Resica

"If men of wisdom and knowledge, of moderation and temperance, of patience, fortitude and perseverance, of sobriety and true republican simplicity of manners, of zeal for the honour of the Supreme Being and the welfare of the commonwealth; if men possessed of these other excellent qualities are chosen to fill the seats of government, we may expect that our affairs will rest on a solid and permanent foundation."

--Samuel Adams, letter to Elbridge Gerry, November 27, 1780


So my quess would be that we have issue with a "solid and permanent foundation."

Hundreds attend TEA Party in Gettysburg
From staff reports York Daily Record


Singing patriotic songs and chanting "USA," more than 200 people crowded the sidewalk in front of the Adams County courthouse in Gettysburg on Saturday to protest high taxes and President Barack Obama's fiscal policies.
The TEA Party -- TEA standing for "Taxed Enough Already" -- was part of a national event coordinated by the conservative American Family Association. The parties are meant to send a message to government leaders that people are tired of runaway debt, local organizer Susan Williams said.
Protesters listened to speeches for about an hour as they took up most of the sidewalk, occasionally spilling into the street. Police asked a few to return to the sidewalk for safety.
Most of those in attendance carried American flags or signs, the most prevalent of which was the Revolutionary War slogan "Don't tread on me."
Other signs read, "No socialist America" or "Honk if I'm paying your mortgage," among others.
After the speeches and singing "God Bless America," the crowd marched north to Lincoln Square and snaked its way around the crossroads.
Traffic -- already busy because of the holiday weekend that coincides with the annual Battle of Gettysburg re-enactments -- was tied up as demonstrators stretched across several roads leading to the square.
Police helped to stop traffic, and a few motorists were seen arguing with some demonstrators. There were many honks from vehicles, but it was hard to tell if the drivers were in support of the event or mad at the traffic jam.
The demonstrators filled the square for about 20 minutes before the event ended back where it began, where voter registration tables were set up and people mingled.
There were thousands of TEA Parties planned across the country for Saturday, according to the American Family Association's Web site for the event, www.teapartyday.com.
According to the group's Web site, the American Family Association represents and stands for traditional family values and exists to motivate and equip citizens to reform the culture to reflect the Biblical truth on which it was founded.

Forbes.Com



Uncommon Sense
Obama's Top Five Health Care Lies
Shikha Dalmia, 07.01.09, 12:01 AM ET


President Barack Obama walked into the Oval Office with a veritable halo over his head. In the eyes of his backers, he could say or do no wrong because he had evidently descended directly from heaven to return celestial order to our fallen world. Oprah declared his tongue to be "dipped in the unvarnished truth." Newsweek editor Evan Thomas averred that Obama "stands above the country and above the world as a sort of a God."

But when it comes to health care reform, with every passing day, Obama seems less God and more demagogue, uttering not transcendental truths, but bald-faced lies. Here are the top five lies that His Awesomeness has told--the first two for no reason other than to get elected and the next three to sell socialized medicine to a wary nation.

Lie One: No one will be compelled to buy coverage.

During the campaign, Obama insisted that he would not resort to an individual mandate to achieve universal coverage. In fact, he repeatedly ripped Hillary Clinton's plan for proposing one. "To force people to buy coverage," he insisted, "you've got to have a very harsh penalty." What will this penalty be, he demanded? "Are you going to garnish their wages?" he asked Hillary in one debate.

Yet now, Obama is behaving as if he said never a hostile word about the mandate. Earlier this month, in a letter to Sens. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., he blithely declared that he was all for "making every American responsible for having health insurance coverage, and making employers share in the cost."

But just like Hillary, he is refusing to say precisely what he will do to those who want to forgo insurance. There is a name for such a health care approach: It is called TonySopranoCare.

Lie Two: No new taxes on employer benefits.

Obama took his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, to the mat for suggesting that it might be better to remove the existing health care tax break that individuals get on their employer-sponsored coverage, but return the vast bulk--if not all--of the resulting revenues in the form of health care tax credits. This would theoretically have made coverage both more affordable and portable for everyone. Obama, however, would have none of it, portraying this idea simply as the removal of a tax break. "For the first time in history, he wants to tax your health benefits," he thundered. "Apparently, Sen. McCain doesn't think it's enough that your health premiums have doubled. He thinks you should have to pay taxes on them too."

