Looming Red

Who is responsible for SOPA and PIPA? Who is driving the greatest censorship attempt in US history? Here is the list of SOPA supporters.

Whatever their goal of stopping their products from being distributed for free, these bills do not accomplish this. These bills will hurt far more than the likes of The Pirate Bay and Torrentz. To begin with, these bills for the information super highway are like thousands of checkpoints on our physical highways stopping all traffic checking for a few car thieves. The bills go further, because anyone may accuse anyone else of copyright infringement and the default of the site being accused will be guilty and liable of fines and lawsuits until that site proves otherwise.

If you are a company who doesn’t like a competitor’s google ranking, you can accuse them of infringement and have them embroiled in legal defenses and potential shutdown until they disprove the allegation. The language in the bill is broad enough that the Justice Department of any presidency may define it however they would like. If you are a small carpet cleaning business that has worked hard on getting a good search engine ranking, your competitor can destroy you because you were using a single image that you did not know was copyrighted.

Review sections of product websites could be shutdown because product makers could claim copyright infringement as their cruddy products are rightly criticized by consumers. Social networking sites could be embroiled in lawsuits until they setup content filtration or member banning for supposed public use of even the names of companies. Google, Yahoo, and Bing could be forced to remove ads, listing, organic search results, and more when they are ruled liable for any search results they come back with.

The whole passage of these bills is information D-Day.

So, are the “artists” responsible, or is it just their distribution channels who are to blame? It doesn’t matter. That a ditzy hollywood starlet has no clue what Disney is doing on her behalf is unfortunate, but it means nothing. The effect is the same, because her employers, the ones with the cash to pay her, and her union, the Screen Actors Guild, are the ones setting the rules and passing their bill on to congress to claim as their own.

Most bills are not technically written by Congress People or Senators. The technical legal language is written mostly by whomever is doing the lobbying. Bills often come pre-drafted, and the less-than-adept legislator simply puts his or her name on the bill as the author who will seek sponsorship from other legislators. This was true of much of Obamacare, Campaign Finance Reform, and even going way back to the creation of the Federal Reserve System. While many bills are written straight from the desks of conniving or foolish legislators, a lot of legislation is written by lobbyists from the private sector, even Socialist or often Fascist (both Marxist) legislation.

Why would “capitalists” go for this stuff or even participate in the creation of it? They simply see the writing on the wall. They see that the trend of government is to further and further control economies and they see that there is limited seating at the table of control, so they try to beat others to one of those limited seats. It the old adage: If you are not at a seat at the table, you are on the menu. These entertainment companies see an opportunity of profiting by a seat at the table of greater restrictions on economies.

It is a social taboo to use the label Fascist. So often, that label is used by people that are ill-educated or even crazy. The label brings up images of Itallian “black shirts”, swastika armbands bands, and concentration camps. People forget, however, that fascism with well-defined political philosophy before its supporters committed their atrocities.

Make no mistake, these two bills are Fascism and not just Socialism. They are not seeking that the government take on ownership of the websites, et al that are said to infringe on copyrights. Marxism is government control of markets and socialism is the government confiscation and ownership route to that control. Fascism is the government regulation and private ownership route to government control of markets. These two bills are Fascism and the Hollywood, Music, and News industry fools who so easily slander everyone with the Fascist label also easily accept the fascism of those who sell the distribution of their content.

Please view the following video for more education:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

The first result of a moderate fire going through a forest with dry enough grass and green enough trees will be a complete burn off of the undergrowth while the trees are left standing. The trees might have some recovery and adjustment to do, but they are free from immediate future fire danger due to the lack of dry tinder recently burned off. The trees are free to continue to grow taller of wider and the undergrowth and saplings are gone. When a forest has been completely obliterated, trees and all, it is from a fire of greater intensity with greater kindling to fuel the larger destruction of the larger trees.

In a free society, government regulations are like these more moderate forest fires. The regulations burn through the small businesses and enterprises alik, but leave the enterprises standing and free to thrive in the new environment of devastation. This analogy is evident from the costs of compliance figures of new regulations and the profit margins a business has to survive the unknowns that the future brings.

All businesses have to plan for unknowns and accomodate them as quickly as possible and with the least losses possible when the unknowns become known. The future, to any entrepreneur is a source of hope and energy, but it is also a source of fear. When economies go south, costs for materials rise, and other surprises happen, the business owner or director has to adjust drawing on the built funds of formerly successful years. The business has to whether the storm with strength of former profits.

