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.]

Happy Birthday, Ayn....

I just wanted to say happy birthday to Ayn Rand. She was born on February 2, 1905. She's dead now, so my wishing her happy birthday has nothing to do with her personally. She'll never hear my wishes now. No, it has more to do with my hope for a future modeled on her sense of virtue, her sense of life. We are still so very far from that world. There are still so many sleeping their indolent dreams of empire while the gates are molding on their hinges. America is dying. It is our ignorance which is the poison in its veins. While the politicians wax pompous and self-important, our country is falling apart. Oh, yeah, you won't feel it for a while. America really was that powerful. It really was that great. There's still a lot of energy to bleed off. But as long as we stick our heads in the sand, let ourselves bleed out in denial of our wounds, America doesn't have much of a future ahead of it. I hope that my children, when I have them, may still be able to have enough opportunity to become educated and have access to a Montessori school so that their minds can evolve unmolested by those who would imprint their egos on the helpless minds of children...and would imprint them with only obedience. If America collapses completely into either the darkness of fascism or the darkness of communism, then a great light will have gone out of the world. And who can say when next it will be born anew? So Happy Birthday, Ayn. Atlas is shrugging and the socialists are choking on the ideal world of their own making. Maybe the rest of them will listen enough to what you had to say to learn something yet.

Cheers,
American Antitheist

Health Care...or Smoke and Mirrors in the Halls of Congress...

I haven't had a lot of time to write or even think about social issues much in recent weeks, so I apologize for the lengthy hiatus. New country, new job, new home, new car...lots of things needed sorting out. Someone brought to my attention their concerns over the current health care debate and I thought I would add my two cents.

It may sound wonderful to imagine a world where everyone has cheap affordable healthcare, but what does that mean, who pays for it, and can such a concept as insurance ever be universal? I think the left and the right both grossly oversimplify all the issues involved and selectively fail to see the viewpoint of one side or the other. It is not a question of class struggle. It is not a question of haves versus have-nots. To adopt such a delineation is to instantly put the debate in a socialist camp from the get-go. The question is, as always, individual liberty. Do you have a right to order a doctor around? Do you have the medical knowledge necessary to second-guess their decisions? Do you have the financial knowledge necessary to adjust a fiduciary table of risk and returns? If you do not, then you cannot be expected to be able to select a representative who could responsibly make such decisions either. And if they cannot make such decisions, then should anyone have the right to supersede the conscience of educated and trained professionals at the point of a gun?

When it comes to government involvement in anything, it must always come down to the governments entitlement to use force to enforce law. By expanding legislation, we expand the government's charter to use force against us. Unless there is a damn good reason for that, I will be opposed to any enlargement of federal authority. We have to assume that our professionals will be professional. If they misrepresent their services, lie, make false promotions, etc. they are already violating the law and no further legislation is necessary. New legislation is necessary to define the terms of homesteading new frontiers of human knowledge and territory and the disputes that inevitably come from them. It is not to regulate and direct our lives. I am 100% inflexible on this concept: Individual human rights are absolute and inviolate. But people do not have the right to someone else's labor, their effort, or their livelihood (even and especially including doctors, bankers, and teachers). If Obama truly wished to make healthcare affordable, then he should consider unwinding the Gordian knot that our government has steadily added to practically everything over the last hundred some odd years, rather then instigating irrational waves of panic to help slide through unwarranted and unnecessary controls on free movement and action (e.g. Pig Flu pandemic scare).

Altruism is what is killing us. I believe this now more than ever. If you could but accept that as a possibility, I think you would be amazed at how much of the human narrative comes into a clear and understandable focus. Also how much easier it is to make moral judgments, when those morals are derived from clearly defined concepts which are derived from perceptions and are adjudicated by the facts of human existence and not on arbitrary exhortations of "humanity" as a concept undefined. I listen to Obama speak and I realize that he classifies businessmen as outside the scope of "we" when he refers to "us" as Americans and "them" as the bankers on wall street. But does he accept responsibility for the fact that business could not collude with government if government was not involved in business? Just as government cannot collude with religion, when religion is properly and strictly separated from government. Just as the end to religious war was precipitated by the separation of church and state, so will the class wars be ended by the separation of government and economics. Politics, is the province of reaching a consensus on how to deal with the classical crimes, the classical criminals, to defending the rights of its citizens from enemies foreign and domestic, and for determining the terms by which new properties, both intellectual and real, will be negotiated between vying parties. Nothing else requires an official mandate. The rest, as they say, is up to us, to the professionals, the educated men and women who decide where to invest their resources. The risk is also ours. As is the responsibility. These are absolutes, unchanging through time. No civilized society can be sustained without them. As much as we may want somebody, anybody to promise us sweet things and remove the burden of that responsibility, all attempts to do so throughout history have ended in disaster. If it will, is no longer a question. The question is, if we will let it happen again.

That is a choice we all must make, but rest assured I hold no illusions about my ability to sway you to my way of thinking. I see things in black and white, because that is how clearly the consequences of a course of actions springs to mind. It is an issue of life and death. I have seen what happens to medicine in highly regulated countries. There are horror stories that you could not conceive of happening here. (Such as women dying in childbirth because the ambulance had to keep driving in circles for hours because no hospital could accept them. Why? Because the mish-mash of regulation on obstetrics had so strangled the industry that most doctor's felt it was safer to go into other specializations and the country found itself with a shortage of nursery units. Funny, huh? That's Japan, where they're supposedly worried about a decreasing population). But there is always a first time for everything I guess. Seen the waiting lines in Canada? THAT's where we'll be going and in short order.

I apologize in advance if I haven't dealt properly with all the possible arguments. But fundamentally, my problem is at the root of the assumption--i.e. that government should have anything to do with the choice in this matter. Thereafter is merely quibbling over details of implementation.

