Democracy As Mob Rule

For all of its virtues, democracy can be a dangerous thing, which can easily deteriorate into mob rule. That is the genius behind the constitution. The founding fathers were concerned about a majority abusing their power at the expense of the minority. That is why we have two houses of congress which are elected in different ways. It is why we have three distinct branches of government, which are chosen differently. It is the reason behind the, often misunderstood, Electoral College, and it is the reason some states refused to ratify the constitution until the Bill of Rights was added. As brilliant as the constitution is, it is not bullet proof. It can still be abused and used to allow a majority to assert their superior numbers and impose injustices upon the rest.

This isn’t as hard to understand as we may like to think. Most of us try to live according to our belief system. That belief system may be skewed by self-interest, but skewed or not it is what we believe. Thus there was a time when many white men and women believed black men & women to be lesser humans, and as such, it was as acceptable to use them as slaves as it was to keep beasts of burden. We may look upon that now and decry that belief system to be barbaric, but people believed it and acted on that belief. The fact that it was believed primarily by people that profited from that belief, only serves to warn us to examine our motives for accepting what we may claim to be obvious truths.

The same holds true of those who believe that it is the government’s role to take care of us. If your belief system is that people can’t be trusted to make responsible decisions, you may logically believe that it is the responsibility of government to make those decisions for them. The obvious pitfall that government decisions are made by people and people who can insulate themselves from the more negative consequences of their decisions is overlooked.

So, here we are with Democrats running both the legislative and executive branches of the government ramming through a health-care bill without regard for the rights, beliefs or protests of constituents at home or Republicans in congress. The arguments originally were that we had to curtail the escalating cost of health-care and provide benefits for the nation’s uninsured. In the headlong race to get something past, we seem to have forgotten the goals.

Republicans wanted to make insurance more affordable, and therefore more available utilizing several methods to achieve that goal. And this without undermining what is arguably working right with the present system.

Much of the cost of medical care today can be attributed to litigation. Between the cost of malpractice insurance, and the need for doctors and hospitals to practice defensive medicine resulting in unnecessary tests and procedures, we are all paying for the jackpot jury awards of the few that call 1-800- SUE-SOMEONE. So it has been proposed that laws be enacted to control outsized medical lawsuits. The Democrats refused to include any such provision in their health-care bill.

Because of an anomaly of wage controls imposed during WWII, medical insurance in our country today is considered largely an employer benefit. This has been codified by the fact that an employer gets to deduct the cost of providing medical insurance as a taxable business expense, without the employee having to declare it as income. Smaller employers often find it difficult to afford to provide health insurance. Even those that can afford it, find that the options available to smaller employers are less attractive than those available to a large employer. So it has been proposed that all health insurance premiums be tax deductible, whether paid for by an employer or an individual or family. The Democrats refused to include any such provision in their health-care bill.

Different states require different provisions in health insurance plans sold in their jurisdictions. The tighter the provisions the more insurance companies have to charge to cover the cost of those benefits. Also, because insurance companies have to apply to each individual state for the right to sell insurance in that state some insurers may decide to market their products in some states and not others. So it has been proposed that we be allowed to buy any insurance policy offered by any insurance company anywhere in the country. This would cause the money to flow to those policies and companies that offered better costs and services, increasing competition and lowering costs. The Democrats refused to include any such provision in their health-care bill.

Democrats have been claiming that they want a bi-partisan bill, but what they apparently mean by that is that they want Republicans to support their bill without using any of their ideas. Their solution is to mandate changes from Washington D.C. Studies have concluded that instead of lowering the cost of health-care, their provisions will increase insurance costs. The Democrats want to provide coverage for all Americans, but they are raiding Medicare, which is already going broke and underpaying for benefits. The Democrats have been vilifying insurance companies, who we can replace with another company if unhappy. Can we expect better from the government which we can’t change and who has the force of law to impose their decisions? The Democrats claim that their bill will not increase the deficit. However, they are using tricks of timing and hiding expenses in other bills to cover their deception.

The majority in congress and the White House are about to take away from us our right to control our health-care. They, aparently, do not think any idea put forth by the minority party worthy of considering. Power does indeed tend to corrupt. Not even the constitution can protect us from all abuses of power if the majority we elect are hell-bent on imposing their rule on the rest of us.

