You say you want a Revolution?

It’s a little disturbing that one of the most common web searches bringing people to this blog is, “Give me hope, please.”  But what really worries me is how many people are typing, “violence” and “revolution,” to end up here.

My fellow Americans, what are you thinking of? 

What is violence going to accomplish that your votes did not?  You got what you voted for.  You want something else?

What?!?

I have nothing to say to “centrists.”  These human dandelion seeds have no senses, apparently; and just float the prevailing wind.  I wish I did have words that’d shake them down.  But I’ve never had any luck with people who think it’s reasonable to split the difference between Hitler and Stalin. 

And true socialist/authoritarians are twisted, ruthless monsters who know that their violence and oppression is self-serving to the elite group to which they feel they belong.  They probably know what I’d like to say to them, but they’d happily have it tortured out of me anyway.

However, most people of the so-called “left” are not those socialists, and they’re not hopelessly foolish.  They don’t understand that politics/government is violence, so they simply don’t know that they are invoking, promoting and unleashing violence upon their fellows. 

The multiply-pierced, tattooed but still smiling Obama fan you see at Whole Foods really does want a peaceful society; he just hasn’t thought any more deeply about politics and market economics than he thought about that ring in his nose.  He doesn’t know that his free-love-and-world-peace dreams drag us all into Stalinist nightmares.  But so far, I’ve found it rewarding to talk to these people. 

Sadly, most of the so-called “right” are much more difficult to work with.  Perhaps they’re worse in hypocrisy and idolatry, and thus inoculated and steeled against reason.  So while many righties seem to pray to God, they put their hands on their hearts and promise to obey a symbol  instead (really; think about that). 

While the word “constitution” invokes wonderful, abstract imagery to them (Norman Rockwell paintings, Bob Hope, and of course, flags), they have no idea what the constitution is for, let alone what it really says.  Just like the lefties, they advocate bigger, costlier, more intrusive government – but they deny it!  They’re just as opposed to individual liberty – but they deny it!   They tear up the constitutions and stomp on them  – but they deny it!  

Frankly, I’d rather hang out at Whole Foods than listen to self-righteous ignorami spouting off about the “coming revolution,” or even secession.  Far-Righties are maybe not as bad as centrists, but their rising mood of undirected, goal-free violence is certainly not helpful. 

What do they suppose a revolution is going to do if they don’t even VOTE for what they say they want?  And what would secession accomplish if it creates only a self-deluded clone of our current mess?

After years of trying to find ten Republicans who know what it is that they want, I’m hard pressed to see any difference between the “right” and the “left” other than the aforementioned tattoos, piercings…and the type and degree of hypocrisy. 

Well, actually, I like Whole Foods.  The one near my work in Houston has a great selection of Belgian beers.  The GOP has nothing like it.

Of course, now that they’ve given up their catbird seat, and there’s no expectation of them actually doing anything substantial, the GOP talks (almost) like Ron Paul. 

But when they held the reins of power, they did only evil, and then chose John McCain to lead them into more of the same. 

They had a chance – a very good, record-breaking, youth-energizing chance – to set things right according to the words they speak from their mouths.  But their voting arms, inexcusably, chose otherwise.

And now they complain?  Inexcuseable.  Shameful. 

Even so, I think we’re seeing that even Republicans can come to their senses in sufficient numbers to shake the centrism tree.  The so-called “Tea Parties” may exemplify this.

We all know we have enemies and problems.  But the question in battle is never so much what to attack, as what to defend.

What do you want?  Please don’t say you want “American Exceptionalism” unless you can explain to even yourself what that really means.  

How do you want to live?  Please don’t tell me “with American Values.”  We’ve all seen plenty of American Values, and I think that’s why we’re all so hopeless, disgusted, and crying for revolution.

On these pages I’ve said that I want my rules written down, and that’s true.  I don’t think we can live in peace without some hard and fast rules.

Good fences make good neighbors.

But if I were to paint my picture of The Good Life, here’s what it’d look like:

1. Citizens can do whatever they want to do as long as they don’t harm anybody else, or take what’s not theirs.
2. We’d have no more government than necessary to maintain #1.
3. We write this down in plain speech and call it law.
4. We invite others around the world to emulate our success, but otherwise leave them the heck alone.

