by: Brantley Oakley

We have been fed serving after serving of compelling rhetoric by President Obama and the Spendocrats throughout this healthcare debate telling us that we must act now to help all those poor Americans who are not getting healthcare. The major problem we face in this bill and in many other political issues is that our crafty politicians know that when they shroud their agenda into an argument that plays on Americans’ generosity and desire for equality they can sell us a ticking time-bomb and we’ll buy it with a smile on our face and give our life savings for it. This bill would be a terminal disease for America for so many reasons;I’ve briefly underlined just a few of the major issues involved with passing this bill. Irreversibility

One of the biggest problems I have with socialistic programs like Medicare and this healthcare bill is that they are essentially irreversible. Don’t think for a moment that when this legislation blows up and costs go through the roof that the Democrats will say “oops. We messed up. I guess we’re going to scrap this legislation.” Nor, will the Republicans be able to do reverse the bill because there will be millions of people receiving free healthcare who would be outraged. So, just like Medicare trudges on in spite of the fact that it is a failed program, so too will this legislation continue to grow and overburden Americans until it finally breaks us.

Unaffordability

The fact that this bill is called the “Affordable Health Care for America Act” is a farce. There is nothing affordable about this bill. The CBO estimates that this bill will cost over $1 trillion dollars in the first decade. I think it is rather self-evident that Congress has a long history of underestimating costs of its proposed bills, and it is doing so with this bill. There is no way we can afford this. Please understand, first and foremost, that the estimation is skewed because the government will collect revenue for 10 years to give 7 years of service. So, what happens for the next ten years? Also, keep in mind that Pelosi and the Spendocrats cut out the $250 billion that will be given to doctors. They are going to pass a separate bill for doctors’ compensation to avoid adding the number to the total cost of this bill—only in Washington is such a tactic rational or ethical.

Pelosi plans on paying for this trillion-dollar disaster by taxing the wealthiest people in America; specifically, she wants to raise taxes to an astounding 45% on all persons who earn over $500,000. Mark my words; this will not happen. These people are not going to sit idly by while their wealth is plundered, nor is there any way that this tax will be able to sustain the massive cancer of costs that this bill would create. The cost of running Medicare has doubled every four years since 1966. The reality is that this program will probably cost around $3 trillion by the end of the first decade and will grow unrestrained until it brings us to our death bed.

What about the Medicare cuts? President Obama said this bill would be paid for by Medicare cuts; what about that? Good question. Supposedly, the federal government, which hasn’t cut costs since Regan was there, is going to raise $400 billion by cutting out waste in Medicare. Well, I say if it’s that easy to cut the Medicare costs, why hasn't Washington done it? Do that first and then come talk to me about healthcare reform. Even if Washington can cut $400 billion—I’m not buying it—but even if they can, that’s not going to cover the tab when this thing doubles or triples or worse in the coming years. Remember, Medicare currently has $34 trillion in unpaid liabilities. That’s just for the elderly. What’s going to happen when you allow the government to take over healthcare for everyone.

2048 Pages

Perhaps the single scariest facet of this bill is that it is an incomprehensible mess. You do not need 2048 pages to state what they have said this bill states. No ordinary American and most of Congress does not really know what is in this bill. We don't know what little surprises this behemoth is hiding? If Washington wanted to play straight with Americans, they would write a lucid and legible bill, and I’m not buying this notion that legislative language has to be this way; this bill is deliberately protracted and obscure. To vote for this bill is to hand Obama, Pelosi and the Spendocrats a blank check and say “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I trust you.”

I agree that our healthcare system needs to be reformed, but this bill embodies the worst possible solution to the problem, which is why I only slightly disagree with the Wall Street Journal when it says this bill is the “worst bill ever.” It’s not the worst bill ever; that award goes to the Cap-and-Trade bill, but this healthcare bill is a close second.

by: Marc Gallagher

Republicans displaying their “Red State pride” following the results of Tuesday’s elections need to face reality. The two GOP gubernatorial election victories in Virginia and New Jersey were unsurprising and expected. Now if a true limited government conservative beat out Bloomberg in the New York mayoral race there would be a reason for celebration.

The reason Bob McDonnell beat out Creigh Deeds in Virginia was not because McDonnell represents some new style small government Republican. McDonnell won because Deeds made campaign mistakes. McDonnell made none. Deeds lost the race more than McDonnell won it.

The same is true for the New Jersey race. Corzine, a former chairman at Goldman Sachs, easily became a scapegoat for a failing economy and political corruption. So, he lost.