An American Anti-theist...No longer Abroad

That's right. I'm coming home. The combination of six years in a heavily socialized nation (Japan) and the horror with which I view the news since Obama assumed power have been the catalyst I needed to refine my vision and understand the duty that lies before me. Don't get me wrong. I would much rather keep on teaching foreign languages and have as little to do with politics as possible. It looks like a relatively filthy profession. However, I've seen what socialized medicine does to a society. I've seen what the welfare state does to business. I've seen what government intervention, coddling, and cronyism does to the average worker. But I have also seen that the necessary hinge upon which change rests is a lucid argument based on reason.

Arguments have power, the power to explain reality to the confused. If one's stance is muddled and uncertain, a clear argument will expose all of that stance's inadequacies. I believe that freedom is the superior argument to all forms of collectivism. I believe that objectivism is a superior philosophy to all other philosophies. I believe when placed in sharp and unapologetic juxtaposition that objectivism and freedom win out every time. So, as one objectivist who is unapologetic for his philosophy and who is unforgiving of the theists and socialists who are clamoring for the sacrifice of humanity to their God/Society of death, I vow that I will work to the best of my ability to reform our government and culture. I don't know how much I will be able to do. But I will volunteer to help the libertarian, objectivist, and libertarian republican movements. I will do what I can to raise the profile of these ideas in the academic sphere. I will do what I can to raise awareness of Ayn Rand, Ron Paul, the Austrian School and anyone (truly) allied with them. If needs be, and if possible, I will even run for what offices I can.

I don't know how much I will be able to accomplish. But I will try. I urge any of you who feels similar to do the same. Not to sacrifice your life for a cause, but to do what you can with the freedom and ability you have. Don't let them disarm you with their apparent numbers. Don't let them humiliate you with their insults and slurs. We the objectivists, We the constitutionalists, We the defenders of individual liberty, We are correct. Do not let them intimidate you. We are following the true and right and noble course. The democrats, the liberal republicans, the collectivists of all stripes are following a path that will require a strictly regimented order to realize. As terrifying as that will be, the chaos which will follow, once that colossus of government collapses under its own weight, that will be even more terrifying.

We have the chance to avert this end. We have the chance to right the path of the nation, to restore it to the city on the hill, to restore it to the emblem of freedom, free will, and self-determination which it once was. All it takes is for all of us to act, to organize, to speak, to assemble, to educate, to argue. If we all make a nuisance of ourselves, in every forum, on every networking site, on every message board, newsgroup, editorial page and blog we come across, if we make such a racket that they can't ignore us any longer, then I promise you, the gears will turn and things will change for the better.

Right now, bad ideas are winning because not enough good people are acting on good ideas. But put the best arguments against the weak collectivist ones, and the collectivist ones will fail. Hone your skills. And then use them.

Best premises and Best of luck,

American Anti-theist

Ayn Rand: The Mike Wallace Interview

This interview was first aired in 1959. I wasn't able to figure out exactly when, but since it's 2009, I figured it would be nice to post it here on it's 50th anniversary. I hope you enjoy hearing Rand's views in her own words. Enjoy.

Part 1



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukJiBZ8_4k

Part 2



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMTDaVpBPR0

Part 3



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

Get the Word Out

Obama's socialist policies will result in increased taxes, inflation, the devaluation of the dollar, and the consequent losses of individual liberty that increased government intervention in the economy will inevitably bring. Vote Libertarian or for Libertarian Republicans like Ron Paul in the next election. We need to reject the morality of social cannibalism that the Democrats and like-minded Republicans represent. We need defenders of liberty in public offices at all levels of the government. So vote, even if it's a small election. Vote for Liberty before it's too late and we see the close of the American dream behind bars of our own forging.

Please mirror this video as much as possible. Let's get the word out for Liberty!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrQTp3kPnho

100th Post at An American Anti-theist Abroad!!

Woohoo!! OK, so I'm feeling a little self-congratulatory. This makes the 100th post on this blog. Just to sum up. Since I started this blog in April 2008, I've had some more active periods than others. (1 post was actually salvaged from an older blog that I never really took anywhere.) But since I started putting this together, I've been able to write about a lot of different subjects of importance not only to me, but also to a number of people around the world. How big a number I'm not quite sure, but given the recent popularity of Ayn Rand and Ron Paul, it seems like the winds may be changing. So, we all have to do our bit to fan the fires.

Anyways,　just to give a status report on how I've been doing, here are some statistics.

Since this blog started officially in April 2008 it has received 5,825 visits from 68 countries.

THE TOP THREE VIEWING COUNTRIES ARE:

1. USA @ 4948 views
2. Japan @ 529 views
3. UK @ 65 views

THE TOP THREE VIEWING STATES (USA) ARE:

1. California @ 717 views
2. Texas @ 485 views
3. New York @ 395 views

THE TOP THREE VIEWED BLOG POSTS (aside from the main page which registered 1196 views) ARE:

1. Dr. Anne Wortham: Objectivism and the Black Community @ 5010 views
2. Dr. Anne Wortham: Black Victimhood vs. Black Individual Responsibility @ 307 views
3. Happy Science: Religious Cults in Supposedly Atheist Japan @ 142 views

Anyways, I just want to thank all the people who have taken the time to read what I've been posting. Also, more importantly, I want to thank all the people who've taken the time to sincerely think about what I've been talking about here. I'm sure that we can all make a difference. I'm still small fry here, but if I can reach even one person and convince them to look at the world even slightly differently, then I've gotten as much reward as I can reasonably expect. Changing the world is really for all of us. We have to change our morality, the standards of our belief and judgment. The alternative is to horrible to imagine. That's why we have to act. The native state of all systems is entropy. It is only through concerted and consistent human action that we can keep things from sliding into decay, whether that decay is cultural, moral, economic, political, scientific, cognitive, or spiritual.

Finally, I'd like to close with a video from Ron Paul. He's the only prominent figure in politics today who unabashedly supports a rationally integrated world view and truly advocates liberty and justice. Here he is talking about the torture debacle. Republicans and Democrats are both guilty as sin in leading us into such debauchery. For my prior articles on the issue please see these earlier posts:

Sam Harris and the Fallacies of Torture

And this is what happens when thugs get moral license...

