The Economist: Should political parties let just anyone run for president?

In an article deploring the fact that there are 25 candidates for the Democratic nomination to run for the presidency of the United States of America, The Economist wants American political party establishments to play a much bigger role in choosing a small number of candidates who will be allowed to run in party primaries.

They even advise increasing the number of superdelegates, who played a big role in selecting Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party nominee for President in the 2016 election.  Superdelegates are not required to vote in accordance with the primary vote outcome in their states and they are usually chosen from the ranks of the Deep Party Apparatchiks.  This is a most undemocratic method for choosing a party nominee for President or any other elected office, but democracy is another of many words robbed of meaning by those elitists who hunger for power and have long grown accustomed to exercising it without challenge.  There was a backlash among Democrat voters to the role of superdelegates in the Clinton nomination that led to a cutback in the present power of superdelegates in the party.  An alternative suggested in the article is having a convention to choose a small number of candidates to put before the primary voters.  Still another is to have the party's Congress members put out a recommended slate of candidates, rather as the teachers unions do in public school board elections.

Why does The Economist think that many candidates are a problem?  Because:

"the system has thrown up too many candidates for voters to evaluate.  It rewards name recognition and social-media prowess, and asks activists to make decisions about people about whom they know little."

These are valid concerns.  However, there are so many loony birds among the candidates in this case that it is really easy to winnow out almost all of the candidates.  No, I can make a much stronger statement than that.  It is really easy to eliminate all of the Democrat candidates from any extensive evaluation because they are all nuts, power-hungry, and suffer from a huge delusion that they have the intellectual power to evaluate the needs of all Americans in their lives and to make decisions about people whom they know little.

If the people of the United States are unable to properly evaluate 25 candidates for the presidency, then how can one entertain a faith that any one of those candidates even has the capability of evaluating the real needs of 329 million individual Americans?  How can anyone maintain the delusion that any candidate can know enough about 329 million Americans to then micromanage their lives as the federal government already largely tries to do and the Democrat Party is united in wanting to do on a much grander scale?

We have a federal government that is four times the size it ought to be.  It is constantly violating the many and broad rights of the individual to life and self-ownership, liberty, to earn a living, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  It is constantly deciding who will be given a benefit and who will be deprived under force in order that the politicians can steal what they need to give that benefit.  Republicans have no business exercising these powers and Democrats have even less business doing so because they are even more blind to their unrealistic assumptions about their mental capabilities.

The Economist Provides the Solution to Clean Energy's Dirty Secret

The 25 February - 3 March 2017 issue of the Economist has a cover story entitled "Clean energy's dirty secret."  There is a lead off editorial to the issue that states that "the renewables revolution is wrecking the world's electricity markets."  This is because clean energy generation by wind and solar is erratic and requires expensive standby generation capacity from fossil fuels.

The solution, at least in large part, that the Economist suggests is to use meter technology, batteries, and frequent updates on the rapidly fluctuating cost of energy as wind and solar output fluctuates from near zero to some part of their maximum electric power output to force the demand for electricity to fluctuate as rapidly as does its generation by erratic and unreliable wind and solar power generators.

So the rich can ignore the hourly changes in the cost of their electricity, while those less well-off watch the meter informing them of the rapid changes in the cost of electricity to figure out whether they can afford to cook dinner, watch television, use their computer, use a power tool, vacuum, or use their air conditioner.  So, not only are most people to pay more for their energy use due to the phantom of hysterical catastrophic man-made global warming, but many are to be forced to watch the electricity cost meter extremely diligently and to tailor their lives to its whimsical machinations.

Or we could just use our plentiful fossil fuels that also feed our plants with the carbon dioxide they require and make them very much more healthy.  And we can do this with absolutely negligible effects on the temperature on the surface of the Earth.  That sure would give us a better lifestyle and leave us with money and time to create important improvements in human security and happiness. This is much more sensible than having to tell Johnny that he has to stop reading or doing his homework now and turn the lights off because the wind generators cannot move due to too little or too much wind.

Where do these Progressive Elitists get this mindset that it is the height of morality to mess up the lives of others, especially those not very well off, with their many fanciful controls?  How can they be so malevolent?  When they say they are not malevolent but merely concerned about some bad outcome due to carbon dioxide emissions as a precautionary measure, are they not obliged to have carefully and rationally examined the relevant science on that issue before they take actions that surely will hurt many people?  Isn't that rational examination of the science a necessary test of anyone's benevolence and the proper exercise of the precautionary principle?  First do no harm, unless it is absolutely and  irrefutably necessary.

