The Health Care Debate: Splitting Families Down the Middle

This is an exchange between me and my sister. I've posted it here because I feel it represents clearly the split in the nation on healthcare. Also due to the way she has handled our differences and her choice to cut all ties and continue to denounce me in forums where I cannot defend myself and behind my back, I have decided to end all connection with her.

I'd like you to note the tone of contempt with which she starts out and then notice as she gradually becomes more and more blatantly abusive the more I try to debate the points she brings up. She accuses me of not being civil, but I maintain that all I have done is restate exactly what she has claimed. The exchange ended with her defriending me and severing all contact, which I assume gives me full license to reproduce this conversation on my page so that she doesn't have free-reign to distort the issue any further. If you're interested, please feel free to read this and comment freely. I would be interested in other perspectives on the exchange. You be the judge--who was being rational? Who was flying off the handle with vague accusations?

[Further note: she decided this was hilarious enough to repost this on her page as a note with the heading: "Call me a liberal, but I thought this conversation was fun enough to share...", that was right before I responded with "Well, at least you're being a little more honest now" Let's just say she lost her sense of humor soon after that.]

[Names have been removed to protect the identity of those involved--a courtesy she did not extend to me.]

AmericanAntitheist joined the group WE THE PEOPLE will NOT COMPLY with SOCIALIZED HEALTHCARE!

Sis

Some of us people want socialized healthcare.

AmericanAntitheist

Also you've never lived in a country with socialized healthcare :S

Sis

True, but there should be a public option because it is the only way to actually control costs. Today, a given portion of the population is not covered by insurance, these are the same people who both lack preventable care, and will wait until they are sicker before going to the ER and hence need more treatment and more expensive treatment. The hospital can try to bill them, but may not suceed, causing the hospital to absorb costs. The hospital in turn raises thier fees, which causes the insurance to raise thier premiums. Fact is, we are already paying for the uninsured's treatment, just ineffectively.

AmericanAntitheist

Cost control doesn't work. It just drives down quality. You're ignoring the fact that one of the major reasons insurance and health care expenses are so high is because of the confused nature of and depth of government presence in the health care industry already. Inconsistency in application of malpractice law has driven malpractice insurance through the roof. In the absence of any transparent and explicit guidelines, doctors often feel they have to assign extra tests just to cover their liabilities. This drives up the premium of general diagnostic care. Other hidden costs associated with corporate and small business taxation drive up the cost of employment so that more and more companies shoulder less and less of the benefit cost. Add to this that federal law prohibits insurance companies from competing across state lines and thus eliminates the possibility of developing an economy of scale. Also, one more thought...if socialism worked so great, then wouldn't soviet doctors have been the best in the world? Oh, that's right, most of them risked life and limb to get out. Over regulating the medical industry creates the very serious risk of driving skilled professionals out of medicine and into other fields, or of creating "bubbles" of certain kinds of practitioners. Japan is constantly dealing with these problems. Not enough maternity specialists, so pregnant women die in the ambulance as it runs round in circles for hours trying to find an open maternity ward. Not to mention the complete lack of preventative care. Doctors can only claim a certain amount from the national insurance per visit, so they have to drag out your care as long as possible. I had to go to the dentist 5 times before one would actually pull my wisdom tooth. I get back to the US and my dentist takes care of everything in a couple months. Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.


Sis

They call it an option because it is optional - you can still get regular insurance if you want it. And nobody's saying cold-war Russia was better (tell me you aren't a tea-bagger, please tell me that). But, one way or another, we the people are still shouldering the cost. Do you really think that the insurance companies aren't also driving the MDs out of their fields with pre-authorization clauses and deny-first policies and endless phone trees just to get paid for a single office visit? Why do office visits cost a 120$? Because you see the doctor for 15 minutes, and it takes an additional 1.5 hours of work to get the claim paid. And, it's almost always for profit. So every dime the insurance company can take and not pay out, goes into a golden bucket for the CEOs, whose greed is usually limitless and guilt-free. It is therefore not in their own best interest to pay your claims, it is in their best interest to cancel your policy if you are *too* sick. Once you are retroactively canceled on a technicality, you are well and truly screwed, because your hospital stay was twenty thousand dollars and since you weren't technically insured to begin with, now a pre-existing clause applies on any new policy you try to purchase - meaning they will not cover any future expenses for your illness. Now, you must claim bankruptcy, assuming you are alive, and the burden of that cost goes back to the hospital who passes it on in a never game of hot potato. All I'm saying is that since we are shouldering the cost anyway, and since it isn't truly a free market, but is instead nearing a monopoly, we may as well have it regulated and standardized. Besides, there is medicare and social security and the ER but if you are not old enough and neither sick enough nor poor enough, you fall between the cracks because these programs do not cover everyone. I'm looking out for my own best interests, when I say let's get a public option in place before the potato lands on me.


AmericanAntitheist

I'm not a tea bagger in that I've never been to one of the tea parties, but I am an Objectivist, which means that I hold that the responsibility of the government is to protect individual liberty and little else. The notion that somehow the government has the ability to magic health care to every body at no cost is ridiculous. Health care is not a right. Insurance is not a right. We cannot be entitled to services which require a living being to bestow them. We can only negotiate terms to mutual advantage. The notion that somehow we will be saving money by having the government handle it for us ignores the reality that every single government entitlement program adds a the burden of running a new bureaucracy to the real cost of all the services involved. It also ignores that evry single government move into the provate sector has had negative repurcutions across the economy. Is the current system corrupt? Yes. But the reason is not the unfettered greed of private corporations, the reason is the stinking cronyism of corporations propped up by government bailouts who are endorsed and subsidized into continuing unprofitable activities and who then pass that loss onto the consumer. Just as public education drives up the cost of private education and provides a mediocre product, you can expect the presence of a public insurance program to drive up the costs of private insurance even more and to manifest itself in all sorts of hidden taxes (i.e. the value of our currency, inflation, and the other possibilities I stated previously.) Is reform needed? Certainly. But the reform we need is to move away from the statism socialist society into which we seem to be slipping and back towards our laissez-faire roots.

Sis

I'm not going to go into the objectivism thing with you, I already know that you vehemently believe whatever you believe.

It is not by virtue of it being government run that makes the public option magic. It is by virtue of having the burden of the sick, which I firmly believe we are already paying for indirectly, spread more evenly across the population. All insurance is by nature already socialist - it's just socialist on a per company scale. Short version is that as a healthy worker you are likely to pay more into the insurance program via premiums per year than you are to withdraw via claims (and the employer often subsidizes this to help keep it affordable). But, if an employee has a severely ill child, they are likely to take out more than they put in, and if it's a small company, may take out more than the entire company puts in. If at any time insuring a company is costing more than they are bringing in, then the insurance simply says - pay a higher premium or cut your benefits. Paying a higher premium just distributes the costs across everyone, however, if a company cannot afford to do that, then they may just cut benefits. Cutting the benefits is great because in addition to the $2400 premium each year, a healthy worker now cannot see any payout until they've met the $1000 deductible. If you are relatively healthy, you may not meet the deductible at all. Meaning, that you are paying into a system which does not benefit you one dime on a yearly basis - but we all do it because we fear being the one who is sick. Where the burden of one sick child can astronomically increase the cost of insurance for a small company, larger companies are able to shoulder this burden better because they have more people paying in to the system. A larger base to draw from, means a lower expense to everyone. If said system were nationwide, the base to draw from would be much larger. Hence, why a public option would help small businesses (and sick children with little puppies). The current system is already socialist, it's just uneven in it's distribution, placing a higher cost on small business and a lower cost to conglomerates. Bureaucratic costs will always exist - the question is, do the costs outweigh the benefits of having a public option? No, I don't think they do.