Torture: The Madness that Wouldn't Die

Supreme Court Puts Foot Down on Abrogation of Due Process

Not Everything that Parades as a Democracy IS a Democracy

Ashcroft-Torture Bad Call But No Biggie

Enjoy the video:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skeom9K8fww

And Justice for All? But what is Justice?

With the resignation of chief justice Souter, Obama has yet another chance to skew the machinery of government so as to sustain his socialist agenda long after he has been replaced. Check out the link below for an article detailing why Obama's pragmatism really means amorality in a legal context.

When It Comes to Judges, 'Pragmatic' Means Unprincipled: How the president reasons that disregarding the rule of law can be a virtue.

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

In Mourning for America

Do the math:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-budget7-2009may07,0,4310621.story

A 3.55 trillion dollar budget....17 billion dollars in budget cuts...a deficit of 1.2 trillion dollars...

Now, seriously....any investor....any one sitting at home doing their finances, would they seriously think that these numbers are acceptable? When you're in debt, do you spend more hoping that you'll magically bring in increased revenues somewhere down the line? Do you buy 2 new cars, a GM and a Chrysler with the hope that if you give them some money, they may give you a job, or a raise? Does it make any sense to increase debt beyond our ability to pay it back? If you're in business, do you expand your company's operations when sales are down? If you're managing a household, do you go on a luxurious vacation, when the creditors are knocking at the door?

No, of course not. Anyone who did that would be at least grossly irresponsible, and possibly insane. Does it justify it any more to demand that our children and our children's children, that generations, yes, generations of our descendants will have to pay for these excesses? Doesn't that make it all the more evil, to assign debt to those who have no say in the matter, to burden them with an obligation to feed our folly? Is it satisfying to mark our children with the mark of Obama's breed of original sin?

This madness seems to know no bounds. I do not see a bright future for America until a significant libertarian presence is felt in Congress and the White House. As such, I've darkened the background of my page to reflect the feeling that America has entered a dark age of decline. Hopefully the grassroots efforts of advocates of liberty across the nation will one-day be enough to lift this blinding curtain of self-righteousness and end the orgy of self-immolation which is the American politic.

Just think of it, and does it make any sense:

$1,200,000,000,000 deficit
- $17,000,000,000 budget cuts
=$1,183,000,000,000 remaining deficit

....Just what kind of difference is Obama making?

Ron Paul for 2012

There is only one man in elected government today who has had the courage and consistency to advocate what is objectively best for this country. Please, support Ron Paul and his Campaign for Liberty.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-hDFndx1zY

Going Galt on Easter? or Trying to Have One's Cake and Eat it Too...

There is a reason that the Tea Parties will not amount to much. There is a reason why the Libertarian Party will continue to receive only minimal support. There is a reason and it's been staring us in the face for over fifty years. The reason is that we are facing a philosophical crisis, and only a coherent philosophical response will negate our opponents.

Why is the notion of laissez-faire capitalism viewed as a fringe crackpot obsession? It's because the so-called defenders of capitalism are logically incoherent. Greenspan preached free markets while going at them with a pair of pliers and a scalpel. Then, when the patient's dying on the table, he declares that the patient was to blame for being butchered. John McCain, like "W" before him, preached free markets out of one side of his mouth, while running around trying to curry favor with every right-wing Christian messianic institution who could offer to grease his shiny white noggin with. Freedom and theocracy don't mix. Period.

The people who are going to the Tea Parties and bearing signs accusing Obama of being a Muslim are also missing the point entirely. It doesn't matter what religion Obama holds in the confines of his own head. Hell, he could even be an atheist for all we know. The problem with what he is doing is that it is predicated on the assumption that political and economic power should be conjoined. The truth is that combining the two is the fast track to fascism. Perhaps he isn't even fully aware of that. Maybe he is. But it is certainly not an idea started or even driven by Obama. On the contrary, it is an idea that has been espoused by many people both Democrat and Republican and for a very long time. Ultimately, Obama couldn't be able to do what he has been doing unless the people of the country put him there to do it. Bush couldn't have started what Obama is finishing if the people of this country hadn't put him there to do it. So why? Why don't people turn to the Libertarian Party, the only one supposedly advocating freedom? The fundamental reason, as Ayn Rand pointed out a long time ago, was and is that it is philosophically incoherent.

The Libertarian Party stands against government, but what does it stand for? Is a vote for the libertarians a vote for anarchy? Or is it a vote for Objectivism? Is it a vote for an economic policy? But economics is just one province of politics. What can the Libertarian Party be expected to advocate? How can those who advocate armed revolution for the sake of abolishing government entirely stand side by side with those who want to secure the framework of a capitalist society and thus preserve the structure of what civilization has accomplished? The Libertarian Party needs to establish a philosophically coherent alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. There can be no allowance for god in government, just as there can be no allowance for politics in economics. The Republicans fail on the first count. The Democrats fail on the second. But the reason why the Democrats have such power right now is because theirs is the essentially more consistent philosophical stance, whereas the opposition is fractured and inconsistent. Neither is fully coherent, but in this age of "have-it-your-way" ideology, consistency is enough to make a philosophy seem coherent. But a fully coherent, internally consistent political platform would blow away even Obama's cocky smile.

The Democrats fully accept the altruistic doctrine that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. They fully accept that the state, i.e. the body politic, has the full right to dictate the lives of its individual constituents, because they fully accept that people do not have individual rights. They view rights as a social privilege to be removed or altered at whim. So, they offer a fully consistent front when attacked on those issues.

The Republicans have presented only the most convoluted and tired excuses for capitalism. The reason is because they, too, want to cling to the old moral premises of altruism. However the Democratic ideology is more consistent with altruistic premises then capitalism. Capitalism is fundamentally opposite to altruism in every conceivable way. Therefore, to try and justify capitalism on altruistic grounds is destined only to make advocates of capitalism look foolish, irrational, and illogical.

