The Patient Subjugation and Unaffordable Care Act and Progressive Elitism

As the time nears when Americans are once again being forced to sign-up for government approved health insurance plans, a string of pithy quotes by Jonathan Gruber, a chief contributor to the creation of the near-secret PPACA bill, baldly state that stupid Americans were easily manipulated into subjugating themselves to this law.  In fact most Americans have always opposed this law and very many were always angry that the Congress did not construct a bill of such a critical nature with due deliberation and discussion.  It did not even read the bill, as famously noted by Nancy Pelosi with her statement that the bill had to be passed so that it might be read!  It is true that Americans had been duped into providing the Democrat Socialist Party the presidency, a super majority in the Senate, and a majority in the House of Representatives.

All one had to know about the bill to oppose it was that individuals were no longer to be free to choose what medical care would be covered in their health insurance plans.  With some thought, some even realized that the basis for a government claim for the authority to dictate how an individual would maintain his mind and body, was a highly collectivist claim that government had a right of ownership in every individual's mind and body.  This is an appalling claim to anyone who understands and values the equal, sovereign right of every individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own mind, body, and labor, and to the pursuit of one's own happiness.  The government's denial of individual self-ownership is chilling and brutal.  This denial was a chief aim of the many Progressive Elitists in leadership positions in the Democrat Party, in academia, and in much of the media.

In the cause of achieving this universal claim of collective ownership of every individual's mind and body, the Progressive Elitists are highly united.  They often agree that lying, misdirection, bribery, and fraudulent voting are all very acceptable means to achieve the end of collectivism which they value above all else.

Progressive Elitists often state that everyone is morally obliged to sacrifice their own interest for, as they like to say, "the least among us."  This is not only a moral claim in their minds, but it is a license for the use of government force to make everyone give up their own interest in favor of someone the Progressive Elitist believes to be in need, either materially or mentally.  This claim of subjugation to the needs of "the least among us" has become more and more common on the part of Progressive Elitists.

There is a tradition and still a strong following among Progressive Elitists for the notion that government is the moral enforcer of the so-called pragmatist claim that the greatest good for the greatest number defines morality.  When real moral principles are deemed too hard to formulate, to defend, and to live by, such a weak nostrum is about all a society can fall back on, excepting religion and the commonly related divine right of Kings and their aristocratic and ecclesiastic enablers.  To be sure, the American Progressive Elitist does view the President as a King-like figure and themselves as the aristocratic and ecclesiastic enablers.

They also claim to be proponents of democracy, though that claim is modulated by their constant belief that most Americans are stupid, as was so clearly revealed in the Jonathan Gruber and Nancy Pelosi comments.  This was earlier revealed in Obama's claim that most Americans cling foolishly to their guns and religion.  That he also sees himself as a king is very apparent in his saying as President he can do anything he wants and in his continuing violations of the Rule of Law.

Progressive Elitists are in a bind given that they purport to support democracy, yet they think the People are mostly incapable of choosing their own values, managing their own lives, and of voting correctly as envisioned by the Progressive Elitists.  They must find a way to manipulate the unwashed masses to vote in a manner that will allow the Progressive Elitists to actually dominate and control the government.  Because the Progressive Elitist is sure that she knows what is best for the masses, deception through any combination of lies and misdirections is justified.  We have seen this in spades with the PSUCA (see title) or the Patient SuckA.

How do the Progressive Elitists enlist support from the People in democratic elections?  Usually it is by claiming that they are for all the People except the Rich or that they are the champions of the Middle Class.  In this way they are hoping to gain the support of the majority and they will commonly promise this majority enough special favors to try to win them to their cause.

Among their many deceptions is the idea that it is possible to achieve the greater good of the greater number through laws that affect many of our moral choices.  Perhaps it is the in-supportability of this idea that has actually pushed more and more Progressive Elitists toward the claim that government is obliged to primarily pursue the interests of "the least among us," though this claim is usually made to fellow highly educated people they expect to be fellow elitists.  The practical problem of achieving political power is complicated if the Progressive Elitists actually ask the Middle Class to give up its own interests.  This is not an easy sell.

Why is this notion of the greatest good for the greatest number unachievable?  If force is to be used to transfer some value from some to others and yet a majority has to be enlisted to support that use of force by the government, then it is not easy to have a big enough pool of victims from whom enough can be extracted to provide a noticeable benefit to the majority except when the majority is not much greater than the victimized minority.  So, on one issue the beneficiaries might be 60%, on another 55%, and on another they may be 80%.  If the beneficiaries are randomly chosen, the chance any one individual was benefited on all three issues is only 0.264.

If these same issues were left to the private sector, most people might very easily arrange their affairs to benefit on each of the three issues or at least not to be hurt on any of them.  Surely on all of the issues before our Big Government now, a transfer to the private sector would commonly allow individuals to achieve 70 to 90% of their values.  In the private sector one has the added critical advantage that force cannot be used to make you enter into a trade that you do not think is in your own best interest.  In the government sector a victim is required and force must be threatened to make the victim yield his time, his income, or his wealth up to the Progressive Elitist re-distributor.

Now to be sure, the Progressive Elitist program does not aim to distribute the benefits randomly.  Some people are supposed to be the ones who are commonly to bear the hurt, in theory.  In practice, Big Government is little more controlled by the Progressive Elitists avowed agenda than it is a true expression of the democratic will of the majority of the People.  As I have noted over and over, Big Government is so vast and complex that the People do not understand what is going on and they commonly feel powerless to control it.  Even few, if any, Progressive Elitists can understand and follow the full scope of government actions.  This was richly illustrated in their contingent of full-time politicians voting for the PSUCA without reading it and later having to admit that they knew little about it.