Global Warming Alarmism Again Pushed in The Economist

The most recent issue of the Economist, 27 November - 3 December 2010, is once again pushing the catastrophic man-made global warming thesis as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is starting in Cancun, Mexico today.  The cover, the first commentary, and a 4-page article push the global warming agenda, but with some indications that they actually do now realize that the understanding of the issues required to make useful long-term climate projections is deficient.  Of course, those concessions to the truth were hidden well into the main long article after the commentary and the initial article have taken great pains to raise the alarm due to man's CO2 emissions causing drastically rising temperatures, rising oceans, floods and droughts, human and species migrations and deaths, crop failures, and the spread of diseases.

In fact, adding CO2 to the atmosphere has no such consequences.  As I have shown in my article, Do IR-Absorbing Gases Warm or Cool the Earth's Surface?, published in the book Slaying the Sky Dragon - Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory, adding CO2 and methane to the atmosphere actually cools the surface of the Earth during the daylight hours and that cooling exceeds any possible warming during sunlight-deficient times of the day.  CO2 and similar greenhouse gases moderate the Earth's temperature variations between day and night, which is generally not a hardship creating effect.  This moderation of the daily temperature range is observed and is among the many failures of the CO2 warming computer models.

Despite this reality, The Economist lead commentary hysterically claims that:

Even if the currently moderate pace of emissions reduction steps up, the likelihood is that the Earth will be at least 3C warmer at the end of this century than it was at the start of the industrial revolution; less warming is possible, but so is more, and quicker.   Heatwaves that now set records will become commonplace.  Ecosystems will find themselves subject to climates far removed from those they evolved in, endangering many species.  Rain will fall harder in the places where it falls today, increasing flooding; but in places already prone to drought things will by and large get drier, sometimes to the point of desertification.  Ice will vanish from Arctic summers and some mountaintops, permafrost will become impermanent, sea levels will keep rising.

Now logically the first sentence in The Economist statement is true.  It is actually a statement with no content, except its clear intent to frighten.  Yes, the temperature may possibly go up by a few degrees, or maybe it will not.  What is more, the start of the Industrial Revolution was also essentially the end of the Little Ice Age, a time which was certainly cooler than other warmer periods such as the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, and the Minoan-Mycenaean Warm Period.  In any period of about 150 years, heatwaves will set records, even in an Ice Age.  Species that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and even tens of millions years are not so fragile as to actually disappear due to a temperature increase much smaller than that since the last Ice Age.  Not surprisingly, ice coverage is down and sea levels are up since the end of the Little Ice Age.  Arctic ice melts during the warmest part of the summer day, which is when increased atmospheric CO2 absorbs more incoming solar radiation in the atmosphere well above the sea surface and therefore cools the arctic ice surface.  This Economist diatribe is all sound and fury.

The article itself talks about a 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and a 0.7C temperature increase in the last century.  It does not note that CO2 atmospheric concentrations generally do increase whenever the oceans warm since they evolve large amounts of CO2 then.  It notes that the International Energy Agency (IEA) says our use of fossil fuels will cause a temperature increase of 3.5C by 2100.  It notes that the IEA says the reduction in carbon per unit of GDP was 1.4% in the last decade, but if the temperature is not to rise more than 2C, it will have to decline at a rate of 2.8% this decade and from 2020 to 2035 it will have to decline by 5.5%.  It is finally dawning on many who think that greenhouse gas emissions are a big problem that their theory requires declines so severe that they are very unlikely to happen.  The article then completes a picture of direful consequences, before another interesting admission pops up:

It is tempting to imagine that adaptation decisions might wait for models that can provide greater certainty about what might happen where.  This is a forlorn hope.  Faster computers and new modelling techniques might well provide more details and finer distinctions.  But they will not necessarily be more accurate, or capable of being shown to be so: if different models become more precise and as a result their disagreements grow rather than shrink, which are you going to trust?  Decisions about adaptation will be made in conditions of pervasive uncertainty.  So the trick will be to find ways of adapting to many possible future climates, not to tailor expectations to one future in particular.