The Libertarians present a good economic argument for capitalism based largely on the work of Mises and some libertarians even credit Rand. However, the Libertarian Party still does not have a lucid image of what government should be. They only have an image, albeit an accurate one, of what it should not be. And while their arguments against intrusive government are convincing, arguments for total anarchy are fundamentally flawed. As long as there is a significant anarchistic/nihilistic influence in the Libertarian Party it cannot present a coherent alternative to either of the others.

It is time for the champions of liberty to recognize that Objectivism is the only philosophical system which both secures human rights, provides a rationale for freedom and capitalism, and delineates the proper constraints of government influence in a coherent, fully consistent model. Stop apologizing for Rand, we need to embrace her ideas. We need to embrace her arguments. We need to embrace her morality, the only morality which declares that "your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it." You cannot have capitalism and Pat Robertson. You cannot have McVeigh and freedom. You cannot have anarchy and prosperity. Until we have accepted and embraced a unifying, cohesive, and fully functional philosophical moral standard behind which to campaign we will not be able to stand up to a unified front of gentle, smiling socialists. We will continue to be internally divided and discredited by our own hypocrisy.

However Objectivism is not a philosophy that can be taken piecemeal. The whole point is that for political actions to be morally validated that they must be integrated into the whole of our objective knowledge of the universe. Of what it means to live, and to die. Of what truly is the nature of human beings. How do they come to know things? And what does such knowledge mean for their survival. A contradiction cannot be allowed, it is sufficient to invalidate any moral claim, or political initiative. Under Objectivist thought, unless a law can be demonstrated to be coherently integrated with human knowledge and the morality that knowledge entails, then that law should not be adopted. Conversely, if a law can be shown to be inconsistent with our knowledge of the human condition, or immoral in light of what we know, then that law should be removed. Taxation, global policing, government involvement in private lives...these are all things which are inconsistent with what we already know about the nature of human freedom and which systems optimize human happiness. This is why the enemies of freedom wish to pervert the meaning of the words freedom, human rights, and liberty. They want to coopt freedom to mean freedom to claim the property of others to establish equality. They want to distort human rights to mean an unqualififed claim to a doctor's or a teacher's labor. They want to claim that liberty means mob rule.

These stances are rife with contradictions, but until and unless we call their bluff and declare that the emperor has no clothes, until we do this, they will maintain the appearance of holding the high ground. Especially to the college professors responsible for training our teachers who are responsible for educating our children. Along this chain it ultimately starts in the colleges. And unilateral cries for freedom for freedom's sake will be powerless to stand against a consistent logical set of views.　The highly educated demand that there be at least a seemingly logically consistent philosophy behind their political agendas, and they devote a great deal of time and effort in picking holes in rival theories. Unfortunately the libertarian movement is so varied that it is relatively easy to demonstrate the lack of cohesive thought. And as long as we try to attack them for acting on principles explicitly which we continue to hold implicitly, we are bound to make them look like they are on the firmer ideological ground. If we want to be free, we must be prepared to demonstrate how and why freedom is superior. We cannot state that it just is.

The notion of going Galt, as an intentional withdrawal of sanction from the current social system, in our present age is premature and a practical impossibility. There are several reasons for this. One is that the government claims the legal right to tax almost everything, property, interest, etc. This means that to go off the grid, so to speak would be impossible. One could withdraw all their assets, buy gold and go live somewhere. But unless they continued to pay taxes on the capital gains of those assetts, taxes on the very land they live, and sales taxes for what they purchase the government would eventually come to collect. And as long as they have to pay those taxes to keep the guns off their porch, then they're supporting the current government. This is the fundamental immorality of any involuntary tax system. Namely, that it forces us to support those we oppose. Of course, cooperation under coercion cannot be said to mean sanction. We can be confident that we are morally pure in this, because the government has left us no alternative. Pay or die. Sacrifice your whole life, or pay a percentage. A choice made at the end of a gun is not a free choice.　But regardless of guilt, the end result is the same...the government is still supported by our labor.

The other alternative would be to simply stop doing anything, dismantle and dispose of all one's assets and go on the social dole. However this would have a psychological consequence on those who would attempt this. Not to mention, I think it wouldn't take the governement long to notice if people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were all applying for welfare. No, that won't work either. There's a reason why in Atlas Shrugged, there had to be a place for people to go to where government couldn't find them. It's because without such a place, they couldn't effectively withdraw. We can't withdraw if we have no place to go. As long as we are forced to be active participants in the system, the only tangible net effect of our withdrawing from social life, is to remove what little resistance we offered to begin with.

No, the only alternative is to increase our activity. To target it. To forge our resistance into a blade of reason--honed with our arguments and tempered by our convictions. We must take the leadership roles in the industries in which we work. Or we must support the most capable and efficient in those roles. We must become skilled debaters. We must actively seek out discussions where our views are freely under attack and we must defeat our opponents using polished rational arguments that leave them no where to stand but to resort to petty insults. We must drive the statists out of the public discourse, not by force, but with the inherent superiority of our policies. But just as impurities in the metal will cause a sword to break, so will inconsistencies and contradictions in the philosophical basis of our resitance cause us to falter when our mettle is tested.

Yes, we must organize. Yes, we must demonstrate our unified resolve. But until our resolve is in fact unified, all we demonstrate by organizing is how much lack of unity there really is. The unifying philosophical element is Objectivism. It is the only philosophy to organize the current social crisis into a coherent and comprehensible framework of ideas while still advocating the very things we claim to be pursuing. What we need to stand up to the politics of Obama and the politics of McCain is not a party against government in general, but a party for an Objectivist government, organized under objective priniciples, and motivated by the Objectivist ethics.

The Communists Have Landed

I have to say that I am weary of looking in the news and seeing socialist / communist rhetoric spewing forth from Lord Obama and his cronies. Not only is the government buying out US companies on the cheap (a de facto nationalization strategy as illustrated by act such as this: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aqOyfIA14XQ8&refer=us ) but the very question of the propriety of nationalization is a total non-issue in the current political discourse. All that the so-called defenders of capitalism can do is equivocate on the practicality of doing so. All they can do is equivocate on the potential harm to the people. Nobody at all seems to be concerned with whether such action is morally right. Nobody at all seems to remember a little thing like human rights, rights which our nation was supposed to believe are INALIENABLE. Admittedly, most of Obama's supporters probably don't even recognize what the word inalienable even means, much less what the concept of human rights entails. No, they equate rights with an open-ended hunger. Their concept of rights is an infinite demand on what they percieve as a mystically infinite supply of naturally growing wealth. Shake the tree all you want, there'll still be more fruit on it tomorrow, right? But they don't seem to realize that if you cut down the tree, haul it over into your yard and prop it up against a shed--it will not yield fruit next year.