So caveat emptor would replace the FDA, FTC, FDIC, FCC and a zillion other F’agencies.  Common sense, competition, voluntary associations, charity and free market options galore replace union/corporate monstrosities, Medicare, Social Security, lobbyists, regulations, litigation and price controls.  And because of the preceding, you get to keep what you earn, buy what you like (smoke it if you’re fool enough – and as long as you don’t blow it in my face), and live however and with whomever you want…as long as you leave others, and their stuff, alone.

That’s all.

Is that really so bad?  Could you live with that?

Because you know that the alternative plan is not working, right?

Things would’ve been worse!

I take personal offense when politicians claim that their bailouts, color-coded alerts, regulation, litigation and other silly actions saved us from worse socioeconomic troubles.  Not only has their paper money and corporatist fetish been enormously destructive (the worst is yet to come), but it is actually I, Andy, who have saved us all from greater calamity so far.

That’s right.  Me.

You can’t imagine how much worse things would be now without my protests and angry letters to politicians about all the voodoo that they do.  My efforts have spared you from foreign marauders, socioeconomic collapse, and even the Ice Age that would’ve happened in the 1970′s if, well …

If it weren’t for me.

What; you take their word over mine?

Which government program has ever done what it was supposed to do, on time and within budget?  How’d the “War on Poverty” work out?  How about the “War on Drugs?”  Have we had a year’s peace since the “War to End All Wars?”  So far, the “War on Terror” has lasted longer and cost more than did WWII, and it seems we’re now looking for new enemies. 

Just imagine how much worse this could’ve been if it weren’t for me!

Politicians raise taxes to stimulate the economy and cut taxes to stimulate the economy.  They subsidize sports teams and rich bankers and pornographers and foreign dictators to stimulate the economy.  We should’ve been stimulated past Pluto by now but for one key fact: politics doesn’t work. 

Check any history book and you’ll see a perfectly unbroken, ancient and ongoing record of corruption, oppression, slavery, genocide and war.

So our once-precious Rule of Law gave way to violently Robbing Peter to Pay Paul; and you are not Paul. 

No, don’t thank me.  I expect nothing from my tireless efforts on your behalf.  But quit the Stockholm Syndrome with politicians.  They’ve got your money; they don’t need your praise, too.

A Short History of Health Care: Let Doctors Be Doctors

I just ran across this on another website.  It’s a column I wrote for Indiana Policy Review a couple of years ago that seems more appropriate than ever now.

A Short History of Health Care: Let Doctors Be Doctors
By Andrew Horning

Healthcare is an odd business in that it has always been both expensive and unpleasant. Until the 1920s, the average doctor couldn’t even help with the average ailment. While medicine then included a range of arts like phrenology, acupuncture, homeopathy and allopathy it really was a coin-toss whether you’d be saved or killed by a doctor’s work.

Then the 20’s brought insulin, sulfa, other “miracle” drugs and sterile fields that meant, for the first time, that healthcare actually worked more often than not. From there, doctors, scientists and medical engineers really took off; rapid advancements increased life expectancies and decreased suffering. And because of increasing effectiveness and supply, healthcare was even becoming cheaper in real cost-benefit terms.

However, politicians had nothing at all to do with this, and that was apparently a problem. Teddy Roosevelt proposed a German-style, cradle-to-grave “socialized” healthcare system, but it was assailed as “the Prussian Menace” in those anti-German years before WWI, and Teddy’s scheme died. Even so, politicians wanting to seem compassionate started promoting socialized healthcare. The July 1919 issue of the Insurance Monitor made this prescient assertion: “The opportunities for fraud upset all statistical calculations. . . . Health and sickness are vague terms open to endless construction. Death is clearly defined, but to say what shall constitute such loss of health as will justify insurance compensation is no easy task.”

No matter. Between The Revenue Act of 1939’s health-related tax breaks, and 1943, when the War Labor Board excluded employer-paid health insurance from its wage freeze, American politicians charged into health care on their favorite horse, income tax.