This actually admits that the over 20 climate models they have referred to earlier do not have a very useful predictive capability.  In fact, it has been observed, consistent with CO2 causing daylight cooling and night warming, that the daily temperature range is contracting and these computer models based on CO2 causing net warming do not yield that as a result!  They have the basic physics wrong and they have no predictive capability,  In fact, CO2 concentrations have continued to rise in the last 12 years, but the temperature has not continued to rise.  Yes, the highly tampered with ground surface temperature record shows the temperatures staying about constant, but the ocean temperature record, which covers much more of the Earth, is less tampered with, and is not affected by the urban heat island effect is now showing some cooling.

The article then discusses how man can adapt to the climate changes they are predicting.  It turns out that the adaptations they suggest do not seem so tough.  They certainly seem a lot easier than cutting way back on fossil fuel use.  In fact, they advocate the desirability of becoming richer, not poorer, so we will have more adaptability options.  What is more, there is little need to act before any climate problems actually begin to appear.  Interesting.  That is exactly what man has always done.  He has adapted to the many natural climate changes he has been faced with over hundreds of thousands of years and during the last 2,500 years which are pretty much in the historical record.

Schumpeter on College Problems

Schumpeter is a regular commentary in The Economist.  In the 4 - 10 September issue, Schumpeter takes up the status of the decline of colleges with many of the same concerns addressed in my post of a few days ago, The Soon-to-Burst Education Bubble.  He adds some interesting facts, which we will take note of here.

He notes that as the world was once in awe of GM, it remains in awe of U.S. universities.  The Shanghai Ranking Consultancy evaluates universities worldwide and claims 17 of the top 20 universities are in the U.S.  Of the top 50 universities, 35 are in the U.S.  70% of the living Nobel laureates in science and economics are teaching in U.S. universities.  A disproportionate number of academic journal article citations are those of American academics.  Despite this, there are signs of major problems.

These problems are seen in these facts:

• While median U.S. household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in the last 40 years, in-state costs to attend a state college have increased 15 times and the out-of-state costs have increased 24 times.  Private college costs are up by a factor greater than 13.
• An Ivy League college costs $38,000 a year, excluding room and board.
• Only 40% of students graduate in 4 years or less.
• A professor's reputation is based on his research, not his teaching ability.  They are said to give students light workloads and inflated grades in a trade in which students are supposed to leave the professors alone.
• Senior professors at Ivy League schools get sabbaticals every third year now, where it used to be every seventh year.  Of the 48 history professors at Harvard this year, 20 are on sabbatical!
• The patents and licenses resulting from federal R&D funding have been decreasing in numbers for several years.  One reason is that legislators are directing funding largess away from centers of excellence.
• A study of 198 top U.S. universities shows administrative spending is greatly outstripping spending on the teaching faculty.  This problem is even worse in elite private colleges than it is in state colleges.  Administrative spending per student at Harvard is up by 300%.  Almost half of Arizona State University employees are administrative staff.  College presidents are living regally.
• Universities are ranked by the research prestige of their faculty, not by the quality of their teaching.  They are also generally subject to little scrutiny on costs.  In fact, some universities such as George Washington University compete by offering lavish facilities at a high cost.

Schumpter concludes:

This luxury model is unlikely to survive what is turning into a prolonged economic downturn. Parents are much less willing to take on debt than they were and much more willing to look abroad for better deals.  The internet also poses a growing threat to what Bill Gates calls "place-based colleges".  Online, you can listen to the world's best lecturers for next to nothing.

 America's universities lost their way badly in the era of easy money. If they do not find it again, they may go the way of GM.

The education bubble is due to a combination of government interference and self-indulgence at the universities.  The government with subsidized and guaranteed student loans and loans to student's parents have made it easy for the universities to pass on cost increases, which have gone up even more than medical costs.  Government R&D research grants have overly distracted faculty from teaching.  Administrators at universities have taxed those government research funds with higher and higher overhead charges over the years, which has allowed them to live higher on the hog.   This has decreased the fraction of the funds actually being used for research, so the efficiency of research has fallen.  Finally, many politically correct aims and government mandates such as affirmative action, diversity, social activism programs, and Title IX athletics requirements have all driven up university costs, particularly administrative costs.

The universities have been hotbeds of socialism and Progressivism.  As such, they require an environment from which reality is excluded.  The longer reality has been denied access to the universities, the more ravenous it has become.  Reality will not wait for these complacent and otherworldly universities to open their doors to it.  It will simply cave-in the walls and stomp through those hallowed halls all too soon.

The Real Party of NO!!! or really of HELL NO!!!!