Progressive Elitists who are not actually corrupt are also overcome by those who are corrupt and a multitude of special interests who fill the power vacuum to manipulate some government policies of particular interest to themselves.  Big Government becomes mostly a government not of and for the People, but one of and for the Special Interests.  Contrary to the claims of the Progressive Elitists, this is not correctable by electing or appointing better Progressive Elitist managers.  Indeed, the Progressive Elitists who see themselves as managing government actually have to turn to Special Interests for help in writing the laws which control actions in the private sector they do not themselves understand.  This happens all the time.  Some Special Interests are happy to do this for them so that they can design a law that gives them special favors or at least costs smaller companies, their future competitors, more to abide by than it costs them.  Complex laws and regulations tend to suppress smaller, hungrier competitors very well.

ObamaCare certainly has rewarded many special interests while depriving many individuals of the health insurance plan they wanted, the doctor they wanted, the convenience of using a hospital near them, and the weight of often much more expensive plans especially if a young male, but also for anyone who was healthy.  The AARP was among the heavily rewarded special interests, as were some other insurers.  So were many hospitals since many doctors had to give up their private practices and join hospital and clinic groups due to the computer records and financial pressures of ObamaCare.

Government can be designed so that it only acts in all of our interests.  There is only one way this can be achieved.  Government must be allowed only the power to protect the one value we all share.  That value is our individual rights.  This was recognized in our great Declaration of Independence.  A government so limited in power and scope was mandated by the People in our Constitution.  Unfortunately, the Progressive Elitist program has long required the effective destruction of the protections of our Constitution, for as Obama famously stated it is a roadblock to the redistribution of wealth and favors.  The Constitution stood in the way of his Progressive Elitist transformation of America.  Now the Obama Regime simply ignores it and any law they do not like.

Because the Progressive Elitist government model cannot improve the lives of the majority of Americans compared to their own self-management in the private sector, the Progressive Elitist has to have constant recourse to lies and misdirections.  The Middle Class must be deceived.  It is simply impossible to actually benefit "the least among us,", the Middle Class, and the necessary number of Special Interests.  It is an absolute certainty that most Americans will suffer from the Progressive Elitist Big Government model.

The only way we can ever bring back a commitment to constitutional and limited government consistent with our individual freedom is to live by an individualist philosophy designed to promote rational values consistent with the practical needs of life on Earth.  Objectivism is that philosophy.  A commitment to its principles would enable the People of the USA to elect officials capable of and dedicated to reforming our horribly errant governments.  We must transform these tyrannical governments too much under the control of the Progressive Elitists and their allied Special Interests.

Those special interests are not just rich people, corporations, and religious people as the Progressive Elitists claim.  Some special interests are rich people or corporations, but there are many more.  These include:

• Christians who would use government to impose their values, commonly by requiring women to carry a fetus to full term, by denying same-sex marriages, or by claiming that Christian charity requires governmental redistribution.  Yes, some Christians are Elitists, some Progressive, some Traditional
• Islamists who want to impose Sharia Law.
• Environmentalists who believe man is evil, but all other animals are supreme.
• Those opposed to carbon-based fuels for environmental and CAGW reasons.
• Those who believe that profit is evil.
• Labor unions who deny individuals freedom of labor contract.
• Government workers
• Green energy companies with subsidies and favoring mandates
• Farmers with subsidies
• Those who benefit from the ethanol mandate.
• Users of the Export-Import Bank
• Those companies protected by high tariffs
• Banks with cheap money from the Federal Reserve
• Too-Big-To-Fail financial institutions
• Too-Big-To-Fail auto companies
• Extended unemployment beneficiaries
• Disability insurance recipients who used to work with the same disability
• Food Stamp recipients
• Employees whose employers are forced to do all the tax paperwork with its risks
• Professions and jobs with limited competition due to licensing requirements
• Accountants and tax attorneys due to the overly complex tax law
• Trial lawyers
• Insurers due to excessive liability awards allowing them to collect high premiums
• AARP with its health insurance supplements and anti-youth political program
• Home builders and mortgage lenders due to mortgage interest deductions
• Beneficiaries of rent controls
• Older home owners in areas with severe home-building restrictions
• Existing commercial real estate owners where new commercial construction is denied
• TV and radio stations favored by the FCC
• Those near shale oil and gas formations with super cheap energy because governments are delaying pipeline construction
• Russia and the Saudis because governments are slowing energy production here
• Many, many more

The Progressive Elitist does not think we are capable of arranging and choosing our own health insurance, just as they do not think we can generally choose our values and manage our own lives.  As Tocqueville said:

A man’s admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.

It is interesting to note that that contempt seems to easily transform into a disregard for the welfare of your fellow man and makes it easier to take advantage of him as a Special Interest manipulating the powers of excessive government.  The transformation of America implemented by the Obama Regime has richly illustrated this.

[On 26 November 2014, Prof. Walter E. Williams wrote a column called Elite Contempt for Ordinary Americans, which emphasizes the role of academics as a center of such contempt and their efforts to indoctrinate the young in college.]