In a nutshell, here’s what happened: Tax breaks for employer-paid health insurance meant that health insurance became a part of employment, and insurance became an integral part of healthcare. This inserted middlemen, which of course made everything more expensive. But who cared? The tax-subsidized, payroll-deducted cost was invisible enough that Americans started using insurance to pay for routine visits, dental checkups, eyeglasses and even plastic surgery. Group insurance offered large corporations better plans than small companies could muster, giving large corporations even greater advantages in hiring and competition than corporate laws already gave them. This also meant that the poor, or worse, the self employed, were even further distanced from the rich and incorporated in a very serious way. Obviously this created problems, but politicians never admit error, do they?

Four days before Tax Day, 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower established the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, giving government even more direct control over some of humanity’s most precious commodities. More political money and power meant more reasons for businesses to make campaign contributions and lobby. Of course, politicians at every level of government have used healthcare policy to reward their friends and punish their enemies. That’s their stock in trade.

Now tax money and policy is sifted and sorted through political appointees, immortal bureaucracies and defense-contract-style arrangements to feed a dwindling number of profit-starved insurance companies who then deny your claim. Doctors hire legions of workers to manage the regulatory, litigative, and insurance paperwork hassles; or leave private practice to become an employee within a clerically staffed healthcare corporation. So healthcare is still both expensive and unpleasant. But now it’s only because politicians, not doctors, are practicing medicine. Our healthcare injustices and vital statistics have decayed into an embarrassment at just the time when technology should make healthcare cheap, effective and available to all.

It is hard to imagine what politicians could have done to make our healthcare situation any worse. Yet, according to a July 2006 Harris Poll, Americans rate the issue of healthcare well-behind Iraq, the economy, immigration and even gas prices. Even more strangely, most people now think we must, to some degree and by some unspecified method, “socialize” healthcare just as Europe, Canada and other nations are now scrambling back toward free market reforms. What are we thinking?

Let politicians have their way with Iraq, the Colts and toll roads. Let them run lotteries and practice voodoo. But please, let doctors do healthcare at last; they’ve earned the right.

I wish I’d said that…

I read this column by Roger Roots some time ago (I’m guessing in November of 2008), and came across it again today.

It’s brilliant.  I can’t do better.  So in honor of Constitution Day, I’m reposting it:

http://rinf.com/alt-news/politics/constitutional-dead-letters/4851/

Politics isn’t cool. It’s deadly.

It is the all the rage to blame “big corporations,” “profit motivation,” and “the influence of money in politics” on our social problems.  But that is a dangerous self-deception for at least three reasons:

1. Corporations are not creatures of a so-called, “unregulated free market.”  On the contrary, corporations are inherently political creations with special legal privileges allocated by politicians, and intended to thwart the absolute accountability in truly free markets.  The “corporate veil” is a layer of protection against evil decisions, in other words.
2. Corporations can’t buy influence that’s not already for sale.  It’s politicians who’re the influence peddlers.  Politicians are in fact the agents of all large-scale injustice.
3. Yet Americans have no problems that voters haven’t repeatedly chosen with a greater-than-98% incumbent reelection rate.

We citizens need to understand our power and accountability.  The last thing we need is an imaginary whipping boy.  Our economic and social troubles will abate only when, or if, we come to our senses, act like grown ups, and quit putting our faith in politicians.  Politics isn’t cool and it’s never safe.  After all, the history of politics is the history of oppression, slavery genocide and war.  The whole point of constitutions is, in fact, to put politicians (not corporations, and certainly not you) on a leash.  

Do something unusual on Constitution Day.  Read the Constitution.  You’ll find that:

1. You’ve been lied to for long enough.

2. The truth really can set you free.

Rotten, worm-eaten, stinking-evil contemptible…

I didn’t easily find more recent data, but as of about ten years ago, the average sentence for murder in the USA was about 16.5 years, meaning about 12 or so with good behavior (this last statistic as of 2005). 

Granted, your mileage may vary.  If you’re a famous ex-football player and movie star, you can kill a couple of people and walk away free; if you kill a cop, you’ll probably be dead before you can reload.  If you’re a senator or president, you can get away with just about anything. 

But typically, the average bloke can murder for the price of about 16.5 years.