AmericanAntitheist

It's curious to suggest that more of a bad thing will somehow make it better. As for the nationwide economy of scale, that could be realized through free-market principles as well, were it not made illegal by the very same government that you suppose will make it all work out. I am well aware of how insurance works. Insurance is not socialist by definition. There are free-market solutions to these problems. I don't see how you can support further government control of these systems when you already concede that the system (which is already heavily government controlled) is contradictory and wasteful. I have never seen a government organization which was not so. Do you seriously think that an insurance company simply run under the government's name will be more respectable, trustworthy and less prone to abuse and "unfettered greed" than a private company? If you haven't noticed, the government doesn't seem to have a lot of money left to fund these things. Perhaps you didn' notice that the very greed mongers that you berate are those companies propped up by the government already. Remember AIG? How much money did we sink into floating that organization and for what?


Sis

Now, now, don't get angry just because I'm challenging your assumptions. I'm only discussing a public option, not whatever other stupid things the government has been doing lately. I'm expecting you to counter me with logic. Try to educate me as to why your path is better, rather than just saying blanket statements that a free market would solve everything and that the government is evil.

Insurance is socialist on a small scale because it is a system where a bunch of people pay into it and only those who need it withdraw out.

A free-market does not work in this instance because it is not in the insurance industry's best interest to insure everyone on thier own, even if they did compete accross state lines.

You are very quick to try to shoot down the public option, but haven't told me your solution. I mean, a practical solution that could get through Congress and make improvements in the lives of the uninsured or underinsured. Obviously you aren't going to overthrow our existing governmental system any time soon, so what solution do you support? Keeping the devil you know vs the devil you don't?

AmericanAntitheist

Well, I did say. Withdraw governmental controls on the insurance and banking industry, stop bailing out failing businesses and financial institutions, allow insurance companies to market across state lines thus developing the same economy of scale, dismantle the FED and return interest rates and currency to a real standard rather than arbitrary political manipulation. (For starters...) All of these things have been changes mandated by government which created the problems we are now experiencing. It is just as simple to unmandate them.

Insurance is a VOLUNTARY enterprise. This is not socialist. Socialism is by definition "a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole."

Insurance companies are private businesses which set the terms of coverage and collect premiums to fund that coverage in the event it is needed. It is funded by voluntary contributions to the whole and is paid out along the terms mandated in the insurance contract. If insurance companies are not meeting the terms of those contracts, then it is within the province of governmental authority to hold those companies accountable to the terms of their contract under existing fraud laws. Insurance prices are driven by the risk and reward generated by market, legal, and political conditions. It is the presence of government guarantees to failing megacorporations which incentivizes unprofitable activities. It is the support of those corporations which pass the costs onto the taxpayers.

A socialist insurance system would be one where the insurance is owned and managed by the government, where it is funded or at least partially supported by government through taxes on the people and the government establishes the terms of payment. Interestingly enough, social security and medicare were intended to be socialist insurance paradigms and they're going bankrupt. I wonder what is to keep this new mandate from following the same path? It seems very noble to suggest that a socialized insurance option will somehow make healthcare available and affordable to all, but it doesn't explain how it will be paid for, and it fails to make an accounting of the numerous side-effects that the introduction of such a program will have on the cost of health-care and private insurance.

Also, since the government is in the business of enforcing contracts, it seems like a conflict of interest to have the government so tightly entwined with the insurance industry. The reason being is that if the government decided to change the terms of the coverage due to fiscal insolvency or political maneuvering, who will enforce the contract? It will be exactly like social security where the government can shift the terms at will with impunity, after of course it has already collected all the payments and spent the funds. When an insurance company goes bankrupt, there are legal procedures in place to dissolve the assets and pay back the investors (as well as the aforementioned legal procedures for determining fraud). At least that was until Obama decided that bondholders don't have any rights and that the taxpayers should be burdened with propping up zombie corporations.

It is not the business of insurance companies to ensure 100% of the people. They offer insurance on the terms of risk they are willing to accept. It is unprofitable to insure high risk cases, just as it is unprofitable to make loans to high risk clients. Incidentally it was exactly for this reason that the housing crisis occurred which started this whole mess. A complex tangle of government regulation mandated that banks lend to high risk borrowers. Obviously they couldn't pay back and it sparked a chain-reaction throughout the financial system. The same thing happens when you insure regardless of risk, too many inevitable payouts and before you know it the system is bankrupt. You may think that worrying about how we are supposed to pay for this is incidental but I insist that it is fundamental.

Inevitably, those who produce more, who have less need of insurance will be burdened with maintaining the depleted reservoirs of the needy. The disincentive to productivity this will incur is profoundly socialist and flies in the face of everything a society based on individual choice and responsibility stands for.

You seem very quick to shoot down the free-market option, and yet you have not explained how this public option will be maintained. You also seem to resist the challenging of your assumptions. I have explained that I do not assume that it is the obligation of insurance companies to insure everyone regardless of risk and in spite of taking a loss. And yet you seem to assert that the public option will guarantee coverage of everyone regardless of risk. I think that makes it incumbent upon you to explain how this principle can be maintained in reality. You are after all supporting a large fiscal commitment on the part of the government, which btw is an imposition on all of us who pay taxes. I am simply advocating that people pay their own way.

Sis

Your "free market option" isn't an option at all. It doesn't insure everyone, which is what we're discussing, and no amount of deregulation and free competition would make them. So, your way of insuring everyone, is to... not. It costs too much.

I think healthcare IS a right. Surely "life" is one of our unalienable rights. What you fail to understand is that no man is an island, we all live within a community of people, not all of whom can afford healthcare. The bus boy(/self employed designer/ recent college graduate/ homeless person in the bus/ fast food worker/ etc)'s health is very much my own issue if only because of physical proximity. One sneeze and I get swine-flu.

I refuse to believe the money doesn't already exist - we all know about government pork, which could be eliminated to pay for healthcare. Even if not, I wouldn't mind paying a little more on taxes if I felt I was getting a tangible benefit from it, like healthcare for all (of course adding a commuter train system locally would also be nice). I definitely wouldn't mind a tax on those earning over 250,000 a year to pay for it - even if some day I earn that much.

"It takes a neighbor to raise a barn", no one is completely self-sufficient, and no matter how much you'd like to believe otherwise, we are all in this together. The common good doesn't just benefit someone else, if benefits me, too. Someone who is in good health is less likely to burden other programs which already exist (welfare) and is more likely to work for a living - a better life for them, means more income into the program. I fail to see how healthcare for all does not benefit us all.

American Anitheist

(I'm copying my reply to this last bit here just in the interest of keeping this fair)

[Note: At this point she had decided to repost this discussion as a note where she would have the ability to delete the entire conversation at her sole discretion]

AmericanAntitheist

Well, at least you're being a little more honest now. You DO advocate a socialist state then. You think it is fine to appropriate the labor and productivity of all to give to a few. You see doctors,bankers. insurance providers, not as humans with the right to the fruits of their own productivity but as reservoirs to be tapped to fulfill your wishes... See More. I am interested to see how you would feel, were someone lower on the food chain to propose that your freedoms should be sacrificed to provide them with more. But at least I think we understand each other. Don't pretend to want to live in a free society and then suggest that "other" people are resources to be stolen from at will (taking without consent is stealing) and distributed as you wish. I maintain that social rights cannot exist in the absence of individual rights--a society is simply a group of individuals, if individuals have no rights to their earnings, then the society doesn't either. And that is socialism.