Now, don't get me wrong, I thing Wagoner was a fruitcake. He went crying to the government for help, and sure enough they gave him the help he so desperately deserved--a solid kick in the ass. But the point is that the free market would've sent Wagoner packing anyways and without sacrificing taxpayer money and without setting a dangerous precedent for the arbitrary government nationalization of American industries. Let the idiot CEOs fail, let the brilliant ones prosper, and let us all work to fill the jobs created by the ingenuity and excellence of the very best productive minds around us. The only jobs a government can provide are those which enable it to file, index, sort, encage, punish, and monitor the rest of us. This is because a government's sole function is to maintain and enforce the rule of law. All it can do is threaten, fine, and imprison people. A government doesn't create wealth. It produces nothing of value. It's function is to maintain an environment where people are free to produce freely. By constraining that environment, by bringing it's legislative violence into the private sector, the government in effect becomes a totalitarian force with it's eyes and hands on everybody's life, and the net result is that people are not allowed to be as efficient as they could be were they simply allowed to pursue their own happiness.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness used to be more than just words, they were a dream and an ideal worth fighting for, worth dying for, and more importantly--worth living for. And yet we find ourselves tied down in an age where the last flailing remnants of American idealism are being skinned alive, where the stillborn dream of an American society was sacrificed on the altar of "God and Society" with the self-defiant neurotic cry "For the good of the many!" What is America with no right to one's own life? What is America without the freedom to know your own mind and to act upon the values you decide for yourself? What is America without the moral conviction that one's happiness is an end in and of itself, that one's values have value, that one's dreams mean something? Those dreams mean something, Damn it! They mean something because they are fragile and isolated and occur only fleetingly in the minds of individual men and women all over the Earth. Those dreams that become generators. Those dreams that become companies. Those dreams that become the lifeblood of those who couldn't dream as well or as hard or as thoroughly. Ideas mean something, and the more fragile and fleeting, the more precious those ideas become.

The laughing dreams of children do not have to become the discarded carcasses of compromising adults. For the sake of us all, for your own sake, and for the sake of decency, don't sell out the American dream for a smile and a handshake and the burning coals of "good intentions". Vote libertarian or Vote for Ron Paul in the next election. Protest, speak out, scream out for Obama to stop his systematic, methodical butchering of the human spirit.

Apples, No Apples, Apples: The Sleight of Hand of Obama Inc.'s Elite Economic Corps of Dunderheads

OK. Now I had to read this a couple of times to make sure I got it straight. Now, I thought that I wasn't reading it correctly. I mean, circular logic has some famous adherents. Just look at Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy...or Sam Harris' justification for torture. But this circle is the most striking for how clearly circular it is. You don't have to dig too deep to see the sleight of hand going on in this one. For the whole article, you'll have to check out this link here.

But the part that floored me was this quote:

""I do think the American people in the past have shown an excellent ability to respond to adversity," Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told members of the Senate Budget Committee. "And I believe it's going to happen this time and that we're going to see a much stronger economy, not that far in the future."

To hasten that day, the Fed and the Treasury launched their long-awaited program to jump-start the market for consumer loans, including financing for small businesses, students and car buyers.

Under the program, known by the acronym TALF, the Fed will provide loans to investors who buy securities backed by newly issued consumer loans. The idea is to revive the market for asset-backed securities, which provides funding for a large portion of consumer lending.

"In our system, banks are important, but typically 40% of lending comes through the securitization markets. And those markets are not functioning well," Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the House Ways and Means Committee.

"So we're going around banks . . . by doing something only the government can do, which, on appropriate terms to protect the taxpayer, is to try to get those credit markets opening up again," he said." "

OK. TALF. This is the system as it appears to be presented here. The government will now encourage more lending to groups which are high risk in a recession and which the markets recognize as such: students, small businesses, and car buyers. (It may be for that reason that the banks aren't loaning as much to these groups right now..duh....)

But of course, Obama Inc. and his party of looting neanderthals, think that the answer is to give more money to people who probably won't be able to pay it back. (AIG, GM...etc, etc, etc...)
In this case, they will subsidize the extension of credit to high risk groups by sponsoring securities based on packages of volatile debt. They will use the security of the United States Treasury to guarantee that debt and sell shares in it to investors. Not only that, but it will loan money to investors so that they can buy those securities. So, technically, the government will be making it look like it's selling financial instruments when really it's just handing out taxpayer money again.

If the initial loans go into default, the securities become worthless. That means the government can't collect the money from these loans, which means that the investors also don't get anything from the securities either, except that they have to pay back the loans to the government that they used to buy the now worthless securities. Which means that the government will in effect be paying for it's handouts to high-risk lenders by convincing credit-worthy investors to commit to paying for them over the long-term.

Housing fiasco redux.

What Obama and his geniuses are assuming is that the people who will receive these loans will actually pay them back. Now here's the catch. If any financial institution was reasonably confident that the people who are the potential beneficiaries of these loans could actually pay them back, then the financial institutions would loan them the money in the first place.

Why? Because that's how financial institutions make money. By lending to people who pay them back plus interest. Nobody makes money by lending to people who don't pay back. As the housing fiasco and its consequences have effectively demonstrated.

So what will happen to investors who buy large amounts of these securities, if the securities go into default (as they probably will)? Well, their balance sheets will have a sudden gaping hole where their assets used to be, and an equal amount of now unsupported debt. In short, I think that any investor who takes a heavy interest in these derivatives will be staking a lot on the dependability of the federal government to lend responsibly. And if the federal government doesn't, then we will see even more investors taken down in this thing. That will further damage the economy, destroy even more wealth (or "redistribute it" as Obama likes to say), and almost certainly cripple our nation for decades. (That is, decades more than these kind of policies have already crippled us...)