Representative John Sarbanes Would Restrict Freedom of Speech

Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat, Maryland, is polling his constituents on their desires to limit the influence of Big Business on Big Government.  I am in his most incredibly gerrymandered district.  Here is his letter to me:

Dear Friend,

Many Americans feel their priorities get left behind in Washington and the priorities of billionaires and big corporations receive undue attention. Many tell me their voices are being drowned out by the special interests. I'd like to know how you feel about the role of big money in politics. Please share your thoughts with me in the survey below.

Do you believe big money politics is corrupting our government?

Yes No

Do you think everyday Americans deserve a way to fight back against special interest spending?

Yes No

Would you support a proposal to amplify the voices of everyday Americans in our elections

Yes No

Earlier this year, I introduced the Government by the People Act (HR 20) - a bipartisan bill with more than 140 cosponsors that would empower millions of everyday Americans to take back their government from big money special interests. To read more about the proposal and become a citizen cosponsor, pleas visit http://ofby.us
Sincerely,

John P. Sarbanes

I listened to John Sarbanes address the House on the bill he is sponsoring, along with many another Democrat in the House, and he only railed against Big Business.  He never mentioned any other type of special interest.  His bias is anti-business.  Of course he especially hit oil companies and made the many times debunked claim that they are heavily subsidized by government simply because they take the tax deductions provided to most businesses.  He had no complaints directed at the big political campaign donations of labor unions, trial lawyers, government employees, so-called green energy companies, teachers, and accountants who love complex tax codes.

The Sarbanes bill would provide everyone a tax credit for making a political donation, provide taxpayer's money to candidates based on how many people made donations to them, and provide additional money in the last 60 days of a campaign if some bureaucrat decides that a super PAC is slamming a candidate too hard in that time period.  So, let us see what this means:

• It now will cost a person nothing to aid the campaign of a candidate.  If it costs him nothing, he has even less reason to understand the candidate's purpose and the consequences of his political viewpoint.
• Hard-working, more productive people and corporations will have to provide funding for candidates who wish to use government force to redistribute their money to the many who pay little or no taxes through the taxpayer campaign financing requirement.  This enables such politicians to better buy the votes of those who pay little in taxes.
• Some bureaucrat, perhaps in the thrall of the President and his political party, will decide which candidates are being unfairly attacked by a big PAC and provide that candidate with taxpayer money.  I wonder if that will work any better than having the IRS decide who can set up a non-profit organization based on whether the organizational name has Patriot or Tea Party in the name or its purpose includes teaching the provisions of the Constitution?

 My response to him:

John,

As usual, your questions belie a bias based on a naive view of the role of government.

When government becomes big and dictates values to the People and starts micromanaging their lives, we all suffer for these quite obvious reasons:

• Government is too big for the elected officials to manage it well.
• The People cannot understand what the government is doing and all of the consequences of its actions.
• The People can no longer choose their representatives adequately.
• As the People lose control and understanding, they lose confidence in their government.
• Special interests step in to fill the power vacuum, manipulating just those policies that benefit themselves with no regard for the individual rights and welfare of most of the People.

The special interests include:

• Labor Unions
• Some Big Businesses
• Welfare Recipients
• Environmental Extremists and Global Warming Alarmists
• Trial Lawyers
• Government Employees including Teachers
  
• University Employees deriving income from Government Grants
• Exporters using Government Loans
• Banks using money printed by the Federal Reserve
• Ethanol Manufacturers and corn growers
• Some Farmers
• Shipping Line Operators
• PPACA Website Programmers
• Health Care Insurance Providers
• Really Bad American Car Manufacturers
• Power-Hungry Politicians
• Campaign Contributors to Power-Hungry Politicians
• Accountants due to Unintelligible Tax Laws Forcing Americans to Buy their Services
• Regulatory Consultants due to Unintelligible Regulations

No, John, you are not addressing the real problem.  The real problem is the Size of Government.  The one and only way to end the control of government by special interests is to reduce it to its very limited constitutional role of providing for the national defense, the post roads, and handing foreign affairs issues.  Then the national government will do much, much less harm to the People, be much better understood by them, and be much more capably managed by our Representatives.

Charles R. Anderson, Ph.D.
Lab: (410) 740-8562
Mobile: (301) 830-1886
http://www.AndersonMaterials.com
http://AndersonMaterials.blogspot.com
http://ObjectivistIndividualist.blogspot.com/

I do not suppose I will get any special interest favors from John Sarbanes!  I am surprised he is up to so much mischief in Congress.  One would think he would be spending all of his time traveling between the far-flung isthmuses of his kingly domain, the 3rd Congressional District of Maryland, shown here in brown:

Only Big Government could create and love such a creature.

24 States Expand Medicaid Under ObamaCare

The CBO predicts that 9 million more people will go on Medicaid in the next year.  Most of this increase will be in the 26 states that expanded Medicaid under ObamaCare.  These states are shown in gold in the map below:

The states not expanding Medicaid coverage under ObamaCare have the number of additional people they would cover with coverage to 133% of the poverty level shown on them.  This represents a huge future savings for these states after 2022 for their state budgets when the federal government stops paying 90% of the bill for the added state dependents.  Those living in the states in gold had best have piles of gold to pay the tax bills after 2022 for all of the people on Medicaid.