Sexual assault may carry an average sentence of around 8 years, but you’ll be out in about 5 (again, 2005 statistics).  From there, the sentencing goes downward for robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and larceny, for which you can get out after about 18 months.  As you know, we have a lot of drug “offenders,” who’ve made our prisons something like revolving doors.  Sometimes you have to free murderers and rapists to make room for the pot smokers, but no matter; in an odd variation on Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes” of fame, it seems that nearly everybody will at some point be in prison for about 15 minutes for some kind of statutory offense (seatbelt laws, airbag laws, drug laws, medical coding laws, business licensing laws…).

Now here’s what I think is interesting:

Bernard Madoff never threatened anybody; he only talked people out of their money, and got a 150 year sentence.

Robert Kahre paid his employees a mutually agreeable wage using USA minted gold and silver dollars according to their face value and reported it all to the IRS according to the letter of the law.  But the IRS didn’t like it.  So he’s about to be sentenced for up to 296 years in prison.

So here’s what I think:

Your government, the one that you and your neighbors vote for with a 98% reelection rate, is evil and deserves only contempt and destruction.  Our laws mean nothing, our money is worthless, our culture is depraved, and if we don’t wake up and reform ourselves from bottom to top, we are doomed in the worst and every sort of way.

That’s all.  Have a nice day!

Opportunity knocks, but maybe only once…

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.”   Our founders knew that ordinary citizens, when allowed their own motivations and institutions, are more adaptable, innovative and productive than even our wisest politicians could imagine or improve.  So our constitutions, state and federal, weren’t written as documents of government empowerment.  They are contracts of limitation; a leash against governments’ historical tendency to get loose and hurt those that government is supposed to protect.

Governments are good at only a few, albeit formidable tasks; and then only if properly restrained.  If we ask more of government, we’ll get less.  What we’ve come to call, “government services,” or programs that rob Peter to pay Paul, can’t work as well as the infinite and dynamic range of citizen alternatives.

Every day, our merchants display a new and endless supply of things like espresso beans, hand-made bathroom tiles, leather-lined cars, -even things like energy saving light bulbs and recycled paper in aisle after aisle of stocked shelves.  When governments attempt such a cornucopia, people wait in line for bad shoes that don’t fit.

Governments can’t command bicycle mechanics to invent airplanes, or decree that college kids will invent a computer in a garage.  Government didn’t invent schools, soup kitchens or voluntary service clubs.  Government regulations didn’t make this nation great; free citizens did that.  The economist Ludwig von Mises wrote, “Progress is precisely that which the rules and regulations did not foresee.”

Not all government programs are as bad as slavery or the segregating Jim Crow laws, of course.  And the “progressive” programs that swept away the Indians and stole property from citizens for the benefit of railroad barons aren’t the finest examples either.  But even government’s best-intended schemes have driven medical costs skyward, and quality downward.  When government tries to stimulate one industry, it squeezes out others.  Some of our most kindly politicians have created social castes and hostile subcultures with their misguided good intentions.

I’ll just come out and say it: according to our government’s statistics, and as analyzed by groups as different as the Cato and Preservation Institutes, our Goose is Cooked.  Like it or not, we are swirling toward the drainpipes of history as our leaders point to the abyss and cry, “forward ho!”

American gross domestic product and expenditures per capita, adjusted for inflation, have doubled since 1960.  Yet for all our apparent wealth, we’re working harder and longer for less and less.  Healthcare spending has gone from about 5% of the GDP in 1960 to over 16% today, much more per capita than any other nation.  But despite better technology, our stratified life expectancies, infant and maternal mortality rates, and communicable disease controls are embarrassing.   In 1950, Americans averaged about $1700 per student/year in adjusted dollars, yet public education was excellent.  We spend over $7000 per student/year now, or over 50% more than other industrialized nations.  I need say no more about the quality of our government-run schools.

Certainly, our leaders didn’t mean to cause us harm any more than they meant to paint themselves into a financial corner.  But with all that’s obviously unraveling around us, I think it’s odd that so many Americans are squawking like Chicken Little now that our egg-faced leaders have confessed that government programs must be cut.  Many are even saying that tax increases, to prop up a few more government services, would be a good “compromise” as we get less and less for our money.  That’s nuts.

