Obama Government Declares The People Original Polluters

Yesterday, Obama's EPA declared CO2 a pollutant gas.  This allows Obama to regulate CO2 emissions under the draconian Clean Air Act.

But, take note that the People breathe out CO2 as an act of life.  Thus, the sovereign People who instituted government to protect their sovereign rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are now sanctioning a government of elitists who can look down their noses at the People for yet another reason.  No doubt these elitists already consider the People to be Original Sinners, who cling to their religion and guns and ignorance.  But now, they can also be perfectly politically correct in terming the People Original Polluters!

Yes, the elitists are also polluters, but in their minds, they have offsetting social value.  This is why it is perfectly fine for Al Gore to jet around the world giving speeches on man's destroying the world because he uses too much fossil fuel energy.  But Al Gore's use of jet fuel energy is OK.  He is doing mankind a service and has earned his CO2 emissions rights!  But have most of the rest of us?  Well, according to many environmentalists, there are already too many people.  They actually talk about the desirability of getting rid of some of us.  So now they can just make an assessment of our social value and weigh that against the fact that each of us is a polluter by virtue of breathing.  Is that social value great enough to justify the pollution costs of each of us breathing?

There is a very interesting synergy now with the health care reform plan.  The Democrats know very well that their plan is going to require massive rationing of health care.  They know there are not enough doctors to go around, so many of us will be forced to take on nurses and nurse practitioners as primary care givers.  They know there will never be enough tax money to cover all of the expenses.  Indeed, the incoming Medicare tax money will fall below the outgo expenses as early as 2013.  Cutbacks in care are a given.  Some will just have to be allowed to die because their care will be too expensive.  But, the health care legislation pussy foots around the issue of who will be given care and who will not.  They want this legislation passed, so they will have to smuggle in the means to cull the population of the weak and the non-contributors.  They will want to preserve the right-minded, no make that the left-minded, elitists, but let the mere People who cling to their guns and their religion go.  But how can they do this?  Don't most Americans still think every life or nearly every life has considerable value?

But just as the regulation of CO2 was never envisioned when the Clean Air Act was passed, its future use in solving the health care funding and rationing problem is not now envisioned.  Well, at least not until this outcast of the Ivy League educated elite realized that it is as of today politically correct to measure the harm of each person's breathing CO2 emissions against their social value.  If that social value, by the standards of the socialist elitists is not sufficiently high, then the medical care plug can be pulled.  They have a civic duty, a duty even to Mother Earth, to pull the plug on any nasty polluter who cannot pay for the right to emit CO2 with a valid permit granted by a government panel of experts using EPA provided pollution guidelines, Department of Labor guidelines for service value, and medical experts estimates of the cost of medical care.

If medical care is needed, it is denied if the harm of breathing out CO2 exceeds the social value.  Let us suppose the social value exceeds the harm of breathing.  Then guidelines have to establish how the harm of medical costs is added to the harm of breathing and that sum must not be higher than the person's social value as perceived by an "objective" government socialist minion elitist panel.  The government now has a great means to lower medical expenditures, since every penny of cost assigned to those who pollute by breathing is  pennies saved in medical costs.

Let us suppose the government says it cannot afford to spend more than $27,000 a year to extend a life by a year.  Lots of people will be very upset that Granny is only worth $27,000 per year to our government.  But, suppose the government tells us that Granny is worth $50,000 per year, but as a polluter by breathing, she costs us $23,000 a year.  Now, they can allow Granny to die and avoid spending $50,000 a year to keep her alive, while claiming she is worth $50,000 per year to them.  All those who care about Granny will say, "Oh yeah, I can understand why Granny's health care is rationed at $50,000 a year.  If she costs more than that, it is OK to pull the plug on Granny."  So now, the government never actually has to spend more than $27,000 a year to extend Granny's life by a year, but they can tell the stupid People that Granny is so important to them that she is worth $50,000 a year!

This is the ultimate win-win situation.  Look at all the special interests you can make happy and beholden to you, the politician:

• The caring people who think everyone must have medical insurance coverage.
• The labor unions controlling the Dept. of Labor who assess everyone's social value.  People will be crazy to volunteer for labor union sanctioned projects to build up their social value quotient.
  
• Hack doctors who want a government position free from medical malpractice suits.
• Those who want to cull the population of excessive numbers of people in the name of the environment and climate tuning.
• The taxpayers who cannot otherwise afford government-run health care.
• All those who think Granny is worth $50,000 a year, but would be offended to hear that she was really only worth $27,000 a year.

So Obama can now not only impress the socialist leaders of other countries at Copenhagen by telling them that he had the EPA declare CO2 a pollutant, but he can also tell them he feels so strongly about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and the environment that he is also committing to sacrificing, say, 1,000,000 additional Grannies a year.  Then he can pose solemnly and ask, "How many of your Grannies will each of your countries contribute to the cause of fighting AGW a year?"