Yet now Obama is signaling his willingness to go along with a far worse scheme to tax employer-sponsored benefits to fund the $1.6 trillion or so it will cost to provide universal coverage. Contrary to Obama's allegations, McCain's plan did not ultimately entail a net tax increase because he intended to return to individuals whatever money was raised by scrapping the tax deduction. Not so with Obama. He apparently told Sen. Baucus that he would consider the senator's plan for rolling back the tax exclusion that expensive, Cadillac-style employer-sponsored plans enjoy, in order to pay for universal coverage. But, unlike McCain, he has said nothing about putting offsetting deductions or credits in the hands of individuals.

In other words, Obama might well end up doing what McCain never set out to do: Impose a net tax increase on health benefits for the first time in history.

Lie Three: Government can control rising health care costs better than the private sector.

Ignoring the reality that Medicare--the government-funded program for the elderly--has put the country on the path to fiscal ruin, Obama wants to model a government insurance plan--the so-called "public option"--after Medicare in order to control the country's rising health care costs. Why? Because, he repeatedly claims, Medicare has far lower administrative costs and overhead than private plans--to wit, 3% for Medicare compared to 10% to 20% for private plans. Hence, he says, subjecting private plans to competition against an entity delivering such superior efficiency will release health care dollars for universal coverage.

But lower administrative costs do not necessarily mean greater efficiency. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office analysis last year chastised Medicare's lax attitude on this front. "The traditional fee-for-service Medicare program does relatively little to manage benefits, which tends to reduce its administrative costs but may raise its overall spending relative to a more tightly managed approach," it noted on page 93.

In short, extending the Medicare model will further ruin--not improve--even the functioning aspects of private plans.

Lie Four: A public plan won't be a Trojan horse for a single-payer monopoly.

Obama has repeatedly claimed that forcing private plans to compete with a public plan will simply "keep them honest" and give patients more options--not lead to a full-blown, Canadian-style, single-payer monopoly. As I argued in my previous column, this is wishful thinking given that government programs such as Medicare have a history of controlling costs by underpaying providers, who make up the losses by charging private plans more. Any public plan modeled after Medicare will greatly increase this forced subsidy, eventually driving private plans out of business, even if that weren't Obama's intention.

But, as it turns out, it very much is his intention. Before he decided to run for office--and even during the initial days of his campaign--Obama repeatedly said that he was in favor of a single-payer system. What's more, University of California, Berkeley Professor Jacob Hacker, who is a key influence on the Obama administration, is on tape explicitly boasting that a public plan is a means for creating a single-payer system. "It's not a Trojan horse," he quips, "it's just right there."

But even if Obama wanted to, it is simply impossible to design a public plan that could compete with private insurers on a level playing field and without "feeding off the public trough" as Obama claims.

At the very least, such a plan would always carry an implicit government guarantee that, should it go bust, no one in the plan would lose coverage. This guarantee would artificially lower the plan's capital reserve requirements, giving it an unfair edge over private plans. What's more, it is simply not plausible to expect that the plan wouldn't receive any start-up subsidies or use the government's muscle to negotiate lower rates with providers. If it eschewed all these things, there would be no reason for it to exist--because it would be just like any other private plan.

Lie Five: Patients don't have to fear rationing.

Obama has been insisting, including during his ABC Town Hall event last week, that the rationing patients would face under a government-run system wouldn't be any more draconian than what they currently confront under private plans. This is complete nonsense.

The left has been trying to address fears of rationing by trotting out an old and tired trope, namely, that rationing is an inescapable fact of life because every system rations whether by price or fiat. But there is a big difference between the two. If I can't afford caviar and champagne every night, any rationing involved is metaphoric, not real. Genuine rationing occurs when someone else controls access--how much of a particular good I can consume.

By that token, Obama's stimulus bill has set in motion rationing on a scale unimaginable in the land of the free. Indeed, the bill commits over $1 billion to conduct comparative effectiveness research that will evaluate the relative merits of various treatments. That in itself wouldn't be so objectionable--if it weren't for the fact that a board will then "direct financing" toward approved, standardized treatments. In short, doctors will find it much harder to prescribe newer or non-standard treatments not yet deemed effective by health care bureaucrats. This is exactly along the lines of the British system, where breast cancer patients were denied Herceptin, a new miracle drug, until enraged women fought back. Even the much-vilified managed care plans would appear to be a paragon of generosity in comparison with this.