Rumors

Remember when senators, congressmen and celebrities stood up and declared that President Bush had lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? I was not a fan of President Bush, but I remember how angry I was when liberals claimed that he lied about WMD. He was wrong. He may have been more eager to go to war against Iraq than he should have been. His idea of spreading democracy in the mid-East may have been naive, arrogant or both. But he had not lied about the weapons. Many in our intelligence agencies, as well as intelligence agencies around the world, let alone Saddam’s own generals, believed he had WMD. And Saddam did nothing to dispel that impression. Those that claimed he lied were lying themselves. It convinced me that they were not patriots, but partisans. They were willing to say or do anything for political expediency. They let their hatred for the President dictate what they chose to believe, or say about him. They knew, or should have known, the difference between lying and making a mistake. They seemed to be so blinded by partisanship, that they deemed the Bush Administration unworthy of either honesty or critical thinking. The way President Bush was treated was unfair, and won few, if any converts.

I have been getting emails for some time now showing President Obama standing with his hands folded in front of him, while men and women in uniform around him are saluting. The email accuses the President of showing lack of respect to the flag. If you watch a video of that scene, you will see that the President has just taken the stage to the band playing “Hail to the Chief”. It turns out his behavior is absolutely appropriate.

That is one example of many accusations circulating on the Internet. When I get these I usually do some research before passing them on. I often find them to be ill-founded and they go into my deleted files folder. I can give a litany of things I believe the President has done and is doing badly. With all that ammunition, why do we bother with accusations that he isn’t an American by birth, or that he is a Muslim. When these or other hate filled accusations are circulated, it may fire up the converted, but only puts the more provable and substantial arguments in a bad light. Let’s assume that he is a Muslim, communist, who was not born in the United States. If you don’t have multiple credible sources, which cannot be impeached by his defenders, circulating those accusations just gives those who are on the fence less reason to believe the other, more mundane arguments against the President’s policies. You know…those things that would sway the undecided.

When Senator Kennedy stood up in the senate & called President Bush a liar, he only proved to me that he was not honest in his criticism. Michael Moore may get something right every now and then, but I will never know it, because his bazaar accusations keep me from ever giving him an objective hearing. He past that point in 1989 when he produced “Roger & Me”.

If you think that President Obama is bad for the country, stop spreading rumors that only inflame his defenders and damage your own credibility. You may be right, but if you are too quick to pass on rumors and emails that don’t pass the smell test, you hurt your cause.

The Ecology of Economy

In my college days I learned how a hunting restriction on a deer herd in Southern Utah resulted first in a spike in the number of deer and then the collapse of the population due to overgrazing and starvation. It turns out that people had eliminated the natural predators and than eliminated man as a predator. We had thrown that ecosystem out of balance. By trying to do a good thing, people had caused more harm.

The economy is much like a natural ecosystem. When we try to tamper with it, we are more likely to mess it up than help. There are just too many moving parts and too many unknown nuances to keep track of.

That is why attempts to manage the economy so often backfire. Whereas minor tweaks designed to influence it can help, efforts to control it often end in disaster. There are just too many variables, and therefore too many things to go wrong when we get involved in the minutia.

When the financial system teetered on the brink, the proper response was to cut taxes and let the freed up money flow to those who would use it to buy goods, pay down debt, and invest in projects that would produce jobs and rescue the system. Directing the flow of money by the federal government, is subject to political favoritism and ideologically motivated efforts to send the money where the politicians think it will do the most good. But where it will do the most good is, as often as not, unknowable. Before there was a Microsoft or an Apple, nobody knew these companies would emerge to revolutionize the computer industry.

When trying to remedy the health-care system, the proper response is to facilitate the competitive pressures of the marketplace to determine the best use of health-care dollars. Demonizing insurance companies, as the administration and many in congress have been doing lately is political gamesmanship. Of course you can find examples of abuse by insurance companies. What makes us think that the government will be more beneficent? Does anybody think the IRS is full of virtue and light? The answer is to regulate the abuses (i.e., an insurance company ought no to be allowed to cancel coverage on somebody undergoing treatment), and permit more insurance companies to compete for the business by removing barriers to buying medical insurance across state lines. When you do that, more creative solutions to the problems will be found because there will be more people and companies looking for ways to compete for the business.