Yes, it is now clear that Grannycide is the only way to go if you are environmentally conscious!  Where is your commitment?

Institute for Justice to Fight for Bone Marrow Donor Compensation

The 1984 National Organ Transplant Act makes it illegal to compensate people for donating their bone marrow.  Donating bone marrow is nothing like donating a kidney, part of a liver, or a lung.  It no longer even involves the insertion of a long needle into the pelvic bone.  Nowadays, a donor is given a drug to stimulate blood stem cell production and the cells are collected from the blood using the same equipment used to collect blood plasma, for which donors can be paid.

Because marrow cells produce white blood cells and these cells attack foreign tissues and cells, it is particularly important to get a very close match between bone marrow donors and recipients.  For white people awaiting bone morrow, there is a 75% likelihood for finding a match.  However, for minority members, the probability of finding a match falls to 25%!  Apparently, the restriction on bone marrow donation compensation, which would help address the problem of such limited matches, was added to the National Organ Transplant Act at the last moment and no one really considered what they were doing.  How typical for Congress.  Apparently they rushed proposed legislation to a vote in 1984, perhaps without reading it, much as they do now without understanding its consequences!

The Institute for Justice is now working on a legal case to make it possible to pay bone marrow donors so that the chances of finding bone marrow matches will increase.  This could save the lives of thousands of cancer patients.  The Institute for Justice has done great work already in protecting individuals and small businesses from eminent domain abuse and ridiculous business licensing and regulations.  It is a non-profit organization well worth supporting.

Some Marijuana Raids Ending

The Justice Department under Obama has made a good policy change. They have decided to no longer raid people and establishments who are not in violation of state law. So, if the laws of a state, as is true for quite a few states, allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes, medical dispensaries operating within state law will no longer be raided. This is a wise and rational policy. Such matters are better left to state law. It is to be hoped that now that the Feds are not interferring in such matters, more states will consider passing laws to allow a more humane and rational policy with respect to the medical uses of marijuana. Indeed, it is time for states to generally get rid of laws against marijuana, since whatever problems it has, they are not worse than those of liquor and tobacco.

Richard Rahn: Manslaughter by Politicians

Richard Rahn published an article called "Manslaughter by Politicians" in the Washington Times on 4 June 2008 which is a good read. Commonly, politicians find reasons to pass many thousands of pages of new legislation every year that affect our ability to perform work and to produce goods and services. The greater part of this legislation imposes great costs, which few people stop to consider. They simply accept whatever intended purpose for the legislation the politician offers up as being the only important result of the legislation. If it seems it might be nice to reduce the amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere by the human use of energy, then why bother to calculate the cost of using less energy, of developing and using new forms of energy which emit less CO2, or figuring out what human activities will have to be given up to pursue the goal of reducing CO2 emissions. The same is true with respect to many other things that seem good to people, such as OSHA requirements for workplace safety. When do we ever calculate the actual cost of nice sounding legislation against the expected benefit of that legislation? Almost never, and when we do, the calculation is simple-minded and biased toward proving that the legislation was necessary, since it is usually the government that is funding the research study.

Economics is the study of the use of limited resources and all resources are limited and finite, especially perhaps that of human life hours. We are all constantly faced with the decision to do this or to do that. Often, we cannot do both and if we can, we still often have to decide which action we will take first. So, if we are spending more of our money to buy gasoline because the government will not allow oil and gas companies to drill for oil in the United States, then we will have less money to spend on our medical needs. If we must pay more for food because the government is requiring the use of a large fraction of all US corn to make ethanol for gasoline fuel mixtures and driving up the costs of food production with crop subsidies, then again we will be able to spend less on medical care. Since worldwide food prices have doubled in the last year, many poor people around the world are suffering increased malnutrition, which leads to shortened lifespans. There are reasons why the average life expectancy is highly correlated with the per capita income of a society and why income growth is correlated with economic freedom.

Rahn cites a study by Frank Lichtenberg of the National Bureau for Economic Research that found that the medical expenditure needed to gain one life year in the US is about $11,000 and the pharmaceutical R&D expenditure needed to gain one life year is $1354. Consequently, when the politicians proposed allowing Americans to buy their prescription drugs in Canada, where a national health system puts pressure on pharmaceutical companies to sell their drugs at prices below those sufficient to fund the development of new drugs, the necessary expenditure to buy one year of life through pharmaceutical developments becomes impossible. So, does it make sense to save some money now on drug purchases at the expense of not further extending American lives in the future? Few people ask and think about this question, yet it is a central question.

When politicians fail to ask such questions and to weigh them rationally, they are committing manslaughter. When dealing with manslaughter, we have a serious responsibility to name the crime, even if it does not seem to be the nice thing to do in a non-confrontational society. But, it is better to force a confrontation and examine the consequences of the actions we force upon others carefully, then to unthinkingly bury the bodies as they pile up.