Obama has repeatedly asked for honesty in the health care debate. It is high time he started showing some.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and writes a biweekly column for Forbes.

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Paul Rahe: Obama's tyrannical ambition
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July 1, 2009 Posted by Scott at 7:44 AM
We have invited political historian Paul Rahe to write something for us on the themes of his timely new book Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect. Professor Rahe writes:

President Obama has one distinguishing feature. He is a man of rigid self-discipline. Politicians are a lot like actors: they tend to be vain; and, more often than the rest of us, they are presented with the temptations to which the vain are prone. Many--one thinks of Bill Clinton, John Edwards, John Ensign, and Mark Sanford--succumb. If, however, in his personal life as an adult, Barack Obama has strayed from the straight and narrow, we have heard nary a word.

It is, in fact, a sign of his astonishing self-discipline that we know next to nothing about his life apart from what he chose to impart in the two autobiographies he published. For a long time now, for longer than we can perhaps imagine, every move he has made has been carefully calculated, calibrated, and choreographed. In this regard, he is in the fullest sense what every politician aims to be: a self-made (one might even say a self-invented) man. It is easy to see why someone like Evan Thomas should think him a god.

Once in a while, however, when Obama gets separated from his teleprompter, the mask slips a tad. On the hustings, Joe the Plumber caught the candidate off guard and got him to admit the truth about his plans to effect a redistribution of wealth. Something of the sort happened again last week--when, at a carefully staged rally for the administration's health care proposal, to which the flacks who run ABC News tellingly invited no one who regards the current healthcare arrangement as even remotely satisfactory--President Obama responded to a question by acknowledging that his plan aimed to reduce medical costs by aligning "incentives" in such a fashion as to discourage the sick and the dying from undergoing "additional tests" or taking "additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care."

Obama's choice of words was, as always, soothing. But anyone familiar with the healthcare debate will immediately recognize what he left unsaid. We all know that, wherever there is socialized medicine, there is rationing. Cutting costs is, in fact, its rationale, and this end is achieved by a refusal on the part of the government to pay for care that the bureaucrats judge uneconomic. Already now, in the semi-socialized system to which we have been made subject, those consigned to HMOs come up against gatekeepers charged with shaving costs by restricting care.

Why, we might ask, should one have to wait months or even years for a hip-replacement operation? Why should one be denied a cataract operation if one is over a certain age? What business is it of Barack Obama's whether I choose to spend my own hard-earned money on procedures thought to have only a limited chance of success? What gives him--or, for that matter, anyone else--the right to make decisions that are for me a matter of life and death?

Defenders of Obama's proposal will reply that I am misrepresenting his proposal. No one, they will say, will be forced to give up the health insurance they have. Technically, of course, this is true. But what President Obama calls the "incentives" will be structured in such a way that employers will no longer have to offer coverage, and to save themselves the expense (which is considerable), they will seize the opportunity to opt out, and then we will have no choice.

Perhaps we will then be left free to spend as we see fit the money left to us after we have paid for the government-run insurance program. Perhaps we will be able to go into the private market and pay for a hip-replacement operation, a cataract operation, or for tests and procedures that our doctor recommends but that the government-run insurance program refuses to pay for.

Here is where Obama's "incentives" reappear. The government-run insurance program will, for all practical purposes, be a monopsony--the sole purchaser. It will be in a bargaining position enabling it to dictate the price that it will pay, and, of course, it will pay very little. You, as an individual purchaser, will have no leverage at all; and, like those not covered by employer-sponsored insurance plans today, you will have to pay through the nose. Unless you are filthy rich, you may well have to wait your turn for that hip-replacement operation, forego that cataract operation, or do without those expensive tests and procedures. In sum, you will not be in the driver's seat.

To grasp what is at stake, one must step back and consider what sort of thinking underpins the drive for what is called "health care reform." There was a time in the United States when we lived under a regime of individual rights, and as individuals we assumed responsibility for our own welfare. We worked; we saved; and we took pride in looking after ourselves. Many of us still think in this fashion, but this is not the manner in which our masters now think. We may be the heirs of the men who adopted the Declaration of Independence; those who rule us are the offspring of the Progressives, and men of this temper have dominated our political life for almost a century now.