The Economist endorsed Obama prior to the election.  The most recent issue of The Economist, of 12 - 18 June 2010, has a cover article called The risks of "Hell, no!" and an editorial called What's wrong with America's right - Too much anger and too few ideas.  America needs a better alternative to Barack Obama.  The editorial goes on to say this:  "Many of America's most prominent business leaders are privately as disappointed by the right as they are by the statist Obama."  The editorial bemoans the fact that there is a civil war going on in the Republican party and the wrong side is generally winning.  It makes it clear that the editors detest the Tea Party movement and its affect upon the Republican party.  They are cheering for the Republican moderates, those same establishment types who just want a slower, but steady movement toward socialism, rather than the abrupt revolt and transformation of Obama and his socialist hordes.

The main article complains that not a single House Republican voted for the stimulus package in January 2009.  This was apparently a bad thing, even though it is now clear that the stimulus package was in fact just the left's wish list of new government programs designed to undermine the private sector, not to stimulate it.  It is clear that the stimulus bill discouraged the private sector from hiring.  The paltry few jobs saved or added due to that bill were almost all government jobs.  Late in the article it notes that: "Massive stimulus spending has barely dented the jobless numbers and has pushed the deficit to vertiginous heights."  One wonders where they found a dent at all.

The article complains that not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted in favor of health reform.  Apparently, the assumption is that ObamaCare, despised by most Americans, should have been supported by the opposition party, irrespective of its myriad problems, including its unconstitutionality and the fact that it did not actually even spell out a plan, having delegated much of that task to 137 executive branch departments and panels.

The article bemoans the fact that Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, says the Republican opposition is not just No, but Hell No!  It complains:

Even mainstream Republican politicians now portray themselves as the thin red line defending America's constitution, liberties and moral values from an arrogant president who is determined to appease America's enemies, drown future generations in debt and turn God's own country over to a godless socialism.

Well, yes, and this is a good thing that they have finally been forced to actually oppose socialism and to actually defend the Constitution, as those who have been in federal office or in the military previously have sworn to do.

Basically, the assumption of The Economist is, just as it is with American socialists, that doing something is a matter of giving the government a new power and having it decide what values will be allowed to be pursued and what the rules for pursuing them will be.  This is another example of the Stolen Concept.  The assumption is that nothing is being done if the government is not doing it.  The fact is that when the government takes on new powers and mandates certain actions while using force to deny other actions, it denies many more actions and choices than it enables.  Government itself is the primary agent of NO!!!!! 

When an American demands, angrily or not, that the government be legitimate and fulfill its constitutionally limited role, this is not metaphysically a fundamental statement of NO!!!  Instead, it is metaphysically and basically a statement that:

• We the People need values in order to live our own individual lives.
• We the People are capable of rationally choosing our own values.
• We the People, having freedom of conscience and the right to think for ourselves, have the right and the responsibility to choose our own values.
• We the People, each and everyone of us, has an individual character and have individual values and needs, which we assert the equal right to explore, develop, exercise, and pursue for our individual happiness.
• The individual American asserts the positive declaration that he will manage his own life.
• The individual American will cooperate with others of his own choosing in a free market of ideas, goods, services, and relationships to pursue his values for the sake of his own happiness.

Now let's examine how this positive assertion of life-living individual effort is transformed by the socialist (Democrat, Progressive, Liberal, Fascist, or Communist).   We find them making these very negative statements with strong limits on individual choice and actions.  We find that the socialist, or even The Economists moderate, is the agent of NO!!!!, or even of Hell, NO!!!!  The equivalent statements are:

• A society needs some values so that the basic needs of many can be achieved, though many of the needs of many of the people will be ignored as unimportant.
• The people are mostly ignorant and evil, so an elite of college-educated and properly indoctrinated Progressive people will determine which values the government will indoctrinate the masses in and how that government will discourage any other values the ignorant and stubborn masses may choose.
• Only society has rights and those rights are determined by the government.  Individuals are not sovereign and should not try to think for themselves, but should instead accept the indoctrinated values of the state.
• What is all this individual stuff and nonsense?  You are a Social Security number and a member of various groups.  The group of your race, the group of your gender, and the group of your income define you fully and adequately.  The state will, based on these few parameters, decide what the course of your life will be.
• The government will micromanage your life with rules too complex for you to understand, but much too simple to deal with your individual natures.
• The government will severely limit the freedom of the individual to associate with others and to trade with others in a free market of ideas, goods, services, and relationships.