What Tuesday’s election results really demonstrated was a lack of conviction for either Democrats or Republicans. When the political spectrum shines red, then blue, then red, then blue, over and over again something tangible comes to light:

America is not rooting for either party to win. America is rooting for the underdog.

After 8 years of Clinton, George W. Bush was the underdog. In 2004, Bush was still the underdog largely due to his perceived strength (however false it was) in fighting “those who attacked us on 9/11″. That quickly soured so much that by 2006 the Democratic Party was the underdog so they won control of Congress. If Bush was up for re-election himself in 2006, he’d have lost.

The 2008 election cemented the underdog theory with America getting the chance to elect the first African American President. McCain, largely a Bush twin, had no chance.

Tuesday’s election results demonstrated that the Republicans are now, once again, the underdogs. This bodes well for them in the 2010 election and it could carry over to the 2012 Presidential contest. Of course, that depends on who has the perceived power at that time.

The point of this “underdog theory” is that we are not happy with the blue nor the red team. When the time comes we just want to take away power from whichever team has it.

For liberty champions this eternal game is growing extremely tiresome.

When everyone buys into the two team league yet no one wants either team to finish in first place, isn’t it time to expand the league?

It just so happens that there is a liberty-loving team already in place ready to be added to the league. Here are their names:

• Rand Paul
• David Hedrick
• Adam Kokesh
• Peter Schiff
• Ray McBerry
• Chris Simcox
• Debbie Medina
• Bill Hunt
• RJ Harris
• John Dennis
• David Ratowitz
• Jake Towne
• Randy Brogdon
• Robert Broadus
• Collins Bailey
• Jaynee Germond
• Bob Parker
• Bill Connor
• Peg Luksik

These are the candidates being celebrated today on the anniversary of Ron Paul’s 5th of November money bomb. To learn more about these candidates please check out ThisNovember5th.com. If you find a candidate you like, then please don’t hesitate to support that candidate with a generous donation.

These are the real underdogs and outcasts. Let’s help make them winners and keep them winning.

by: A

An executive has won the right to sue his employer on the basis that he was unfairly dismissed for his green views after a judge ruled that environmentalism had the same weight in law as religious and philosophical beliefs.

…In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that “a belief in man-made climate change … is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations”.

The ruling could open the door for employees to sue their companies for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.

…John Bowers QC, representing Grainger, had argued that adherence to climate change theory was “a scientific view rather than a philosophical one”, because “philosophy deals with matters that are not capable of scientific proof.”

That argument has now been dismissed by Mr Justice Burton, who last year ruled that the environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore was political and partisan.

The decision allows the tribunal to go ahead, but more importantly sets a precedent for how environmental beliefs are regarded in English law.

Wow!  Its a  religion, not a scientific position.  I probably should be laughing, but I’m not.

by: Peter Suderman

The New York Times' health-care blog has a long post going over the fuzzy numbers House Democrats have used to make their recently released, 1,990-page health-care bill more palatable. The post covers a lot of the same territory as I did last Friday: It's only $900 billion if you look at the net rather than the gross; the score doesn't account for the doctors' Medicare "fix"; the bill increases Medicaid costs for states by $34 billion (which isn't counted in the score). And, the post adds, it's not clear that the bill "bends the cost curve," in other words, that it reduces the rate of rise in health-care spending. 

The post ends, however, with a response from Florida Democrat Alan Grayson, who takes issue with the idea that Democrats should be talking about budgeting or cost-curves at all:

Representative Alan Grayson, Democrat of Florida, who has earned himself a reputation recently as a rabble-rouser, said that Democrats had done themselves a disservice by focusing on economic arguments.  “We have wasted so much time talking about bending the cost curve, people have no idea what that means,” Mr. Grayson said. “Why would you want to bend a curve? It’s already bent.” So Mr. Grayson is focusing on another number — the 44,789 Americans that he says die every year for lack of insurance. “The messaging was just wrong, and now it’s right,” Mr. Grayson said. “We are saving people’s lives and saving money. That’s what really matters.”
Now, some may think it's useful for a Democrat to be adopting an aggressive, moralistic tone on health-care reform, but the problem is that at least half of Grayson's primary claim just isn't true. 