Now, now, I'll be fair. The current crisis isn't Obama's doing. It was caused by Bernanke, Greenspan, and the hypocrites at the Fed and in Congress on both sides of the aisle who have been supporting centrist government-controlled markets. That was the problem with the Republicans. They talked free markets, but they were busy getting their hands deep into the guts of it, so they could grease their own pockets, and the pockets of their buddies. That and they were spending so much time preaching about God that the secular conservatives out there didn't feel very comfortable supporting them either.

The Democrats are idealogues. I seriously believe that they think that they are helping people by sacrificing us all to the hunger of the disenfranchised mob that has been created by generations of irresponsible governance. (Although I think it's telling, how many of Obama's picks have a problem paying their taxes...)

The answer is to stop this madness, not to keep trying more of the same thing.

Cut spending, cut taxes, cut social programs and privatize them.
Privatize education.
Dissolve the Fed.

Introduce a staged retreat from social security so that we can support those who have already paid their way in, but so that we can phase it out as soon as possible. Phase out medicare and government intervention in insurance premiums.

Stop the senseless bailouts of companies that shovel out lifetime-guaranteed retirement policies to workers who retire at 48?! (Like GM....)

Stop the war on poverty. The supposed enemy in that war is the only group that can even remotely provide what is needed to alleviate the problem, by pursuing that war we intensify the poverty.

Stop the war on drugs. 1 in 32 Americans are in jail. 25% of them are there for drugs. Only 5% of homicides were narcotics related. Educate your children to keep them off drugs. I agree, they suck. They are NOT good things to have around children. But neither is tobacco or alcohol, and we have managed to keep them in control without making them into the dangerously uncontrolled illicit multi-billion dollar global industries that illicit drugs are today. In a way, the war on drugs is paying for the war on terror....paying our enemy's wages. Not unlike Prohibition and the mafia...Remove the profit, make them legal and regulate them like any other drug or intoxicant.

And, no, we don't need the self-inflated pompous rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh to rally around. What we need is a return to fundamental principles, like those advocated by Ron Paul and Barry Goldwater and the generation of conservatives who really lived up to that name. The crisis we are experiencing day by day in our sweat, our fear, our blood, and our lives...this crisis is a moral crisis. The moral superiority of laissez-faire capitalism, the objective moral reality of rational self-interest as a life-generating force, the moral supremacy of reason as opposed to the bulwarks of religion or the frantic paranoia of the social relativist---the denial of these truths is what we are experiencing tangibly, and visibly and undeniably this very moment.

This country is headed in the wrong direction, and we're speeding it up! You can't defend freedom by destroying it. You can't defend liberty by enslaving yourselves. You can't increase prosperity by punishing it. You can't inspire innovation by stifling it in bureaucratic red tape. You can't broaden minds through education by stifling teacher creativity. You can't heal bad debt by creating more of it. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

"Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality -- you who have never known any -- but to discover it." --Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

Dr. Anne Wortham: Black Victimhood vs. Black Individual Responsibility

Well, with Obama sworn in and gearing up to charge headlong into a socialist rampage that will flush the remaining fractured remnants of our economy down the toilet, it seems that the issue of the day still seems to be race. I've recently been getting some negative feedback for supporting Anne Wortham a while back in this post here.

Anyways, it inspired me to look up more of her work, and as since the video I originally linked to was removed, I was really glad to find this article posted on the internet. It says much better than I ever could exactly what is wrong with the culture of victimization that has infected what the civil rights movement has unfortunately become.

It can be read at this link here: http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/polin/polin092.pdf

Also, if you're interested, here is a very well written op-ed she wrote about Lord Obama:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/wortham1.html

Best premises,

American Antitheist

It's been a while... お久しぶり

First off, I'd like to apologize for being away for so long. But real life takes a priority over my internet musings. Anyways, having taken care of business for now, I find myself with some time to comment on the events of the last 4 months. Probably most prominent in everybody's minds is the full-blown financial panic that is sweeping over the world. The dollar is trading for 88 yen, the Dow is down, way down, and the big auto companies are on the verge of collapse. In the midst of this we have Greenspan lamenting the free-market system and Fortune 500 executives running down to Washington to beg for money--your money.

So, it goes without saying that a lot of people are wondering what Obama is going to do with this mess when he gets into office. A lot of people, that is, except for me. That's because I know exactly what he's going to do. He's going to spend a lot of government money. He's going to give a lot of money to big business, of course not the same big business cronies that Bush has, he'll give it to his green frontier democratic buddies. They may very well let the car companies hang (as they really should) but I don't think they'll go through with it. The Democrats are too reliant on unionized labor. Although the only way they're going to be able to pay for all these bailouts and all the social programs they want to cram down our throats is to raise taxes. Or perhaps they'll just raise taxes on businesses and the rich. (As if that won't be even more of a reason for companies and rich people to put their money elsewhere). Or, like Bernanke and the incompetent quacks at the FED have already done, devalue the currency like there's no tomorrow.

0% interest rates are not a good thing. Printing money on 0% interest rates to "increase cash flow" is not a good thing. It has one tangible result. Yes, money increases. But the downside is that money is worth less. Or worthless as the case may be. Japan is still stuck with interest rates next to nothing after 20 years of recession. It took Koizumi and his aggressive stance of let them fail and make them write off their bad debt, that cleansed the banking industry and let Japan recover, if only temporarily. For a brief span, the Japanese economy recovered. But it wasn't long before the looting bureaucrats, the ruling daimyo of the LDP decided to sink their teeth into the only freshly rejuvenated business sector. First off was a crack-down on foreign-sourced investments, increased government intervention in mergers and sales of businesses. A raise in taxes, the dismantling of Livedoor, and the ongoing stink of corruption in Japanese politics all combined to nudge things back over the edge. This was happening well-before the housing meltdown in the US, despite what the pundits say. I know. I've been watching the news, and I have a fairly decent long-term memory. Nonetheless,　America wants to charge right after Japan and do exactly the same wrong things they did. Nobody, except perhaps Jim Rogers and perhaps the far too splintered assortment of objectivists and libertarians out there has a real understanding of what needs to be done...or perhaps nobody else who's speaking...