The real party of NO!!!! or really of HELL NO!!!! is the party that will not allow individuals the choice of their own values, which will not allow them to explore, develop, and exercise their individual natures, which will not allow them to pursue the many rich variations of their values in free associations with others, and will not allow them the hope of individual happiness.

In life, the assertion of "YES, I can and will" requires that we act to reign in the desire of governments and our representatives in the government to expand its powers and to hold it back within its constitutionally few enumerated powers.  Thus, politically, the People must be constantly saying "NO, HELL NO!!!!!" to those many who wish to expand government and rule the People more firmly and with many more constraints.  But more fundamentally, and more metaphysically, we say that NO to government in order to preserve our individual control of our choice of values and of the many actions we will need to take to pursue those values and our individual happiness.  Living human life as self-directed individuals, is a massive assertion of YES, we are capable of living our own lives and it is our own responsibility to choose our individual values and the principles upon which we will manage our own lives.  We must throw off the excessive limits of big government in order to assert the value of our individual lives in all the richness and complexity of our choices and actions in free associations with other highly individuated people.

We must never tire of asserting that we are committed to that most fundamentally and metaphysically important recognition of the critical role and the sovereignty of the individual human being in all political discussion and decision making.  Each individual has the equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and socialism cannot recognize the nature of the individual, his importance, or his equal rights.  Socialism is necessarily the Party of NO because it denies individuality, the values of the individual, individual rights to thought and actions, and the importance of individual happiness.

The Economist on American Health Care

Mining the 7 - 13 March issue of center-left or center-socialist The Economist further, it discusses the American health care system and the attempts of the Obama administration to degrade it with still more socialism. Of course, The Economist does not call it degradation. After discussing the politics of Tom Daschle's tax problems and how that kept him from becoming the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the appointment of Kathleen Sibelius to that position instead, they slam our health care system in the usual ways.

The Economist says we spend $2.2 trillion per year on health care and get "mediocre results." They say Americans die nearly two years earlier than west Europeans. They say that 46 million Americans lack health insurance. They add that ever-rising medical costs could break the budget. OK, let us examine these claims.

First, we do spend much more money on medical research, development, and care than do other countries. Some of this is wasted money due to Medicare and Medicaid and their harmful effects, which are of the nature of the added harmful effects which will come from further government intervention in the health care system. The Economist article mentions the fact that a typical hospital has a profit margin of 48% on each privately insured patient and loses 44% on each patient using Medicaid. When a hospital is losing money on a patient covered by Medicaid or Medicare, their tendency is to respond with charges for items and services which are not used or needed in order to partially compensate for the loss. This is wasteful and increases the cost of Medicare to the taxpayers and for healthcare. This also sets up habits, which are then responsible for increased costs assigned to privately insured patients also. The whole system becomes more wasteful and it starts with the central fact that the Medicare or Medicaid patient has too little incentive to care about the cost of his medical care and the medical care givers are unhappy with being forced to work without fair compensation.

Another important cost is the very high liability of American hospitals and doctors since they are not protected by a government umbrella against being sued as a nationalized medical system would be. This lack of protection does hold the medical profession to a higher degree of responsibility, but of course it comes with high costs. Among them, doctors must be overcautious in following some standard procedures even when they know they may not be best for a given patient and they must over-prescribe medical tests and some operations.

Still another factor is that we do a very disproportionate fraction of the world's medical research and development. This is very expensive. But, it is also an important factor in the growing life span of people around the world, who even in the socialized medicine environments of western Europe and elsewhere derive benefits from our commitment to medical R&D.

The nationalized medical systems of western Europe save money by rationing medical care and by making it slow rather than responsive. They make operations which are optional, but life-enhancing in the eyes of those who want them, unavailable. They also have a greater preferrence for allowing an older person to die rather than perform an expensive operation which may extend their life only a relatively short time. Finally, they are commonly also slower to make use of the latest medical procedures and to acquire new technology when it is still in its expensive stage. The costs of most sophisticated medical equipment comes down fairly rapidly in time, so you save money by waiting until it costs less. Meanwhile, some people die. A system that makes such choices can save money, but there is a very real expense in quality of life associated with this savings.

Finally, America is richer than western Europe on average. When you are richer, you are willing, able, and happy to spend more on your health and on medical care.

But The Economist's second point seems to argue against all I have said above to justify our greater medical expense. The fact that we have a nearly two year shorter life expectancy than western Europeans seems significant. It seems to suggest that the socialist health care systems of western Europe are doing a better job of giving people longer lives at less expense. Let us examine this.