This is why it is impossible to debate this without getting into the deeper moral issues--and that would mean getting much deeper into Objectivist morality. If you are sincerely interested in learning more about it, then I would be glad to talk with you on it. If not, then there's not much more to be said. I believe that socialism is immoral. We could get into a deeper discussion on why if you're game, but it would require a sincere interest in reading some of Ayn Rand's philosophical work to get a full and honest picture.

PS: The fact that you wouldn't mind pitching in to help others is not the point at issue. The problem is that you're taking that as moral vindication to steal from others to support your goals. How do you justify stealing from people? You claim the greater good as your justification. So did Stalin, so did Hitler. How is this any different?

Sis

Who is stealing? If we voted Obama in on a platform of healthcare reform, that means that most of us want it. If we are consenting, then how is it stealing? We all knew what we were getting in for during the election, and I'm sorry, but one side has to loose. If you don't like the electoral process as created by the framers, leave. Go somewhere where your ideals are being upheld. Where everyone must work for every single service they have and any random chance accident or illness could mean failure, starvation, and death. Let's call it Isla de You, current population 1.

Thankyou for your kind remarks upon my character, they were perfectly logical and not incendiary at all. Why I sure hope the cops aren't coming for me! You don't seem to understand that a person can be both free and conscientous. Just as you don't understand that a person can be moral and disagree with you. You are an extremeist, yes, every bit as extreme as the far right, the anti-abortionists or the al Quaeda. There is no middle ground for you. And because of that... Have you ever gotten a book from the Library? Surely a free and public library would not exist in your philosophy since there is no financial incentive to running a service like that. Have you gotten a free and public education? It may have been mediocre, but at least you got an education adequate enough to get you elsewhere. Have you driven on a public highway or ridden on a public transit system? Have you been to a public park? Have you received mail? When you retire, if social security is still available, will you take that money and live off it? Will you take medicare, too? For all of these things that you have recieved by your own definition, you, yourself, are a theif for you took them from the pool of available socialist resources, and then you went to Isla De You from whence there is no return.

Yes there is government waste, yes there are problems with our current government, and yes, I do want a free society. I think perhaps our definitions of freedom may differ. You seem to like a sheriff-less laissez-faire (from the french meaning do nothing) wild west town where everyone can be free to exploit each other at will. You see I'd like to be free to do what I want within the law (which I currently can) and not live in fear of loosing my insurance (which I currently cannot). The way I see it, we are being held hostage by the insurance companies, because there is no alternative to them. It's either insurance or steep debt. Isn't the public option in that sense providing much needed competition into the market? If the insurance companies then go under, wouldn't that be because they failed to offer a better product at a better price?

You have found an excellent way of writing off all personal responsibility towards your friends, neighbors, colleages, and yes, strangers. But luckily you live in a place where your freedom to be an ass is protected. So quit whining about stalin and hitler - there is simply no comparison there. Adding healthcare to the list of currently available services would free people from the unrelenting weight of private insurance coverage. It would not turn the country into a fascist regieme. Or is Canada fascist now? It's so hard to tell.

And, finally, you know you have a problem when you find yourself on the side of Glen Beck.

AmericanAntitheist

I didn't vote for Obama, a lot of people didn't either. Simply having a majority of people decide to steal from a few isn't rule of law, and isn't consent. Unfettered democracy was not intended by the framers of the constitution. They understood it leads to exactly one thing...mob rule. That is why we are a Constitutional Republic and not a Democracy.

Why were my remarks incendiary? If you believe that socialized healthcare should be enacted regardless of opposition because you have the "might" to make "right" then I don't see my remarks as anything other than stating the facts of your viewpoint as you present them. You ARE advocating stealing from people. You simply don't want to use just those words. You are entitled to your belief, but at least let's be honest about what socialism in any form means.

I do not advocate for socialism. I am not asking for socialist programs. Simply because they force them on me does not make me an active participant in their realization. That is why I actively oppose these programs (including public education, public welfare, public ownership of property), because I realize that if I were actively involved in creating these programs then I would be morally responsible for their effects on other human beings. You ARE actively advocating for these programs so you ARE morally responsible for their outcomes.

Some things do not have a middle ground...like mathematics. Like life and death. When we are talking about life and death it is a very black and white issue. Any amount of death injected into the social system is bad. Period. Every penny that the government takes from people makes it that much harder for those very same people to improve their lives. The government is less efficient than the market at providing services for an appropriate cost. But beyond that, the government (i.e. any mass of people) does not have the moral right to take by force the earned product of a person's labor.

I do not advocate anarchy. And I am not a fan of Glenn Beck (he is far too religious). I advocate the terms of a Constitutional republic wherein are guaranteed the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But the right to life is not a guarantee of life itself and cannot exist without the right to liberty and property. By surrendering the latter you do, indeed, surrender the former. They are inseparable.

And no, I do not write-off helping people who need it, whom I am within my power to help and who I deem worthy of such help. But it is MY choice who to support with my labor, not yours. It is MY choice how much to give and when and under what conditions. If you presume to suggest that you have any right to dictate by force of government how any other person should dispose of their assets then you ARE in point of fact and by DEFINITION advocating thievery. The responsibility of social reformers in a free society is that of argument, of convincing people to donate their assets to a given cause. It does not entitle anyone to just take them by force or fiat.

If you are upset with the label, then perhaps you are the one who should reassess their values more closely. You haven't demonstrated at all how my assertions are in error. If you remember, YOU were the one who started attacking my beliefs in this matter. I have shown just what the systems you support lead to. If any of this is in error, please address the point in question. And no, Stalin and Hitler are very much still relevant. They ruled on the basis of imposing government controls and appropriating private assets for the "greater good". Simply because that is what statists assert will happen, it doesn't make it so. You tell me how I am supposed to trust our government with the same powers and ill-fated philosophy of those other regimes. If the philosophy is different, then tell me where. Are you suggesting "it can't happen here?" I would remind you that Hitler was elected. The suggestion that America must be free by definition is naive in the extreme. People can be legislated into slavery just as surely as they can be conquered into it. Are you suggesting that "but this time it'll be different?"

Sis

Sorry, are you still talking? cause I stopped listening once you called me a thief. Sorry, not even gonna read your post, nope. Don't care, you're an ass. Your opinion is meaningless because you can't even discuss it with civility. So, bite me.

[An interesting addendum, is that Sis couldn't calmly defend her views in our discussion, had an emotional fit, and then severed all contact...only to then write a scathing bit of character assassination on her personal blog where I presume any defense of mine will also be ignored. It's interesting that she accuses me of refusing to see things from anyone else's standpoint, but I am actually the one trying to explain my views and asking her to defend hers. She's the one who has cut off contact so that she can villify me with impunity. I'd link to her blog entry, but she also doesn't have the courtesy to anonymize personal conflicts in public. In the interest of protecting my family from potential wackos who may take umbrage at my anti-theist views I cannot publish my identity openly like that. Too bad, it's some really one-sided stuff, published in a venue where I cannot debate or defend myself. It's just like I've always said, it's very difficult for liberals not to resort to ad hominem and character assassination, because they really don't have a logical, rational argument to support their stance.]

The Montessori Classroom Part I: Practical Life

The Montessori Method is a student-driven, student-centered educational approach which relies on selective control of the environment, peer mentoring, and freedom of choice. The Montessori classroom is divided into curriculum areas, each of which focuses on a specific set of skills and knowledge. The primary curriculum area and the first to which students would be introduced is the ‘Practical Life’ area. This essay will attempt to summarize the purpose of Practical Life, its importance to child development, its principal characteristics and sequence, the role of the teacher in preparing the environment, the concept of ‘sensitive periods’, and how this curriculum area prepares the student for studies in math and language.