Back in 1912, when Woodrow Wilson successfully ran for the presidency, he told his compatriots, "We are in the presence of a new organization of society." Our time marks "a new social stage, a new era of human relationships, a new stagesetting for the drama of life," and "the old political formulas do not fit the present problems: they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age." What Thomas Jefferson once taught is now, he insisted, quite out of date. It is "what we used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple." Above all else, he hoped to persuade his compatriots to get "beyond the Declaration of Independence." That document "did not mention the questions of our day," he told them. "It is of no consequence to us. It is an eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men; not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action"--once of use, outdated now.

For Montesquieu--the only figure, apart from Jefferson, whom he mentioned by name--Wilson had no use, and the constitution drafted under the influence of the Frenchman's great compendium of political wisdom The Spirit of Laws--with its separation of powers, checks and balances, and distribution of authority between nation and state--he regarded as hopelessly passé. "Government," he argued:

is not a machine; but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living things can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. . . . There can be no successful government without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and action. . . . Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. All that progressives ask or desire is permission--in an era when "development," "evolution," is the scientific word--to interpret the Constitution according to Darwinian principle.

What Wilson and his heirs have accomplished is a surreptitious substitution of Hegel for Locke and of the modern adminstrative state with its vast array of administrative agencies (each combining the legislative, executive, and judicial powers) for the regime of self-government imagined by Montesquieu and brought into being by the American Founding Fathers. What our masters aim at--whether they be Republicans, like Teddy Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Thomas E. Dewey, and Richard Nixon, or Democrats, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Barack Obama--is what FDR termed "rational administration"; and over the years, in pursuit of this, they have adopted Wilson's convenient notion that ours is a "living constitution" subject to reshaping by the courts, and they have been willing not only to abandon federalism, the separation of powers, and checks and balances, but to run roughshod over the rights of individuals.

When "scientific racism" was the rage, Woodrow Wilson segregated the civil service, gave "The Birth of a Nation" his imprimatur, and thereby promoted Jim Crow in the North. He campaigned on behalf of the sterilization of criminals and insane asylum inmates, and the progressive jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes conferred judicial sanction on this gross violation of individual rights. All of this was done in the name of the public good. The rights of individuals were made to give way to a utilitarian calculus.

Scientific racism is no longer in fashion, at least for the time being; and we have thankfully become chary of sterilizing those who reside in our mental hospitals and prisons. But we have no principle restraining us from succumbing to either propensity, for our masters are still inclined to sacrifice the rights of individuals to what elite opinion at any given moment understands as the public good. There is no other way to explain their embrace of affirmative action and of the redistributionist ethic.

"To take from one," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association--'the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.'" It was on this foundation that Abraham Lincoln objected to slavery, and it is on this foundation that one can object to the health care reform proposed by our President. For this proposal is designed to take from those who have earned and to give to those who have not bothered to do so; and, by way of constraining "incentives," it will take from us the right to manage our own lives in a matter most dear to each and every one of us, and it will confer this responsibility on experts empowered to decide whether, given the cost of care, it is of greater value to society that we suffer or are cured, that we live or die.

It is easy enough to see why progressive doctrine should be attractive to our masters. Tyrannical ambition is nothing new, and throughout human history it has nearly always presented itself to men in the guise of idealism. We are all inclined to meddle in other people's business; we are all inclined to think that we know better; and higher education tends to inflate our vanity and to make us more inclined to lord it over those who are less well-instructed. Never for a moment does a Barack Obama stop to ask whether depriving us of responsibility for our own well-being is demeaning. He and his supporters know that they know better, and their putative wisdom in this regard constitutes for them an absolute claim to rule. The logic unfolding within the progressive impulse requires that there be a class of Guardians empowered to supervise our lives in every particular, and to an ever-increasing degree this is the reality with which we live.

It is less easy to see why ordinary citizens should find the administrative state and the progressive doctrine underpinning it attractive. It is less easy to understand why they should regard what Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, called "soft despotism" as alluring. To explain why the tyrannized should savor tyranny will require, I fear, another post.




Professor Rahe holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College. Some of the material in this post is adapted from Soft Despotism, which was released on April 16, the 150th anniversary of Tocqueville's death. Professor Rahe's book has been the subject of witty and learned reviews by Mark Steyn in The New Criterion, by William Voegeli in National Review, and by Harvey C. Mansfield in The Weekly Standard.


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