The CBO is predicting that ObamaCare expansion of Medicaid will add 9 million people on Medicaid by the end of 2014 and 13 million by the end of 2020.  These additions and the future large increases in state budget costs will occur in the states in the above map in gold.  Of course, Progressive Elitists will complain that the added 5 million people who might have been added in the blue-gray states have been sadly neglected in this redistribution of wealth.  In fact, they like to complain that even more of those in poverty live in many of these blue-gray states.  See the map below from one of their websites:

So the states not expanding Medicaid have an average 9.1% of their populations qualifying as below 133% of the poverty level, while the national average is 8.0% of the population.  But one thing that is overlooked is that there is one single poverty level for the 48 contiguous states and higher levels for Alaska and Hawaii.  So, this map of those below 133% of the poverty level has to be compared to one for the cost of living.  Clearly, some people at 133% of the poverty level are much better off in low cost of living areas than are others at that level in high cost of living areas.  The cost of living map:

Now we see that the states that refused to raise their Medicaid dependency levels to 133% of the poverty level are mostly states with most of their population below or at the national average in the cost of living.  Most of the states that raised the Medicaid eligibility level to 133% have most of their populations living in high or average cost of living areas.  Of the 24 states not raising the Medicaid eligibility level to 133%, Wyoming, Montana, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Maine are the only ones mostly at the average or higher in cost of living.

There is a reason that Republican-dominated states tend to have lower than average costs of living.  The governments in those states mostly extract less from the private sector to use in unproductive ways in the government-sector.  Their present choice not to increase the eligibility for Medicaid in their states is a move to continue having a lower cost of living.  That means that people in those states above 133% of the poverty level will continue to be better off than will people in the expensive government states that mostly raised their Medicaid eligibility levels under ObamaCare.

After 2022, when those mostly above average cost of living states have to pick up the cost of the 13 million people added to Medicaid, their cost of living will shoot up even higher.  Their taxes will increase further and some of them will go bankrupt.  More and more people will migrate out of those states and move to the states that did not raise their Medicaid eligibility levels.  There will be a further easily seen lesson on the perils of redistribution and socialism.  Socialist transformation and change will have seriously damaged the middle class who will have to pay the bills in the mostly Democrat states that made this bad choice to expand Medicaid.

An Interesting Discussion of Wealth Inequality and Redistribution

There is an interesting post on the blog Marotta on Money on wealth inequality in the USA by David John Marotta and Megan Russell.  They had earlier critiqued a video called Wealth Inequality in America which was based on a 2005 survey by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely.

Many of 49% of Americans are Slaves,

while 51% are wastrels responsible for massive government spending they pay no income tax to fund.  Yes, in 2009, the number of Americans not paying income taxes to the federal government became a 51% majority.  For them, it does not matter how wasteful government spending is, because it is not their money.  They can and do ask, "Why should I care what it costs, I do not pay for it."  Obama has succeeded in creating a majority of recipients of his redistributionist theft.  It gets worse, since some of those 49% who pay some income tax, actually do get more in government goodies than the amount they pay in taxes.

For instance, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 1,909,000 civilian federal employees in November 2008, excluding the postal employees.  With their generally high salaries and extremely good benefits, they can be said to mostly be receiving more in government payments than they are paying in taxes.  It is interesting to note that the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides data on total employment in April 2011, but only provides the number of federal employees as recently as November 2008.  Do you suppose they do not want the taxpayer to easily find out how bloated the federal bureaucracy truly is?  On top of this, I have seen numbers for January 2009 civilian federal employees without security clearances reported to be 2,748,978.  The CIA, NSA, and other complete federal agencies were left out of that 2.7 million number.  This number may include the postal employees.  Does the federal government have as much trouble keeping track of how many employees it has as it does of how much land, how many buildings, and how much equipment it has?  I would not be surprised.

Then there are also those many businessmen so cozy with the government who are collecting subsidies and who benefit from mandates, such as those to use ethanol, wind energy, solar energy, and partially electric cars.  There are also crony mercantilists benefiting from many regulations designed to bury their competition, especially that of small businesses, under a mountain of government requirements and paperwork.  These people are often called crony capitalists, but that is a contradiction of terms.  Crony mercantilists have been around as long as there have been governed nation-states, which long predates the day of the capitalists with their philosophy of open markets and freedom of choice.  Capitalism is the manifestation of the equal, sovereign individual right to associate with whom one wants for the purposes of one's choosing.

Just recently, every business in America doing any business with FDA-regulated companies or with FAA and DOD regulated aerospace companies has been hit with a blizzard of quality assurance paperwork and the pressure is mounting for every company to become International Standards Organization (ISO) certified at huge expense both initially and in an on-going way.  This is expensive for large companies and will be the death of many a small company.  The small company that always had to try harder to provide good service or quality products will now be killed in many cases in the name of increased quality.  Ha.  We will see what the monopoly of the few companies that can bear the expense of this extra-governmental regulation required by government agencies will provide in future quality!  Every lab will have calibrated equipment, but will pay no attention to correctly interpreting the data provide to obtain the real properties of the materials investigated.  There will be no quality in the end product analytical report, but every laboratory will be a quality lab because ISO says they are.  As Ayn Rand noted long ago, regulation by government sets up lowest common denominator requirements and no company thereafter has as much pressure as before to exceed those low requirements.  But, many a tired, old, and large company is very happy with such regulations, whether set by the government or by a one-world organization such as ISO.  ISO also serves the function of providing import protection to Europe primarily, but secondarily to the U.S., Canada, and Japan.

If you wonder why it is so hard to reduce the size of government or to reduce its out-of-control spending, this is why.  There are too few people paying taxes and many too many people getting payments, subsidies, and protection from effort.  The many have truly enslaved the productive and wealth-creating few.  But it is these few who create the jobs.  As our society has become most determined to enslave and whip these few, they have responded by laying off many of the employees they can no longer support and by refusing to hire more new employees even as they struggle to increase productivity while robbed of the capital with which to do it.