All the activities in the Practical Life curriculum serve a function on two different levels simultaneously. On one level, the one the children most readily appreciate, students learn how to perform common household tasks, use common implements, and take care of their person and the environment around them. For example, children may spend their time in this area learning to use scissors to cut along a line, pour water from one container to another, how to use a funnel or eye dropper, dress themselves, or even wash a baby. While this seems to be the direct goal of the child’s action, to the teacher the performance of these tasks are only indirect objectives, not unimportant, but secondary to the directed goals the teacher has in assigning them. The direct objectives of practical life exercises are most commonly to develop the skills of observation, coordination, concentration, and self-esteem. Furthermore, there is a focus on refining the child’s ability to manipulate their own hand musculature in a series of progressively more delicate operations where the hand must manipulate objects in certain ways to achieve desired outcomes. For example, a beginning student may start transferring beans from one container to another by hand. This focuses the child on a specific concrete objective, namely moving all the beans. This procedure is self-correcting. The child knows when the task has not been performed to completion and will strive to perfect its work. This develops concentration. The physical act of moving the beans will develop the hand musculature and coordination. The child will learn to notice spilled beans and beans left in one bowl or the other. They will also notice when other children are doing similar works, whether or not they make the same mistakes. This will increase their observational skills. Successful completion of the task will encourage the child to approach other tasks and build self-esteem paving the way for latter tasks of increased complexity. Once the child has mastered this method of bean transfer, they may be ready for more delicate maneuvers, such as pouring beans between two glasses, and then pitchers. From there, the child may learn to use a strawberry huller to transfer items, and then maybe even chopsticks. At each stage the child develops a greater refinement of manual dexterity, cognitive apprehension, and moral development.

Everything about the Practical Life area is organized to aid the development of these qualities. There is a specific sequence to the materials, top to bottom and left to right. This is meant to assist in the development of eye-scanning habits for later reading. The materials are arranged on trays on shelves. The trays help to separate one task from another so that the child is not lost amongst the arrays of various paraphernalia. There are also themes to the works. There are those, like bean transfer, which focus primarily on hand development. But there are also those which focus on care of the person like the dressing frames. Typically, the shelves would be arranged as follows. The first shelf may contain works devoted to bean transfer. The second shelf may introduce tools such as tongs or scissors. The third may be devoted to water transfer. Moving to the right, the next cabinet may have more refined water transfer works (such as those using funnels or basters) on the first shelf. The second shelf would have tasks requiring finer motor skills like using a clothespin or water transfer using an eye dropper. On the bottom shelf would be more tasks taken from daily life necessity, such as opening and closing jars or lunch boxes. If there was a third cabinet to the right, then it could continue with finer tasks like using nuts and bolts, locks and keys, or can openers on the top shelf. In the middle could be a sorting work, and folding or organizing works, followed by complex works like packing a suitcase or creating soap suds with an egg beater on the bottom shelf.

Once the children had become accustomed to the control of self and body necessary to accomplish these kinds of tasks, they may be introduced to more complicated tasks involving the care of the environment and their own person. They would probably start out with washing small objects like seashells, then move on to leaves of plants which are more delicate and then on to washing a baby doll. They learn to wash windows, tables, and chairs, to polish mirrors, wood, metal, and shoes, and to clean up after themselves. They learn how to dress themselves by focusing on a series of dressing frames designed to focus on specific fasteners for clothing (basically cloth fixed to a wooden frame which must be connected and disconnected using a specific fastening method like snaps or buckles). They learn how to prepare the food they eat and to sew. These works, being left out for the children to freely pick and choose, inspire the children to develop those areas where they are most in need of special practice. Once the child has mastered the skills therein, the child will move on by their own volition, for they will be bored with the task and it will have nothing more to offer them. However, which works will be made available to the children at what time will be something largely controlled by the teacher who bears the vital responsibility to control the environment of the class.

Since the children are free to choose the works they will, the teacher must be aware of the level of work appropriate to the children in the class. If the works are too simple, they will become neglected or be invitations to misuse. If the works are too complicated they will tend to draw the same and worse, they will tend to discourage the students from trying. For instance, a child who cannot transfer beans from one bowl to the other for want of hand strength and coordination cannot be expected to successfully remove the lid from a jar. More likely as not the jar will be thrown in frustration. But if the teacher, patiently observing which works the children are drawn to and how they are used, carefully selects the works to be made available at what time, then the children can be passively directed without infringing on their developing independence by actively assigning them to tasks desired by the teacher.

Also, the teacher has another principal method of controlling the classroom at their disposal. Contrary to what one may think, it is not a monopoly on knowledge. Other children in the classroom may very well be acquainted with all the practical life works and willing and able to instruct their younger peers. Montessori classrooms incorporate a peer mentoring element by teaching children between the ages of 3 and 6 in the same classroom. In this way, children can mentor and be mentored as they gain experience in the various activities available in the classroom. The teacher may be required to conduct larger lessons or to introduce works new to the classroom, but generally the classroom should be self-sufficient in terms of the transfer of knowledge and assuming it has been properly normalized. But the teacher holds authority as the ideal citizen of the classroom and a source of practical knowledge and experience. The teacher models constantly proper behavior consisting of calmness, grace, courtesy and deliberation. The teacher imbues in the students respect for the environment, not through lecture but by example and by maintaining an environment in which the children are able to have access to the tools and techniques necessary to maintain it for their own benefit. The teacher talks politely, and slowly. The teacher moves gracefully and measured. All this serves the double function of modeling polite, civil behavior and also to render one’s actions observable by children. Children, lacking adult proficiency in observation or a knowledge of critical essentials in any given situation, are not as adroit at picking out the salient components of an action, or the critical gist of a lengthy conversation. They need things broken down into readily comprehensible concretes. It is the teacher’s task to tell children what must be done in a way that can be heard and to show them how to do things in a way that can be seen. If a teacher can master these skills of observation and guidance then they will be able to lead children through the critical periods of their development in a way which will enable them to take full advantage of the opportunities they present.

Montessori refers to ‘Sensitive Periods’ of a child’s development. These are spans of time when children are uniquely attuned to a specific sensory input, set of skills, or knowledge. The most apparent example is language acquisition. There is a period of time when children are very young during which the acquisition of language is almost automatic. After this time period has lapsed, other languages can be acquired but it requires a high degree of personal motivation and effort. The same principle can be applied to almost any of the principle skills of human existence. There is a time for the effortless acquisition of gross motor skills, fine motor skills, and even eating and sleeping habits. After these periods have passed, they still may be learned or corrected, but if the proper stimulus is available at the proper time, then the acquisition will be practically effortless. The Practical Life curriculum area accommodates these sensitive periods in several ways. Each exercise in Practical Life is devoted to honing some specific skill. Later exercises build on skills developed in prior ones and create a scaffolding effect which helps children be prepared to successfully engage them. Children are free to select from a wide range of the activities and thus target the areas where they are deficient. As was pointed out before, if they have already mastered the work, it should, in principle, be uninteresting to them and thus something which they would not be engaged with for long. If it is too hard, the task would seem insurmountable. If, instead, the work represented a level of skill exactly in the range where development would be needed, it would also naturally fall in that area of works which would be engaging to the child. The self-correcting control of error present in the works would also help to discipline the child’s movements and help them focus on the tasks which drive their development. Now, especially if the child was in a period sensitive to the skills inherent in the work, they would be even more likely to be drawn to those specific works from which they could benefit the most. The reason is that they are simply more sensitive to and thereby aware of them more than others. As their sensitive period closes and they are drawn to different stimulus, they would move on to more challenging areas. So, too, once they have passed through the periods sensitive to the stimulus of Practical Life, they would be drawn out into the more challenging areas of math and language once they have acquired the basic skills necessary to preparing them to be sensitive to the more abstract works.