Dismantle the FED. Dismantle the government's centralized banking scheme. This disaster, and the long string of disasters that have been happening for the last hundred years are all the direct result of government intervention. Think about it this way, did they have such a thing as unemployment in early days after the American revolution, when business was relatively unrestricted? No.

Yes, there were poor people and there were rich people. There will always be poor people and rich people. But the difference is that the classical American system enabled people to become rich by their own effort, with the fruits of their will. And with this freedom came the condemnation to poverty for the lack of effort. This is the principle of social justice. That those who do not strive to improve their lives shall not be able to, and that those who do, will be. Whether they will achieve personal happiness or not, is something which no government can ever promise, no human being can ever promise another. But the freedom to pursue happiness, the freedom to strive for it, to grasp for it, to work for it, matched with the opportunity to seize it if it is in your grasp---this is the freedom which drives the mind and hearts of men and women to do great things and to pull themselves up from the sordid depravity of apathetic resignation to misery which so characterizes life in the collectivist nations throughout history.

But you, who would preach that social justice must be meted out by the government, those of you who preach that we should all be held hostage to one man's vision of the future, to one man's dreams, even if he is selected by all of our neighbors, you preach a different creed. For how many years must we pay off the future? For how many years must the children of today be sacrificed for the phantoms of tomorrow? Whose vision is worth the slavery of a single man? A single woman? A single child? The founders of this country said that freedom was the heart and soul of value, that without freedom, there is no value to be had in society. That without freedom, we are slaves. And so we are.

'How can we be slaves?' you may ask. After all, are we not surrounded by art and entertainment to suit any fantasy? Are we not free to elect whoever we want for office? (Although the efforts to keep third-party candidates from participating in elections may cast some doubt on that premise.) What else would you call it when all of us must work as hard as we can to gather what resources we can to survive, but people come with the threat of imprisonment or violence to take what you have worked to bring into creation by force? The presumption is that the fruits of your labor are not yours. The presumption is that they belong to your master and that it is your master's will which has the right to decide how they are dispersed. Whether that master is one man who seized power, or if that master is a group of men who your neighbors have chosen to lead you, even if that master was chosen by you yourself--that does not grant them the moral right to your labor. If you grant others the moral right to dictate the terms of your work and the use of its products, then you grant them the moral right to treat you as a slave. And so we are treated. Groups of men and women gather to decide how they can divvy up the pie of American wealth without any consideration that they did nothing to create it, and have no moral claim to it. They cite legal precedent as the foundation of their right, common law borrowed from Europe.

What they neglect to recognize is that America's break from Europe was an ideological break, a moral break. The morality of Europe had led to the servitude of its citizenry and generations of feudal wars, alliances, treachery, and corruption. The strengths of America were the strengths of an emergent American morality, one which died stillborn for want of a voice to express it in terms detached from the old traditions of altruism. And altrusim has slowly choked that system of strength until America will soon fade into the ranks of other statist, socialist nations, chomping at the bit for a taste of world power. What could have once been a shining model of the glory of human liberation, is slippy into the murky, soiled, and shabby frame of a beggar whining about destiny. A nation of men and women who forged their own destiny with their bare hands, is being whipped and shaped into a nation of equivicators and rationalizers. Let reality be the final judge and arbiter of this debate, of this age-long struggle. Open your eyes and see that the tragedies in the headlines today are the culmination of thousands of years of repeating the same mistakes over and over again. For how long can we repeat those very same mistakes without realizing that the answer is to try something different, something which has not been tried, something which would set us all free to pursue our dreams to the extent of our abilities and fly as high as we are able? Why not try freedom? Why not try capitalism? Real capitalism. Not the watered down, hypocritical vacillation characterized by base opportunists like Greenspan. Real capitalism, like that envisioned by Ayn Rand (whom Greenspan betrayed the moment he joined the FED). Instead, is it really better to emulate a socially stagnant Japan or the disastrous economic policies of Soviet Russia?

Who pays for it? Who pays for it all? We all do. We are all victims in this, and some are both victim and victimizer. But we will all pay the price. Our children will pay it and their children. By supposedly working for the future we are instead signing our children over into a life of slavery, where their dreams will always be ranked second to the demands of any organized group of their neighbors. What's the price? The price is paid for in deserted store fronts. The price is paid in unemployment. The price is paid in disease and crime. The price for your slave-owner's paradise, is that everyone is enslaved, noone and everyone is master, and we all descend into poverty together. Or is it that you imagine yourself in the 'privileged' elite that won't have to muck about with all that. Well, I suppose an altruist like Warren Buffett would probably be the last to feel the effects of the meltdown. But when need and apathy has strained their functional capacity and drained the motivation of it's creative minds--it won't be long before the institutional foundations of businesses around the world come tumbling down like a cascading array of dominoes.

If you are still not convinced, if instead you are more than ever insistent that the only way to cure our current ails is to whip us into better and better shape, to force us at the point of the gun and demand our cooperation through violence, then you deserve everything that's coming down the line. Why? Because it's your choice. The ideas you promote, the people you elect have a tangible effect on the world we live in. You can either choose to make it a better world, one where people are freer and happier. Or you can prolong the suffering, dispense misery and condone the execution of the human soul. You WILL reap that which you sow.