We have been presented with a great opportunity to prove our civic mettle.  We can still show the world that liberty still works.  Churches and other voluntary associations can fill the gaps in charity and building projects.  With as much as we pay for political campaigns, I know we can raise money for scholarships, arts programs and day camps.

For decades now, Libertarians, Jeffersonian Democrats and Barry Goldwater Republicans have advocated such simple, proven civic reforms.  Now’s the time.

In fact, it’s now…or never again.

Our government tapeworm has been eating away our civic awareness, industrious spirit and social organizations long enough.  Excising these government dysfunctions doesn’t mean doing without anything.  It means that perhaps at last our government will focus on its core business, and stay out of ours.  It means that now we’ll be free to assess our own priorities, pay for our own causes, and do what Americans were once known for around the world: doing things better.

Where are Samaritans when you need them?

I’ve had it with “religious leaders” spewing socialism.

If Satan has a Bible, I’m sure this is in it: that people should, with all the best intentions, delegate their own, personal role on earth, to politicians.

Where in the Bhagavad-Gita, Torah, Tipitaka, Bible or Koran could you find such evil sophistry?

Universal Healthcare isn’t charity – it is putting a gun to your neighbor to make him do what you won’t do yourself. Social Security isn’t caring for your mother – it’s the hole you personally push her, and your children, into to assuage guilt and allay fears. And you already know that “Homeland Security” has nothing to do with peace and liberty, right?

Our nation’s founders intended that citizens should defend themselves; not just against petty criminals, but against all enemies, foreign…and domestic, as citizen militias. They intended that our churches and voluntary associations, working without the armed aggression of politics, would comprise the departments of Health, Education and Welfare, so that the abstract and erratic junkyard dog we call “politics” would stay in the junkyard, restrained by the tall fence we call Rule of Law.

All of this required that individual citizens, personally, serve the needs of their neighbors; and that we remember, with cold chills, the true history and nature of politics, and people.

Imagine a man was just starting his Corvette after a sales call in northwest Houston, when he was beaten, stripped and left for dead where his car used to be. A TV preacher saw the man, and noted that he really should call 911, but this gave him a sermon idea, so he hurried on. A well-regarded politician saw the man, and said, “dang, I sure don’t want to be seen with a naked man!” And so he also scurried on. But a Mexican, fresh over the fence and scared, hauled the man into his rusty Corolla, took him to the hospital, and even gave his contact information to the ER admitting staff, just if he could be of any help at all, or could pay in any way, for the man’s care.

Who should we emulate? Are there any lessons, in any religion, that tell you otherwise?

Health Insurance…or Healthcare…Choose One

At least as far back as the funeral societies of ancient Greece, humans have formed co-ops or investment groups to manage the kind of losses that happen to people rarely, without warning, or as in the case of a funeral, only once.  Early insurance organizations, like modern ones, averaged and distributed the losses to make them less painful.

These were not comprehensive relief plans.  Maybe a best friend would compensate you for the loss of a favorite hat, but the early societies and later insurance policies were intended to minimize only the loss of a ship, a precious heirloom, or a loved one.  Such insurance was rarely compulsory because the benefits were clear, and forced participation would change the mathematics of sustainable cost versus periodic benefit.

Imagine what would happen, for example, if lawmakers decided that legal minimum auto insurance wasn’t enough.  What if they decreed that insurance companies must pay every driver for regular auto maintenance, new shocks, batteries, and even the cost of gas?  Imagine tax money and tax benefits stirred into the mix.  The mathematics would go so out of whack that it would no longer be anything like insurance.  We’d have only a usuriously inefficient pre-payment scheme for everyday occurrences.  The rare collisions and breakdowns for which you’d really want insurance would become insignificant to the total costs involved.