Regulations enter markets like moderate fires because of the costs that they force all to bare. Regulations are just like rising materials costs. If a business makes bean bag chairs and a new regulation regulates that fire retardants be added to the batting, what costs does that business now have to bare? They have to bare discovery of the new regulations, the cost of the retardants or the badding with the retardants added, the cost of risk of non-compliance, and the cost of not being able to maintain the customer’s desired price.

Discovery is expensive. The cost of discovering what the regulations even mean down to the level of the final product is the cost of attorneys, accountants, and fines resulting from the bad advice of  attorneys and accountants who proved to not be omnipotent. That discovery cost is not a cost that can be recovered on its own. It has to be rolled into the losses born by former profits or rolled into the cost of products or services.

For one section of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, FEI (Financial Executives International) found the average cost of compliance to be $1.7 million in 2007. Now, add that to the average cost of the rest of Sarbanes-Oxley. Of course that is cost born by evil bankers and speculators, so it’s alright, except for the fact that the cost is passed along in the form of lower investment gains and higher fees. When your 401K takes a dip it is not totally from a bad market, it also comes from the cost of regulations.

Once the regulations are discovered and the discovery is tacked on the end of the aggregate bill for the bean bag chair example, the business will have to find materials suppliers who have discovered as fast as they have and at a competitive price. Suppliers that meet that description will be fewer, making the supply of the badding lower driving up the price. So, the regulation had the same effect on the market that a devastating low crop yield of cotton would have. The scarcity of compliant badding is artificial scarcity.

The business may risk non-compliance because the cost of compliance is so great. This could cost more, however, since many regulatory fines are per-incidence, meaning exponentially high to a successful business. Some non-compliance can even bring prison time. In the case of regulation, it is not easier to ask for forgiveness.

The ultimate cost is the loss of customers, because the customers had no inside-baseball understanding of why you suddenly started raising the cost of your bean bag chairs. Costs cannot be born by the customers forever since customers will not buy at any price. Even if some knowledgeable customers knew why the bean bags jumped in price, the same customers may not have the money to buy at that price no matter how understanding they are.

If the bean bag company could not take the loss with previous year profits and could not pass the cost to customers, the business is burnt away. Where a larger business could whether the onslaught longer and more effectively, the smaller business is gone. The small business was the promising sapling growing from a single seed and seeking to grow to great heights or the lush grass satisfied with small stature and deep roots. The regulation forest fire burnt out the grass and saplings and left the mature trees to grow another year and root themselves ever deeper.

When a moderate fire goes through a forest, the smaller growth is reduced to carbon and other component fertilizers for the forest that often benefit the larger trees in the aftermath. Markets are no different in that the destruction of small businesses leaves gaps that can be filled by ever-growing enterprises with better lobbyists and larger teams of attorneys and accountants. Regulation helps big business, it doesn’t hurt it.

On the eve of the people getting their power back from the state, we hear about compromise with the losers by the winners:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2010/10/issa-defines-compromise-on-top-line.html

The word compromise has more than one meaning. It can mean to make concessions on either side of a debate, true. Another meaning of compromise is to weaken something like a ship or state security. When either side of the argument have some common ground than the concession to get to the common ground fits in the first compromise definition. When both sides are incompatible it is the weakening of the whole. Abraham Lincoln understood this when he decried the expansion of slavery to the new states calling the compromise a house divided.

We are facing a similar division of the house. We are stuck between the side of the founding principles of individual liberty and responsibility and the side of state control and the recession of individual liberty. Where state control is, there individual liberty cannot be also. We need compromise with this unconstrained vision of statist leftists like the Hindenburg needed compromise. We need compromise like the Titanic. We need compromise like Pearl Harbor.

These elitist fools in Washington who go out from our states, supposedly representing us, compromising with that which will corrode the whole have got to go. This is not compromise like Madison compromising in the apportionment in the congress and the senate. This is compromise like a breach in the hull, like static electricity on a hydrogen zeppelin, it is compromise like enemy radio silence before an attack on your whole Pacific naval force.

We are through compromising with socialism, because it is not compromise in the first sense. It is really incremental Marxism. It is the devil with his toe in the door. If compromise is needed to get things done, then it should be pure gridlock. If republicans or any other politicians do that they will be Heroes. If not, they will be unemployed.