Practical Life helps prepare children for the study of math and language in various ways. The focus on hand manipulations in work which involve water transfer using an eye dropper or picking up beans with tongs readies them to physically hold a pencil. The focus necessary to achieving mastery of their work prepares them to focus on the salient variables of a complex problem amidst potential distraction. The social bonds formed during the exercise of their work cycle will also be a motivating influence when they see their peers and mentors investigating the more ‘academic’ works. More concretely, the organization of materials on the shelves and the order of movements in the works themselves are predominantly left to right and top to bottom—the progression in which English and most, if not all, European languages are read. Works like the jars and lids, which involve removing and replacing matching lids from their jars, teach one to one correspondence, an important pre-mathematical concept. This is also found in works which require the matching of nuts to bolts, the counting of steps, or the sorting of objects. Water and bean transfer may even be seen as a preparation for grasping concepts like Piagetian conservation of volume.

On one level, Practical Life prepares children for practical living. On another level, it prepares them cognitively, emotionally, and physically to engage their mind in productive works geared toward enhancing their own existence and apprehension of reality. This curriculum area builds self-esteem, self-awareness, and self control. It develops the child physically and cognitively to go into the world and begin to exert control over themselves and their environment. It also prepares the way for academic study, laying the concrete foundations necessary to ground abstractions in reality—a fitting beginning for an educational philosophy dedicated to unifying intellectual endeavor with physical experience.

For Part II: Sensorial, click here.

Happy Galt Day!!

November 22nd is the day when John Galt made his speech to the world. A good way to celebrate it may be to watch XCowboy2's "This is John Galt" video series. He has the first version mostly completed and is halfway through revamping his second version. As an added salute to XCowboy2 (Richard Gleaves) and his efforts to spread the word on objectivism and Ayn Rand, I recommend you read his short story "Dinner at the White House". Happy Galt Day!

Atlas Shrugged Essay Contest 2009

Just got the word that I didn't place in this year's Atlas Shrugged essay contest. I look forward to reading the winning essays when they're posted on ARI's website. Anyways, here's my entry from this year. Hope you enjoy reading it. -- American Anti-theist

BUSINESS & PLEASURE: Vice and virtue in the life of Hank Rearden

Hank Rearden runs his business with ruthless efficiency. The standard of value by which every aspect of his foundry is decided is one simple principle: What’s best for making metal? The wage of every worker he employs is balanced against the cost that wage adds to the production process and the necessity of that worker’s labor to the creation of product. The prices of materials are balanced against the market price of steel. The market price of steel is driven up by customer demand for his steel and down by the prices offered by his competitors. The only way to survive, the only way to prosper, is to minimize costs, to increase quality, to honor contracts, to expand his production so that he can further minimize costs, increase quality, and so on. In order to accomplish this he must pay his employees wages commensurate with their value. He needs quality workers to create quality product. He must buy quality materials. He cannot satisfy his customers with defective product. He must constantly refine his production process. He must condemn waste. He must reward efficiency. The highest value, the benchmark of all these other contributing elements, is simply the extent to which it enables him to produce better, faster, cheaper steel in greater quantities and make the greatest profit while doing so. This profit is his reward for organizing the resources of his business in such a way as to generate surplus. It is his reward for creating that which would not exist were he not to have created it. In business, this reward takes the form of money, a measure of the value he has added to the lives of all those with whom he does business.

If Rearden were to live as he ran his business, he would deal with all the people around him privately the same as he would deal with them professionally. Every emotional investment would be balanced by an emotional gain. If every process and function of his professional life is to render him a greater producer of steel, then every process and function of his personal life would be geared to render him a greater producer of his life’s highest values. The virtues of business are to minimize costs, to increase quality, to honor contracts, and to expand production. The virtues of his life would thus be frugality, integrity, honesty, and ambition. Just as he cannot settle for hiring just any worker for any job at any wage, so too he cannot afford to accept just any stranger into any given role in his life as only justified by their just having shown up. Friends, lovers, wives, and even family relationships cannot be based solely on chance, on the arbitrary advent of circumstantial proximity. They must be evaluated in terms of the value they offer and the price they demand. If they demand too high a cost for the value they offer, then they are not worthy of the role. On the contrary, the significance of the meaning of the words ‘friend’, ‘lover’, ‘wife’, and ‘family’ rests on the value that the people who fill those roles contribute to one’s life. A businessman cannot afford to promote an employee to a position of importance in his organization which outweighs that employee’s worth to the company. So, too, no man can afford to promote a chance acquaintance to a disproportionate position of importance within his own life. The objective measure of the success of his business is monetary profit, the value created by the practical implementation of his business philosophy. The objective measure of the success of his personal life is happiness, the value created by the practical implementation of his personal philosophy.

Rearden does not, however, initially adhere to parallel philosophies in his business and private life. Instead, Rearden follows a diametrically opposed moral code in his private affairs. His brother Philip, his wife Lillian, his mother, his “friend” Paul Larkin…these characters all represent the philosophical opposites of who should fill those roles were Rearden’s values applied consistently in both modes of his life.

Philip is devoid of ambition and produces nothing. He lives only to beg resources off others for the sake of others. He is an empty vessel, a conduit to be used by other men. He takes no pleasure in his existence nor deserves it. He has so little integrity that he has the audacity to undermine the brother who has supported him without complaint, to accept his money but condemn his character. Rearden would not even consider him for the job of a cinder sweeper, yet he considers him worthy of the title “brother”. Rearden would not even let him inside his mills, yet he allows him into his home and supports his every endeavor.

Lillian taunts Rearden with her sex. She uses it as a weapon to disarm him and to break him with guilt. Rearden is tortured by his own sense of guilt and hypocrisy every time he succumbs to her wiles. Yet he does not recognize that the source of the guilt is not the act of sex itself, but the act of sex with someone so completely devoid of any of the values he holds dear. His relationship with Dagny is the one truly worthy of the title “wife” but he does not recognize this inversion for what it is—that he has made the whore his “wife” and the woman who should be his wife into a whore.

His mother, completely dependent on her son for subsistence can do nothing but condemn him for the virtues which enable him to support her. His childhood “friend”, Paul, is simply someone he happened to know as a child and now is still somehow a friend despite the fact that there is nothing Rearden can conceivably respect him for and that he actively works against Rearden’s interests. Among these characters who hold the highest titles of honor in his life—friend, wife, mother, brother—not a single one is deserving of any respect. If his highest ideals are indeed frugality, integrity, honesty, and ambition, then Dagny should be his wife and Francisco D’Anconia should be his best friend. Yet those who scorn everything he believes in are his most valued relationships and he must view with contempt those who most closely reflect his own values.

Rearden is guilty of a terrible sin, a gross error of judgment. As Francisco tried to warn, "You're guilty of a great sin, Mr. Rearden, much guiltier than they tell you, but not in the way they preach. The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt—and that is what you have been doing all your life. You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your virtues. You have been willing to carry the load of an unearned punishment—and to let it grow the heavier the greater the virtues you practiced” (421). Rearden’s willing acceptance of blame for pursuing his highest values has chained him to a philosophical system which will mean his destruction. He has accepted that the values that make him an excellent businessman, an inventor, and an entrepreneur are values which also make him a vile and loathsome human being. He has accepted a false dichotomy which states that productive activity which supports and enriches your existence is evil and that the only good is to support the lives of others. He has accepted the rule which condemns the fulfillment of one’s own desires but praises the fulfillment of the desires held by others. To the exact proportion that Rearden excels in his work, he is evil in his life. This is Rearden’s central error, the one that turns his life upside-down, that tortures him throughout his marriage, that tortures him throughout his affair with the only woman he has ever truly loved, and that eventually forces him to turn over his life’s work and greatest achievement, Rearden Metal, to a thankless mob of thugs as impudent as they are undeserving.