So to stay in business in such a regulatory/fiscal swamp, auto insurance companies would start jacking up premiums and denying claims.  Outraged by rising costs and worsening service, drivers would beg lawmakers to enact cost caps and more regulations against the now-vilified mechanics and insurance companies.  But the pricing rules, bizarre service regulations, and now-necessary political lobbying would drive some mechanics and insurance companies out of business, while others would learn the game and rake in the dough.  On the other hand, even the cleverest shops would have to hire legions of front-office staff to handle the increasingly tricky paperwork and guidelines.  Grumbling about long waits, co-payments, changing service providers, and extra charges for high octane fuel, motorists would forgo routine oil changes or new tires, and cross their fingers against the catastrophic breakdown.  Some motorists would seek “alternative” car care services from chanting transmission savants who’d burn incense to heal a dying clutch.

Ultimately, the bloated world of automobile services would collapse, leaving only a niche market catering to the elite.

So far, this is only a dream scenario for public transportation advocates.  

Now here’s the real question:

Which would you rather have -universal health insurance, or health care?   You can’t have both.   The numbers don’t work, and we’re already witnessing the result.

In a free market, prices drop and availability improves with every technological advance.  That’s not what’s happening in healthcare, is it?   Increased demand should lead to increased supply unless somebody uses force to change the rules.

That force has been building against healthcare since the late 1800’s, when Germany’s Chancellor Bismarck made socialized health insurance the latest thing from Europe.  Wage and price controls during WWII, along with a tax exemption for employer-provided health insurance sealed a devil’s bargain at a time when technology was revolutionizing healthcare.  Costs should have come down, but they were climbing, just as house calls and bartered care were getting pushed away. 

And healthcare became tied to employment, because healthcare became one and the same as health insurance.   Health insurance was a perk of work with the real costs tax-subsidized into invisibility.  This caused a moral hazard, by which people began to use healthcare services differently than if they knew the actual costs.  This started the upward climb in real costs.   So without a job to hide those costs, healthcare spiraled out of reach.

Then President Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965.  The doctors, businessmen and insurance companies who’d previously opposed socialized medicine hardly dared to speak against this keystone in the arch of the “Great Society.”  Almost at once, market logic was replaced by all that’s worst about politics.

Not so long ago, congress started using Medicare money to pay politically savvy teaching hospitals to reduce the number of doctors they trained.  As with paying farmers to ignore farming, our congress decided that healthcare needed price supports.  Yet Medicare payments for real services have been cut again and again across the board, with the most dramatic cuts yet just ahead. 

As you should expect with politics, however, these cuts don’t lower costs…just the opposite, in fact, is happening.  Proposed “utilization rate” and “self-referral” rules intended to cut costs and abuse already, for example, force doctors to order more expensive tests using ionizing-radiation instead of cheaper, safer, and sometimes even more-effective ultrasound tests.  I’ve personally witnessed this, and a good friend of mine (a medical professional himself) has suffered a far more personal medical imaging horror story in which taxpayers got charged ten times the necessary cost, and my friend suffered serious medical complications. 

But there’s more to say about where we’re headed. 

It’s been said that blood is thicker than water …and that money is thicker than blood.  Your mother is not writing the rules that determine when you get care, and when you die.

We’ve long ago moved past the ideal of patient-centered care, and into cost-accounting for the Common Good. That’s dangerous enough.  But we’re so collectivized in risk (while “privatized” in profit) that everyone has a financial hook in you.  We all want you healthy enough to work and pay your share of the burden.  But just as a transmission can’t tolerate a broken gear, the collective We The People (and the bureaucrats who do our dirtiest deeds) will cast you aside when you’re too weak to work.

Proper pain management is expensive, and doesn’t add to the machine’s bottom line.  Prolonging the life of non-productive cogs doesn’t make sense to the Common Good, does it?

And despite what Obama the Chicago politician promises, doctor-assisted-suicide/euthanasia is already in discussion.  Seriously.

If you’re up for reading 1018 pages, you can read it for yourself.  (I’ll make it easy…read the context before and after page 428 here http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090714/aahca.pdf)

And the long run economics are not sane.

For the past hundred years or so, almost every nation on earth has operated on a debt-currency, central banking model that’s, well …a Ponzi Scheme that makes Bernie Madoff look like a petty pickpocket. The true costs of each generation’s debt is deferred into monetary inflation and social re-engineering as a bubble to beat all bubbles.