Turn on any TV show that has some interaction with public sector employed characters and you will get a narrative of shrinking public sector budgets leading to financially strangled public sector employees. Two episodes in a row of the SyFy show “Warehouse 13″ have characters employed in the public sector who bring up budget cutbacks. This TV show is not unusual in this depiction as it is very common to hear the narrative.

Specifically in the world of public education, media narratives of financially smitten educators abound. Congress comes back from recess for emergency funding to support the budgets of locally run districts. The president gives speech after speech with backdrops of teachers in an effort to get wide support for the plight of the starved teachers.

Many states and school districts have managed their affairs into the toilet. As a result of that and the economic environment, money for the public schools is said to be tight. You and I can, through our local school boards, attempt to fix our local problems, but we cannot effect one bit the decisions of some far off locally run education system. Yet, the argument from the president and other socialists is that we must pay for those far off districts and boards none the less.

Obama says that our kids will not get the education that they desperately need, because the sainted teachers will not have the money to come back and teach this year. Our kids will suffer without an education. In the spirit of this gushers and bailouts presidency and congress, we must give whatever our hopes are for our money to pay for the aims and designs on our money for the teachers and their unions. This is nothing but another bailout for those communities that have screwed themselves over with bad management on the backs of those who haven’t.

What is the point?

The national debt, contributed to by this bailout mentality is climbing and climbing. The deficit is rising. The private sector is shrinking. The government mentality is to consume and consume the surplus and non-surplus of the private sector and put off the payment to an undefined later date. Well who is going to pay later?

The debt and deficit will be reconciled by higher taxes and inflated-away savings values. Those are the only two ways this can be resolved. Unless there is an epidemic that kills off the current working generations, the current working generations will pay in shrunken retirements and shrunken pay before they retire. Still, they are not the only ones that will have to pay. The ones that will supposedly suffer by the lack of teachers are the ones who will pay later for debt today.

Anyone who has lived in a country with runaway inflation can tell you of the value of an education in such an environment. Yes, you may have a slightly larger edge over those who don’t have an education, but it is an edge that makes you king of the trash heap. Education in a hyper-inflation environment has very little effect on your ability to raise yourself out of poverty. There are no examples in history where people in mass could do anything but leave their country or revolt  to change their personal situations in mass when presented with such a circumstance.

So, again, what’s the point? If bailouts like the current one for local education lead to monetary collapse, one cannot raise by any means himself from such a collapse, what is the point of having an education payed for by bailouts?

Imagine that social mobility from incapable and poor to capable and well off is an old-time water wheel. As new water runs down stream past the paddles, the wheel turns. The part of the wheel that was under water is soon the part at the apex of the rotation. When there is freedom in the system, with a stable currency and manageable expenses, each part of the wheel can one day be at its own apex.

The American dream is that from even underwater means, one can rise to his or her own apex. We can be successful with that talent and hard work with which we have been blessed to possess or perform. That mobility it provided by a system with freedom in the rotation of the shaft on which our wheel turns.

When hyper-inflation kicks in, runaway taxation ensues, and the other burdens caused by the bailout mindset become evident, the rotation of our water wheel stops as though a tree branch is thrust in the spokes or the bearings have seized up. No amount of running water can push the wheel. You can work hard, you can work smart, you can educate yourself, but nothing pushes your wheel. You remain underwater. Underwater becomes your apex.

So, what is the point of bailing out education systems that will educate for a future where education does nothing to push your wheel? We might as well all be illiterate in the rice fields.

Samuel Adams:

It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.

Samuel Adams was tied to the original tea party movement in this country, the one that led to a British naval blockade on the Boston port. Disguised colonial freedom activists dumped tea in the bay. Other tea shipments sat unused in the cargo holds of ships that could not be unloaded due to the refusal of dock hands to perform the labor. What was the big sin that so riled New England and other colonial citizens? Was it a tax that made tea unbearable to buy? Not at all.

The tax that so outraged the American Colonists was a corrupt bargain. In fact on the issue of taxes, many taxes that were hated by the colonists had been lifted by the British parliament. Seen as a finger in the eye, the Tea tax was a statement by parliament that not only basically said, “Not only can we tax you dirty colonists but we will.”