Those that want government to solve economic problems want to cure inequity. But we can’t. There will always be inequity. Government isn’t a scalpel. It is a chain saw. It is big, unwieldy, and loud. It is a fine tool for what it does well. But surgery is not what it does well. We should let the government do the work of freeing up markets. Allow money to flow to the entrepreneurs who will think of ways to employ it that the beurocrats and politicians won’t. Not that they aren’t smart enough. I’m sure some of them are, but we limit the opportunities to succeed when we try to use the government to manage the economy. Bill Gates developed software, a politician didn’t. Henry Ford developed a way to mass produce cars, a bureaucrat didn’t. The government’s job is to provide very broad rules and free up money, then get out of the way

Shades of Things To Come

Like me, you may have thought it was about better statistics on breast cancer detection and survival. It wasn’t. It was a cost benefit analysis. Stay with me on this, because this article is not about breast cancer or mammograms, but we need to go there to get to the point.

It turns out the U. S. Preventative Services Task Force, which had recommended in 2002 that all women over 40 receive screening mammograms decided last week that only women between 50 and 75 should receive the tests unless there is an underlying history to indicate otherwise. Routine mammograms have reduced the incidence of breast cancer in women by 30%. According to the Wall Street Journal, 40% of patient years saved by mammograms are for women under 50, but it takes 1,904 mammograms to detect one case of cancer for women in their 40s and only 1,339 to detect a case in a woman in her 50s. Of course the number would decrease for a woman over 75, but the task force decided that she was so close to the end of her life that we would be wasting money on her. According to the op-ed article in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, the task force has no oncologists or radiologists, but they decided that the cost was too great to have women in their 40s or over 75 undergo the tests.

We should all make medical decisions based on our own cost benefit analysis. There are a whole host of tests and procedures that we don’t do because the cost and inconvenience of going through those tests doesn’t compute for us. But we make those decisions with our own lives and our own money. What we have here is a panel whose decisions are generally accepted by Medicare making that decision.

President Obama and many of his fellow Democrats in congress have been assuring us that there would be no rationing with their version of health-care reform. But there will have to be guidelines adhered to. It may not be unreasonable to weigh the cost of a procedure against its potential benefits, but when we put an impersonal government agency in charge of determining costs, benefits and eligible recipients of care, we are putting our vary lives in the hands of a government that does not know us personally. When that happens, you can count on sacrificial lambs as budget deficits increase and resources become scarcer.

War and Peace

"Ronald Reagan once said “history teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap”.

Walk alone down a dark alley in the wrong part of town and you are asking for trouble. Walk down that same alley with ten of your well armed friends, and you are likely to be left alone.

There was recently an article in a popular news magazine that posited the idea that nuclear arms make the world safer because nobody with them is willing to confront anybody else that has them. That was behind the MAD (mutually assured destruction) doctrine of the cold war. If both the Soviet Union and the United States had enough nuclear capability to wipe each other off the map, and no effective way of stopping incoming ICBMs, nobody would launch a first strike. While arming the world with nuclear weapons is not a safe or sane approach to world peace, we can learn something from that period of history.

There are bullies in this world who run governments as well as school yards and organized crime. Seeking peace is a good thing, but we must be aware that the bullies only respect and believe power. If you are overly reluctant to demonstrate your power, or if you sue for peace too anxiously, these bullies will interpret your behavior as weakness. Convinced of your willingness to avoid war at all costs they will be inclined to push you to the point where you have no choice but to capitulate or respond with force. If, for example, you are unwilling to allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, you can’t let them put you in a position where you will have to react with more force to a larger threat and cost more lives than would have been the case if you had clearly drawn your line in the sand at the beginning of the exchange and reacted with targeted force the instant that line was crossed. You will face anger at home and abroad, but you will have saved lives, money and, ironically, preserved the peace more effectively, by using force sooner rather than later.

The longer you wait to address hostility in the Iranians, North Koreans, Al Qaeda or even the Russians, the more egos are in play on the side of those aggressive regimes, and the less they believe your threats and ultimatums. You are enticing them to push you as far as they think they can, and that is likely farther than you are, or should be, willing to be pushed. The result is a much larger scale war than would have been the case with a sterner position and reaction in the beginning.

A clear example of that is Saddam Hussein. After the Gulf War there were terms set down for Iraq to follow. Saddam agreed to those terms, but repeatedly violated them. Little of consequence was done in return. The UN and the USA wagged their fingers and gave them stern looks. Then came September 11, 2001. President Bush was in no mood for a repeat. An ultimatum was given, allow UN weapons inspectors unfettered access to your country, go into exile, or be attacked. There are reports that tell us that Saddam’s generals believed he had weapons of mass destruction, because he believed giving that impression gave him cache’. Those reports indicate that he was convinced that the United States would not launch a major assault on his country. We see the results of those miscalculations.