Pope a Hypocrite: Hoards Gold and Condemns Greed

Today's case study in what is wrong with the world is drawn from this article:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25754069/

The headline reads: "Pope urges young to spurn the 'spiritual desert' : He challenges crowd of 200,000 to help world turn away from materialism"

Aside from the many many philosophical problems I have with attacks on materialism, greed, and selfishness. And aside from the many many problems I have with those who promote altruism over rational egoism. Aside from these things, is there anything more hypocritical than the figurehead of the Catholic church berating people for enjoying personal comfort that they have at least done something to earn? Has anyone out there even seen the amount of gold that decks out the Vatican? If not, here's some pics:


If they're so earnest about sacrifice, why don't they lead by example and distribute church wealth to the needy rather than trying to make us feel guilty for spending the money that we earned with our labor? I mean, after all, who deserves their money more? Some guy who works his ass off every day of his life? Or some fat and indolent preacher-boy who's never done anything but sit in a high chair and rattle off how worthless people are? I'd bet on the worker over the preacher any day.

And, hell. While we're on the topic of greed and materialism anyway, why don't we look into this "spiritual desert" and see what's really going on there.

"In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair," the pope is quoted as saying. He blames this on greed and materialism and people turning away from faith. I would argue that this despair, this fear is spreading as a direct result of the faithful. And if not directly through religion than indirectly through secular altruism.

How can a person have self-esteem, if the more successful they are at their job (and therefore more successful monetarily)--How can they have self-esteem if the better they are, the more guilty they are supposed to feel? How come excellence and the demand of greater rewards for greater excellence is condemned as a sin? If someone is good, then, dammit, they deserve more. We NEED good teachers, we NEED good doctors, we NEED good engineers. But how do we expect to find people who can fulfill these needs? Should we expect them to appear magically and just perform these functions because that is their nature? Or do we have to assure that they have an equitable return on their efforts, so that they are self-motivated to perform these functions in society? Yet oddly enough, we turn around and condemn the people who are doing exactly what we are paying them to do, we condemn them for being TOO good.

Has anyone who has sat down and blindly condemned people for greed actually fully thought this through? As we progressively enact more laws, and the religious organizations gather more followers, and the secular humanists jump on the band wagon and berate rampant selfishness and the profit motive, has anyone noticed the corresponding erosion of the economy, rampant inflation and critical shortages of teachers, nurses, mathematicians, and engineers? Perhaps the faithful are hoping that they can merely pray and have God magically deliver the trained professionals who will keep the engine of global civilization running. Or perhaps they think that those who are capable of providing those services should do so simply for the sake of all those who can't, and should serve humbly, apologetically, and with head bowed in shame for the epic force of will and dedication of mind necessary to accomplish such feats of creation as has never been known to the leaders of the religious front.

What insights have popes or cardinals or imams given us as to the structure of the universe or the fate of humanity? None. Not a thing. All they have done is preached how near disaster we are, and how we should abandon reason, when reason is needed most. Can the pope build a railroad? Can he erect a building that will not fall? Can he conjure more food from the ground or purify our water? Can he answer the dual needs of protecting the environment while not stifling economic prosperity? Can he do any of these things? NO.

All the pope can do is pray, and berate and cajole and beg. And for what? Why is he doing all this needling? Is it for the good of humanity, as he would claim? Or is it so that he can take advantage of the poor, the ignorant, and the ashamed? He'll casually accept money from the poor, and claim that it is going to help those in need. As he wears gold crowns and lives in a gold bedecked palace. He'll gleefully accept the donations of the guilty rich who, ashamed of their own prowess, seek to assuage the moral conflict that rages inside them by hoping to buy their way into paradise. And the ignorant, the church will gratefully embrace the ignorant, because to embrace God requires no discipline of the mind, it requires no rigor of thought, no effort of will. All it takes is the effort of release, of everything.

If you release your mind, your body, your will, your judgment, your soul, your self-esteem, and your pride, then you will be beloved of god. If you destroy everything there is that makes you who you are, if you destroy anything and everything that makes life good and worth living, then you will be saved by god. God wants to destroy you. The religious want nothing less than the spiritual destruction of humanity. That is why the absolute sacrifice is the symbol of their faith. The absolute of death is sacrosanct in every major religion.

Death is the ideal. A noble death is a noble goal in every major religion. No religion abhors death and reveres life to the extent that they would say, "Live your life to the best of your ability and enjoy those fruits of that ability for they are the mark of your best nature." No, instead they claim that the very qualities that enable you to survive are the qualities that you must apologize for. They claim that the more able you are to live, the more guilty you should feel. That is because, in faith, we are all expected to want to die, but not being able to, should feel guilt for our life.

How perverted and despicable a promise to humankind! Such a miserable and filthy demand! To demand that all should die to fulfill the warped philosophy of the incompetent. To demand that the worthy apologize to the unworthy, that the able apologize endlessly to the inept.

Wouldn't it be a better world, if we all stood as equals--not in the sense of some guarantee--but in the sense of having equal rights to the fruits of our own labor? That we could stand shoulder to shoulder with giants and thank them for all that they have given us in the terms of an easier, safer, healthier life. We could thank them, and allow them the freedom to enjoy the fruits of that inestimable boon they have granted us. Without guilt. Without shame. Proud and radiant as human beings, all of us. Proud that we have done the work that we were best able to do, no matter what work that is. Proud of what we have attained, and created, and managed to preserve around us.

Would it matter if we all cannot be a Vanderbilt, or an Einstein, or even an Elvis? We do what we can. We build what we can. Does anyone have the right to begrudge another the results of their own work, whatever work that may be?

I say NO! I say ENOUGH! The time has come to stay this madness. Reject religion. Reject the secular altruists who preach freedom on one side, and berate the use of it on the other. Reject all those who would offer you a collar in exchange for your self-esteem. Do not be seduced by the prospect of harvesting the wealth of those you envy--for all that road promises is that you will be sacrificed to those who envy yours.

Defend your freedom. And do it not for the good of others. Do it not for the good of generations to come, or for the protracted and unseeable future. Do it for yourself! Do it for the now! Reject all forms of statism, nationalism, religion--all forms of spiritual and physical sacrifice. Claim your birthright, claim that which is yours, not because I say so, but because you earned it. Reject the claims of all those who savor the unearned, who would make you a slave and expect you to be grateful for it. Fight them, do what you can. Speak, blog, vote, protest. We cannot afford to surrender. To surrender is to embrace death.