The populations of western Europe are more homogeneous than is that of the U.S. There are growing numbers of Muslims from North Africa, but the European population of Native Americans and Black Africans is much lower than in the United States. There is a genetic component to life expectancy and there are also behavioral components. These are not likely in many cases to be changed by a socialized health care system. For instance, black African American males have an average lifespan which is 6.2 years shorter than that of white men and 8.3 years shorter than the national average. Native Americans average even shorter lifespans than African Americans.

African Americans have a 70% increased likelihood for diabetes. They are about 80% likely to be salt sensitive, while about half of the world population is, and this makes them more prone to high blood pressure. The high incidence of diabetes and salt sensitivity make them more likely to die from heart disease and they do at a 30% higher rate than whites. African American men are most likely to die from homicide, followed by unintentional injuries, between the ages of 15 and 34. African Americans are more likely to be obese and they are the only group with sickle cell anemia and the health problems related to that. Black Americans also make unhealthy eating choices more frequently and make sexual choices which cause them to acquire sexually transmitted diseases in higher rates by far than other groups of the population. So, the net shorter American lifespan is substantially due to genetic and subculture differences which are not a function of the health care system.

More accurately, the number of Americans reported without health insurance was 46.9 million earlier, but it is now reported to be 45.7 million. Obama and the Democrats are still generally using the outdated number to say that the number of uninsured Americans is 47 million. More important, the number of uninsured is really an estimate of all people living in the United States and includes millions of illegal immigrants who are Americans in the sense that they mostly come from North or South America. But it also includes other illegal immigrants from other parts of the world. Furthermore many of the uninsured can afford insurance, but choose not to have it. Some because they are young and healthy. Some because they are wealthy enough to be self-insured.

Indeed, if you have enough income and fairly liquid assets, it is perfectly rational not to have health insurance, which usually has an upper limit of payments and which certainly has a profit margin built into the cost of the insurance. About 2.87% of American households have an income of $200,000 a year or more. If a household has had this level of income for a few years, it may have built up a good nest egg of investments and savings. These about 2.9 million households have an average of 3 people in the household, so there are about 8.7 million Americans who might very reasonably choose to be self-insured. In some cases, some of these households might choose to in effect insure other family members not living in the household as well. So it is very reasonable to believe that health insurance is very optional for as many as 10,000,000 Americans. Because Americans are relatively wealthy, there is a higher percentage of Americans who would choose not to have health insurance than would be the case in most of the world, including western Europe.

Finally, The Economist is worried about our rising medical costs. So am I, but I am sure that they will only continue to rise even more with more government intervention, or if they do not, it will be due to drastic, anti-individual modes of government forced rationing of health care. Our current rising costs are a function of both wasteful current government meddling through Medicare, Medicaid, and the courts and many increased options for our health care offered by new technology and procedural advances. The latter cause is a good one. Another expense increaser is the problem that the rest of the world is more and more opting out of their responsibilities for the development and the costs of new procedures and drugs. America is subsidizing the rest of the world's healthcare in a big way. The only way we can prevent this is to shoot ourselves in the foot.

The article notes that Obama has signed an expansion of the state health insurance for children. He has set aside more than $630 billion over ten years as a "down-payment" towards making health care affordable for everyone, clearly at added expense to many others. And what does it really mean to say he has set this money aside, when he has no such money, but only huge deficits? He also wants to force all parents to buy health insurance for their children. He would not allow insurers to reject covering people for new insurance who have pre-existing health problems, which will raise medical insurance for the healthy. He will allow everyone to buy into the government health plan if they wish. Obama will curb costs by cutting out waste (a precedent breaking new government ability unique to Obama government) and he will encourage healthy living. He will computerize medical records and use this to determine what procedures have the most bang for the buck, so he can ration health care according to his evaluation of what bang is enough for the buck. He will increase taxes further on liquor, cigarettes, and sugary drinks. Restaurants may be forced to serve smaller portions. Companies will be forced to provide gyms for their employees to use and presumably force them to actually use those facilities. What an American concept!

Where is the sovereignty of the individual to be perceived in these plans? Each of our lives is to be micromanaged by our all-knowing government. How delightful. We will all have to live almost 2 years longer no matter how little some of us might like the rules. If only those genetic factors and those lifestyle choices predominantly found in some ethnic groups do not prove too resistant to government rules and mandates, we should have a successful future as western European socialist mimics.