To make this statement more palatable to supposed subservient citizenry, parliament made a tax arrangement with suppliers of the East India Trading Company that actually made the tea cheaper for the colonists. The EIT Co. would  supply tea to the colonists at tremendous discounted wholesale cost and the British government would then subsidize the suppliers with revenue from a tax placed on the tea. The resulting cost of the tea was cheaper than it would have otherwise been.

It may have been cheaper tea, but it was unacceptable government to a large minority of citizen colonists. It was a finger in their eye. It was a matter of principle to principled people. The parliament had made a corrupt bargain that, leading to cheaper tea, also would lead to a cheap purchase of individual freedom from colonist British citizens who could not have a vote in parliament and could not effect future taxes and potential corrupt bargains.

Samuel Adams:

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.

It was the Lockean notion of Natural Law that sparked the grassfires of freedom in the American colonies. No intellectual elite in a far-off capital could trump the natural freedom of people in the dominion of the elites, true. Still, natural law meant more.

Justice was equally important. The British government had made corrupt bargains with one group in favor and others not in its favor. It was not the outcome that was important, but the injustice of taxing one to pay another and to take from the justice-minded colonist his voice to appose the injustice.

The colonist minority activists had but one recourse. “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” This was treason to the crown! To the minority freedom activist colonists it was treason to natural law to allow liberty to erode further.

The following is a letter that I emailed to Senator Hatch after learning of his vote to squash a filibuster on the issue of qualifications of Obama federal court Nominee, David Hamilton.

Dear Senator Hatch,

A few days ago, I got a request for donations from the republican party with your name on it. I put it through my paper shredder. If you are not afraid of my vote then maybe you’ll be afraid of my refusal to donate. I did this because the Party continues to not understand who its base is. In NY-23, Scozzafava may have been chosen by the local Republicans, but the national party tried to shove her down our throats. Endorsements from Gingrich and others was an attempt to legitimize her with Republicans, even though she was for card check, gay marriage, unlimited taxation, and was endorsed by ACORN affiliates. My thought when I shredded your donation request was, “Republicans have to clean up their act before I will subsidize it.”

The wisdom of doing this has been confirmed by the fact that YOU voted to squash debate on David Hamilton’s qualifications. While Republicans had the majority, you did not stop filibusters on judges though you could have with the nuclear option. Now in the minority, you vote with the democrats to stop filibuster attempts.

Senator Hatch, the judiciary is the only thing, the one and only thing holding back this Marxist takeover of our country. No longer are the Marxists even hiding who they are. They praise Mao, appoint communist Czars, and quote Marx himself. And you vote with them to stop a filibuster on a man who believes that the constitution is clay in the hands of an Empathetic Judge? How about empathy for the person going before the court expecting to be able to predict the law because it is written down? How about empathy for those that would like this to be a country governed by laws and not men?

Last year I wrote reprimanding your vote for the bailout bill. You wrote me back, justifying it. Do you know when I received the letter in the mail? On the election night of Barak Obama. And who was right about the wisdom of that bill? I was. Look at the damage that Bill and the mentality behind it has caused. Sir, you must have principle if I am to vote for you and support you financially. STAND FOR SOMETHING! You and the Republican party elites don’t stand for anything, unless 10 feet behind the democrats on the same downward slope to Marxism is a stance.

You have to drop Keynesianism and appose the Marxism. A compromise on principle is like a compromise in a ship. You cannot compromise with this flood.

NY-23 showed us that we do not need the Republican party. An independent with little funding and little on-the-ground organization got within 3 points and maybe even less once the votes are certified.

I will never vote for a statist democrat on principle and will put up with only so much statism in Republicans. If I have to vote for the constitution party or a libertarian to explain my dissatisfaction with your statist-light voting, I will. The Dems may gain ground, but it will be your fault for not standing tall, not mine.

Remember, before Abraham Lincoln there was total control of the 3 branches by the Democrat populists (looting the public coffers and oppressing whole segments of the population for their own gain). That changed in sweeping victories over the next 10 years. If I have to bid farewell to a party with such a noble past because of the non-courageous leaders letting it sink into statism-light, I will bid it adieu. America may become statist in nature, but it will not be by the party or platform I support.

We are on the cusp of socializing our very bodies. Government controlled healthcare is literally submitting to a far-away bureaucrat the power over your life and death in the arena of healthcare. Once the central government in Washington has the power over your life and you don’t like it or you think it is corrupted, what would you do? You have to beg, but not just about something like public schooling or building good roads. You have to beg for your life.