Then, Rearden realizes the weakness of his enemies. That weakness is that they have no power over him except what he has conceded. His sanction is necessary for them to continue their deception. His validation of their moral code is essential to enable them to brand him immoral. Once Rearden withdraws his sanction and aligns his personal moral code with his professional one, he removes the only device by which he could be chained, his own sense of guilt. Guilt is only possible to someone who has virtues, who feels that they have betrayed those virtues and sacrificed a greater value to a lesser one. By removing his acceptance of the slanders against him, he removed the ability of his enemies to pressure him with the guilt he had willingly accepted. By refusing to allow his virtues to be branded as vice, he was at last set free to feel his full worth, to embrace the self-esteem which had been rightfully his to claim from the very first. He was free to embrace his ethical peers as friends and to truly love them selfishly. With that simple realization, he was also set free of the world of decay. For him, the doors of Atlantis were at last opened and his place in the world of the future secured. That simple realization was that one’s virtues really are virtues and that it doesn’t matter who says differently. The only true measure is in one’s own happiness, the profit of a virtuous life.

On this day...

On this day, we must honor those who have died for our country. On this day, we must honor those who fought and lived, often with lifelong ailments of both mind and body. And how best to honor them? Do the parades and flag-waving actually mean anything anymore? What are we waving the flag for? Who are we saluting? For what are we fighting?

The answer for Americans has been and can only ever be one thing...FREEDOM.

But are we still fighting for it? Or is it something we passively accept? Do we still feel the weighty responsibility of the blood that has been spilled to defend the right to rule one's own life? Or have we surrendered it for the sake of the silken promise of serenity? How can we claim to be fighting for freedom when our government continues to allow torture? How can we claim to be fighting for freedom when our government takes control of businesses? How can we claim to be fighting for freedom when we rush to surrender our property and our choice to selected officials? Have we truly forgotten the horrors of the Berlin Wall, the Killing Fields, the Third Reich, the purges and concentration camps, the barbed wire and minefields, the executions and assassinations (public and private)?

Have the young people of today never learned of the horrors that chained whole continents to a destiny of fear and oppression? Have they never learned that these chains were all forged from promises made of an easier life, promises of the right to dispose of the blessings granted others as your own, promises that the blood of today will be the prosperity of the future? But that prosperity never came...only the blood. And true prosperity vanished as a whisper on the wind chasing the fleeting phantasms of its butchered progenitors.

Have you ever wondered why it is that every single country which has tried to earnestly enact the idea of wealth redistribution has had to keep its citizens within its borders at the point of a gun? Have you ever wondered what freedoms you would have left in the world you desire?

If you still remember these things, or if you see the error of fighting for freedom and then turning it over to a populist mob, then perhaps you can honor those who died fighting for the American dream. The American dream? Isn't that supposed to be a house, a white picket fence, 2.3 kids, 1.4 cars and a dog? No. The American dream is anything you want it to be. Therein lies its power. Therein lies its majesty and mystery. If the things you would fight for are nothing more than material objects than you are a fool, destined to find yourself in a gutter lying next to all the other petty criminals and thieves.

But if you would fight for freedom, for the true legacy of the right to decide for yourself, of the right not to support the fallacies and contradictions of your neighbors if you so choose, of the right to make up your own mind and the freedom to act on that choice-if you would fight for these things, then you are truly honoring the brave men and women who lost everything that they had just for the chance, for the shimmering sliver of a dream that freedom could be a reality.

So please, rather than making empty token gestures of patriotism today, go out and protest. Howl, scream, demand, argue, rant and petition for your freedom. Talk about it with your friends, lovers, spouses, co-workers, everybody you can. Post, comment, blog, YouTube it, Facebook it, Twitter it. Today is a day for honoring freedom. Even if it is just at arm's length, go and honor freedom today and the people who died for it.

I leave you with one of the great historical speeches that many of you may have never even heard of before.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MDFX-dNtsM

Why Open Borders are the American Way

Now first I want to define what I mean by "Open" borders. I don't think that everyone should just be able to stream into the country unscreened. That would be disastrous. No, I think what should be meant by open borders is that the government screens for criminals, spies, terrorists, and diseases. If someone checks out okay, then they should be allowed in.

Now, there are several arguments I am aware of which people use to attack this position. First I would like to dismiss concerns about shifts in primary language or ethnic demographics as purely racist. Over time, populations naturally shift their genetic and linguistic composition. Opposition to immigration on purely linguistic or demographic grounds is therefore unwarranted and clearly motivated by a philosophical perspective which discriminates between human beings on non-essential characteristics. These arguments are not even worthy of attention and so this is all I will say of them.

The other two primary arguments against open borders, as I have already defined them, concern either the economic or the environmental impact of population increase. First I would like to address the environmental argument. Then I will address the economic one.

Environmentalists proclaim that we all have an environmental "footprint" and that expansion in population is destructive of the environment. Well, first of all, every single activity that human beings pursue is bound to have some effect on our environment--especially since the only way that human beings can survive is to alter their environment. Environmentalists also conveniently ignore the reality of the scientific advancements that have enabled us to double our population in the last 100 years while the forest population has remained relatively stable.

No, I think that the argument from environmental impact is largely geared at a hatred for humanity, for the desire to eliminate humanity from the face of the earth and leave a pristine, consciousless jungle in our wake. The "irreversible" disaster scenarios promulgated by activists are yet to be substantially verified by science. And even were they to be substantiated, handicapping our ability to deal with them (i.e. restricting the capital development of the sciences to refine our manufacturing technology) is not the road to finding viable solutions. But that's neither here nor there.

Ultimately, the rebuttal to the environmental argument is that they claim that living people are the problem and offer no solution except to hobble our ability to cope with environmental problems by limiting economic growth and in some cases even suggesting such fascist manuevers as forced birth control of the populace. Wouldn't that be pretty? In short, the fear of the environmental impact of population explosion due to immigration is a non-starter by scientific standards. And by economic standards it has even less weight as I will explain next.

(For a more in depth discussion of the environmental argument please see this blog entry by Curtis Edward Clark here: http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2009/01/environmental-footprints-and-starving.html)

(And I also recommend reading this op-ed by physics Ph.D. Keith Lockitch which explains the moral implications of environmentalism here: http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=22271&news_iv_ctrl=1021)

So, we are left with asking what would be the economic impact of massive immigration or population growth? Under our current system...disaster. But the reason for that disaster is the presence of entitlement programs, safety nets, public education, welfare, unemployment, minimum wages, medicare, public health insurance, food stamps, etc. In a laissez-faire capitalist system, there would be no need to screen immigrants for their economic sustainability. If they couldn't sustain themselves in America, then their options would be to go home or die. Not by violence, but from starvation. That's what happens when a population exceeds its resources.

But long before that would happen one of two things would happen.
1. The economy would adjust to accomodate the larger work force, resulting in more jobs, higher productivity, and lower prices.
2. Or, the economy would not be able to accomodate these workers, salaries would drop to unacceptable levels, and we would see reverse migration.

Although I think this second is extremely unlikely. The main reason is that in a free market, prices (especially wages for labor) are determined by supply and demand. A high demand for work may drive down wages, but it also drives down costs and thus prices for product, which effectively compensates for the numerically lower wage.