Let's leave aside for a moment Grayson's blustery claim that the bill will save lives (which is impossible to verify: even if you accept his lives-lost statistic, there's no way to account for long-term future losses due to reduced medical R&D); his idea that the bill will save money is just wrong, at least by the traditional definition in which "saving money" means "spending less." Even if you take the CBO at its word that reform will cut the deficit (a sketchy claim that even the CBO seems to know is unlikely) cutting the deficit isn't the same as spending less. It's entirely possible to cut the deficit and yet still spend more. 

It's true that the reform bills, as written, produce some savings by cutting certain types of Medicare expenditures. But that money is then repurposed to help pay for subsidies so that lower-income people can buy insurance. And that money only pays for some of the new expenditures in the bill. The rest comes from either a surtax on expensive insurance plans (in the Senate plan) or a new tax on couples who earn more than a million dollars a year and individuals who earn more than $500,000 a year (the House plan). Either way, what these bills do isn't save money. Instead, they spend more, but also bring in more revenue through new taxes, theoretically resulting in a lower deficit over the long haul.

by: David Boaz

Brink Lindsey described a “libertarian consensus that mixes the social freedom of the left with the economic freedom of the right” in his book The Age of Abundance. Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie said that right now is a “libertarian moment.” I saw a “civil liberties surge” in public opinion polls on marijuana laws and gay marriage. And now Jacob Weisberg foresees the imminent end to various kinds of prohibition in these United States:

Within 10 years, it seems a reasonable guess that Americans will travel freely to Cuba, that all states will recognize gay unions, and that few will retain criminal penalties for marijuana use by individuals. Whether or not Democrats retain control of Congress, whether or not Obama is re-elected, and whether they happen sooner or later than expected, these reforms are inevitable—not because politics has changed but because society has.

For good measure, he adds that we’re not going to prohibit either abortion or gun ownership. “Conservatives would be wise to give up on the one, liberals on the other. In each of these cases, popular demand for an individual right is simply too powerful to overcome.”

Sounds like libertarian heaven:

The chief reason these prohibitions are falling away is the evolving definition of the pursuit of happiness….

Republicans face a risk in resisting these new realities. Freedom is part of their brand; if the GOP remains the party of prohibition, it will increasingly alienate libertarian-leaners and the young. But the party as presently constituted has very little capacity to accept social change. Democrats face a danger in embracing cultural transformations too eagerly. Nearly four decades after George McGovern became known as the candidate of amnesty, abortion, and acid, cultural issues are still treacherous territory for them. Why get in front of change when you can follow from a safe distance and end up with the same result?

Of course, if the Democrats raise taxes and the deficit high enough, and do what they’re threatening to do to health care, marijuana may be the only medicine you don’t have to get on a waiting list for, but you won’t be able to afford it. And the marriage penalty may make everyone decide they can’t afford to get married. And flights to Cuba may be too expensive on our dwindling after-tax incomes.

For a summary of the bill, check out...
H.R. 3962 Summary

For the full text, go to...
H.R. 3962 Full Text

by: Garry Reed

Immortality is just around the corner, right up the street, behind the Curb Your Dog sign. Or maybe it's a mere 20 years away. So says American scientist Ray Kurzweil in a Telegraph.co.uk article.

Advances under Kurzweil's "Law of Accelerating Returns" in such areas as genetic engineering and computer sciences and nanotechnologies will not only help our biological bits function longer but will make it possible to replace our vital organs. It seems that life-extending goodies like artificial pancreases and neural implants are already available.

"So we can look forward to a world where humans become cyborgs, with artificial limbs and organs," Kurzweail is quoted as saying.  Unless, of course, the Evangelical Right grabs the reins of government and forcibly puts an end to this blatantly evil science on the basis that immortality will prevent the Apocalypse and the Second Coming and the establishment of the Kingdom of God, which means that unrighteous evildoers must be Left Behind for the good of God's Plan (and for the good of people who call themselves True Believers who will certainly not kill themselves off.)

Unless, of course, the Green Left grabs the reins of government and forcibly puts an end to this blatantly evil science on the basis that immortality will create a population explosion and prevent environmental sustainability, which means that evil earth-destroying humans must be killed off for the good of Gaia (and for the good of people who call themselves Green who will certainly not kill themselves off.)

Unless, of course, some other arrogant self-appointed rabble of world-savers grabs the reins of government with the intention of saving the world by destroying it.

Libertarians, being non-authoritarian, being live-and-let-live, being voluntaryists, being believers in free will and individual liberty and personal responsibility and life-oriented and positive and rational (at least those descended from Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism) will mostly embrace and welcome the prospect of living forever.

