a person takes the path of actively denying their opponent's rationality, that person becomes part of the problem.