Chuck Roger - Government-run, taxpayer-funded, anti-poverty programs do not work

Chuck Roger, in his Clear Thinking, The Blog, has an interesting post on the ineffectiveness of government anti-poverty programs.  He notes that government anti-poverty spending has increased by 89% in the last decade, 2000 to 2010.  Looking at the graph of anti-poverty spending as a percent of GDP, back in 1962 it was 0.5% of GDP, but is now 4.4% of GDP, which is almost a 9 times increase in the redistribution of income from taxpayers to welfare recipients in that time.  The average American is giving up $4800 a year to fund these anti-poverty programs.  The spending on food stamps has increased by a factor of three in the last 10 years. 

Despite all of this effort, the number of those in "poverty" had not changed much over the years.  Recently, due to the mostly government-induced and the government-prolonged recession, the number of people in poverty has increased.  Of course, most of the people in poverty under normal circumstances are the young who are students or in their first jobs.  Many still live with their parents.  Until we get rid of the young, we will always have similar numbers of people in "poverty" as we do now.  The need for anti-poverty programs is mostly a fraud.  The idea that government should and can effectively provide anti-poverty help is entirely a fraud.

The August Jobs Story - Dismal, Very Dismal

The headline statistic on jobs in August 2010 is that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate went up slightly to 9.6% from 9.5% in July and June.  However, in a long recession especially, the usual unemployment rate statistic may not be very useful because many people have given up on finding a job so long ago that the statistics do not reveal that in a better economy many of the unemployed would want a job.  Last year, I realized that it makes more sense to track the number of missing jobs by comparison to a time when people had plentiful and well-paying jobs.  The number of jobs wanted and needed might better be compared to the number needed to keep the same fraction of the population employed or actively looking for work as was the case in that good time.  Because the population is increasing, the number of needed and desired jobs should be increasing also.  The time I chose to compare to was January of 2000 when the workforce was at a high rate of 67.49% of the noninstitutional civilian work age population and the unemployment rate was 4.04%!  Times were good and many people wanted to work.

The updated table of job and unemployment statistics is given below.  The most important things to take note of are the fact that the work age population grew by 209,000 people in August, the number of employed people dropped by 215,000, and the number of missing jobs grew by 356,000 jobs relative to July!  This is an awful trend!  Yet the usual story using the unadjusted employment numbers actually would imply an improvement, since the seasonally unadjusted unemployment rate actually improved from July's 9.75% unemployment to August's 9.54% unemployment.  This happened because the number of people actively looking for work took a nosedive in August.  All that means is that those who would like to have a job became more discouraged in August than they already were in July!

For the third month in a row, the number of government jobs decreased.  114,000 census jobs died in August, causing a total loss of government jobs of 121,000 in August.  State and local government lost 10,000 jobs.  This is actually good news as the burden of paying for these jobs is lifted from the private sector.  The private sector added 67,000 jobs in August, which is fewer than it added in July, but more than in May and June.  So far this year, the private sector has added jobs each month.  August was the first month this year that manufacturing jobs decreased (by 27,000), after they had decreased every month in 2009 and after January of 2008.  Most of the private sector job increase was in services such as health care, leisure and hospitality, and professional and business services.  Construction had a small increase of 19,000 jobs.

The average work week for nonfarm private employees is only 34.2 hours.  The average hourly earnings are $22.66.  The number of full-time employed workers fell by 1,254,000 people from July to August, while the number of part-time employed workers increased by 1,039,000 workers!  This is another hidden measure of the July to August catastrophe.

Lawrence Katz, a Harvard University economics professor, says that about 300,000 jobs need to be added each month for 4 years to return the unemployment situation to where it was prior to the recession [Wall Street Journal, 4-5 September 2010].  By my missing job chart, just to get back the situation of December 2007, the economy has to create 9.75 million new jobs on top of the number needed to keep up with population growth.  Based on the growth of the noninstitutional civilian work age population growth from January 2000 to January 2010, the economy must produce about 158,000 jobs a month to keep up with the needed number of jobs due to the population increase, assuming that 67.49% of them want jobs as they did in January 2000.  To catch up to the "mere" 11,023,000 missing jobs of December 2007 in a four-year period, the replacement job rate is 203,000 jobs a month to be added to the population growth rate of 158,000 per month for a total job creation rate needed of 361,000 jobs per month!  The professor is coming in a bit low!  Any month in which 361,000 jobs are not created is a month of slow recovery from the recession, if not a month of deepened job recession.

We will need a much more business and wealth friendly environment than Obama will allow us to have if we are to create jobs over a four-year period at a rate of 361,000 per month.  That is simply not going to happen with the socialist redistributionist in chief at the helm.  Even should the Republicans capture the House and even the Senate, that is not going to happen.  We will need a committed return to a concept of much more limited government and a very renewed confidence in Capitalism and individual choice for that to happen.  So, we will be faced with a job insufficiency for a long time to come.  This weighs particularly heavily on those in their late 50s and in their 60s who lose jobs, on the young, and on those who are under-educated.  The young who do work will be much over-burdened by the ever-increasing numbers of people on social security and medicare, not to mention paying the huge benefit packages for government employees and government retirees.  There will be many sad stories for Americans for a long time to come.  The consequences of having chosen socialist principles of government for a long time have accumulated and have been wrecking havoc.  The drag on the economy has been evident in the missing job increase since the start of 2000 with the recession accelerating that trend.