In terms of classical liberalism versus statism, with federal mandates on healthcare you are beholden to the state. Your life is in the hands of another to grant or not. What if a Stalin-like individual gets into government or the bureaucracies become so large and in-transparent that impersonal life/death decisions are the norm? How do you get back the power that you gave to government in a time when things looked like they’d be different? You are stuck along with your fellow citizens.

Healthcare is expensive as it is and will only get more so. But why is it expensive? Has it always been like this?

Many say that healthcare is expensive because of healthcare insurance companies taking huge profits. So what are their profits? According to Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics, the health insurance industry ranks number 86 in profitable industries, below garbage collection, cleaning products, personal hygiene products, and many other industry categories. The whole health insurance plans industry shows an average profit of 3.3%, less than 4 pennies for every dollar. Yet, healthcare insurance continues to rise at the rate of about 12% on average every year. How does an average profit of 3.3% translate into the cause of 12% yearly increase? It doesn’t.

But why should people profit off of the health of others? Many think even 3.3% is just greed over the misfortune of others. Profit is not greed. If it costs you $600 a month to travel to work, eat during the day, and use up your time to work for your employer, is it greedy to expect more from your employer than $600 in compensation? If you take home $1000 for the job you have a profit of $400, which is a 66% profit.

One might say that an individual’s profit for a job done is different than the profit of a company. How? A person desires profit from their job for all sorts of things that have nothing to do with just living hand to mouth. Even the very poor have things. Was it greedy for them to get more than what they needed to merely live? Well a company must do more than merely live. They have to prepare for the future and they do it through profits. When there is a downturn in the economy, a lack of investors, an epidemic health crisis, or whatever, the only thing standing between you continuing to get insurance through your company and the complete failure of that company is the 3.3% that they had in former years.

Of course governments are never greedy, right? Only people who admit they are out for a profit are greedy, right? Governments are greedy for money and power.

When bureaucrats spend all of the money that they had left in there budgets at the end of the year so that their records show they spent everything, they do so to make sure they are considered for an increase the next year. Spend what you can so you can get more? Is that not greed? It is more greedy than a profitable insurance company. That profitable insurance company can’t simply spend and charge what it likes as the bureaucracy does; it must compete in a market where their competition could exploit their inflated prices. Bureaucracy has no competition in that sense.

A politician may get into office raise spending and do so at the expense of others with out even asking them if they can afford the increase in taxes. That politician may have money in mind when taxes are raised, but for what end? Charity? No, if charity were the goal, then the politician could give funds to charities or even raise no taxes and use his position and popularity to encourage voluntary charity. The statist politician seeks public options, because ultimately those options give the statist politician power.

Perform a thought experiment. Obama says that he wants GM jobs to survive and uses the government loans used to “save” GM as an excuse to commandeer GM shares and property. He does so because he didn’t like the plan that GM had presented on its own to save the company. What was he seeking when taking over 48% of GM shares? He didn’t like what they were doing, thinks his own people and he know better, and therefore seeks control. What is control? Power.

Right now there are about 1300 health insurance companies in the US. Every American can only access those companies in his or her state by federal law. If insurance is too costly in California and not too bad in Wyoming, forget being able to buy insurance in Wyoming unless you move there.

Does it make sense to limit competition like that? If you think that a store in your area is charging too much for computers, you can go online and buy from somewhere else. Insurance is a service that is much more portable than computers. You can pay your premiums online and the company can pay claims across the country. Why would anyone limit your access to a service that can be performed from anywhere? Power. The statist had an opinion about cross-state competition and sought the power to prevent it because the statist wanted control. Statist politicians are greedy for power over others, no matter what else is their motivation.

The question still remains. Why is insurance so expensive?

BIG REASON NUMBER ONE: It isn’t insurance.

Insurance is a prearranged agreement for one person to pay upfront for a promise that the other will pay for greater unforeseen expenses should they occur in the future. Car insurance is insurance in the true sense for the most part. You pay a company and then try your darnedest (if you are smart) not to ever need that company’s service.

Examine the agreement of most health insurance plans. You pay part of the money against some catastrophe that you knock on wood to avoid, but the rest goes to paying for things that you actually expect to pay. It is not out of the norm for a person to see a doctor once a year. It costs you and the insurance company an average of $152 for that visit with the average co-pay share of that being $20. Health insurance costs and average of $13,000 a year and plans that provide for routine visits cost usually two or more times the price of catastrophic only coverage. So rather than pay the $152 out of pocket or savings, you payed someone else more to pay it.