True, I’d rather go broke on healthcare than on war; and maybe that’s a choice to make. But going broke, in case you haven’t noticed, is a global phenomenon already; and, once again, despite what you’ve been told by the class of people with a 100-year, 100% record of error, we’re just getting started.

The third-party-payer, tax-policy-created healthcare mess we have now must go.  But what I see people debating is whether to put out this fire with dry wood, or gasoline.

As every chapter of human history amply demonstrates, politics isn’t the solution, it’s the problem. 

We could fall back into funeral societies if we had to.  Without cars, we could still get around just fine.  I thank God that our politicians haven’t yet proposed food insurance, or a “universal food supply.”

But if we keep letting politicians sell insurance and practice medicine, we’ll see what it’s like to live without health.

Being President Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry

What if I were to say to my justifiably angry, insulted and hurt wife, “I could have calibrated those words differently”??

What if I were to saunter into work six hours late after hosing up a multimilliondollar project and call it a “teachable moment” for all Americans?

Oh for crying out loud.   Is it so hard for a President to simply say “ I screwed up and I’m sorry?”

The constant twisting of words, arrogance, continual and prideful invocation of his office should convince us, once and for all, that Barack Obama is just another politician.   No different from the previous one, or two, or six.

He is not “The One.”   He is not our “Saviour” or any other lofty abstraction publicly applied to this Chicago machine tool.   He is no better than the least of us.

…Except, of course, that this man has access to armies, cops and nuclear weapons.  And he likes using force and intimidation to get what he wants.

We should humbly, seriously reflect on that.

In fact, this really should be a teachable moment for all Americans.  We should wonder out loud and with our friends; not just why his mistakes are America’s lesson, but also why the violent, failure-doomed ideology of Nero, Stalin, Hitler and Che is “cool.”  Why do bumper stickers, logos and banner waving, cheering crowds of young people promote oppression?  How did hip young people, within just a generation or two, transmogrify their ideology from the 60′s-70′s mistrust of power and armed agents of government, into today’s violent disarmament of citizens to make them submit under authoritarian rule? 

How did that get cool? 

How did the totally voluntary interactions between adults in a free market become a bad thing, while the inherently armed aggression of politics is …hip?

Words are powerful.  Obama knows that.  That’s why he almost never uses any real words; and instead butters our ears shut with fairy-dusted snot.   It was an accident that he actually said something of meaning.

The inconveniencing of his elite friend raised emotions in this typically cold creature, and he said something revealing.  

Words send armies to war.  Words heal bruised feelings.  Words comfort the frightened and frighten the wise.   It’s insidious necromancy that “government” sounds good when it’s the same thing as “politics;” which we all know sounds bad.

Pseudo-smart young kids think that (often because they’re taught to) it’d be cool if “government” were to take a role in every aspect of business, education, health and welfare.   But who’d think it’d be so swell if “bickering and corrupt politicians” were to get their mitts on those things?  This isn’t just words we’re playing with – it’s oppression, slavery, genocide and war we’ve made into catchy slogans.

It’s time for some idol-smashing.   Look hard at that man we’ve elected to be the savior of humanity.   Look hard at the history of “In Politicians We Trust.”  

The collection of swaggering elitists who’ve been both law-breaking and dead-wrong about everything they’ve said for over a hundred years shouldn’t be called “experts” and “your honor.”   They should be called the criminals and liar-fools they are and dealt with accordingly.

Or, what the heck?   Maybe we should all act like that.   Maybe we just keep ignoring the blossoming of crime and injustice we’ve been ignoring for decades (admit it; you’ve ignored the headlines of human traffic/slavery and exploding corruption, rape and murder), and just go with the examples set from the top.   Never say you’re sorry.   Never admit anything, in fact.   Try to never say what you mean or mean what you say.   Make horrible plans that you know are stupid and can’t happen, and watch them come true before your eyes!  

And then, above all, forget about “please” and “The customer comes first.”   It’s every man for himself and Rule Of Tyrants instead of Rule Of Law.   Yee haw!   Grab your guns and leave morality behind; we’re all politicians now!

Maybe I have finally figured out why the bumper stickers say “Power of Pride” instead of, “how about some humility?”  Maybe I more fully understand why we train our kids to be confident instead of competent.

Sheesh.  What have we become?