Back to the month of August:  It fell short of the goal of adding 361,000 jobs by a mere 576,000 jobs.  This kick in the teeth just prior to the November election ought to be a kick in the teeth for the Party of Mass Job Destruction, the Democrats.  It is being hidden by the foolish method the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to measure unemployment.  Nonetheless, the people know something is very wrong.

Obama Chooses NHS Admirer to Head Medicare

Obama has chosen Dr. Donald Berwick to be the new head of the Center for Medicare/Medicaid Services.  Berwick gave the talk shown in the video below in 2008 in the United Kingdom and bowed in praise to the altruists' shrine of the British National Health Service (NHS).  He loves the political system of rationing health care and redistributing the costs from those not poor and not unhealthy to the poor and the unhealthy.  He claimed that health care decisions made in the free market are made in the dark, while those made in the bowels of a gigantic government are made democratically in the public light.  That huge government makes democratic decisions in the light of day is certainly laughable in the light of understanding how ObamaCare came to be.  The backroom deals with big companies to gain their support or at least to prevent their opposition, the backroom deals to enlist the aid and enthusiasm of labor unions, the backroom deals to get the votes of certain reluctant Senators, the willful trampling of the well-expressed opposition of the People, and the order to pass the bill so we would find out what was in it, all make a lie of the Berwick idea that the political process is democratic and performed in open daylight.

On the other hand, health care decisions made in a free market are made where they matter in the light of day.  First, the government does meddle extensively with the free market in medicine, with many limitations on health insurance due to state mandates and many government limitations on competition between hospitals and among doctors, such as severe limits on their numbers.  The government has also stacked the cards in favor of having employers choose the health care insurance options for their employees, thereby reducing the employee's choice in the matter.  Still, the employee does evaluate his own compensation package in choosing employers and the employer will sometimes offer multiple choices.  The market, if it were free, would offer more choices.  But, even after all this, the decision that really counts is one made by the individual, who can decide which compensation plan best meets his individual needs.  In the Berwick and Obama system, bureaucrats will make many more of these decisions than they now make.  Dr. Berwick thinks this is great.  Listen to him:

Clunker Morals and Government

The Democrat Congress cash for clunkers program has quickly spent its first billion dollars. The program is widely touted as an effective stimulant of the economy and as popular with the people. Presumably, the environmentalists and those who worry incessantly about running out of fossil fuels or about the Middle East enjoying oil income, are all very happy to get the clunkers off the road.

I, however, have a few problems with this program. They are:

• It encourages the destruction of wealth, without the wise inputs of the free market system, which is replaced by the foolishness of politics.
• It transfers large sums of money from the taxpayer to the relatively few individuals who decide they want a new vehicle and who have a qualifying "clunker."
• It transfers large sums of money from the taxpayer to the auto industry.
• The pollution emissions of even 12 year-old cars are already very low, so there is little to be gained on that issue, unless you believe the craziness that CO2 is a pollutant or a global climate changer of catastrophic import.
• If oil were in critical short supply such that cars that would mostly have been junked in one or two more years saved enough to be significant, then oil prices would be high and we would not hesitate to drill in ANWR, the eastern Gulf, and off the southeast Atlantic coast.

No, this is immoral politics as usual. It is a simple transfer of wealth to buy votes. The beneficiaries are more grateful to the politicians than those who are hurt are angry.

Before the late 1930s when Roosevelt's threat to pack the Supreme Court turned some of the Justice's knees to jelly, such a program would have been found unconstitutional on two grounds. First, Congress has no enumerated power to play the stimulating the economy game. Second, such a transfer of wealth from so many to so few could not be said to be consistent with the limitation on the federal government that all of its actions be taken for the General Welfare. This is clearly a program for the welfare of a few and the harm of the many.

The concept of the General Welfare these days is apparently this: The government will undertake thousands of programs most of which harm more people than are helped. But, somewhere among these many programs there are likely to be a few which will help a given individual. If most people are helped by some program, then the General Welfare has been satisfied.

There are severe problems with this concept of the General Welfare. They are:

• People are aware of how they have been helped by the few helpful programs.
• The vast majority of people cannot add up all the harm they have suffered from the many programs that hurt them, partly because they are unaware of all the little hurts and even if they remembered them, they cannot calculate up the sum of the pains.
• This concept gives the government unlimited powers, which the politicians are certain to abuse.
• These programs act to reduce the role of choice in each individual's effort to manage his own life.
• The government is given the power to pick winners and losers.
• The politicians use this power to collect campaign contributions to win re-election so they can continue to sell their votes in Congress.
• The entire process pits every segment and group within our society at the throats of all other such groups, because the prize to win the power to guide the government monopoly use of force is so critical. The losers are hurt badly and the winners are rewarded grandly.
• As a result, every segment of society has reason to distrust every other segment of society.
• This distrust causes universal anxiety and uncertainty.
• Anxiety and uncertainty make life miserable and people in despair turn to government to bail them out, which creates a visicous circle.

One would think this would be reason enough for rational people to reject this loose and immoral idea of the General Welfare. Apparently, the observational skills, the rational linkages of the observed events, and the importance of the principles of a harmonious and force-forebearing society are too much for the modern man to figure out. Yet, the framers of the Constitution were able to figure this out in a more primitive world than that we live in now. We should be most appreciative of their intellectual effort, even as we bemoan the weakness of the modern American's thinking skills. To a substantial degree, we can thank the dumbing down of Americans in a public school system for that. These government schools are very happy to confuse the people about the ennumerated powers of the federal government and about the Constitution's further restriction that actions be for the General Welfare.