So lets say, as was the case with me when shopping for insurance, you are presented with “Plan A” that only covers catastrophes at about $2100 a year and “Plan B” that covers catastrophes and all kinds of routine things like checkups, prescriptions for any ailment, etc. at a cost of $4200 a year. If I choose Plan B, then I have literally just payed twice as much money for things that I can reasonably expect that I may need to pay for during that year. Will all of the extra $2100 go straight to paying for the doctor visits or drugs? No. A large portion of it will go to pay for billing and other administrative costs by the insurance company, doctors office, and pharmacy. If you can reasonably expect to pay for routine things during the year, why pay someone else to pay them for you? You could have just chosen Plan A and used the saved $2100 during that year to pay directly to the doctor or pharmacist.

Most Americans have chosen Plan B when presented with it, because it sounds nice to not have to worry. That means that we are not paying extra money for healthcare, we are paying extra for worry-care.

BIG REASON NUMBER TWO: People most of the time have no clue how much they were charged.

If you had iTunes insurance that you pooled with 1000 other people that would pay for any possible iTunes expenses, all of the prices for each buy were unknown, there was only a fixed small co-pay for each buy, and you buy all you wanted as long as you had enough for all the small co-pays, what would happen to the price of the iTunes insurance for every participant? What an audiophile may have reasonably spent on straight purchases would increase rapidly and it would do it for every participant in such a ridiculous policy.

That is what we have chosen to do for health insurance. People have no clue how much visits cost, they have no clue how much drugs cost, they have no clue how much administration costs, but they pay it collectively every month in the form of a ridiculous scheme that is really not insurance—it’s concierge payment service. We have decided collectively act like we’re all contestants of Super-Market Sweep Healthcare Edition where the twist of the show is that the host gets to ring up the full baskets.

The excuse for healthcare cost rises is often said to be technological advances. If that is true then how come technological advances mostly cost more in the “I-have-no-clue-how-much-this-is-going-to-cost-me” model? La-sic eye surgery does not have the huge increases in costs that other innovations have even though the technology is better and better and the procedures are relatively new. Plastic surgery has come down from the enormous costs of its early days to where they continue to fall today—this occurring with greater and greater technological advances. However, anything in the “I-have-no-clue” model is more and more expensive.

Where else do we say technology makes things more expensive? Only in government endeavors and healthcare. Harvesting wheat is cheaper with technological advances. Manufacturing cars is cheaper with technological advances. Is it cheaper to have a machine and tech that probe your guts for a blockage or probe the old fashion way by opening you up with a staff of payed medical professionals, rented operating room, rented hospital room, etc, etc? The per-unit cost for a machine is more expensive if all you would ever have is one guy to use it on, but most medical machines are bought to perform on multiple patients. So, is it the technology or the fact that people have no clue of how much they are billed that made it expensive? They have no clue is the answer.

BIG REASON NUMBER THREE: Tort, tort, tort.

What product or service would not be expensive if the providers or sellers were to be shaken down by sharks in suits? If a sandwich shop had to pay half its income paying to protect itself from the occasional mobster coming in to break everyone’s kneecaps, how much would the sandwich cost?

People see former Senator John Edwards running for president with the money he made from suing doctors, nurses, and hospitals for a since disproved cause of cerebral-palsy, and only think he is a scoundrel when he cheats on his sick wife. He is a scoundrel on both counts and probably more.

more to come…

A famous rallying cry of the communists, “Workers of the world, unite!”, was written by Marx and Engels in the The Communist Manifesto. The assumption of the Manifesto was that communism would be an international movement spurred on by spontaneous revolts all around the world. In the end the communists all became National Socialist fascists because it turned out that spontaneity needed to be squelched to bring about the communist’s desired result.

Spontaneous opposition arises from the grassroots of a society in a democratic republic. From the extreme cases of the Boston Tea Party to the Contras of Nicaragua or from simple voter revolutions like the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson to the election of Ronald Reagan. In these cases, the people felt like they were having freedom taken away from them or their fellow citizens. They felt that they were being abused and that their nation was being destroyed.

We are seeing a spontaneous grassroots movement catching fire. President Obama is already, according to some of the more creditable polls, one of the most unpopular presidents at this time in his presidency since these running polls have been taken. He is more unpopular 6 months into his first term than the two Bushes, Carter, and Nixon. Though the legacy media will continue to slobber over Obama and make him out be the most popular president ever to fill the office, the grass is beginning to burn out here in the real America.