Another misconception is the idea of a limited amount of jobs or a set load which the economy can support. These concepts only enter into the picture once the economy is constrained by government coercion. If the marketplace is free to allow people and goods to flow without the threat of physical violence (government or individual), then people without jobs could start their own business with little resistance. With the increase in population would also come increased opportunities, an increased customer base with specific needs. In short, the increase in population would increase the economic potential of the nation, not diminish it. With the increase in economic activity would come more jobs, more money, lower prices, and a higher standard of living for all.

A side benefit would be, as Yaron Brook points out in the video below, that if we allow everyone except spies, criminals, terrorists, and the diseased into the country freely, then that means we only have to patrol the border for spies, criminals, terrorists, and the diseased. And as he aptly points out, those are people who we could shoot with moral impunity if they were discovered sneaking in, because those would be the ONLY kind of people sneaking in.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib3nVuw2RQU



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF92vXogERE

As it is, the influx of immigration, both legal and illegal, is motivated by the comparative poverty of other nations around the world. These people want to come to have a better life. Their motivations are largely noble. The only thing which gives us cause to fear them, are the very social institutions which we have put in place to steal from some, to secure the unearned for others, WITHIN the country. If we are aware of the unsustainability of those programs and the social cost of such, then we should be directing our energies at undoing those programs and not in further punishing people for exercising their American rights to decide their own terms of employment. The government has no right to dictate to any person who they should be able to hire. Period. And if it weren't for the minimum wage, which makes it impossible for agricultural concerns to hire citizens for the wages that the market demands for their products, they wouldn't have to face the choice of hiring illiegals or going out of business.

Ultimately, the immigration issue is yet another social ill which has been created by our government's intervention in people's lives. This and so many others will not disappear until the government is properly constrained into it's appropriate social role, the preservation of the individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

Everything else, as they say, is up to you. You should have the freedom to decide who you want to hire. You should have the freedom to decide how much you want to pay them. People seeking employment should have the freedom to decide who they want to work for. People seeking employment should have the freedom to decide how much they are willing to work for. The government has no place in manipulating the job market or restraining economic growth. Economic growth is simply a function of all the activities that people pursue to live their lives and make those lives better. The more the merrier. The larger the economy, the more profit to be made by all.

But we are not free, and so we have these "conundrums". We must focus our energy on being free, on reclaiming our freedom. Being sidetracked with tertiary issues only divides us and makes it easier to continue the systematic unraveling of the American ideal.

Capitalism Didn't Fail...Just saying so doesn't make it true

So many leftist pundits are spouting off about the death of capitalism and how Greenspan was a libertarian so that proves that free-market policies don't work. Well, bullshit.

Greenspan was not a libertarian, he wasn't even an objectivist except perhaps in his youth when he contributed to Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and advocated a return to the gold standard. But, of course he sold those views out right quick when they threatened to dampen his career goals. No, Greenspan was a soulless mercenary, who knew enough to know what was the right thing to do, and then did the wrong thing anyway. There can be few more damning indictments of a person's moral character than to knowingly choose to do the wrong thing.

As for the so-called failure of the free market system, well our market was not free of government intervention before, so it baffles the mind to think how people can actually convince themselves that we were actually under a free market system before this whole crisis developed. Of course it didn't help that Republicans were preaching free market principles while expanding government like there was no tomorrow, but all that proves was that the majority of Republicans were and still are hypocrites. At least if they have the sense to rally behind Ron Paul this time, perhaps we may see some change for the better. But with all the new legislation that Obama and his gang are going to be able to cram through the legislature, it's a bit like closing the barn doors after the horse has already fled.

Anyway, there's a very good article by objectivist Dakin Sloss over at the Stanford Progressive. It's a very succint and easy to understand explanation of how the government was involved in the economic collapse. I highly recommend it, so please check it out:

http://progressive.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/article.php?article_id=343

Best premises,
American Anti-theist

Obama or McCain? Vote Bob Barr for President

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5-jKSRYdgc



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe-ulwqnQ9k



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HttZXK8n3rY



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqFrbRw5R_g

Not Enough Teachers = Not Enough Nurses = Not Enough Teachers

There's a big question that I would have in response to this:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25626353/

And that big question is: WHY?

You see, as a student of finance, it seems highly unnatural that such a large distortion in the job market should appear. If there is such a high interest and so many students who want to learn nursing, then how can we possibly explain the lack of teachers? Simple. Government intervention in the economy.

Government subsidizes medical treatment and insurance thereby driving prices up. While at the same time a litigious culture and permissive judiciary drive the price of hospital insurance up. (Now of course, a doctor who causes harm through incompetence should be punished. But proper consideration of the patient's chances at survival if there had been no doctor at all should be weighed into the judgment.) These create a stress on the resources of hospitals. But, hospitals are, for the most part, private institutions so they have certain flexibility to raise wages, prices and respond to supply and demand.

But factor in things like minimum wage, taxes, insurance premiums etc. and we see a pressure on all businesses (not just hospitals) that keeps them from hiring the necessary personnel. Why? Because they are not free to respond to supply and demand in the labor market and that means that inequalities arise. The inequalities give rise to underemployment of the work force which means unemployment for the workers.

So why do we see too many applicants, not enough teachers, and a surplus of jobs? Well, because there are not enough teachers, there are not enough trained nurses. And if there are not enough trained nurses, then that almost certainly guarantees that there will not be enough trained teachers or nurses in the future as well. So, what is driving the teacher shortage? Well, it's simple. The rewards for entering the nursing profession are greater than the rewards entering the nurse training profession. The highly subsidized and legislated public higher education market has horribly skewed both the importance of teachers and the ability of universities to respond to market conditions. The obscenely high demand for nursing teachers should see a corresponding rise in benefits for those jobs. The free market would enable universities to respond to the demand for teachers by competing with the hospitals for those veterans that both need so desperately.

Unfortunately, for decades, our university system has been dedicated to antiquated systems based on seniority and wedded to sneering socialist dogma which scorns free-market ideals as base capitalism. They rush to suck up private funds, but sneer at the very systems which generate those funds. If their own systems were structured more efficiently, then there would be enough teachers. If you need more teachers, you need to make the terms more attractive. If you need better teachers, then you need to reward based on merit rather than on seniority or associations. You need to look at the work. And you need to pay people what they're worth. If any business tries to get away with anything less, it will inevitably either have a shortage of necessary labor, or it will be stifled with incompetent labor. So, because hospitals consistently offer better terms, the skilled nurses who could potentially become teachers go into the hospitals instead of the schools and only the few who choose to forsake those benefits go into education.

Government intervention kills. By creating market imbalances, by creating 'wormholes' in the fabric of the labor market, government creates unemployment, drives inflation and creates shortages of all kinds. If you want to know what is strangling the US economy it is the American people's mad quest for state-mandated security. Terrified to face the reality of shouldering responsibility for our own lives, our own careers, our own finances, choices, and the consequences of them. Terrified to face the facts of our existence, the fact that there can be no guarantees, the fact that we cannot avoid responsibility for our own actions, we can only defer the responsibility to others, and even then we are only deferring. We cannot run from the consequences of our folly forever. It comes back.

Reality cannot be fooled, schmoozed, or cajoled into letting you have your cake and eat it too. And the ultimate end of market imbalances is not a thing as sterile and intellectual as those words would make it seem. The cost of an economic imbalance is a human life. A dream thwarted unnecessarily by an arbitrary condition that never needed to have been. A life snuffed out, through poverty, exhaustion, despair or negligence. A life that never was. A child who will never have the opportunity to move up the social ladder because clutching and frantic paranoia has convinced so many that the only way to be secure is to hand over all choices to others, and those others (suffering from the same paranoia) have responded by securing their own supposed interests and locking the social ladder in place.