Fein -- Redistribution blather

Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer, has written an interesting commentary called "Redistribution blather" for the Washington Times on 11 November 2008. He says,

Morality and economic prosperity militate in favor of turning the prevailing progressive income tax scheme on its head. They also argue against government redistributions of wealth through spending, including the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Act of 2008, which was championed by President Bush, Mr. McCain, and the president-elect alike. It lavishly rewards the prodigal, financially irresponsible, and politically connected at the expense of the thrifty and prudent.

He notes that barriers to voting by the masses have been reduced and the checks against majoritarian tyranny have become less effective. The progressive income tax and massive redistribution programs have allowed politicians to purchase the votes of much of the middle and lower classes. The rich retain influence by making campaign contributions and by providing advertising and think tanks. The politicians then squander many billions of dollars winning the affections and allegiance of the rich, the middle class, and the lower class. Then Fein produces a great argument on the morality of progressive taxation:

In any event, the "ability to pay" standard is morally obtuse. At present, most income is obtained through private market transactions. Income is earned by doing things other persons want done, i.e., giving them satisfaction. The willingness of a private individual to pay from his own resources is the best proxy ever invented for fixing the economic value of the thing provided. Every other standard is hopelessly subjective.

Individuals who earn high incomes through private transactions are thus the true "Good Samaritans" because they give the greatest amount of satisfaction to others. Someone who slaved 24 hours a day digging a hole to nowhere that no one wanted would be economically barren and might be whipped for refusing to do things that others wanted done. So much for Karl Marx's labor theory of value.

By any sensible moral yardstick, high-income earners should be taxed least because they generate the greatest amount of consumer satisfaction. Low-income earners should be taxed most because they create the least social good. Moreover, taxation reduces the amount of the thing taxed by raising its cost. High taxes on low-income earners would reduce their numbers by giving tax relief for earning more.

Then another juicy comment:

An individual whose diligence, industry and wisdom have earned great personal wealth by satisfying the wants of others stands on a higher moral plane than an individual whose indolence, indiscipline and criminality have plunged him into abject poverty.

For my part, I will not propose an anti-progressive income tax with say the first dollar earned at a 39.6% rate, the second dollar taxed at a 36% rate, the third dollar earned taxed at a 33% rate, etc. Well ... at least not as long as government does not insist on doling out more welfare benefits to the lower income groups. No... I am willing to go along with a system with a flat tax rate of say 10%. I understand that it is said that a flat rate of 17% would be needed, but that assumes that we will continue the many redistributionist programs we already have. So either we slash those programs and go with a 10% flat income tax rate, or we keep the redistributionist programs and adopt an anti-progressive income tax. Thems my terms!

But really, Bruce Fein is on to something here. Besides making it apparent that he has probably read Ayn Rand, he is staking out the moral position from which we will probably have to start if there is to be any hope of ending up with a flat income tax. The socialists claim we are our Brother's Keeper even when we do not know our brother and their numbers are too fantastical for any one mother to have borne them all. We need to finally apply the counterbalancing truth in order to get any justice at all. That truth is the truth I quoted Fein on above. We need to start the Anti-Progressive Tax League and parlay that into something approaching a moral income tax.

Eviscerating the Private Sector

The private sector is under total attack by government, the mainstream media, and socialists, who are now nearly everywhere in charge of educating our children by virtue of their control of the public schools, of colleges, arts and culture, and increasingly of religion. The attack is unremitting and the inroads toward total control of the economy are terrifyingly extensive. What has happened:

• It has been established in the courts that anything we may wish to sell, whether goods or services, is subject to regulation under the Interstate Commerce clause of the Constitution, despite its purpose being to free trade.
• The financial industry was heavily regulated, but now the winners are chosen by the federal government using bailout money, with those not being chosen being forced to merge by takeover with those who were chosen.
• The disposal of waste products is largely controlled by governments, with many areas having draconian recycling laws which make no economic sense.
• It has long been law that governments can prosecute a company for charging more for its goods and services than other companies do (proves monopoly), or for charging the same (proves collusion), or for charging less (proves cut-throat dumping). Woe be the company that angers government.
• Homes and commercial buildings cannot be built in most areas of the country without currying the favor of local and often state governments. When they are allowed to be built, they must often be built according to archaic, expensive building codes. Architectural designs must often be approved by conventional thinking local agencies. Often homes can only be built on very large lots, which means that it only makes sense to build large, expensive homes on those lots.
  
• The Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency a very freely exercised power over power plants, manufacturing firms, and the user's of many products such as paints, aerosols, insecticides, and plastic foams.
• The Clean Water Act controls the use of water and the emissions or dumping of chemicals which may pollute water sources. It also means that low spots which are only very occasionally wet, cannot be used, since they are declared wetlands.
  