But libertarians won't be grasping after the reins of government. That would be counterproductive seeing as how all governments are premised on coercion and therefore fundamentally destructive. Government doesn't enhance life, it demeans life.

Libertarians understand that free people freely exchanging ideas in a free market will discover and implement the actions necessary to overcome the problems of the evangelicals and the environmentalists and all the other authoritarian ideologues.

And then, if free people equipped with brainbots and biosynthetic colons and Rearden Steel hamstrings and micro-organo elastopolymer erectile extensions can figure out how to make a non-coercive non-government institution that does nothing but protect individual's rights and property, we can all re-elect Ron Paul for non-president in 2112.

Wanna live forever? Join the optimists. Join the libertarians.

by: Thomas Craig

Republicans... ENOUGH!  I am exhausted from hearing arguments against healthcare reform from people who clearly have no clue what they are talking about.  Before you go off on how you don't want a public option because it is socialist, perhaps you should consider our streets, libraries, law enforcement, and countless other aspects of our lives.  I am against the public option but not because I am afraid it will be a socialist move.  I think it would be great to provide health insurance to every American.  I, personally, would love to have a public option for my family and I to join in.  (I am aware of the contradiction I just made.) 

The reason I am against the public option is because I don't trust the government to run it properly.  Everything that the government runs becomes a bureaucratic and financial nightmare.  I am not willing to sacrifice the well-being of 250 million Americans for the sake of covering the 50 million (or whatever the number is this week) with low quality healthcare.  We cannot afford the public option plain and simple.  Even if we could afford it, I would not trust the government to change the oil in my car let alone oversee my health insurance.

We need to stop complaining about socialism because it emboldens the liberal base and allows them to point their fingers at you and make you look like a sophmoric flag-waving buffoon.  As I mentioned above, we already have many aspects of our lives socialized.  From now on, when somebody asks you about why you are against the public option, explain to them exactly why.  Ask the person to name you one program or department that the government oversees that is not a financial and bureaucratic nightmare.  When they realize that they are not able to name one, tell them that that is exactly why you don't support the public option.

by: Peter Suderman

The public option has been in critical condition all summer, but, like Jason Voorhees, it stubbornly refuses to stay dead. Indeed, in the last week or so, it's been gaining support. And now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has announced that he's moving forward with a public option that allows individual states to opt out:

Reid announced this afternoon that he plans to push ahead with a public health insurance option that includes an opt-out provision for states—even though he's currently short several votes for passage, according to people close to the situation. 

"It's the fairest way to go," Reid said at a news conference, where he said he’ll send the state opt-out plan to the Congressional Budget Office. States would have until 2014 to opt out. 

Reid, who spoke with virtually every member of his 60-member caucus this weekend, currently has between 56 and 57 votes for a proposal to create a national insurance plan but allow states to opt out of it, according to Democratic aides. 

But Reid said he will not send the "trigger" option to the CBO—which endangers the support of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), who has not signed on to the opt-out idea. Snowe wants a public insurance option to kick in only if private insurers don’t expand coverage fast enough. 

Asked about Snowe's lack of support, Reid said: "We are going to have to move forward on this." 

A month ago, I would have said there's no way any bill with a public option can pass. Now, I'm not so sure. This may simply be a way for Democratic leaders to appease the liberal base. But it also might be a serious attempt at passing a bill with a public option.

Strangely enough, however, one of the most prominent frustrations for Democratic leadership at this point appears to be... the White House. Yes, Obama has consistently had good things to say about the inclusion of the public option (though he's never demanded it be included). But lately, he's waffled about which particular flavor of public option he favors. According to Ezra Klein, that's proven irksome for Senate Democrats trying to figure out what, exactly, the administration supports.

I'm also hearing a lot of irritation from congressional Democrats at the mixed signals being sent by the White House. If the White House wants to advocate for the trigger, fine. If the White House wants to advocate for the public option, fine. But for the White House to host one meeting where they signal that they're uncomfortable with Reid's decision to push the envelope on the public option and then make a big effort to walk that meeting back after the left gets angry is confusing everybody.

...Since the administration is considered the most important actor here, no one knows quite how to structure their strategy so long as the White House refuses to fully show its cards.