Hats off to Lee Cary, writing in the American Thinker “The Obama Resistance Grows”. He has clearly outlined the growing distrust of Obama. Many didn’t know him or what to expect and his empty rhetoric sounded sugary to them. Now, they have been shown what a true ideologue does with taxes, healthcare, global warming scares, and economic crisis. They have heard “We need it right now” too many times and are now suspicious of any such proclamation. So, they begin to investigate more the details of the “emergency legislation” and find the decaying skeletons in the closet.

The grassroots resistance sees politicians defaming their spirited opposition as an artificial movement payed for by lobbyists when they are making the effort to leave work early to attend events. They hear the speaker of the house literally say that she doesn’t care what they think—this in a free representative republic. They hear that their politicians are beginning to cancel town-hall appearances for fear to meet up with their own constituencies.

As their representatives become more aloof the Grass gets dryer and the fire spreads further and hotter throughout the population. Those of us that saw this socialism and elitism coming can only hope that this is the spontaneous combustion of the American will.

Update

Watch as an AARP representative, ignorant or a liar, proceeds to deny AARP’s official endorsement of the Obama healthcare plan. She is rude, condescending, and hypocritical. When the audience shows its passionate knowledge, she leaves the podium then later unplugs the microphone when she can’t simply talk over the audience at will. The outrage—if you can call it that, being very civil on the part of the audience—is a complete alignment of opposition of disparate people with disparate lives and it is completely spontaneous.  Kudos to MichelleMalkin.com for pointing this YouTube video out…

There is a bill coming out of congress that purports to help with the healthcare situation in the country. About this bill, Senator Jim DeMint stated, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Well I say that it is either his Waterloo or the Waterloo of our American freedom.

As an aspiring independent person, I would like to go in to business for myself. There are many reasons for me to do this; I think that I have unique talent for what I do, I am tired of working for people who do not have my family interests in mind, and I love the free market in healthcare benefits. Right now the freest healthcare market is in the individual policy market. The inequalities in that market are more due to the employer-coverage dominance and government regulation than due to “evil insurance” providers.

Right now, if I want to get an HSA and Catastrophe coverage I can do so with a variety of providers. No employer or government can say no to me. This is because my state has elected to be liberal in the classic sense regarding healthcare administration. Other states have chosen to hurt themselves on this issue.

On page 16 and 17 of this healthcare bill, I have learned that freest market in healthcare will disappear. It clearly states that only current policies can be held and new policies will not be allowed. Despite the fact that this takes away liberty from me that government has no right to take, the result is bad as well. Those policies held prior to the law will discontinue as providers will withdraw and I will be left with only the government as an option.

I will not be sold on promises of great government care. Even though I do not trust these promises coming out on this bill, there is more to it than results for me. This is a question of rights. The government has no right to take from me the choices that God and nature grant me. This goes to the very heart of this nation’s founding.

Many will argue that liberties have already disappeared on this matter, because of prior laws and the monopolization of HMOs, etc. This scenario that has lead us to the precipice of this loss of liberty is entirely of government making. It was not a conspiracy, but what economist Thomas Sowell calls a “Conflict of Visions”. My vision and that of the founding fathers is a constrained vision: aggregate Human nature is fixed, but predictable. People are prone to corruption, waste, and abuse when granted power over others.

The “Un-Constrained Vision” that is the opposite, points to a false malleability over aggregate human nature. Human nature is only malleable, in my view and the view of our founding, on the individual level and this only in humility not unearned power. This bill is unearned power to unconstrained government. The results: withdrawal of former promises made to the old (cut backs in Medicare with no free replacement), high taxes to all brackets in the form of income taxes and “fees” that amount to the same thing, loss of liberty which is enough for me to not support this bill, and many many more negatives.

This is the waterloo of the American experiment. Fore, a loss of liberty on this issue will allow losses in so many areas and not just the atrocious loss in the area of provider choice alone. This will mean that any law that can be interpreted to lower “public healthcare costs” will be justified no matter what the loss of liberty.

This is our battle of the bulge for the independence of human freedom. Which Senators and Congressmen will be our Patton on this matter?