We want peace. The United States does not seek war for conquest. We have not occupied or annexed a vanquished foe since the Indian wars of the 1800s. But we must realize that we value human life more than our adversaries do. We can’t let that desire for peace allow them to back us into a corner. We can’t give up weapons systems without getting something meaningful in return, and we can’t use fewer troops than is necessary to get the job done in Afghanistan, and we can’t wag our finger and talk sternly to Iran. We can’t wait until the cost of waiting is capitulation or more massive devastation.

Power Corrupts

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."...Lord Acton

We all have ideas that we believe to be important. For example, here I am writing a blog with the hope that anybody will read it and that if they do, I can change something. I, however, am pretty harmless. I will write what I think, and a few people will read it. Some may agree with me and others will not. There is an outside chance that my thoughts will reach somebody with some influence and power, but even if that happens, they are the ones with the power, not me.

But when we elect people to public office, we empower them to act on our behalf in ways that effect all of us. By electing them, we give them immense power. The higher the office, the more power they obviously have. And they have ideas that they think are important too. The difference is that they are in a position to do something about it.

When our economy was on the brink of collapse, those that we elected rushed to pass a bill to pull us back from the edge. That is what they should have done. But they had some important ideas about how government should run. They thought that as long as they had to pass a bill, they would spend $800,000,000,000 on a lot of things that had nothing to do with rescuing the economy.The economy appears to be recovering and only a fraction of that money has been spent, but it will be spent anyway. Most economists expect a slow and tenuous recovery, and many would attribute that, at least in part, to the policies in Washington.

There is little doubt among those in the financial world that something had to be done. But last November we gave Democrats something they had not had in decades. We gave them the Presidency, a large majority in the House of Representatives and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. I am not a big fan of the two party system, but that is far superior to a one party system. A one party system is what we gave the Democrats. We gave them more power than any political party has had in a very long time.

Among other things, we have had imposed upon us, in rapid succession, an economic bailout bill that goes far beyond bailing out the economy. The House has passed a Cap & Trade bill that, if passed by the Senate, many believe will not resolve the problems it was purportedly designed to remedy, but will hurt the economy that the bailout bill was intended to fix. Now there is an emergency to pass a health care bill that will give government unprecedented control over our lives and a large chunk of our economy.

Washington DC has a habit of making a mess of things as it is, but when we give one party such unchecked power, we can expect unchecked corruption.

Is Medicare a Good Model for National Health Care?

It is a rhetorical technique to state a debatable issue as if it were fact. It puts opponents at the disadvantage of having to play defense, and those who may be less well informed will have a tendency to assume your statement is true.

I keep hearing proponents of a government option in health care use Medicare as an example of how well it will work. The President did this Wednesday night. So, just how well does Medicare work?

Many doctors will not take new Medicare patients because the program underpays so severely as to make it impossible to earn a living if they see too many patients. Not impossible to earn a good living. Impossible to earn a living. Some Medicare reimbursements are so low that, depending on the doctor's overhead, each patient visit can be a few dollars either side of break even. It requires those of us with the kind of insurance that the administration and some in congress are villainizing to pay our doctors enough for our visits that they are able to afford to see Medicare patients at all.


Medicare is due to start bleeding money faster than it is taking in money in just a few years.


The President thinks there is so much "waste and abuse" in Medicare and Medicaid that cutting it out will fund nearly all of his new plan. If there is that much "waste and abuse" in Medicare, why not cut it out now?

Part of the reason is that in any bureaucracy there will be waste and abuse. The larger the bureaucracy, the more waste and abuse there will be. That is just the nature of the beast. Nothing runs perfectly and the larger and more complex the organization, the less perfectly it will run. It is fantasy to think you will eliminate waste and abuse any more than you can eliminate gravity. In order to get money out of Medicare he is going to have to cut payments in a system that already underpays to the extent that health care is now being rationed to the elderly by virtue of doctors not accepting new patients.

The President promised that a government run plan will be self-funding. That is the way the Postal Service works.

How long did you have to stand in line the last time you went to the post office? Postage rates have been increasing annually for the last few years and still the Postal Service is losing money. Rather than resolving the problems by being more competitive and customer friendly, they are talking about cutting delivery services to 5 days a week and closing some post offices. This is what happens when the government runs something. There are no competitive forces at play to compel creative thinking. It doesn't become a matter of providing better services to the customer. Do we really want to replace what is arguably a good health care system in need of improvement with a government monopoly similar to the Postal Service or Medicare?