The problem with this notion, it seems to me, is that it assumes the White House supports a very particular policy. But as I've pointed out before, what Obama really supports is the passage of a bill—any bill, just so long as it can more or less legitimately be called "health-care reform." Now, it's obviously impossible to know for certain what the White House's thinking is. But my guess is that what he supports isn't so much one version of the public plan or another, but instead, whatever flavor of the public plan is most likely to result in successful passage—and thus, political victory.

by: Radley Balko

"There's no way to rule innocent men.The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals.Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.One declares so many things to be a crimethat it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

--Ayn Rand 

Violent crime is down America, across the board, spanning two decades. Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced that the incidence of reported rape had hit a 20-year low. Homicides are down, as are juvenile violence and crimes committed against children. Crime rates have been plummeting since the early 1990s to such an extent that explaining the drop has become something of an obsession among criminologists and sociologists.

Part of the drop can of course be explained by mass incarceration—America leads the world in the percentage of its population behind bars. Putting one in every 100 citizens in jail causes its own problems, and there's plenty of debate over just how much that incarceration has contributed to the fall in violent crime. But there's no question that we've put lots of people in prison over the last 20 years, the crime rate has fallen, and part of the public likely believes (with some justification) that there's a link betweent the two.

But there's something else going on too, picked up in the blogosphere last week by George Washington University political science Professor John Sides. According to Gallup, since 2002 the percentage of the American public who think violent crime is on the rise has been increasing, even as actual violent crime rates continue to fall. Sides notes that from 1989 to 2001, perception and reality somewhat went hand in hand. But 2002 to 2003 saw a 19 percent leap in public perceptions that violent crime was on the uptick, and the figure has been going up in the years since—to 74 percent today. What's going on?

From the time Richard Nixon made crime a national political issue in the 1970s, we've been conditioned by politicians and public officials to live in perpetual fear. Our baseline is that there's too much crime, and that we aren't doing enough about it. Despite that, there was an actually drop in public worry about crime that began in 1992 and continued until 2002. As noted, that drop corresponded with an actual decline in the national crime rate, something that hadn't happened in 30 years. That crime rates going down for the first time in a generation was something new, something worth noticing. The 1990s were also generally an optimistic decade. The economy was humming. We weren't engaged in any major wars. We didn't have many worries, period.

Post-2002, the national mood soured. Terrorism, obviously a form of violent crime, was all over the news. The economy slowed down. Illegal immigration once again became a national issue, along with the false assumption that undocumented immigrants bring violent crime. And so we returned to a state of fear, though the crime rate continued to fall.

These fluctuations in the Gallup poll are interesting, but it's worth noting that the percentage of respondents who believe violent crime is on the rise has dipped below 60 percent only three times since 1991. This, again, despite the fact that violent crime has been in decline over the entire period.

Fear makes for easy politics. It both wins votes and primes us to give government more power at the expense of personal liberty. And that's certainly true when it comes to crime. With the possible exception of an incumbent mayor, politicians only benefit from exaggerating the threat of violent crime. Senators, Congressmen, and even governors are rarely held responsible when the crime rate goes up. But they do win votes by proposing new powers for police and prosecutors to bring it down.

The result has been a one-way ratchet effect on crime policy. We're perpetually expanding police and prosecutorial power, a process only occasionally slowed by the courts. Congress and state legislatures rarely take old criminal statutes off the books, but they're always adding new ones. A 2008 report from the Heritage Foundation estimates that at the federal level alone, Congress has been adding about 55 new crimes to the federal criminal code each year since the 1980s. There are now about 4,500 separate federal crimes. And that doesn't include federal regulations, which are increasingly being enforced with criminal, not administrative, penalties. It also doesn't include the increasing leeway with which prosecutors can enforce broadly written federal conspiracy, racketeering, and money laundering laws. And this is before we even get to the states' criminal codes.

In his new book, the Boston-based civil liberties advocate and occasional Reason contributor Harvey Silverglate estimates that in 2009, the average American commits about three federal felonies per day. And yet, we aren’t a nation of degenerates. On the contrary, most social indicators have been moving in a positive direction for a generation. Silverglate argues we're committing these crimes unwittingly. The federal criminal code has become so vast and open to interpretation, Silverglate argues, that a U.S. Attorney can find a way to charge just about anyone with violating federal law. In fact, it's nearly impossible for some business owners to comply with one federal regulation without violating another one. We're no longer governed by laws, we're governed by the whims of lawyers.

Whatever one may think of Ayn Rand's political philosophy or ethics, her criminal justice prophecy has proven unsettlingly accurate: In our continuing eagerness to purge American society of crime, we've allowed the government to make us all into criminals.