The foolishness that they refuse to recognize is that the more they lock that ladder in place, the more they undermine their own future prosperity and even survival. So whether you're a Republican clamoring for government subsidies for big business, or if you're a Democrat howling for universal health care you are in effect pleading for the same thing. You are pleading for the guarantee of your own interests at the expense of everybody else's. What you fail to see is that that it is also at the expense of your own interests to demand such things. That in the long run, it will come back to you.

When you are lying in the hospital with insufficient nurses taking advantage of your governmentally guaranteed health care, will it be a comfort to you to know that everybody will have the same quality of health care, regardless of how insufficient that health care will have become?

When you are baffled by the collapse of your stock prices despite the money you poured into government lobbies, when the real effect has been the collapse of an economy too top heavy with those very lobbies, will it comfort you to know that you were just doing what everybody else is doing?

When America runs blindly off of the cliff of mad devotion to equality and tolerance as a social absolute, a universal ideal, will it comfort you to know that all people will be guaranteed jobs even when no more jobs exist? When we lack the necessary teachers of math, science, and medicine today, what will you do when buildings collapse, planes fall from the sky, and you die from diseases for which there already are cures? Will you be comforted by the hollow ideal of sacrifice to God, nation, or society? Or will you scream and beg and plead for someone to come save you from the nightmare world of your own creation?

There is an alternative. Reverse the course we are going down. Do not overcorrect by doing more of the same thing which has created the various tragedies of our modern age. Change course. Do what has not even been tried. Set business free. Set yourselves free. Cut back the strangling tide of bureaucracy and neo-fascism which is threatening to tear our country apart into rival camps of those who would control our liberties through force and those who would control our liberties by finance, between Republicans and Democrats, between Big Brother and the last lingering relics of the idolaters of communism. Reject them both. Elect Bob Barr for President. And maybe we'll have a chance at putting this nation back together again.

The Weakness of Conservatives...The Hypocrisy of Liberals..

This old footage of Ayn Rand is as relevant today as it was when it was shot in 1961. Here she is addressing the conservatives of the GOP but she might as well be addressing the rival political parties today. Instead of the threat of Soviet Russia, we can think of the threat of religious extremism. And of course there is still communist China, whose relaxed financial rules have created a smokescreen for their continued fascist treatment of its citizens.

China's aggressive suppression of freedom of speech, it's negligent disregard for human life evidenced in its nonchalant attitude to food safety and chemical waste, and it's belligerent self-righteousness when challenged on its premise of citizens as sacrificial fodder to the social animal--these are all situations born of the socialist system, both its mind-numbing effect on its citizens and the cumbersome way in which it adjusts to meet crisis.

How much blood will pave the way to a continued and vibrant communism? How much more blood will we provide as we rush to surrender to an enemy so pitiful and small that it could not survive but by the sanction we grant it? How much blood will they pour on the pyre of the greater good as they rush to convert capitalism in to the socialist quagmire that their ideals fix in the stars as the highest moral system?

Whether that enemy be the religious multitudes swaying to prophetic breeze of idolatry and hate. Or, whether that enemy be the fascist legions of 1st world mercenaries unleashed by the moral abdication of capitalism's defense.

Watch this video and ask yourself, how much blood has been spilled in defense of socialism? How many lives sacrificed? How many dreams crushed? Ask yourself how much of that blood has flowed in the scant 47 years since this video was created. And ask yourself how much more must be sacrificed before we finally fix what must be fixed? Before we embrace capitalism as both effective and a moral ideal.

I'm sure it would be fascinating were Obama and McCain able to respond to this lucid challenge from another age.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTf6NK0wsiA

Even Joy Must Be Silenced For the Sake of Control?

As you read today's recommended news article, I would like to suggest that it may be enlightening to ponder these thoughts that have gone before:

"If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them."--George Orwell

"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free."--Goethe

"It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have these three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to practice neither."--Mark Twain

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."--Thomas Jefferson

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25083792/

Arresting people for a public display of joy is disgraceful. It is a clear violation of constitutional rights and should be stopped immediately. Public schools especially are subject to the mandate of public ownership, which means that basically the owners of that school are the very people who are cheering. A private school may have grounds for ejecting people, but as long as public funds are being used to pay for the ceremony, then anyone should be able to go and cheer as much as they like. At the very least there is no excuse for actually arresting people and carting them off for clapping or cheering. The government should put a leash on its goons.

Defend Freedom of Speech. Reprint the Mohammed Cartoons.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24976215/


If you would like to submit to the arbitrary edicts of fanatical militants, then by all means cower in fear of their retaliation and do nothing. However, if you value freedom of speech, the time-honored right of all free human beings on the face of this earth, then do what you can. If you have a blog, print the cartoons there. If you run a newspaper, reprint them there. They can't bomb everybody. Our soldiers are brave enough to put their bodies between the extremists and us. We can at least be brave enough to preserve the freedoms that they believe they're fighting for. The alternative is to let them die in vain. How about it? Do we still value freedom?

I do.

















(Also posted here)

Food Prices Driven Up By Myopic Hysteria

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24942035/

The article of debate today is the one above. Food prices are rising. World leaders are panicking. People are scared. So what do we do? Do we take a sincere look at what is actually the problem? No, of course not. We're much too committed to our Christian/Jewish/Islamic/Buddhist ethic of give to the needy. Has it actually occurred to anyone out there that we have been giving billions, yes billions , of dollars to the world's desperate nations for decades now. Has it struck anyone as even slightly odd that those countries are, if anything, more deranged, pestilential, and afflicted than ever? Who exactly is to blame for the world's poverty in a time of supposedly intellectual wealth?

Well, I would like to offer a possible explanation.

Government intervention in the business of food kills. And if that's too complicated.... governments kill.

Period.

How can I say that? Easy.

Government subsidies to farmers artificially skew the market so that they grow what the government wants them to grow. Or in the case of the US, it pays them NOT to grow certain things, so they effectively get government money for NOT doing something. And it's not just America. Japan has a host of weird rules concerning the production of rice. A lot of it has to do with post-war paranoia about being self-sufficient. Of course, many countries just abscond with the goods and they don't ever get to their starving masses, because frankly the reason their masses are starving in the first place is the governments which are begging for help are really begging for their figurehead dictator's new Porsche but don't give a damn about the people starving to support their collectivist ideal.　Hell, most of those countries don't even have an ideal, they've just got a dictator and a big gang of gun-toting fanatics to keep them in power. At least until the next big gang with guns comes along to "reform" the country.

The truth is that the rapidly shifting needs of world consumers depends on the ability of business to meet their needs. Normally, we would think that where there is a massive demand, business would rush to meet that need out of the basic necessity of meeting their demand and thus maximizing profits. Unfortunately, government subsidies in countries around the world, foreign trade embargoes, and various forms of legislation relating to agricultural lobbies skew the market in favor of predetermined variables. The unfortunate part is that those variables are all set by governments too far removed from the processes of supply and demand and they absolutely cannot respond fast enough to the shifting demands of the real world. Business can, does and must do so just to survive. But, government constrains business so that it can only limp after the lead of nationalist masters.

After decades of shelling out support to "needy" countries and scrambling after socialist ideal after socialist ideal, isn't it time we learned our lesson? The USSR collapsed out of the economic impossibility of its proclaimed goals. They were INCOMPATIBLE with survival. So what do we do when we follow those ideals and things continue to get worse and worse? Do we stop and rethink our position? Do we strive to find alternatives? No. What we do is try to keep doing more of what we've been doing all along, just on a bigger and more self-destructive scale.

When will we wake up? When will we realize that we've all been playing the fool? When will we realize that playing the fool is as good as asking for our own death? Were Rosencrantz and Guilderstern any the nobler for being unaware of their fate?