• Employers are required to hire some people and reject others, sometimes forcing them to adopt racist policies. They are required to serve as unpaid tax collectors and record keepers for governments and their employees. In some cases, they are required to confiscate the pay of their employees.
• People are required to subsidize many businesses through their tax monies. Examples of such businesses are those farmers who grow corn, rice, wheat, soybeans, peanuts, sugar, sugar beets, and many other crops; banks, especially those favored with bailout money; home mortgage holders, especially those in default who will soon be given bailout money; industries protected by tariffs, such as sugar growers, ethanol producers, steelmakers, and many more; power companies using wind-driven electric generators and solar power; companies granted monopolies by government such as cable companies, electric power companies, land-line telephone companies, gas stations on many toll roads, and others; and by companies and individuals given licenses for operation such as cab companies, plumbers, electricians, interior decorators, beauticians, real estate agents, certified public accountants, doctors, psychiatrists, dentists, EPA and FDA and state and local government accredited laboratories; those who purchase energy-efficient cars or who add insulation to their homes; those who send children to college on student loans; those who send children to public education schools; those small businesses who get subsidized loans from the Small Business Administration; those businesses owned by favored minorities and by women; businesses located in depressed zones; and many other activities favored by government.
• Redistribution of income using the progressive income tax, which moves money from those who create wealth and value to those who do not. This is an essential defining characteristic of socialism and has no basis in the American heritage prior to the New Deal in about 1937.
  
• Rare and unimportant species and the occasional hill or mountain take precedence over human needs for land or resources even in situations where the harm to the living species is unknown or minimal while the harm to humans of inaction is very clear and considerable.
• Businesses are required to keep expensive records of all transactions involving money, despite the fact that their only purpose is to be used as evidence against a firm that it is not paying some tax money some government wishes to take from entities with no voting privileges. The more government can tax business the happier it is, since voters care little and understand little about how these taxes have deleterious impact upon their lives. Businesses are required by Sarbanes-Oxley accounting requirements to use accounting procedures which make little economic sense.
  

What do we have to look forward to? Much more of the same. This includes:

• The declaration that the use of most energy forms produces polluting and climate-changing CO2, so our use of all the major forms of energy will be curtailed. This means much less economic activity since coal, oil, and natural gas use will be greatly reduced, despite the fact that this will do very little to reduce climate change, which is dominated by the forces of nature, not by those of man.
• Much more massive redistribution of income, with non-taxpayers receiving deceptively termed tax rebates from hard-working and creative thinkers who earn higher incomes.
• Slower economic growth caused by reduced use of energy, more expensive energy, less efficient investment of income due to government favored redirections, less total investment since lower income people invest less, an unwillingness to invest in longer term projects because of erratic and arbitrary government interferences such as changes of tax law and emission standards, the holding of investments for excessive periods to avoid paying higher capital gains taxes, shifting investment into government bonds, the increased commitment to expanding operations abroad where corporate taxes are lower, and creative and hardworking people working less.
• A great increase in required service to the government or to those charitable activities it may favor. Women will be required to register for the draft. More schools will require community slavery, err... service, before children are allowed to graduate from high school. College loans will be dependent upon signing up for service with the government, which will put many ignorant and untrained young people into the business of using government power, resources, and our tax money to do all sorts of mischief.
• Heavier dependence upon Social Security for retirement as stocks and securities either continue to shrink in value or grow much more slowly. As the economy grows more slowly, the tax income to support those on Social Security will diminish. Obama would give tax rebates to people who do not pay income tax, claiming that the rebate is really because they pay Social Security taxes. The distinction between income tax and Social Security tax will be completely lost. Since the Social Security money already collected has already been spent largely on non-Social Security programs by the federal government, that distinction was already very weak. In order to continue the Social Security program for Baby Boomers and beyond, the tax burden on the remaining workers will increase until they rebel, assuming that their vote is any longer able to take power away from the governments. Obama may choose to rule as his socialist hero Hugo Chavez does in Venezuela where the voters have little say.
• Freedom of speech will be everywhere as limited as it is now on most college campuses and in most public schools. Important issues will no longer be discussed, because if an issue is important, it has the power to make someone upset and it is not allowable to upset anyone, unless he is intelligent, hardworking, and a creative and rational thinker. The remaining pablum which we will be allowed to talk about will be the subject of radio talk show hosts chosen initially to have equal numbers of conservatives and socialists and very few libertarians under a Fairness Doctrine. After awhile, all libertarians and most conservatives will be banned, since it will be claimed that they are guilty of hate-speech and racism or that they are global-warming deniers.
• Human beings will be discouraged from procreating, since they are considered a threat to the planet and natural ecosystems. They cut down forests, build homes, use resources, and breathe out the greenhouse gas CO2. Humans will be considered inherently evil by most people rather than just the elitist environmental radicals of today and those young people recently rolled out of the propaganda mills called schools. Western Europe and Russia, where new births are far below replacement levels, will set the example in the U.S. where our population is damned for growing.
  
• Massive depression of the population will set in as they realize that they cannot do anything unless they get the approval of 25 government agencies, all of whom are fighting for power and have different, often contradictory, requirements. Many more people will turn to alcohol and drugs, as they do in Russia, to forget their helplessness and their total insignificance. Some, those who can remember the time, will dream of living a self-directed life.
• The United States of America will be as jaded as France and Germany. People will lose all sense of individuality. They will be defined only by what gender, race, and economic class they fall into. Employers will have the duty to provide jobs and will be thoroughly hated. More and more, government will attempt to chain them to their posts. Slavery will make a historical return with minorities and women as slave masters of so-called white males. Of course, this slavery will be directed through the agency of government, so that it will be easier for people to pretend that it is just required service. The slave masters will be many, rather than a single individual.
  

If we should fly with McCain, he will push us out of the plane with a deployed, but badly ripped parachute. If we fly with Obama, he will push us out of the plane in a free-fall without a parachute. We sure do have a lot to look forward to as we watch the ground come rapidly closer, before socialism gains its last death grip on us as we imprint the earth. Our deaths as individuals will be unlamented, but we will be damned for that last imprint we make upon the earth.