What we need:

• Freedom in choice at all costs (employers offering a policy must also offer a cash alternative with the same tax-protection)
• Freedom of group benefits outside of employer benefits (companies and individuals may pool risk as they choose)
• Expansion of HSA options (any bank may offer them and any plan may be coupled with them)
• Healthcare regulation be returned to its constitutional regulators in accordance with the 10th amendment (to the states and the people respectively)
• State providence of risk-pooling conditions for those un-coverable by regular market coverage (pre-existing conditions)
• Abolition of federal mandates on “concierge coverage” (3rd party payment of regular expenses that could just be payed by HSA money rather than through mounting higher premiums)

Liberty is the key here! Liberty is our heritage and Liberty is our solution. Let the virtue of the people be the solution and let them live or die by it.

In the declaration of Independence Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness are discussed as immutable and natural rights that are equal to all. These rights that cannot be taken away by any government are the rationale to throw off oppressive government.

Sadly the concept of rights has been lost among many Americans to the exclusion of the essential and basic rights. In our pursuit of a right to a home, we give up our liberty to keep what we earn as government moves to repair the damage of giving others the means to a home. We lose life at the most innocent level to have the right to choose well after the choice of abstinence was already declined. Over and over again we give more ground on the declaration’s basic rights of human individual sovereignty to allow for some marginal right.

But are these marginal “rights” actually defined properly as rights. The term right is where the deception and confusion lie. It is easy to understand the pursuit concept of the right to pursue happiness, because pursuit is defined easily as a personal endeavor. So, even though we often don’t understand happiness as understood by the signers of the declaration and as understood by Jefferson, we can understand that it is up to us to achieve it. Life and Liberty are as difficult to define as Happiness, but even more difficult to understand with a faulty definition of a right.

Take the right to Life in the declaration. Who grants life? We have a right to live and none can take from us our life without trespassing the natural law of human rights to it. Still, who grants to us the right to live? Is there a resulting government agency in charge of assuring that the right be granted? We do not receive food by assurance, birth quotas by mandate, or any other aspect of the granting of life. On the issue of life, government has only been commissioned to punish the seizure of life from one by another, but it does not grant the means of creation and maintenance of life.

Look at Liberty. Government must prevent the seizure of liberty from one to another without due process and just cause. It does not, however, enforce that one take liberty. If you may but will not choose to do something for yourself, government does not enforce that you take liberty and choose it and all other things. It would cease to be liberty and become merely diversity. It would be absurd to suggest.

Yet, it is this definition of right that we talk of marginal rights. You have a right to choose, so the means of the choice must be provided. You have a right to life, so you must wear your seatbelt. You have a right to work, so a job must be provided. You have a right to a home, so it must be provided. You have a right to transportation, so it must be provided. You have a right to education, so it must be provided. You have a right to health care, so health care must be provided and you must choose it.

Forget arguing whether each is a right or not, it is the definition of right that is faulty. It is not a definition in line with the American concept of rights as in our founding. It is a definition not inline with history beyond our culture. The sly definition of right in modern times means a providence and not pursuance. Providence and pursuance are mutually exclusive—unless one means that I need to pursue the providence of others. If I must pursue the providence of others than how is it a natural right?

I can pursue the retention or liberation of rights as the founders did in the revolutionary war or as the Union did for the slaves of the south or as Moses did by the hand of God. But I cannot call it a right that I have to request providence of it from another. It would not be a right; it would be a concession.

If we have a right to health care and then it must be provided, by whom is it provided. It is conceded by a politician and provided by the confiscated result of another’s labor through his or her taxes and the loss of the value of his or her savings through inflation as the inevitable debt is monetized.

So, the virtue of the “right” to health care is to exclude the natural true rights of our founding. Life may be rationed by bureaucracy. Its pursuit may be thwarted by shifting one’s resources by force. Liberty is traded for the providence of the “right”. If you want of get it yourself or don’t want it, you have no choice. If your pursuit of happiness leads you to risky behavior or to a trade-off of security for some other desired goal, you cannot choose it when providence of another “right” is forced. You have no liberty to choose to be charitable when your labor is confiscated to the concession of another’s “rights”. Your family’s life, liberty, and happiness are at stake when your wealth is confiscated irrespective of your needs.

We must reject any form of involuntary health care, provided health care, and the naming of it as a right under the fallacious definition. Rights are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness among others, by they are up to us to achieve and up to government to assure. A “right” defined differently excludes our true rights and is oppression.